Well, this is a long old run-up to the 2009 set of football games, isn’t it? I don’t know about anybody else, but I’m finding it particularly tough to cope this year. Last year was bad enough—I thought October and PES2008 would never come (and now I wish they hadn’t)—but this year my impatience and hunger for both FIFA09 and PES2009 seems at least twice as bad.

In the meantime I am still playing the PSP version (needless to say) of PES2008, and FIFA08 on the PS3. I haven’t spoke directly about my ongoing careers (in Master League and Manager Mode respectively) for several posts. There’s been so much else going on. And, in truth, I do kind of feel that I’ve already said everything I want to say. At this stage, with FIFA09 and PES2009 so close, there’s an air of unreality hovering around both of my current games. So I’m really going to be focused on the approach of the 2009 games from now on.

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Having said that, it’s still worth taking a look at the end of season 2021 in my Master League on PES2008. I actually finished season 2021 on the PSP a week or so ago. I’m well into season 2022 right now.

It was a spectacular end to the season, one of my very best. I scored tons of goals and ran away with the title. After I secured the championship (five whole games early) it was quite instructive to just play the ball around a bit in my last few meaningless fixtures. With nothing to play for I stroked the ball around, trying to keep possession and score wonder goals. At times it was productive. But at other times I saw yet again just what lengths the PES AI will go to to control the rhythms of play and massage micro-outcomes for the sake of its bigger picture.

Here’s a clip that I’ve been sitting on for several days (painfully, in every sense). It shows me trying to pass the ball out wide during a spell of ungodly CPU pressure. Watch what the game brazenly does with this straightforward pass:

The game doesn’t even try to disguise its dirty tricks any more, does it? It makes the ball go straight through my player’s leg and into touch for a CPU throw-in. I was absolutely disgusted. It’s at times like this that I wonder how I ever got into ISS/PES in the first place. Has it always been like this? I don’t remember incidents like the above happening very often—or at all—in the distant past. But maybe I’m mistaken.

I had to put up with a couple of pretty shocking defeats toward the end of the season. In particular there was a torrid game against Barcelona where I felt like a helpless spectator rather than a supposed participant. PES over the past few years has been inching ever closer to that most dangerous place for any sports-based game: a largely interactive script where the ‘gameplay’ is tantamount to an extended Quicktime event.

Ho hum. A year ago when I started blogging about my daily PES habit, I never dreamed I’d spend so much time being so bitter about the transparently scripted nature of some elements of the game.

Will PES2009 see an end to incidents like the one in the above clip? No, I don’t think so either.

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After the season I was curious enough to check my league win percentage. I also checked all the other seasons’ percentages, from 2007 to 2020. For curiosity’s sake, here’s the full list of my win % from the start of my career to the present:

2007 - 0.0% (!)
2008 - 21.43%
2009 - 21.43%
2010 -28.57%
2011- 50%
2012 - 36.67%
2013 - 50%
2014 - 56.67%
2015 - 63.33%
2016 - 60%
2017 - 60%
2018 - 76.67%
2019 - 66.67%
2020 - 74%
2021 - 83.33%
2022 - 60% (so far, after 12 games)

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And that’s the current state of play between me and PES2008. Like I said above, it all feels very odd playing this game (and FIFA08) with the next, super-duper clutch of games just around the corner. I am still playing, though, and next time I’ll post an update about my progress in FIFA08.

It was crunch time for me and my Treble. I’d just won the league title here in season 2020 of what is turning out to be another long Master League career. Winning the title on its own is pretty good, of course, but the Treble is where it’s all at in this game. I’ve already won a few Trebles, most recently last season. Back-to-back Trebles would be very nice indeed.

I was in the Division 1 Cup final and the European Championship final—i.e., PES’s Champions League equivalent. If the persistent rumour is true and Konami have secured the rights for the Champions League, will this competition have its ‘proper’ name in PES2009’s Master League? In other words, will this most prestigious of real-life Cup competitions find itself integrated into the often bizarre, made-up football game world of Master League?

I strongly doubt it. Somehow I can’t quite see Manchester Red pitching up against London Blue in the Champions League. Even with all the teams edited to look right, you’ve still only got four leagues. No, it just wouldn’t be right. It’d be a waste of the license. The debate is raging, but I’d bet on a standalone Champions League game using the PES engine coming out at some point in the 2008/2009 football game year.

Anyway, about those Cup finals. The ones I had to win in order to secure an historic consecutive Treble.

The Division 1 Cup final was first. It was against Basel—or FC Basel 1893, to give them their resounding full name. They were the easiest opponents I can remember having in a Cup final. I won the game at a canter, 3-0.

The European Cup final was the next and final component of the Treble. It was against Ajax—of Amsterdam, I often find myself mentally adding. I come from an era when TV and radio commentators always called them Ajax of Amsterdam. Sometime around the late 1980s they stopped doing that and started calling them simply Ajax, but for me the add-on element has hung around like an echo.

It was the first time I could remember playing Ajax (of Amsterdam) in this career. They were pretty tough, but not in a good sense. They were tough in the bad sense—in the sense that there seemed to be an underlying script at work that said “every time the human team scores, the CPU team scores.” Okay, my defending was probably suspect for some of their goals. Whatever, I won it 4-3.

And that was the Treble. I’d done it. Two in a row.

The only thing left to do was navigate my way through my remaining league fixtures without conceding too many more goals. I had another target to meet before season’s end: concede less than 20 goals. I was doing very well so far with just 14 goals against. If I could get through my last three league games without conceding more than 5 goals, it’d make it a truly remarkable season.

I’ll cut to the chase: I conceded 1 goal in each of the remaining games. I beat Sevilla 6-1 (always easy meat, them). I beat my next opponent 3-1. I drew the final game of the season 1-1. Conceding a goal in each of these games was slightly disappointing, and suspicious. I find that I am always suspicious of PES lately.

