PES Chronicles

[My Capuano football shirt has arrived---pics at the end of this post.]

This week I had to take a day off PES2010—my first in months—to do something else. When I went back to it the next morning, I took 3 league batterings in a row from a seemingly invincible AI. I’ll do well to win the league title this season now.

I think I was a bit rusty after the day off. But I also think the game has stepped up a notch or two of difficulty over the past few seasons. This could be an illusion borne of me simply not focusing hard enough recently. Or it could be something unapologetically hard-coded, a buried new layer of difficulty that only reveals itself after the human player has progressed up to a certain point and ‘needs’ a greater challenge more consistently.

I find the game is a good deal harder in season 15—and in ALL the ‘teen seasons’ so far, really—than it was in season 10. With 15 seasons of AI player growth, it would make sense for the difficulty to scale up proportionally. The screenshot of my perennial transfer target, the Regen Paul Scholes, bears this out. He’s a 24-year-old superman of a player. I doubt I’ll ever be able to afford him now. If I’m still playing the next time he retires and regenerates, I’ll be sure to nab him when he’s 17. (The screenshot also shows that I have started scouting a certain 17-year-old who goes by the name of Mathieu…)

There are extra layers of gameplay difficulty in PES2010 from the start. My Champions League and D1 Cup experiences of the past several seasons are testament to it. Of this I am 100% convinced, as are many other PES2010 players from what I can gather. So why could this extra Cup difficulty not be gradually insinuated into the League side of things as well? I suspect this is in fact happening. Not all the time, as this season’s 7-0 thrashing of the current champions, Porto, demonstrated. But just enough for it to start becoming noticeable. I’ll keep an eye on it and report back in due course.

Naturally, all this belly-aching means that I’m not in the position I’d want to be in. After 15 matches I’m only 7th. I’m 11 points behind the leaders, Manchester United, and if the rest of the season follows the pattern of these 15 matches, there’s no way I’ll catch them. I know I can play better than I have been doing, though. I believe I will improve, and that I can climb up this table.

I’m conceding more goals than usual. This is carelessness, and also possibly a side-effect of playing Capuano as an AMF. He’s still a natural-born SB. When he plays at left-back the whole defence performs better.

In the Champions League I’m ridiculously far ahead of the other teams in qualifying. After 4 matches, I had already secured top spot. I haven’t bothered playing the remaining group matches. I simmed them and won them both by a few goals. I’ll soon find out who my first knockout stage opponents will be. If they’re French again, for the fifth season in a row, I’ll be holding an enquiry.

I’m coming up to the mid-season transfer window and I can’t risk signing any new players, not even any free agents. I have pre-signed one Youth player, a familiar old name whom I’ll talk about on Monday. In all of next week’s posts I’ll be discussing each of my players in some detail, picking out key stats, key skills, and generally just going a bit more in-depth with my squad than I usually do. If this season does develop into a potential Treble-winning one, that might just elbow out the player discussion until a later time.

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And in late, breaking news—it’s here:

As can be seen, I finally went with a generic sky blue shirt, very appropriately for Master League. The shirt’s a lot more sky blue than it appears in these very quick photos. It’s a blazing sky blue.

Over the weekend I’ll try to post some, ah, tasteful shots of the shirt being worn. And obviously, at some point I’ll have to play PES2010 while wearing the shirt...

For anyone who’s interested in replicating this lunacy for themselves, these custom football shirts cost £12.99 + P&P from soccerprint.co.uk.

Season 2012-2013 in my Master League career on PES2009 has had its ups and downs so far. At the moment it’s just after the mid-season negotiations and I’m still in the top half of the table. For that at least I am thankful.

A few seasons ago (can’t remember which; they all blur into one now) I had a similar good start, but fell away drastically and finished only a few places from the foot of the table. So the fact I’m still within touching distance of the promotion places with 8 games left is a sign of the progress I’ve made in PES2009 recently.

It still seems to be a harder game this year. It’s definitely harder than PES2008, but that’s not saying much (I’ve eaten yoghurts that were harder than PES2008). And it seems harder than PES6, for me. By this stage on PES6—five seasons in—I was going for a Treble.

I’ve passed through the mid-season negotiations. Once again I had enough points in the bank to go on a raiding mission for some quality experienced players. If I wanted to. But I decided that I’m doing well enough with the ones I’ve got. Instead I satisfied my mid-season craving for fresh blood by snapping up a few players from the Youth list. Ahhh, Youth list. Where would I be without you?

First I went for an 18-year-old HAMANN. I’ve seen him there in the list for a few negotiation periods now, but always passed him over. For some reason I identify Hamann as being nothing but a workhorse type of defensive midfielder, lacking the talents that I’m looking for.

