Okay, this is getting scary. I’ve been playing PES2009 solidly for three days now and I’m loving every moment of it. I might even play it for the next week, or at any rate until I feel the tug of FIFA09 again.

There are still huge shortcomings to this game that are all too apparent in this era of new-style FIFA. And yet, and yet… Maybe it’s time to stop resenting PES2009 for merely being ‘adequate’. Maybe it’s actually pretty good. It feels nice to be positive about PES again, probably for the first time in a year. However long or short a time this feeling lasts for, I’m glad it’s here. ‘Tis better to have loved and lost…

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I’ve gone on with my Master League career as Coventry City (using the Default players) and started my second season. I’ve moved down a difficulty level, from Top Player to Professional, just for this season (not that it’s helped me). The damn dog is back in the Master League menus. It appears to be a Scotch Terrier this year. What was it last year? I can’t remember.

My transfer activity in this career has been quite intensive. In PESes past I don’t remember being able to pick up quite so many new players as I’ve already picked up in this career. Even though I’ve been rubbish on the pitch and didn’t amass many points to spend, I still managed to pick up a  fair few players from the Youth and Unbelonging lists.

VAN DER VELDEN (pictured left)—An average player really, but still better than any Default player. Most notable for his strangely long head (left). The picture has not been doctored in any way. And people talk about FIFA’s zombies…

SCHONE—Just average again, but again he’s better than any Default player, so he was well worth getting. These are the kinds of players that have to be acquired in order to start picking up results.

MAI LUNGI—a nice find in the Unbelonging list. A veteran 28-year-old striker, tall and strong, with a good rasping shot on him. I’ve already scored a spectacular goal with him late on in a match that had me punching the air and grinning like an idiot.

DIETRICH—an early gem of a find in the Youth list. Can play DMF or AMF and already has decent stats for an 18-year-old. His development graph (right) is only above-average-looking, really, but I hope to ‘over-develop’ him in the same way I did Bradley last year. He’ll do until I can get Bradley or someone like him, put it that way.

KOBAYASHI—a bog-standard left-sided defender, can play SB or CB.  A placeholder. Better than the Defaults, but destined to be traded for a better player as soon as possible.

TRAORE—I got him from the Youth list mainly because of his name, but he’s not either of the more famous Traores from what I can tell. Still early days though.

ANTONINI—a decent right-back who can also play SMF. I off-loaded Giersen as soon as I got him.

JACKSON—a solid CB, one of the few highlights of last year’s ML. Another Youth player.

That’s a lot of new players for a struggling team at the start of season 2. I know… The underlying logistics of Master League have evidently been tweaked, enabling you to get this many players even with almost no funds.

I had to release a good few of the Defaults to make room for these players in my squad, and also get the wage budget down. I didn’t keep precise notes—mainly because I was enjoying myself too much playing PES2009, and I didn’t want to stop and break the ’spell’. I’ve still got most of the Default lot but the likes of Stein, Huylens, and Ceciu have all been released. I scraped through the last week of negotations with just 230 points to spare.

Here’s my current First XI:

I have to continue a tradition from last year by stating that my First XI is very, very provisional. None of my players are capable of playing two matches in a row.

So—I’m playing PES2009. I’m posting my squad lists and my First XI. What gives?

I like the gameplay. It’s not as good as FIFA09’s gameplay, but it’s still good. PES2009 also encourages patient, engrossing gameplay to a surprising degree.

Here’s a key goal I scored in a recent game. It’s been a bad start to the season. I’ve yet to win a league game after 5 games. But in the Cup I beat West Brom 1-0, a hard-fought and satisying victory. The clip doesn’t do full justice to the rhythms of play and the patience shown. This goal was the culmination of an exquisite passage of play (I’m praising PES2009 here, not myself) that saw me keep possession, lose it, get it back, keep it again, and then patiently wait for an opening to show itself. Here’s the last 15% or so of the sequence in question:

That stalwart of Master League DODO applies the finish—a lovely 25-yard curler into the top corner. What I loved about his goal was that it was my first proper goal scored from the ‘DMF hole’, as I call it—i.e. the slightly withdrawn, long-shot-friendly position that the DMF slots into in my beloved 4-3-3 formation.

PES’s assisted shooting mechanic has a surprising amount of subtlety, but it can still feel unsophisticated after experiencing the depth of FIFA’s semi-manual shooting. The weak, flapping goalkeepers are a persistent worry for the long-term. And I’ve never seen passing as unreliable in PES as it is in PES2009. Sometimes a pass just doesn’t go where you direct it to, for no real reason that I can see—something I’ll no doubt be moaning talking about in detail next week.

But I’m holding off on the detailed criticisms for now. These last few days have been overwhelmingly positive. I’m actually waking up in the morning and looking forward to playing PES again.

Master League is the greatest game mode ever created. For me it brings the kind of immersion that other gamers get from Football Manager and World of Warcraft. It easily leaves FIFA’s Manager Mode trailing in its wake. The sheer amount of time I’ve spent on Master League is frightening to think about. 1000 hours of my life spent playing Master League would probably be a conservative estimate.

I only stopped last season because the PS3 version of PES2008 was a dog’s dinner of a PES game. That was after 100 hours of play. Even then, I simply got hold of the PS2 and PSP versions of the game, like some kind of unstoppable, ML-loving cyborg, and carried on with another Master League career.

