PES Chronicles

As ever, Sunday is other football game day on PES Chronicles. Except… apart from a token few matches on next-gen FIFA08, I haven’t really played any other football games this week.

I’m currently going through a dark time with next-gen PES2008. It turns out that my draconian House Rules (well, I think they’re draconian) might not be tough enough. Once again I find myself more or less going through the motions in far too many games. This might be down to me being very busy with other stuff away from PES over the past week or so. I’ve got a few days off work next week so I’ll see how the leisure time affects my play.

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Dagenham & Redbridge are near the top of Coca Cola League 2 in my second next-gen FIFA08 manager mode career. Playing this game so infrequently nowadays means that I’m struggling to do anything except draw 0-0 or 1-1. My previous two games were both 0-0, then it looked like the last game of the session was going to end 1-1. Not good enough really, and it was all going to cost me in the end. If I slipped down to fourth place and missed out on promotion I’d probably quit the entire manager mode career and go back to my Coventry City galacticos.

Ah, but in the last minute of stoppage time, Huckerby popped up in the box:

A fine looping header over the keeper. I know that I keep saying it about FIFA08, but this goal was another rarity. Most of my headers fly past the post or over the bar for no apparent reason. Did the game want me to score that goal? Are football video gamers amongst the most paranoid people on earth?

Apart from these three games on FIFA08, I haven’t touched any other football game.

I’m still waiting to get a new PC on which to play Football Manager 2008. That’ll be sometime in the summer.

I’ve still to play LMA Manager 2007 on the Xbox360. Maybe I’ll give that a whirl sometime this week.

Sensible Soccer might as well not exist for me. It was the most pointless £7 (or whatever it was) that I’ve ever spent on a game. I’m sure Sensi is a lot of fun for its dedicated fans, but as I said a few weeks ago I missed out on the game the first time around—in the mid-90s—and it’s possibly too late for me to get into it now. I will definitely give it another try for at least a couple of continuous hours. (So far I’ve only managed short bursts of twenty minutes here, half an hour there.) That will be the last test. Sensible Soccer is drinking in the Last Chance Saloon. At least it won’t be short of company at the bar…

Maybe I’ll finally lose my patience with next-gen PES2008 and admit defeat and just get the vastly superior (it now seems clear) PS2 version. I know that at least one reader of this blog will be nodding and thinking I told him so…

Every Sunday on PES Chronicles is devoted to Other Football Games. It’s been another week without much action on that front. While I’m wrapped up in a PES Master League there’s never much action on any other computer games, never mind other footie games.

On my shelf at the moment I have all of these games, partly played or completely unplayed: Halo3, Mass Effect, Oblivion, Assassin’s Creed, Call of Duty 4, Crackdown, Command & Conquer: Tiberium Wars, and others. There are loads of old PS2 games (including the really-must-be-played-soon titles God of War 2 and Okami) that are in a similar suspended state. Football games account for 99% of my gaming life.

Sadly, I don’t think I am ever going to learn to love—or even like—Sensible Soccer on Xbox Live Arcade. Every play session goes much the same way. I start out full of good intentions. I am going to get into this classic game, I think. And for twenty minutes or so, I do get into it. I can fully see why the game earned its reputation. Goals are plentiful and, bizarrely for a retro game with simplistic graphics, the gameplay is deep. Sensible Soccer is more difficult (for me anyway) than either PES or FIFA.

But then I start to lose interest and engagement. It may be too late for me to get into Sensible Soccer. Perhaps you had to be there the first time around in the mid-90s. And I almost hesitate to say it, but fun is not enough for me. I look for something more (or less?) than fun in a computer game. If fun was the sole value criterion for a computer game, then something like Sonic the Hedgehog would be the greatest game ever made, and it’s not.

The frequent periods when next-gen FIFA08 is decidedly not fun are why I keep coming back to it. In the past few weeks I’ve been PES-ing all the way, so my time has been limited on EA’s much-discussed new iteration in its justly-lambasted series (has there ever been a FIFA that’s got the PES community buzzing like this one has?).

I’ve played another handful of games in my Manager Mode career with Dagenham & Redbridge in the Coca Cola League 2. This week I’ve dropped the difficulty level down a notch. Dare I say it, but World Class was proving to be so tough with the players at my disposal that I was spending most of every game just chasing the ball. It was not fun…

Back down to Professional, then, and the games pick up. I have more of the ball, spend more time taking my time and indulging in the gameplay that I have come to admire and respect. And love? Possibly.

