Category Archives: squad

12 Monkeys

  By not-Greg | April 19, 2013 - 12:00 | , ,
60 Comments

PES5 got Camacho

I’ve played pre-season in my extremely casual dalliance with PES5(PC). Remember this…

PES5 calendar

Choosing how many pre-season games to play. I always choose based on how much money I think I’ll need to make up my Expected Earnings.

Speaking of which:

PES5 expected earnings

I had a nice cushion, but I wanted to buy some players.

I made an audacious-seeming bid for Camacho, who’s a pretty well-developed 20-year-old in this ML world right now. I made a Trade offer of Stein+6000, and was surprised when the bid was successful.

PES5 season X - team

Having Mathieu and Camacho at the same time probably violates some kind of Law of PES. So far, though, nothing spooky has happened. They’ve played together in the two pre-season matches without ill effect.

I picked random teams to play, and then deleted all but two—against Real Madrid and Auxerre.

By the way: how nice to hear Brookley and Bracking again on the commentary. (Sic, also by the way.)

I lost the Madrid game 0-1, and still needed to make up my Expected Earnings. Still getting the warning.

I romped to a 2-0 win againt Auxerre in the next friendly. Should have been 3-0. I got a penalty late on that I just knew, in the way that I always knew, would be missed—and indeed it hit the bar. Back in the day it was a notorious feature of the old-school PES games that they rarely used to ‘allow’ penalties to be scored if the scoreline and/or match momentum was generally going in your favour. Momentum, thy name is scripting.

10 GOTO 10

  By not-Greg | April 10, 2013 - 12:00 | ,
90 Comments

PES2012 Hagi at 18

Today was nearly a completely football-game-free post. In fact, I toyed with the idea of there being no post at all.

But this very Wednesday morning, with a spare twenty minutes, I powered up the PS3 and played one match of the game currently in the tray: PES2012. Hurrah!

That’s a picture of Regen Hagi at the top. He’s still only 18, but closing in on 80OVR and starting to develop some ‘whip’ in that left foot.

PES2012 season 19 squad

My current First XI and squad on the left here. It’s a bit threadbare, like this post.

20 players only, now. I had to get rid of Barnes and Sibon and Neeskens and others. Finance reasons.

While walking along the street the other day I had a fantastic idea for a football game in the spirit of New Star Soccer. Like NSS, it’d be browser/smartphone-level only. The idea I had hasn’t been done before, from what I can see. Time to dust down my Sinclair BASIC.

I’m still not greatly attracted to going back to any structured daily football gaming.

I can feel football gaming slipping further away from me day by day.

It could be that what happened to many footy gamers years ago, when PES2008 on next-gen landed with such a sickening thud—i.e., a ‘gradually sudden’ estrangement from football gaming—is happening to me now.

I no longer feel nauseous at the thought of playing a football game. Instead I just feel nothing at all. Neither attraction nor repulsion. I suppose it’s an improvement. Isn’t it?

Not playing has let me see how the other half live—how people who actually get to read books and watch films and play other games that they want to play (currently Civilization, in my case) must feel, i.e. fulfilled and happy that they’ve put their free time to good use.

Perhaps we all have an Expiry date for the things we like to do. A date that we’re ticking inexorably towards every day, like death.

I’ve previously used the example of ‘going out’ (i.e. pubbing and clubbing it).

For most of my late teens and twenties and early thirties, there I was, boozing and carousing with the best of them.

Then suddenly, BLAMMO. Door slammed. No more pubbing and clubbing. Suddenly just didn’t want to go. Had enough of it. Seen and done and felt everything I was ever going to see and do and feel, hundreds if not thousands of times over. Didn’t need it—whatever it was—any more.

Maybe I’ve hit a similar stage in football gaming.

After making 50,000 passes, after scoring 20,000 goals, or whatever it’s all been, maybe my time as a football gamer is simply up.

The time and the place

  By not-Greg | March 20, 2013 - 12:00 | , , ,
84 Comments

ML2011 front end

Playing PES2011 on PC means a better class of screenshot. See the old front end of Master League 2011 above. It doesn’t take long to settle back in and resume navigating the long-abandoned menus and features like a champ.

The theme for today is: PES2012 and PES2013′s Master Leagues: what happened?

ML2011 mid-season 1 formation and squad

Here’s my mid-season squad. This is after all the mid-season transfer activity. Many of my starting Coventry original squad members are already history.

