PES Chronicles

Somehow, I have started playing and enjoying PES2009’s Become a Legend mode. I never wanted this. I was rather looking forward to spending the rest of this football game year catching up on all the unplayed games on my shelf. I’ll still do that, but now it seems BaL in PES2009 (and Ultimate Team and BaP in FIFA09) are also going to be in the mix.

After spending a third of my first season with Manchester City in the Reserves ‘B’ team, I found myself bumped up to the Reserves ‘A’ team. This was a really big deal. I was actually nervous before the match and for most of the time during it. I was still playing in the reserves, on an empty, echoing reserve team pitch, but I was playing with the first team players alongside Robinho et al. I felt that things were moving in the right direction for me.

But I played quite badly in the match. The occasion got to me. I tightened up, always going for the safe, conservative passes. I was scared to make a mistake. Another complicating factor: it was my first game as a proper AMF. I’d played all the previous 16 or so matches as a CMF. The problem now was that I kept dropping too deep. The performance was a mess. It wasn’t helped by my growing anger towards some of my team-mates. Yes, anger towards make-believe team-mates…

One of the most convenient options available when you get the ball in midfield is to lay it off to a winger. But that rarely leads to anything good. It’s only by playing BaL that I’ve come to appreciate just how very, very bad at wing-play the PES2009 AI really is. 9 times out of 10 the winger, whoever it is, just messes it up.

You play the pass out wide, and go on the long run into the box anyway. Watching your winger on the ball, waiting for him to do something with it, is exquisitely painful. JUST SQUARE THE ******* BALL! CROSS IT, CROSS IT, YOU USELESS PRANCING SHOW-PONY. ****! But no, he tries one jink too many, trips over a blade of grass, and that’s it. You’ve made your run and expended some of your precious non-renewable stamina for nothing. You might just as well have passed it to the opposition.

Eventually I worked out it was okay for me to just goal-hang for a bit if that’s what I wanted to do, so I did. Late on, I even had a half-chance that I thumped tamely into the keeper’s midriff. It’s a measure of BaL’s deep-immersion factor that I was hugely satisfied with that.

Despite having a pretty bad game I made the subs bench for a proper game. This was an even bigger deal for me. It was the second leg of a D1 Cup tie against West Ham. Different atmosphere, full match, crowd, commentators. The Hammers went 1-0 up. I was brought on in the 65th minute. The cutscene that showed me coming onto the pitch made me drool. Finally a chance to try to do something in a proper match.

I felt overwhelmed and played ‘tight’ for the first few minutes. After that I played ok, getting a dozen touches in the 25 minutes I was on the pitch. I played a few decent passes, including the one that eventually led to our equaliser. We went through to the next round of the Cup 1-2 on aggregate.

I thought my average performance might send me back to the reserves. But I was still on the bench for the next league match, and the one after.

Here is where I started to encounter a huge negative with BaL. Being a substitute and having to watch the match is a total chore. I’m not coping very well with it at all. You can speed up the action to twice the normal speed, but it still makes for tedious minutes spent doing nothing at all. CPU vs CPU action contains little or no incidental entertainment value for me. It’s like watching a demo game on a screen in a shop. Maybe this won’t be an issue after my player matures and earns a regular starting place, and as I become more identified with my team(s), of course.

I didn’t come on at all in that in the first league match—very frustrating, that—but I did come on in the second. This time I was brought on as a CMF, which is currently my preferred position. As CMF I seem to play an active role in nearly every type of play. I can drop deep, push forward, hang wide, or I can just stick to the official position and let play develop towards me. I thought I had a decent game and it ended 0-0.

Next up was the mid-season negotiation period. Aston Villa made a bid for me, and I accepted the offer. I was feeling frustrated about being a substitute at Man City, and thought I might have a better chance of playing more games at Villa. It was a big old NOOB error on my part. Because, of course, at Villa I had to start all over again in the reserves…

Aston Villa away. After I started the season like a rocket, and grew concerned about PES2008 becoming too easy for me, the CPU teams have just stepped things up a gear. I’ve taken a couple of sound beatings. I not only want and need to put one over on the PES version of the Villa, I also would like the 3 points, thank you very much.

In real life, the rivalry between Coventry City and Aston Villa football clubs is mostly one-way. We care about beating them, and we used to beat them very rarely in the English top division. Villa don’t care about beating us, and they used to beat us a lot. There’s some kind of lesson in there somewhere.