Here’s a couple of goals from this week’s play:

The first goal in the clip is an example of the bad in next-gen FIFA08. I get a shot away with Baiano that hits the crossbar and loops into the air. As it comes down I vaguely challenge the keeper for the ball, and it rebounds off his hands into the net. The game credited Baiano with the goal. Groan. It’s just one of many little niggling faults with the game.

The second goal in the clip is one of my favourites. An extended dribble down half the pitch, holding off the defender at my heels, and then an arrowed shot into the corner of the net. Remarkably, in FIFA08 such goals are a rarity.

I’ve got Dagenham and Redbridge up to 4th in League 2. A notorious bug in next-gen FIFA08 (a stupid oversight, really) means that there are no division playoffs, so I’ll have to finish in the top 3 to go up to League 1.

Promotion is a certainty unless I buckle and put the difficulty back up to World Class—which I’ll probably do, come to think of it. It won’t be fun trying to re-learn the game at that level (especially as I’m spending 95% of my time on PES2008), but it will be challenging. That’s what I like in a computer game.

From today, every Sunday on PES Chronicles will be Other Football Game Sunday, or OFG Sunday for short. I wish I’d thought up a snappier name for it, but I wish for lots of things that don’t come true.

Over the past few months I have interrupted my PES posts with lots of side-quests involving the likes of next-gen FIFA08. These posts about other games have cropped up more or less randomly. Sometimes they’ve persisted for several days in a row. And then I’ve switched back to PES2008 for a while. And then I’ve gone off and… I dunno, played Subbuteo or something for a couple of posts after that…

Now that I’m back playing PES2008 with some regularity, the question arises of where those other football games fit in around here.

I won’t be abandoning those other football games. Some of them are just too good to abandon. Others are middling-good, and worthy of repeated revisits from time to time.

Next-gen FIFA08 will see some action on this blog on a regular basis. I’ll be talking about EA’s flawed masterpiece with shocking regularity for those PES fans of a nervous disposition who (like me) just cannot quite accept that there’s a FIFA game with actual merit.

In addition to FIFA08, OFG Sundays in the future will also feature Sensible Soccer, LMA Manager, Football Manager 2008, and any other football-related game that might attract my interest. I picked up a pre-owned copy of FM2008 last week but haven’t yet had time to test it out on my notoriously unreliable PC. Ideally I’d really like a new PC to play it on, but my purchase of an Xbox360 has put back that particular plan by a few months.

If Football Manager Live turns out to be any good, it’ll be mentioned here too. We’re only a few months away from its launch. If it’s half as good as it looks like it could be, it’ll be a great game. I’m quite unreasonably excited about FM Live, but I’m not much of an online gamer. So I’ll have to see.

Occasionally, if there’s a lot to discuss, I’ll expand OFG Sunday to include Saturday as well (making it an OFG Weekend) – but this would be a rarity. It would definitely not spread out to the rest of the week. Monday-Friday is guaranteed PES chitchat. Most Saturdays too. Only Sundays will be devoted permanently to Other Football Games.

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I’ll start the ball rolling with the latest on my next-gen FIFA08 progress.

After winning the Quadruple (League, Cup, League Cup, European Cup) with my Coventry City megastars on Professional difficulty, I briefly made the move up to the very top difficulty – Legendary.

I found it weirdly easy at first. I thumped Atletico Madrid 5-0 in the Supercup match. However, this honeymoon phase did not last long. Pretty soon I discovered the massive drawback to playing on Legendary: when the CPU decides it wants to keep the ball, it keeps the ball and it seems there’s little you can do about it. Little I could do about it, anyway. After several torrid games where I was frustrated to within an inch of my football gaming life, I acknowledged temporary defeat. I’ve put the difficulty down a notch to World Class. I’m not proud.

Even World Class is still super-hard. Next-gen FIFA08 is a hard, hard game. I don’t know if that’s been mentioned before…

In my current season – my seventh in Manager Mode – I was eliminated from the League Cup in the second round by Birmingham City. I crashed out of the European Cup in the group stages – bottom of the group (a miserable effort).

Now, in February 2014, I’m 5th in the League. I have a team of galacticos worth over £150m. Cristiano Ronaldo is one of my attacking midfielders, and he’s not even my best player.

I’m 9 points behind the leaders, Chelsea. All the signs are that I’ve got too much ground to make up, but you never know. I’ll keep plugging away. FIFA08 has a peculiar (and quite disappointing) feature that allows you to overtake teams a long way ahead of you in the leagues. The other team(s) lose and draw just enough to allow you to catch up, usually leading to a decisive last few games. I really don’t like it, although I have benefited from it in FIFA08 more than once.