I’m currently only playing on Regular difficulty—due to go up to Professional for the latter half of the season (because it would be rude not to).

I bought the 36-year-old Sibon in what is probably his last season before retirement, figuring his goals and power might just take me over the line into the Premier League.

Before the kickoff

Palmieri and Schmidt are raw Youths but still better than the Coventry City original defenders that my option file came with.

I also got Ruskin. That’s a journeyman right-back, Damia, on the other side. And a journeyman striker up front, Pavone.

Here’s the table—only on Regular, remember. I wanted to ease myself in, and I’ve done that. No, there’s not many goals around:

ML2011 season 1 after 16

These screenshots are scrumptious, aren’t they? I like not holding my phone up to a screen. I like rather a lot about being on PC, actually. I’m not a convert to the Master Race yet. Consoles are just too convenient and hassle-free in too many ways. But let me just say that the PlayStation4 doesn’t feel like as much of a must-have item as it did a few weeks ago.

And of course this ‘old next gen’ Master League with all the features can be enjoyed on any platform. I’m enjoying PES2011.

Sibon’s individual training regime, as designed by me:

Sibon Training

I figure I might as well get all the shooting and power out of him that I can in the last months of his career.

Here’s young Palmieri’s training regime, on the other hand:

Palmieri Training

Much more balanced, with no shooting training for now. The way PES2011 plays, I’ll rarely want to see Palmieri storming forward.

Here’s a gratuitous shot of the Myth of Castolo about to score a vital goal:

The Myth in Motion

I’m playing in a  generic lower league stadium for now.

ML2011 my stadium

Looks lovely, doesn’t it? Here’s another one from another stadium—Watford’s:

The Goalkick

But what about the gameplay? What about the stumble? What about the step-around? What about everything that almost drove me crazy back in 2010-2011, and is still there for all to see?

This post from May 2011 is fairly representative of the loathing I came to have for PES2011. What about all that?

What about it indeed. I just don’t know. There’s no accounting for context, really. Some things have their time, and it feels as if this is PES2011′s time for me.

The PES that got away is now firmly back in my sights.

Bad boys, stick together; never, sad boys

  By not-Greg | January 28, 2013 - 12:00 | , ,
68 Comments

Suspensions everywhere

Above you see the fruits of my recent labour. I seem to have run into a string of close matches that see me leading by the odd goal, time running out, and the CPU pressure ramping up.

Cue my most vicious, scything, leg-breaking tackles. I’ve racked up the cards, and earned key players extended spells on the sidelines. Note the above are all DMFs and defenders.

It’s been worth it. I’ve closed out each one of those narrow wins, sometimes hanging on with 9 men. And even sometimes scoring again with 9 men.

Playing well with 9 men is always an exhilarating experience in PES, and something of a tradition of mine that stretches back to ISS days.

No significant defeats in a long while. A few dispiriting draws that should have been wins, but no defeats. The table after 23 matches is an interesting one:

ML2013 season 8 after 23

With such a long way to go there’s no reason to get excited—we all know what PES can do—but I am excited.

Especially as I’m still in with a shout of the Treble. I swashbuckled my way through to the FA Cup Quarters with a 3-2 win over Chelsea. Their two goals were utterly stupid, needless to say.

I’m still in the Champions League too. Got the knockout stage draw coming up soon.

ML2013 mid-season 8 squad

Here’s a look at my squad at this stage.

Look ay Coynborough on 108. Most of the others aren’t too shabby either.

This is with minimal boots and items, I should add. I haven’t opened the Items menu in about a season now, and I don’t know if I ever will again. I’m happy to play with the cards dealt.

AURTENETXE at LB is a brand-new signing. £32m from Spain. That’s ridiculously overpriced but I paid it without a qualm—I had nearly £100m in the bank and nothing to spend it on.

One of the major critiques of this edition of Master League is that there’s little to no incentive to put your hand in your figurative pocket and splash the cash. I won’t remember PES2013 for the excitement of building my team via the transfer market, that’s for sure. You’ve got to hope that somebody somewhere in Konami actually meant for it to be this way.

Onward and upward. If I was doing one of my olde-style ‘confidence graphs’, where I chart the progress of how much confidence (in every sense) I have in PES2013, the graph would have been creeping steadily upward over the past few weeks. I’m really loving the game again, after a dodgy pre-Christmas period. For this I no doubt have to thank my modest playing skillz.