PES Chronicles

Oh dear. It’s not improved, you know. In fact, it’s got worse. A lot worse.

I’m talking about my career in PES2010′s Become A Legend. I’ll cut to the chase: it’s just about over. I’m completely and utterly fed up of watching the godawful, empty, endless swathes of CPU vs CPU ‘action’ that the game mode forces me to sit through, session after session after session after session after session…

I’ll say right now that I’m not even going to try out PES2011′s BaL mode unless it has a ‘skip CPU matchtime’ kind of option. Things are that bad.

It’s now almost the middle of my second season. I’m still on the bench. I’ve been on the bench for all but a short period at the start of this season. I can’t believe it. I can’t accept it. I’m struggling with it. A lot.

By this stage in 2009′s effort to get into BaL, I was starting regularly. Perhaps I’m just not good enough at PES to have the same kind of career path that so many others seem to have had. I’m sure that’s got to be it. If I sound a little like I’m waving goodbye to BaL here, that’s because I think I am doing that. It is just about all over.

Which is a shame. I was looking forward to the Master League-style magic that so many glowing testimonies tell me BaL truly possesses. But the way it wants to take me there is intolerable. I think I am literally incapable of sitting through one second more of CPU vs CPU football.

Below are my player’s current stats (the second page is embedded afterwards).

Not the most impressive stats, and certainly in real life I’d never get anywahere near a first team. But I expect to spend my time with a console football game playing the game. BaL doesn’t let me do that, and it’s unacceptable for me.

With not-Greg sitting on the bench, it’s the 60th, 70th, sometimes the 80th minute before I come on. When I play BaL I’m sitting and seething for 75% of the time.And then it’s all over in the blink of an eye. Whoosh. There went my playing time.

I don’t want to occupy myself with other things during the CPU vs CPU torment. I can’t consume things in bite-sized chunks while doing other things. If I wanted to read a book or play PSP or anything else, that’s what I’d do: I’d read a book or play PSP or do whatever. When I play PES, I want to play PES.

I can’t really go on spending time on BaL—any time—like this. Having said that, I would probably persist for the 5 seasons of BaL that I promised myself (even while hating it, because I can be stubborn like that)…

But something has happened. Something that has probably ended this year’s BaL experiment at a stroke.

Yesterday morning, I came on as a sub for 20 minutes and got a 6.5 post-match rating in a 2-1 victory for Stoke. That’s pretty good. And I was good. I contributed a direct assist, made some vital tackles, and played some good passes. That, I was sure, should get me a starting place.

Next match? On the bench.

In a fit of temper, I quit BaL with some time to spare of my play-session. I didn’t fancy having a go on FIFA10. The mood I was in was no kind of mood for Manager Mode…

Looking down my pile of games, I saw PES6 for the Xbox360 among them. Hmmm. Why not?

I played one match in my unfinished Master League career, as PES United. (The 360 version had very meagre Editing.)

I played that one match—and every cell in my body seemed to vibrate with sympathetic magic. This is the stuff I need, I thought. As King Arthur says in the underappreciated 1981 film Excalibur: “I didn’t know how empty was my soul, until it was filled.”

I know exactly what he meant. More next time.

My patience with PES2010′s Become A Legend mode was hanging by a thread. It’s almost the middle of my second season as a young professional at Stoke City. Granted, in real life I’d still be nowhere near the first team. But in this game mode I think I should have become a regular starter by now. I do get occasional starts, but then I’m back on the bench again.

Clearly I need something big to happen—a goal, or a couple of assists. I need something more than solid performances. Playing my position and making my passes aren’t doing it. 6.0 and 6.5 ratings aren’t good enough. I need magic.

But I get so frustrated and wound up by being on the bench. When I come on, it affects my performances. Case in point: It was the 80th minute of yet another match in which I had just come on as a substitute. I feel intense pressure to do something special in what amounts to about a minute-and-a-half of real time.

When an opponent sprinted near me with the ball, I gave chase. But I couldn’t catch him. I let loose with a frustrated sliding tackle that just clipped his heels and brought him down. Ouch. I’ve already been red-carded a few times in this career for tackles just it.

Here is where my BaL fate was either made or unmade. As the referee ran across to me, I distinctly thought: if this is a red card, I’ll just exit the game, abandon BaL, and never come back to it.

The ref stopped in front of me and brandished the card. It was yellow.

I played on. BaL is still alive. If I do go on to have a full and immersive career, I’ll look back on that moment as the moment when everything could have been so different.

I started a game a few matches later, and had a very good time. I really do enjoy BaL when I get a full game. My stamina is now 81 overall and I can run for pretty much the whole 90 minutes, although I still get subbed around the 75th minute. I can cope with that.

I’m still more or less in the football gaming doldrums. In PES2010′s Become A Legend, there’s a been a grim development: I’m back on the subs’ bench.

I spent a whole session mostly watching PES2010 play with itself. [Hah, which makes a change from... No, no, no.]

Being benched has come as a very unpleasant surprise. Until now in this season, I was starting matches. I thought I was past all of this nonsense.

It’s a peculiar kind of torment. Why? I keep asking myself, whilst watching yet another CPU vs CPU game spin towards its end, with the faint hope of my eventual appearance as a substitute. Why?

At first I thought it was a one-off. I recall being benched for odd matches here and there in last year’s BaL campaign. But when I was on the bench for the next game, and the one after that… and the one after that, and the one after that…

Currently, I’ve been on the bench for 6 matches in a row. Coincidentally, that’s been my after-match rating for all of them: 6.0. Which isn’t bad, and was the kind of rating that got me into the First XI in the first place.

