PES Chronicles

A single game in my Become A Legend career yesterday. It’s literally all I had time for. One game. I was ready for more games by the end of it, but I had to run. Literally run, for a bus. (Such is adult life. I’ve never liked it much.)

In lots of ways it’s a miracle I made it to June before feeling overcome with football game fatigue. The next-generation games are both pretty good, in their own ways. Yes, even PES2009. But neither PES2009 or FIFA09 can hold a candle to the brightness of the mid-2000s games. In particular PES3 and PES5, my personal favourites.

Poor old next-gen FIFA has got a lot of ground to make up with me. I can see how great it is. I do still enjoy playing it. But it’s never really, how shall I put this, grabbed me by the balls. Not even FIFA08, when it was all brand-new. It’s all to do with the lack of a truly satisfying offline game mode.

I know, I know. A proper Manager Mode, FIFA10-style, is coming. Three years late, but it’s coming. I’d have been a lot more charitable toward FIFA08’s and FIFA09’s Manager Modes if they weren’t such puzzling, strange steps back from the fully-featured Manager Mode that was in FIFA07 on the PS2. All the things that EA are promising us for MM in FIFA10 were already in it on the PS2. Why has it taken until now for it to appear in next-gen?

But hey—BaL and all that. So I had time for that one game. It was a League match against Wigan at our place. I was in  the starting line-up, of course, as I always am these days. Before this game started I flicked R2 to check on my form arrow. I rarely do that, but this time I had a Feeling.

Disconcertingly, the form arrow was a purple, down-pointing one. Ouch. In Master League I’d never pick a player with a purple form arrow, but the CPU manager in BaL has no such qualms.

I believe a purple form arrow denotes a -10 penalty across the board. Something like that. My stats are pretty meagre as they stand. (Snapshot of them on the left. The leftmost column shows my stats when I came to Tottenham; my current stats are on the right. They show quite a growth in less than a season. Starting regularly for a top team has really helped.)

I made up my mind before the match started to stick to my position. I’d play the simple passes. I’d go off on adventurous runs very occasionally (rather than all the bleedin’ time, which is the default BaL behaviour).

And I stuck to the plan. But what thanks did I get for it? I was subbed in the 60th minute—one of my earliest substitutions ever—after having had a pretty decent game in my estimation. I played a dozen good passes. I sent over a couple of floated through-balls that the strikers got a hold of. I even had a shot (keeper’s midriff). I laid off the sprint button. At the point where I was taken off I still had half a stamina bar. I was starting to find space and put in dangerous crosses.

The match ended 0-0 and I checked my post-match rating. 6.0. Not good. Not good at all. If that’s what I get for playing the game properly, I think I’ll have to go back to trying to tear up trees.

Ah, but when will I be playing the game(s), PES2009 or FIFA09, again? There’s no guarantee that there’ll even be a post on Monday—or if there is one, what it’ll be about.

Friday’s bit-of-a-rant was unusual for me in terms of scale, but not completely unexpected that it happened at all. I do often have periods of being less interested in football games (and in games in general). The downtimes do usually come in the summer months.

The storm seems to have passed—for now. Diagnosing my own condition, I think I experienced a few days of despair about all that’s wrong with the next-gen football games, instead of seeing all that’s good and even great about them.

I’m still not too happy about large parts of the games. I still think we’ve been needlessly short-changed over the past two years by PES and FIFA. But I have at least gone back. I always go back. My time has been split roughly 50-50 between PES2009’s Become a Legend mode, and FIFA09’s Manager Mode.

In BaL I’ve exercised some self-control and discipline, stuck to my position more, and got better results. I think most problems on the field of play in BaL can be traced to trying to follow the ball everywhere like a school playground player.

My current team, Tottenham, suffers some peculiar defeats when I’m playing in it. I’m certain this isn’t due to anything in particular that I’m doing or not doing—although I suppose having a little more nous up front wouldn’t hurt our cause. It’s mainly due to me simply being in the team, and thus obliging PES2009 to invoke the famous old momentum/scripting factor in all its glory. Tottenham were a top-5 side when I arrived. We’re a mid-table side now, and out of both Cups.

At least I’ve notched up another goal:

Link:

It came against West Brom. I beat that defender with suspicious ease, and no real idea of how I managed to knock the ball so far out of my feet. But, gratifyingly, the finish went exactly where I wanted it to go—across the keeper, tucked into the far corner. The goal made it 2-0 to us and was our first win in a few matches. I’m now a regular starter.

Over In FIFA09, I scored this novelty goal with Bojan:

Link:

As with the fabled Recoba from PES of old, there’s no actual button combo (that I’m aware of) to trigger that kind of skipping, backheeled shot on goal. It just fires automatically under certain conditions, of which this was an example.

I’m doing very well in the league. You can just make out that my Coventry City side is top of the Premier League after 16 games of the season. My star striker, Pavlyuchenko, is second-top scorer. Despite my very real contempt for FIFA09’s Manager Mode, I’m determined to at least finish this season.

