PES Chronicles

A mixed few days of news about the 2011 games. PES2011 has had a major scare, with the appearance of several videos showing players indulging in chained rainbow flicks. If the final game’s trick system is that forgiving, PES2011 will be PES2008 part 2. I don’t even want to think about that.

Following last week’s great FIFA11 gamespeed scare, two lads from the FIFA Soccerblog went for a playtest on Monday. They reported the gamespeed to be ideal. Hopefully the Slow setting will actually mean something this year

Sadly, as is now all-too-typical and totally INFURIATING, the FSB boys mostly played multiplayer. 1p vs 2p. Yet again the state of the AI was ignored. The single-player game was totally ignored. Ah, but when it was all over and they were in the bar, one of them nipped back to the demo room for a few games against the AI. It was literally an afterthought.

This issue has been a bugbear of mine for a long time now. When did 1p vs 2p become the default method of previewing a football game? Why is there seemingly no awareness that they should be looking at more, doing more, exploring more, reporting back on MORE than simply how much chortling fun it was to go head-to-head against their pals?

I don’t have access to any precise figures. But I would bet quite a lot of money that about 90% of football game players still spend about 90% of their time playing against the AI in single-player.

A very illuminating moment cropped up in the latest WENB podcast. Konami’s Jon Murphy and Steve Merrett were guests, and one of them—I forget who now—remarked in passing that when they’re showing journalists their new game, they’ll often pause it to highlight something new. E.g., “Look at what you can do in defence now…” And the journalists will say how good it is, ignore it, and get back to playing, totally focused on beating their mates. My ears pricked up at this, because that description sums up exactly how I imagine it.

It’s the last full week of August. As far as I know there’s still no clue about the condition of opposition AI in either FIFA11 or PES2011. It’s a major failing not just on the previewers’ parts, but on the parts of EA and Konami, who allow it to happen.

Or do they want it to happen? That’s got to be a reasonable suspicion. But there’s probably no need to hide the AI from the typical PES/FIFA previewer, because he’s not looking for it.

And so to my current gaming. Oh, I’ll be happy when this period is over and the 2011 games are here, believe me.

I’ve gone off FIFA10 again. I had a good few days with the game, but the lack of anything compelling to do with it has got to me once more. No doubt I’ll come back to FIFA10 for a visit when I’m putting together my end-of-year review in a week or two. Other than that, compared to my extensive time spent in FIFAs 08 and 09, FIFA10 has more or less passed me by.

I’ve mainly played Dwarf Fortress for the past week. I woke up yesterday morning thinking about how I was going to channel an underground pool into a reservoir for my dwarves to use.

Valkyria Chronicles II for PSP is out next week. I’ve got my preorder in.

And there’s also PES6(360). Now, after a few weeks, I’ve settled back into it enough to have some perspective. I’m finally experiencing its well-known limitations as limiting. But I’d still say it’s the best pure PES gameplay available on the next-gen consoles so far, which is shocking and shameful. And I’m still enjoying it enough to plough on with my ML career. I’ve got a quarter of a season left in which the Treble is out of reach. I have a Double to go for in this season, and then a fresh assault on the Treble is next. This should occupy me—and the blog—for the next week or so.

So, was I too harsh on FIFA11—and on next-gen FIFA in general—on Friday? Yes and no. There’s still a full game of FIFA11 to come out, of course. If we based everything on shakycam vids and confused reports by guerilla poets on the Gamescom floor, no games would ever come out.

But I stand by my opinion that next-gen FIFA is  heading in slightly the wrong direction—for my personal tastes. FIFA10 has always felt faster than I want it to be, even on its so-called Slow setting. Its pressure/stamina mechanic (or lack of one) is just stupid. Stupid. Much like PES2011′s, really, to judge by what’s emerging from the Master League Online Beta testers.

I won’t go into details (no time; less inclination), but I’m not hearing anything about MLO that’s making me yearn to play the mode. MLO sounds just like Ultimate Team in all but name. Super teams packed with superstars all exerting maximum sprinting pressure for entire matches. No doubt I will try it at some point. I forecast a single session that’ll last about an hour at most.

I played some FIFA10 over the weekend. I am still hip-deep in a very good PES6(360) ML career. But I’ve missed out on the Treble in my current season and I felt that I needed a break before starting to push the rock up the hill again.

Predictably, I loved FIFA10 all over again. Just as predictably, after a while I started to want something substantial to do with all this wonderful gameplay.