And so here I am again. Let’s get the messy stuff out of the way first. I’m not a big Editor on PES. Never have been. I did the same this year that I always do. I went in and changed all the English teams’ names to their originals. I also changed PES UNITED’s name to COVENTRY CITY, and altered their default kit. That was my Editing done for the year.

Home kit on the left, of course. It’s a reasonable facsimile of the actual current Coventry kit. It’s nowhere near exact—and I can’t be bothered messing about trying to do the badge. I’ll attend to that in the future, when I get a spare moment. I’m too impatient to start now.

While I was going through the menus and setting things up, I felt relaxed and safe. We’re creatures of habit, us gamers. We like the familiar and the comfortable. Which is why Seabass & co. are getting away with manifestly NOT doing a ‘proper’ next-gen Pro Evo, but this isn’t the day for that argument again.

I chose Top Player difficulty, with all other ML settings on Normal. And of course I’m using the famous DEFAULT squad. I’m not really ready for Top Player difficulty. I played all my International Cup warm-up games over the weekend on Regular and then Professional difficulty. Going straight onto Top Player with Ximelex and Iouga & co. on the pitch will be a tough challenge. It took me a shameful 3 seasons to get promoted last year—and that was on PES-bleedin’-2008…

The league setup. I looked at what teams were in them, but didn’t make any changes. Last year I set up an ersatz English league, but I’m not bothered this year. I’ve always tended to take what’s dished up in Master League leagues. I chose to start in League C. The teams are all mixed up: Stoke City alongside Willem II, Manchester United alongside Juventus. That’s fine. I don’t need no stinkin’ realism.

My formation, as ever, has to be 4-3-3. I can play with many different formations in FIFA09, and play very well. In PES, I can only play with 4-3-3. Nothing else works for me. Is that a strength or a weakness—and whichever, is it in me or in the game? Who knows.

My First XI is pretty much the same as last year’s. What was that I was saying about habit? I’ll post a diagram tomorrow. I also have the same strategy buttons as last year, with minor differences in the alternate formations. Again, I’ll post details in the future.

My first game was against the mighty CFR CLUJ. That can’t be a real team. Surely that’s a made-up name for a real team? I haven’t got the faintest clue who they’re supposed to be. Usually in PES I can recognise a player or two and work out who they’re supposed to be, or at least what country they’re from. Knowing PES, this lot will turn out to be 1956 Hungary or something like that. [EDIT: Just Googled them. Well I never. The things you learn from PES...]

Anyway—the game went great. My supposed Default no-hopers handled surprisingly well. Even at the start of the season when they’re fresh, they shouldn’t handle this well. Maybe it’s a change in the game. Maybe the Default players are better this year. God, I hope not…

Ordaz was my central striker. I scored two goals with him in the first half. Neither goal was anything special. I won the game 2-1, with CFR CLUJ’s goal late in the second half feeling suspiciously scripted. Yes, I’m starting the OMG TEH SCRIPTING theme early.

After one game, I checked the league table and found my team installed as the early leaders. Only on alphabetical order, but it still counts. Great stuff. I was also happy to see the size of the lower division back down to where it should be—only 12 teams. Thank you, Seabass. 20 teams last year was a bit much. When you had a write-off of a season, it was a slog to get through the rest of the games. At least you accumulated more PES points to spend on transfers, but it was small consolation.

Yep, that’s one crazy-looking league all right. That’s Master league for you. Maybe I should have taken the extra few minutes to set up my own custom leagues, but… nah. Master League is its own little world. I’m looking forward to getting into it again. But…

Yes, there’s a king-sized but. PES2009 is a good game. It’s a lot better than PES2008 (which isn’t saying much; I’ve had patches of eczema that were better than PES2008).

But PES2009 is nowhere near the level of FIFA09, in my current opinion. How long can I really play PES2009—Master League or no Master League—for? There’s no way to combine playing both games. It just doesn’t work.

I’ve got a tough decision to make.

Happy bleedin’ Christmas. There’s nothing quite like a bit of PES on Christmas morning. Every year I have at least a couple of games before being dragged away to the delights of those tasty little sausages wrapped in bacon, bottomless glasses of fizzy red wine, and paper hats that don’t fit on my big head. This morning, as slate-grey clouds scudded overhead and the neighbours’ kids raced up and down the road on their new bikes, I sat down in my sad little room and powered up the PS3.

There’s not much Christmas spirit in evidence in my Master League at the moment. I played four more matches - taking me tantalisingly close to the mid-season negotiations (aka the Promised Land). I took another four gruesome beatings, dished out to me by a ruthless CPU. I have now lost nine games in a row.

This is considerably worse than how I remember it going the last time around. Bumping up the ML difficulty level from Normal to Very Hard has done exactly what it said on the tin.

Atalanta, Marseille, Benfica, Feyenoord: all four teams came, saw, and conquered. I spent this morning alternately groaning and crying out in frustration as none of my passing moves worked and very few of my shots found the target. I scored one goal in the four matches. Just one: a header from a corner. Not even a proper goal…

The only positive spin I can put on this morning’s results is that I kept the goals-against tally down to a reasonable level. Only one team, Benfica (a very strong outfit), scored more than two goals against me. Admittedly they did score five without reply, so I can’t be too overjoyed at ‘only’ losing 0-1, 0-2, and 1-2 in the other fixtures.

I have two more games to play before I get to the mid-season Negotiations. There was no time to get there this morning. It’s bloody Christmas, after all. There are certain things that one simply has to do at Christmas, whether or not you’d rather be playing PES. If I don’t get to see The Guns of Navarone on TV for the umpteenth time, I won’t be happy.