I remain a strong admirer of FIFA09’s core gameplay. Incredibly, there are still people who haven’t heard the news about the new FIFA. There are still many PES fans for whom being anti-FIFA is almost a cherished ideological standpoint. They steadfastly refuse to budge. All the talk about FIFA this, FIFA that, is just so much white noise to them.

I think it’s a shame. The last PES holdouts have missed out—and are still missing out—on sampling the gameplay that is closer to what we all thought PES would be like in the next generation than PES2008 and PES2009 could ever dream of being.

New-style FIFA isn’t a perfect game. In my opinion FIFA08 and FIFA09 have not come close to matching the glories of the Pro Evolution Soccer games of the mid-2000s. Ah, but will anything come close to those games, ever again?

A bad couple of games on PES2009’s Become A Legend, and a bad little run on FIFA09’s Manager Mode. At this moment I hate both of them. It’s been a bad few days for me and my football games.

In BaL, I’m starting to believe that I really picked the wrong position to play from the start. Even as an AMF in the Tottenham midfield (licensed to goal-hang, in other words), the games often just pass me by.

I still go through distinct phases with BaL. Phases of disliking it, liking it a bit, liking it a lot, and then thinking it’s the greatest game mode ever. I’m somewhere between dislike and like at the moment. I’ve played enough of BaL now to know that I’ve just got to play a few more games and I’ll probably be back in the adoration stage of the cycle.

In FIFA09’s Manager Mode the sheer sameness of the matches is starting to grate. I’m talking nails-on-a-blackboard kind of grate… I don’t know how long I can go on. After a while I barely notice which teams I’m playing against. Every single match is played in bright sunshine, one after the other, in an unending, grinding fashion. League, Cup, League Cup , Europe—every single match kicks off in the middle of a sunlit, golden afternoon. Sometimes there’s a cloud in the sky, but even then you only see it in substitution cut-scenes.

Reportedly, EA omitted night-time matches and weather effects from Manager Mode in FIFA09 because having them would have been ‘inconsistent’. The problem they faced was that some stadia in the game weren’t coded with night matches and/or weather. So what was EA’s solution?

Was their solution:

a) Let the stadia that did have the capability to host night matches and weather in Manager Mode have night matches and weather in Manager Mode, and allow the ones that didn’t have them to just not have them, and leave it at that.

or

b) Force daytime sunlit matches on every stadium in the entire mode, all the time.

The good folk at EA—otherwise so sure-footed in this console generation—went with b). Brilliant!

And to cap it all: in one of those loading screen Q&A things, I saw Notts County referred to as Nott’s County. I’ve been on the Internet long enough not to get upset by misplaced apostrophes, but this one made me want to burst into tears.

And soon after this, I saw Bolton Wanderers called the Bolton Wanderers… No, no, no, no, no. If I was a different kind of ‘net denizen, I’d have that Captain Picard facepalm picture right here.

The way I feel right now, 360-degree dribbling and all of FIFA10’s other bells and whistles can just go and be damned. If Manager Mode doesn’t have night matches and weather (and a better transfer system), it’s not going to happen for me. I mean it. I really don’t care if the core gameplay is made in heaven by angels. There’s got to be a single-player game mode that’s worth playing over at least a couple of months, or it’s pointless.

It’s a startling truth that I’ve spent almost my entire time on FIFA09 this year just ‘making the best of it’. Getting by with scraps from Ultimate Team and Manager Mode.

And then there’s FIFA09’s distance shooting. It’s not as bad as some would make out, but it’s still not quite right. The gleeful surprise you feel when you do get one on target, or even score one, is a good sign that something is wrong.

This happens all too often:

Link:

That’s me hitting the crossbar from a shot taken about 25 yards out, from an angle. I’ve done this—hit the post/crossbar—from this kind of position, approximately 50 times in FIFA09.

If I get a throw-in roughly level with the opposition penalty area, I’ll try to work the space to take a shot from this kind of position. They’re not hard chances to make, and there’s usually time to cue up a finesse shot, as in the clip. About half the time I’ll miss badly, or send a weak shot scudding along the ground. And the other half of the time… I always hit the post or crossbar.

And I mean always. It doesn’t get saved by the keeper. It doesn’t go in. It hits the post or crossbar. Every. Single. Time.

I’m so used to hitting the post/crossbar with these kinds of shots that I rarely try them any more. I only try them occasionally in the faint hope that I might, at some point, not hit the post/crossbar—that I might actually score.

There is a programmed tendency in FIFA09 for long finesse shots from that certain area of the pitch to hit the post or crossbar, and this makes me feel stupid for playing at all. PES has its macro-level scripting, which certainly has its knockers, missus, but FIFA09’s scripted elements are arguably just as bad. Scripted hitting of the post and crossbar is just an awful, awful thing.