FIFA needs a compelling offline answer to PES’s Master League mode. It’s no longer an optional extra that EA can afford to nurture and grow organically over a period of years. It’s got to happen now.

Manager Mode has been a disaster for the series and few will miss it. Career Mode sounds sparse and utilitarian, but as ever I have a wild mad hope that it’ll be good. I’m an optimist when it comes to football games, it’s plain to see…

Below are some goals I scored in my weekend FIFA10 sessions (all using semi-assisted controls). The very first one had me sitting up and punching the air. The match was a tight affair. It doesn’t really come across in the clip, but I gave the right stick the slightest nudge in order to make the space, and then whipped the shot in. It felt very good. The other goals were one of my patented ‘reverse hook’ shots, and a different kind of long-ranger that found the postage stamp corner of the net:

Link:

A lot of people say that goal-scoring in FIFA isn’t varied or satisfying enough. I’ve never really gone along with that view. The three goals above are indeed all a bit samey—but only because I favour goals scored from outside the box when assembling clips for the blog. I’ve always scored plenty of different types of goals in next-gen FIFA, from FIFA08 through to today.

My issue with FIFA is the lack of a meaningful context in which to score the goals. What’s it all about? What’s it all for?

The Treble is over for me in PES6(360). After losing all three of my opening European Championship group games, I had to win the remaining fixtures to stand any chance of progressing. Game 4 was against Inter. I lost 0-2, and it was a pretty miserable performance all round.

At least I’m still top of the league and I’m 1-0 up after the first leg of the D1 Cup quarter-final. So the Double is still on. But it’s the Treble I want, and I’ll have to get it to feel any sense of closure with PES6(360). I’m disappointed—and time is fast running out in the current game year. I should be able to squeeze in another season or two of PES6(360) before the end (Dwarf Fortress willing).

At this time of the year a lot of my football gaming activity is related to the imminent new games. I always have something to say about them, and it’s always necessarily personal and opinionated. I’ve railed against my own pseudo-journalism on this blog—which was conceived as a regular diary of my football games playing—but I can’t help indulging myself every now and then. Particularly every August and September.

FIFA11 has received a fearful kicking over the past few days. At the time of writing (Thursday evening), the forums are still boiling over. It’s all based on a  couple of dodgy videos filmed on the Gamescom floor on Wednesday.

You can’t tell anything about the most important part of a football game—how it feels, to play, in your hands—from videos, no matter how good or bad. But FIFA11 looks ridiculously fast, which is worrying enough. More worrying still is the clear evidence in several videos that next-gen FIFA’s most unattractive feature, the dreaded double-sprint-pressure clamp, is still in the game.

In next-gen FIFA, sprint-clamping has gradually been turned up to the max. Turned up to 11, you might say. It is so extraordinarily, unbelievably, shamefully effective. By this stage the ‘technique’ is so widely known and generally despised that its continued presence in the FIFA series can only be a deliberate, conscious choice on the  part of EA.

“If you don’t like it, don’t do it.” This argument has never, ever washed with me. Whether it’s super-sprinting in PES2008 or double-sprint-pressuring in FIFAs 09 and 10, if something is in the game, it’s in the game, as EA themselves would say.

And I’m speaking just as an offline, 1p vs CPU player of football games. I never play online. When I moan about sprint-pressuring, I’m moaning about myself. I’m the one who uses it in all my games. Knowing it’s there, I have to use it.

Sprint-clamping will be the death of next-gen FIFA as a serious football game in the long run unless Something Is Done. Feeble tokenistic gestures—tweaking this or that variable to mitigate the effect by a few fractions of a percentage point—are not good enough. The whole damn mechanic needs to be got rid of, or reduced in effectiveness so much that it’s only effective 10% of the time, say—instead of 90% of the time, as it is now.

God knows what online players must have to put up with. I did play a few matches of FIFA10 online, way back at the start of the footy game year. My random opponents might as well have glued down their sprint, tackle, and secondary pressure buttons.

Having said all that, I’m not too worried about FIFA11. Over the course of this year it’s become plain that I’ve moved away from FIFA and back towards PES. The reason? Master League 2010. That’s the reason.

So I don’t anticipate myself playing FIFA11 for longer than a few weeks at either end of the upcoming 2010-2011 game year. I am greatly looking forward to giving myself wholly over to Master League in PES2011. (What could possibly go wrong…?)