But hang on. I took a look at his stats and skills. What’s not to love about Hamann? For a Youth player his stats are already reasonable. He has good stamina. And, critically for me with my 4-3-3 formation, he has Middle Shooting. It’s virtually obligatory for the DMF, who gets lots of long-range shooting opporutnities. Hamann’s not better than Dietrich right now, but in a few seasons he could be. So I gathered Hamann into the bosom of my squad. Let’s see how he turns out.

Along with Hamann I picked up two 17-year-olds. Park Jyun Hi (a steal!) and a solid CB called Barth. I have vague memories of playing with Barth in years past, possibly as a veteran. Here and now, he’s my third decent young CB, along with Jackson and Conwey. It seems that by default I am operating a Youth policy at my ML club. I’m building an Academy. That’s fine, really. I’ll grab the expensive veteran players when I can—hopefully when I’m finally up there in Division 1.

I did try to get PRIETO, who’s now 20 and looking seriously great. His club accepted my bid of Davies+4000 points, which was very, very, very generous of me. I offered Prieto 1400 salary, but he declined my offer. “Negotiations broken down”—surely the saddest words in Master League.

Back in December 2007, while praising FIFA08 I described it as the Ninja Gaiden of football games. For those unacquainted with Ninja Gaiden, I don’t mean the original, classic NES game(s). I mean the forbiddingly difficult action adventure game on the original Xbox. (NG enjoys cult status because of its eye-wateringly steep learning curve and unforgiving boss fights. The first random enemies on the first levels of that game are as hard as many final boss fights in other, lesser games.)

FIFA09 is also the Ninja Gaiden of football games—perhaps even more so. (It’d be more symmetrical to call it the Ninja Gaiden 2, but the sequel was not a worthy follow-up to the original, in my opinion. Perhaps it’s the Ninja Gaiden Sigma…)

I’ve been playing FIFA09 a lot for almost exactly one month now. A few weeks ago I thought I had it licked. Not literally—that would be both disgusting and pointless. I mean figuratively, in the sense of ‘I know how this game plays now, and my continued playing of it will be just be a variation of everything I have experienced thus far’.

How wrong I was. Of course, if you play FIFA09 as it comes out of the box—or entirely online, as many people do—then no, after a while it won’t have much else to show you.

The tipping point came with the switch to semi-manual and manual controls. That on its own was enough to completely transform the game that comes out of the box. I’ve posted a lot about the satisfying nature of playing with different control settings. But perhaps the ultimate game-changer for FIFA09 comes when you start to play with bad players. Yes. I have begun a new career with Coventry City.

I’m playing on World Class difficulty—but maybe not for much longer. I have so far played 5, lost 4, drew 1. I’ve only scored two goals. I’m playing so badly. It’s not even the end of August yet and I’ve had a warning from the board.

And I’m playing with what for me is a pretty conservative formation. I usually like a nice 4-3-3. Eight years of PES left me all but unable to play with anything else. Here I’m using a modified 4-4-2. I’ve pushed the wide midfielders forward, and dropped one of the central midfielders slightly deeper. Playing with Atletico Madrid in my other, much more successful MM career, it works brilliantly well. Alas, with Coventry City it’s proving a pretty poor formation. I might try a 4-5-1 or something. If that doesn’t bring me any joy I’ll switch to a 4-3-3, or even a 3-4-3. Might as well go out all guns blazing.

I can see myself being sacked soon and having to restart. And I can see this happening not just once or twice, but many, many times. The game is just bloody tough. I cannot emphasise enough how hard it is to play FIFA09 with an average set of players on World Class difficulty using semi-manual and manual controls!

I’m struggling to muster any real joy out of playing any of the games. This is the most worrying thing for me. I think I’m still playing as if my players are world-beaters. I have to slow down and not be so anxious to do spectacular things with the ball. The through-ball bug is really, well, bugging me right now. I’ll have some more to say about that tomorrow. I’ll also post my full First XI and their Overall ratings.

I’m still playing FIFA08. Not as often as I would like, but I am still playing it. I will go on playing it until FIFA09 is released. But it’s probably too late now for FIFA08 to become my main, or only, football game for the rest of this football game year (what’s left of it).

If the PSP & PS2 version of PES2008 hadn’t come along and rescued my PES year, I’d have played nothing but FIFA08 since the turn of the year. For definite. But ‘last-gen’ PES2008 did come along, and it did save my PES year, and thus FIFA08 has held a rather marginal position ever since.

It’s a shame, as I know there are depths to FIFA08 that I will never get to explore now. There’s just not enough time left. I’d love to have attempted to win the Quadruple in Manager Mode, on Legendary difficulty, starting with a lower-league team, and using House Rules in the transfer market to make it more realistic. What a fascinating experience that would have been—one to hold in reserve for FIFA09 and beyond. I think I might have found it impossible.