I’m low on motivation to play any of the football games at the moment. The way things are going, Monday’s post could be about Peggle on the DS (surprisingly great), or why Final Fantasy VII isn’t what I remember it to be (lots of RPGs under the bridge since then; Cloud is no longer a unique hero; the random battles are annoying), or why you should never, under any circumstances, put your whole poker tournament on the line to chase a gutshot straight draw (the odds, the odds)…

The way I feel now, if my PSP wasn’t occupied with FF7 I’d play my PSP PES2008 Master League career and report on that for the next week or two. I’ve just about had it with PES2009 and FIFA09 at the moment. Had it.

What has happened to football games over the past few years? It’s not just me, is it? None of them have been really great.

Some have been good, yes—FIFA08 in particular was very good—but we’re a long way from the heights reached earlier in this decade. Or am I merely donning the proverbial rose-tinted spectacles to look back on the PS2 era with such fondness and nostalgia?

Was everything really better in the old days? And if it was, what has changed?

The only thing really different about today is the higher profile of online multiplayer. I dislike online play, so I might just be picking on it for no reason here, but could it be to blame for, well, everything? Has the mass online era—which diverts time and resources from the core game, and arguably requires gameplay to be dumbed down optimised for online conditions—ruined football gaming for good?

Ah, Become a Legend, how I have neglected you.

It’s not the mode’s fault. As I have discovered, there is something compelling about playing just as a solo player in a Master League-like game world. (A world that’s not Master League-like enough for my liking, but enough with the quibbling.)

It was always inevitable that I was going to drift away to play ‘proper’ football with a full team of 11 players at some point. That’s what I did, drifting over to play Manager Mode on FIFA09 for a bit. Manager Mode is shallow and anti-immersive and crude and all the rest of it, but it does provide some incidental amusement. In FIFA08 and FIFA09 it’s a rickshaw, when it should have been a limousine. I’m hoping to see the limousine in FIFA10.

I played MM for a week or so, happy as Larry, whoever he is. It was just as inevitable that I’d drift back to PES2009 and Become A Legend eventually. And here I am.

I think this is how it might be for the rest of the summer. I’m going to be a nomad of the football game modes.

In BaL, last time I looked in, I’d just moved to Tottenham, had just broken through to the subs’ bench, and was grumpily watching most of the games from the virtual sidelines. As I’ve remarked before, and will do so again, this is my least favourite aspect of BaL. In fact, it drives me crazy. Crazy.

If I get 1 hour per day to play games, I want to play games in that hour. Not spend chunks of it watching dire AI-versus-AI matches, with no guarantee I’ll be brought on. If BaL does appear in PES2010 then it’s got to have a ‘GO TO X‘ feature in the match menu, where X is either ‘the moment when my player is brought on’ or even ‘the end of the match’.

BaL purists could argue that watching the matches from the bench is an important feature of the game mode. Bench-warming represents the same frustrations that a real-life player feels when not in the First XI. I do agree with that, but I would still like the option for days when I just can’t afford to wait around.

Admittedly a lot of this can be avoided by not moving clubs too much. You always have to work your way into the first team at a new club. Tottenham are my fourth team in as many seasons. Thus, I’ve spent more time than I should on a lot of benches. I won’t be leaving Tottenham in a hurry—not least because they’re one of the few teams that usually plays with a proper AMF, my official position.

I’m playing in a decent Tottenham midfield that, amusingly, features Cesc Fabregas. First match was the second leg of a Masters Cup tie against Ajax. I was on the bench and watched as we took the lead, playing some lovely stuff. When your team is doing well, the chance of you being brought on increases dramatically, and so after half-time I was very happy to see me lining up in the pitch for the kick-off.

And then Ajax scored almost immediately. I was an AMF and could easily goal-hang without being too far from my ‘proper’ position. So I goal-hung (-hanged?) and actually scored one. It was a tap-in after a scramble. I was on the verge of recording it, but it was just too ordinary a goal to post here. Literally just a tap-in from a yard out. I did enjoy scoring it, though. That’s the greatness of BaL: every goal (or assist) feels very special indeed.

Next was a league match against my old club, Portsmouth. I played from the start and finished the entire match. I was careful to do the simple things well and not try to take on the entire team. We won that one, and then faced Arsenal in the next. I was back on the bench here. It was 0-0 right up until the 75th minute when I came on—and Tottenham promptly fell apart. It’s amazing how often this happens. Almost as if the game knows when you’re playing…

We lost 0-2, and I got a 5.0 rating afterward. Ouches all round.

I was back in the starting XI for the first leg of the next Masters Cup tie—against Manchester United. I actually played well in this one (got a 6.5) and nearly scored with my first touch in the 2nd minute (the ball whizzed ‘inches’ past the upright). We lost 0-1, though, and will have a lot to do in the second leg. For now, I just want to consolidate my position and get back to being what I was at Portsmouth: a regular starter.