What has gone so wrong? At the start of this season I was in the First XI. I’m not doing anything differently from before. If anything, I play more soldily as a substitute, knowing that I have less time to impress. I’m playing the percentage game, making my passes, holding my position.

This is nearly the middle of my second season. My gaming time, as ever, is at a premium. I’m not very motivated to spend it in staring morosely at the speeded-up ‘spectacle’ of CPU vs CPU action. That’s what I’ve done for most of the time during these 6 matches. In one, I didn’t get on the pitch until the 85th minute. I touched the ball once, then the final whistle went.

I have to ask myself what I’m doing. What’s it all about? Should a game mode in a football computer game really be triggering an existential crisis? I’ve got books to read and websites to stare blankly at. I can’t do anything else while the CPU vs CPU matches are on other than wait for my time to come, however briefly.

I wait as patiently as I can. And, post-World Cup, something strikes me: CPU vs CPU games are eerily like top-level International football at its very worst. There’s little in the way of goalmouth action. The two teams more or less cancel one another out. If there was something worth watching, things would be different.

By the time this post appears, I’ll probably have found my way back into the First XI. I hope so.

Confession to make: I’m in the football game doldrums. I’ve been in them for some time, probably from just before the World Cup. I shifted from playing Master League to FIFA10. FIFA10′s Manager Mode let me down quite badly, feeling even worse than ever. I was cut adrift. Then the World Cup got going and took a lot more time away from my football gaming. Football Manager 2010 and a few non-football games have also had an impact. This is definitely the least football-gamey I’ve felt in a long, long time, maybe in years.

I am still playing PES2010/FIFA10 for an hour or so every day. It’s habit more than anything. I tend to skip between the games and dabble in various modes, rarely playing the same thing in consecutive sessions. I’ve even had enjoyable sessions of Manager Mode.

I’m dragging myself through the early parts of a Become A Legend career in PES2010. It’s got quite difficult to keep playing. I mean that it’s got difficult to keep my interest levels high. It’s season 2 and I’m past the early, frustrating period of being on the subs’ bench all the time. Now I’m starting regularly, albeit wth occasional returns to the bench.

My core gaming experience of BaL is just the same, all the time. Go on the pitch, twist and turn for ages, watch the ball, call for the ball, be ignored, keep watching, take up a good position, receive the ball, lay it off tidily or dribble for a bit and then lay it off tidily, rinse, repeat, end of match. I have a shot every now and then. My player is still very young and very below-average, akin to an ML Default player.

I’m oath-sworn to give this mode a chance, at least 5 seasons—but that presupposes a certain base level of enthusiasm remaining constant, and it’s not. It could be that BaL is just not for me, in the same way that Master League is just not for some people. This is by no means the end for me and BaL. Just a signal that I’ll most likely play it occasionally, rather than daily, for the rest of the summer. It could take a while to get through the 5 seasons, but I’ll persist. I’ll persist with BaL solely because of the ML-like devotion that so many PES veterans have for it. I want to peel away the spiky outer layers and get at that soft, nougaty centre, if I can.

Over the past few days I’ve played some of my PES2010 Master League career for the first time in a few weeks. It’s got too easy for me now, but the memory of the 18 seasons I spent playing it at white-hot intensity will never leave me. It still entertains me for a few matches at a time. I scored a stylish volley from a cleared corner with one of my DMFs, the regen Gattuso. Coincidentally, in the previous session I scored a similar volley with a player in my Manager Mode team. What made the FIFA10 volley a bit special was that it came from a fully manual cross that I managed to deliver perfectly for once. Here they both are:

Link:

I’ve come to a weird understanding with Manager Mode. I no longer expect it to take on ML-like proportions. I just play the games, one after the other. I still don’t really check on where my team is in the table, although I believe I’ve got a good chance of promotion with Coventry City in this, my second season. Will I finish the season, though? Unknown. Probably. But possibly not. FIFA10 continues to be dragged down by its career mode, which should be the game’s blazing, shining light. Oh, Manager Mode, if only you were even a bit better!

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This week has seen another stage on the road to PES2011. The new screens and videos and hands-on accounts are all over the PES web—I won’t recap them all here. Except to say that, once again, those of us who play single-player most of the time (all of the time, in my case) have been badly served by the previewers. They’ve all mainly played multiplayer again. Fucking hell.

Their argument (according to one of them, anyway) is that they were only there to analyse the overall way that the game played. Hmmm. That presupposes a lot of things.

A 1p vs 2p match is not a true representation of how a football game plays in single-player. Human players commonly indulge in sprint-clamping, which produces a particular kind of gameplay—a very different kind from single-player where the AI, bless it, rarely indulges in the benighted practice. Most of us still play single-player most of the time. I believe it is a better kind of game than the pressure-fests of multiplayer. The game that we unwrap and play on Day 1 will be qualitatively different from the one that all these previewers are reporting back on.

The infuriating thing is that I’m sure most of the previewers are predominantly single-players as well. And this is only the beginning. We’re coming into the season now where more and more grinning fools will look out at us from Flash video windows, both of them holding 360 controllers in their hands, and they’ll give us ‘the skinny’ on PES2011/FIFA11, having button-mashed one another to death for an hour or two. No, no, no, no, no, no. no, no. NO.

Which is why I’m less and less interested in reading about PES2011 nowadays. I’m just not reading anything about the actual game that I’ll end up playing.