It’s always possible that both FIFA09 and PES2009 will turn out to be terrible or unsatisfactory in some way. Not much chance, in my opinion—I believe both of them will be great, I really do— but there’s still a chance. If so, I’ll always have FIFA08 to fall back upon.

At the moment I’m playing a Manager Mode career with the lowest-ranked club in the English leagues—Dagenham & Redbridge. I started out playing on Professional difficulty, which is the middle of five difficulty levels in FIFA08. The difficulty levels in FIFA08 are not the equivalents of those on Pro Evo—a fact that has probably caught out many a curious PES player. Professional level on FIFA08 is roughly the same as 4.5 stars on PES, or just below Top Player. The higher difficulty levels—World Class and Legendary—are both considerably harder than the hardest difficulty level on PES. Legendary is completely off the scale. I don’t know how anyone could play that level regularly.

I’d pretty much mastered Professional, if I may say so myself. Winning a Quadruple in my first Manager Mode career was a sign that it was maybe time to step things up a notch. I took Dag & Red from the lowest point in League Two to the cusp of the Championship. During the last few games of my promotion season from League One, I upped the difficulty to World Class—possibly reckless of me, but it was long overdue. I won promotion and have now started my campaign to get Dag & Red into the Premier League, still on World Class.

It’s hard. I’m finding it very, very hard. It’s so hard that some of it isn’t even enjoyable. Now, I adore hard games. Ninja Gaiden? Loved it. Etrian Odyssey (a really old-school RPG on the DS)? Playing it now and loving it. There aren’t enough truly hard games, in my opinion. (PES itself could do with being a lot harder.)

FIFA08 is a hard game even on its lowest difficulty setting. As you move up, things get progressively tougher. On World Class, the difficulty level hits Ninja Gaiden-proportions. Long, long periods can go by without having the ball. When I get the ball, I can’t do anything with it. In my most recent FIFA08 session I played one game where I had precisely one shot on goal in 90 minutes (played as 5-minute halves), and that shot was off-target by a country mile. (When you miss the target in FIFA08, you miss the target by a long way. The assisted shooting of PES looks and feels clumsily arcadey, almost childlike, in comparison.)

Things picked up because I persevered. That’s the key to hard games in general, and to FIFA08 in particular: perseverance. The reason games developers make so few genuinely hard games—i.e. games whose harder difficulty levels are hard and remain hard, forever, even after long experience with the game—is that hard games are not deemed ‘accessible’, and accessibility is everything from a money-making point of view. Instant gratification and bite-sized chunks of gaming are where it’s all at. (May the gods of gaming save us from the dreaded ‘casual gamer’.)

FIFA08 on its harder difficulty setting demands concentration, patience, persistence, dedication, discipline…. You can’t have half your attention on the radio. One of my worries about FIFA09 is that EA might choose to lower the difficulty settings after a lot of reviewer negativity, and bring them into line with PES settings. That had better not happen.

After a few goalless draws and 0-1 defeats—and one chastening 0-3 defeat, where I actually felt lucky to get nil—something clicked. I got it. I got what World Class on FIFA08 is all about. I started playing football, continental-style. Knocking it around at the back, waiting for an opening to emerge. In PES, especially over recent years, that style of play just isn’t encouraged. You can ping the ball forward within seconds and create a goal-scoring chance without much effort at all. Occasionally, yes, passing the ball sideways and backwards is advisable—but how often, really? About 5% of the time, in my experience. In FIFA08, that equation is almost completely turned on its head. The times when you can pass the ball forward in seconds and burst through on goal account for roughly 5% of attacks. The rest of the time, you’ve got to work hard for everything.

FIFA08 is not without its faults. Some are major, many are minor, others are just comical. Take this goal, for example—

I have a tame shot that the dodgy keeper ‘edges’ with his palm. The ball rolls towards an unguarded net, but is stopped by a CPU defender, who knocks it back toward the now-upright keeper. The ball stops at the keeper’s feet. Evidently the AI’s script doesn’t know what to do here, because neither the defender nor keeper try to do anything else with the loose ball. My striker gets in between them and bundles the ball into the net. I couldn’t believe my luck. That was a big goal in an important game.

As things stand right now, I’m sitting in 9th place in the Championship. I’m still struggling to find lasting form at the World Class difficulty level. I doubt I’ll be able to find my feet in time to make a push for promotion this season. But that’s fine by me. Consecutive promotions whilst playing on Professional difficulty made me get more than a little complacent about FIFA08. Moving things up a level has whetted my appetite for the struggle again.