I’ll talk in-depth about FIFA08’s version of scripting in the future. The good news is that there is little or none of the PES-style scripting that drives me mad from time to time. Loose balls do not always fall to CPU players in next-gen FIFA08. You can take a corner and – amazingly, for a PES player – any clearance will fall to one of your players outside the box as often as it will fall to an opponent.

But FIFA08 has other knavish tricks up its sleeve – tricks which are just as annoying and, in my opinion, totally out of place in a 21st Century football game.

For example, a CPU player in possession of the ball on the wings near your corner flag will enjoy a preposterous skill/strength bonus. Their cross is coming into your box, and there’s almost nothing you can do to stop it. I’ve got better at bringing across covering defenders to support the full-back, but mostly the CPU will squirm its way into space regardless of counter-measures.

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Here’s my next-gen FIFA08 goal of the week.

Babel applies the finish. Yes, a fairly straightforward goal in PES terms, but in next-gen FIFA08 terms it’s a tough one to pull off. For me it is, anyway. In 400+ games I’ve only scored a relative handful like this. Most of those shots – from that angle, with the players and the ball moving at those speeds – end up rocketing into the stands, or go straight at the keeper.

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On the side, I’ve started a new FIFA08 manager mode career with Dagenham & Redbridge in the Coca Cola League 2.

I picked Dag & Red (as they’re known in-game) because I read on the official EA forum that they’re the hardest team to take from the bottom to the very top.

It certainly is hard. The first few games with the official squad were as tough in their own way as starting out in a PES Master League with the Default players.

But the FIFA08 transfer market offers plentiful opportunities to get great players very quickly. Would a club like Dagenham & Redbridge really be able to sign Darren Huckerby and Bianchi on free transfers? I think not. Players like that shouldn’t even listen to offers, never mind accept them without a murmur. It’s something that has got to change for FIFA09 if EA wants to build on its head-start in the next generation.

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Next Sunday I’ll talk about my latest adventures in Sensible Soccer. I’ll also take a look at next-gen FIFA08’s internet forums… they’re not pretty. PESfan has got nothing to worry about.

What do I know about Luxembourg? I know that its football team used to be the kind that England would routinely thump 9-0. (Those were the days.) I know that it is one of the practically-infinite number of places I would like to visit but never will. I know that it appeared in one of the most famous (to me) song lyrics ever, which forms the title of this post.

I also know that Luxembourg thumped me 6-0 in my first proper game of Sensible Soccer on the Xbox360. I was playing as England. I didn’t have a clue what to do or how to play. I couldn’t pick up loose balls. I couldn’t pass. I couldn’t shoot. One button to do everything? Eh?

Yes, I’ve finally got an Xbox360. There it is, sitting on the shelf in my bedroom. I bought it last week, along with a few games. (Among them was a rather forlorn-looking copy of LMA Manager 2007. At just £5 from GameStation’s pre-owned shelves, it would have been rude not to pick it up. I might cover LMA Manager on this blog if I end up playing it to any great extent.)

I never played games in the 1990s. The reasons for this are too complex to go into, but in a nutshell: the 1990s was a gap decade for me not just in terms of gaming, but in terms of life. I was unemployed and/or drunk and/or stoned for most of it. Gaming did not exist.

Consequently, Sensible Soccer is a franchise that I’d never played until just a few days ago here in 2008. I know. Shocking. For a football gaming enthusiast never to have played Sensible Soccer is a little like a literature fan never having read Shakespeare. Or if not Shakespeare, then at least Marlowe.

A few years ago I did play the demo of Sensible Soccer 2006 on the PS2. The screen juddered every few seconds and gave me a headache and I didn’t play it again. What a disaster that game was, I now know.

Sensible Soccer on the 360 is a different proposition. ‘Sensi’ aficionados assure me (indirectly) that it is a faithful reproduction, in glorious HD graphics, of the 1990s Amiga original. That’s good enough for me.

A football simulation this is definitely not. I’ve played about 20 games so far – all single-player. It’ll be a very long time before I dare to show my virtual face online. A review stated that new Sensi players faced “a very steep learning curve”. Understatement of the year.

I replayed England-Luxembourg several times, as all of the Sensi forum gurus advised. Play as a top team against a lesser team. Right. After a couple of thumpings, I started to kind of get what Sensi is all about. (One button? One button?!)

Here’s my first goal. I have no idea how it went in. Aftertouch, or something. This clip’s mobile phone video production standards are even lower than usual. I never thought I’d ever say that.