But I don’t want to see a great football game—which next-gen FIFA is, despite its problems—progressively ruined by corporate timidity. I agree with the most common theory prevalent on the FIFA forums: EA are terrified of losing the kiddie crowd.

We have now come through 3 years of next-gen FIFA. Have EA really not noticed that an awful lot of people play their game with their fingers clamped on three buttons? That that’s literally all they do, just waiting to get the ball back? And that the most common end-result is a midfield wrestling match with occasional outbreaks of football?

PES isn’t innocent. Some passages of play in the PES2011 vids are truly alarming. Whenever I’ve played PES online, the problem exists there too.

The FIFA forums have been in ferment for a few days and show no sign of settling down. Ahhh, but they will settle down… FIFA11 will likely come out in much the same condition as FIFA10. It’ll  be a bit too fast for my taste even on Slow, and performing a Vulcan death grip on the controller will win me back the ball 90% of the time.

That’s fine. As I showed last year and the year before, I’m capable of getting a lot out of such a game. But is this really what FIFA’s future looked like in the heady days of FIFA08, when the much-maligned old footy franchise swaggered back onto the scene? It didn’t look this way to me.

It’s been a really tough few days. Maybe I should have made more of a fuss about getting in on the Beta. I mean, maybe I should have shamelessly touted myself in Konami’s face as a long-term PES/Master League blogger. I should have tried to blag my way into the Beta via the back entrance.

Maybe I could still try it—but no, I won’t. Not my style. I’d feel embarrassed, weirdly. I bet Jon Murphy’s not even looking at his email or Twitter accounts, knowing that they’ll be full of begging letters.

I’ll just live with my pain. The Beta will be over soon enough, and then all of us who didn’t get in can be happy again. Happy…

It’s been hard to look on from the sidelines. Hard to watch the videos and read the testimonies from the front line. But it’s character-building, is what it is. It’s an opportunity to be philosophical about shit.

Having other things to do helps. Dwarf Fortress! On Monday night the disappointment of Monday morning was crushed beneath the weight of a five-hour Dwarf Fortress session. I’m starting to glimpse the frightening reality behind this celebrated quote from the DF forums: “I play Dwarf Fortress. I wish I was a meth addict instead.”

And there’s also been PES6(360), and PES2010(PS3).

I played a session of PES6(360) yesterday morning. I was still hurting about the PES2011 Beta, and there wasn’t much conviction in my play, alas. I lost all three of my opening group matches in the European Championships. Even three good wins in my remaining fixtures won’t guarantee me scraping through to the knockouts. The Treble might be over.

After that, I took a look back at PES2010(PS3). With all the talk about PES2011 I thought it might soothe my pain to have a go on the most recent PES. And I’m coming up to my end-of-year review of the game, so it’s only right to refresh my memory. I played two ML matches and won them 3-0 and 4-0. It had been five weeks since my last game.

Despite this, I enjoyed myself. As I’ve said before, I regret ever leaving PES2010 behind. I know I could have played Master League all year in some form. I went off to dabble with FIFA10 because I felt that I should. I will never repeat that mistake again.

I’ll play Master League for the whole 2010-2011 football game year if that’s what I want to do. But will I be playing Master League Online? Early reports have not been inspiring. Never say never, of course, but I doubt it’ll be for me.

Master League Online sounds just like FIFA’s Ultimate Team. Playing one-off matches against random opponents isn’t really what I envisioned when I thought about ML Online. It sounds to me as if they’ve just created an Ultimate Team clone and grafted the Master League name onto it. But we’ll see. As the novelty of playing PES2011 wears off for the lucky Beta testers, they’ll start drilling down into ML Online. Maybe there’s gold in there.

At least PES2011′s gameplay looks good and sounds good. Some of the videos have looked amazing, some have been average, and some portions of some matches looked really poor. Overall, though, yes, it looks like PES2011 is finally a departure point for PES in the next-generation.

So could the Great Anguish, as the period 2007-2009 may come to be known in PES lore, be over? Will PES2011 halt that decline? Reverse it? Cancel it out completely?

If I’d been in the Beta I think I’d have a good idea by now, which is frustrating. The upcoming demo won’t really tell me anything. 2-minute matches with a small selection of teams makes for a very distorted impression of the game, as last year’s PES2010 showed. (Great demo, not-so-great final game.) So it’s looking like it’ll be October, and mid-to-late October at that, before I get the answer to the burning question.