In PES – the 2008 flavour, or any other – there’s a definite forlornness about the whole local rivalry thing. The FIFA series has all the real-life licenses, and has always modelled local rivalries particularly well. In PES, you more or less have to imagine it for yourself. This is something I have always done with gusto. Whenever I finally make it into the top division I always look through the calendar and make a mental note of the two league fixtures against the Villa. Then I start preparing for them a couple of games in advance, resting key players, and licking my lips…

I made a fantastic start. Literally, the stuff of fantasy: two quickfire goals in the first 10 minutes from that man Schwarz. I was punching the air here in my sad little room.2-0 up, then, and almost guaranteed to be in a winning position. You’d think. But this is PES2008.

All matches for me at the moment in Master League seem to follow the same pattern. Taking a 2-0 lead is almost guaranteed to invite a response from the CPU in the form of a cheeky goal that it seems you are powerless to prevent. Aston Villa got themselves a corner, and I braced for the inevitable.

Recently. I have started to be able to defend corners with about 95% success. I had been automatically trying to defend them using the method from the last couple of PESes. In PES5 all you had to do was stand a defender in the sweet spot on the corner of the six-yard box; in PES6, the sweet spot was a yard or two deeper.

I got hold of my defenders in the box and dragged them over to stand on the Villa strikers’ toes. Over came the corner. The ball was dropping directly at my defender, Mattsson. There was no way the Villa attacker – who was not only smaller than Mattsson, but standing behind him relative to the ball’s approach vector (bear with me here) – was ever going to get his head on that ball, right? Right?

I waited until the appropriate time, and then pressed for Mattsson to make the kind of routine clearance that I have been routinely performing for many dozens of games now, ever since I discovered how to do it. Mattsson didn’t move, and somehow the ball went over his head, onto the Villa attacker’s forehead, and into the net.

1-2, and I would have fumed if I had any fumes left with which to fume. PES2008 has almost completely defumed me. Bless its little heart.

At this stage, things can go several ways. The CPU will maintain its supercharged drive forward to get a goal. What you need is another goal yourself, to kill the game off.

I got it. Again it came from Schwarz, completing his hat trick:

The game ended that way: 1-3. I was happy to have bested my virtual local rival on their own patch. I resisted the urge to soil a sheet of toilet paper and send it to the real Villa Park along with a rude note (again). I’m way past that.

I moved onto the next games with increased confidence. It seemed I was through the bad patch. I beat Fulham 3-0 despite the CPU once again being in perma-God Mode. I’ve discovered – or rediscovered – how to cope with God Mode in PES2008. It’s simple: remember that you’re playing a game, not locked in a life-or-death struggle for your family honour. When you feel your fingers cramping up as though you’re trying to strangle the joypad, you’re doing it wrong. Pause the game for a few moments, take literal and figurative deep breaths, and then resume.

I played the return leg of the Division 1 Cup tie against Spurs. It was at their ground, and it ended 1-1. It was a hard match but I held on to go through on the away goal. It’s my Cup and they’re not taking it off me.

The session concluded on a downbeat note with a mammoth encounter against Arsenal. It ended 3-2 to them after I had been 2-1 up at half time. They got the equaliser on 70 minutes from a penalty that I thought was a blatant dive. Referee!

I quite like the inclusion of diving in PES2008. Like it or not, diving is a feature of the real-life game. Any football video game that aspires to represent the sport must include diving, however unsporting it is. Q.E.D. What’s next, then, an objector might, er, object. Hooliganism? Point taken, but diving in PES2008 enriches the game, in my opinion. It leads to contentious moments, exciting scenarios, fair and unfair outcomes. I’ve tried it myself, off and on, with almost zero success. But it’s still early days.

When Arsenal clicked into their turbo mode in search of a winning goal I started to ignore my own advice. I could hear the joypad creaking under the pressure, but I never let up. I was clamping again: pressing R1+X+Square. Will I never learn? Clamping doesn’t actually benefit you a great deal. All it does is drag players out of position, tires them, and send them into a virtual panic. While your players are hurling themselves pell-mell all over the place, the CPU delves into its box of tricks, with this kind of result:

Oh, the pain.

Going into the mid-season negotiations period, I’m still holding steady in fourth place, but Chelsea at the top of the table are starting to pull away. They’re 7 points clear of Man Utd in second place, and 12 points clear of me. It’ll be difficult for anyone to catch them now. I wasn’t expecting to challenge for the title this season, though, so I’m not disappointed. What I wanted from this season was to avoid relegation. I will avoid it, I think, so a top-6 finish and qualification for next season’s European Cup is now my new ‘bonus’ target.

Another bonus: at the moment, Schwarz is second in the top scorers’ league. He has 12 goals. Rooney, in first place, has 15. I’d like to get Schwarz to the top of this list by season’s end. He deserves it.

I’ve always said to anyone who will listen (i.e., to no one) that the greatest PES striker ever was PES5’s Dennis Bergkamp (after he had regenerated, of course). Schwarz in PES2008 isn’t quite there yet. But he’s a contender.