But I was comfortably under the 20-goals margin. I finished the season with 78 points. I was a massive 22 points ahead of a slightly resurgent Barcelona in second place. Valencia, after a poor season by their standards, were 4 points behind Barca. In other items of interest, Real Madrid managed to drag themselves up from mid-table to finish in 6th place. And Osasuna, my long-time nemesis, failed to win promotion back to Division 1. I won’t be seeing them until at least 2022 now. Ha.

I won 25 games, drew 3 games, and lost 2 games (boo). I scored 82 goals, and conceded just 17, giving me a final goal difference of +65.

All of which begs an obvious question: has PES2008 become too easy? My view right now is that it’s still a bit too early for me to tell. 2020 was a great season—a miracle year in so many ways. (But for those two defeats, it would have been just perfect…) It could be a one-off. If season 2021 is another season like this one, then yes, I’d say PES2008 is too easy for me. PES4 was the last PES game that I thought was a little too easy. We’ll see how PES2008 plays out after next season.

Here in season 2020 of my Master League career on the PSP/PS2 version of PES2008, I’ve just won the league title with several games to spare. I’m in the Division 1 Cup final and the European Cup semi-final. The Treble is very much on.

After winning the Treble last year, I badly want to win it again this year. It’s only natural. For me, winning back-to-back Trebles would be the ultimate confirmation that I’ve mastered PES2008 in terms of its gameplay. I’ve won a few Trebles in the past in this career, but never consecutively. In PES4 and PES6 I was capable of winning back-to-back Trebles without much effort. I found those two PESes pretty easy overall, so it’d be a yardstick for PES2008 if I could replicate my achievements now.

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As well as the general goal of a Treble, I had two bonus targets: to navigate through to the end of the league season unbeaten, and concede less than 20 goals while doing so. For a long time this season, it looked as if I would succeed on both fronts. And then I stupidly let my newfound confidence get the better of me. I lost a game to Valencia, my long-standing divisional rivals.

That hurt, but at least I was keeping the goals-against column down to respectable levels. As I’m remarked previously, it seems a lot harder to stop the CPU from scoring goals in this version of the game than in any previous versions.

In PES5, for example, it was customary for me to concede around 10-15 goals per season. Here in PES2008, especially in the early seasons of this ML, I was shipping an average of 30 goals per season. I’ve complained to high heaven about the CPU apparently waltzing the ball into the net with my players either rendered immobile or ludicrously unable to put in a routine challenge (or challenges) to stop the attack. In other words, I was asserting that most of the goals scored against me were scripted.

Scripting is a serious topic for football game fans, and for PES fans in particular. If scripting is real, and if it’s as bad as we sometimes think it is, then what would be the point of playing any football game? Wouldn’t we be complete fools simply to press buttons whilst watching an interactive script unfold before our eyes? Yes, we would be complete fools.

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Wanting to concede less goals than normal is my own little way of challenging myself, and of testing the sturdiness of the alleged behind-the-scenes script. I wanted to see if it really was true that half the CPU goals were inevitable and unstoppable, or if it was just me not concentrating properly, being reckless, being too attack-minded—in short, defending badly.

It might be too early, but I’m pleased to report that the answer would seem to be that it was all my fault. This season so far I’ve conceded 12 goals. With three league games left, unless I suffer a compete catastrophe in a game or two, I think I’m going to meet my target. We’ll see.

None of which means that scripting per se isn’t true. Scripting in PES is very much true. It’s real and it’s annoying and it doesn’t belong in a mature, serious football game. In my opinion. All that my little mini-experiment with defending shows is that with concentration you can drastically cut the number of goals you concede. I’d still say that 75% of the goals I have conceded were predestined and frankly unstoppable.

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In league game 28 I actually lost another game—my second of the season. Real Zaragoza beat me 2-1. I was actually more bothered about conceding those two goals than I was about the defeat.

It was very like the 2-1 defeat I took from Valencia earlier this season. The same scoreline and pretty much the same reason for it—over-confidence bordering on arrogance from me. When you head out onto the virtual pitch assuming you have a right to win the game, a lot of the time it’ll work out for you—if you’ve got enough experience in the game to back up your belief. But when you’re at 1-1 and the CPU is plainly up for a fight, and you ignore all the warning signs and push on regardless, looking for a winner that the game is in no mood to let you have, well, that’s a mistake. Best to shut up shop, accept that the game is a draw, and see if you can’t snatch a cheeky winner on the break toward the end. That’s what I’ve done countless times already this season to great effect and it’s what I should have done on this occasion. But I didn’t.

Like I said, conceding two goals was the most hurtful side of it. That’s 14 goals against me all season. I should still make it to the end with less than 20 conceded, but it’s looking like being a lot closer than it could—and should—have been.

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Happily, in Europe there was better news. I met Lazio in the semi-final of the game’s Champions League equivalent. It’s the third or fourth time, in total, that Lazio and I have faced off in European competitions over the seasons. They beat me in a European Champioship final a few seasons ago. I’ve generally found them to be alarmingly tough opponents, almost on a par with my domestic nemesis Valencia.

On this occasion, though, Lazio were pussycats. I won the first leg 1-2 at their place. With those two away goals to my name, I regarded the second leg as pretty much a formality—a dangerous thing to do, yes, but I got away with it. I won that second leg by the mammoth scoreline of 6-1. The only dowside was conceding that solitary goal, but that was near the end when the game was over anyway.

All of which leaves me having to win just the two Cup finals to win the Treble. My second Treble in a row, hopefully. And I have to try not to concede another 6 goals in my remaining three league games. I think I am going to do it on all fronts.