PES Chronicles

(The last time Castolo was truly great he was called Castello, but I’ll come to that.)

Yet another Elcherino hat-trick featured in a crazy game against Sampdoria that ended 5-5. That’s 17 goals for him since mid-season. He’s already second in Division 2′s top-scorer table. Caracciolo got my other two goals. I was lousy at defending in this match. Elcherino’s goals have made me complacent. I’ll have to work on that.

Elcherino was unfit for the next game against Spartak Moscow. I had to play Castolo up front on the left. I was quite worried about this game, as I was also missing Altintop, Camacho, and Jackson.

Castolo rose to the challenge of filling the Special One’s boots by scoring all three goals in an easy 3-0 win. Here’s the pick of them:

Ahhh, Castolo. There’s plenty of PES lore that I’ve yet to mention in this blog. The topic of Castolo as a PES phenomenon is a prime example.

Castolo in PES2008 – and in PES down the years – is a subject I will return to at greater length in the future. It’s going to be a long 10 months to PES2009.

For now I’ll just say that until PES4 - I think that was when he underwent the name-change from Castello to Castolo (why? this has never been established) – he really was as good as the first set of strikers you’d end up buying for your ML team, and sometimes better. He was definitely the last player you’d ship out on a trade or transfer, and you’d always get a good price for him.

Nowadays, though, I don’t see what all the Castolo-related fuss is about. He’s better than the other Default players, granted, but being the best of a bad bunch doesn’t make him a good player. In my opinion Castolo, like many real-life players, continues to enjoy a special reputation based on past exploits alone. He really hasn’t been ‘all that’ for at least three instalments of the game now.

Until he scored his hat-trick against Spartak, he’d only scored one other all season. In my first Master League he was just as bad.

And yet people still rave about him, to the extent that the entire Master League default team is often referred to as ‘Castolo & co.’

I don’t get it. Maybe it’s me.

When Elcherino plays, I score a shedload of goals and I win. It’s as simple as that. Sure, I might concede a few goals. I still haven’t got enough good players all over the park to shut out the CPU.

When Elcherino doesn’t play, I still win – most of the time. My other new players are pretty good in their own right. Altintop and Caracciolo have scored a couple between them. Jackson got a header from a corner.

I haven’t lost a game since the mid-season negotiations. I’ve lifted myself up to 12th in the league – mainly on the back of getting just one player.

Espanyol, one of Division 2′s strongest teams, fell victim to the Elch. He ran riot for me, scoring another hat trick in a 4-0 demolition.

Due to fitness, the man of the moment was missing from a game against Celtic where I struggled to get the ball for long, long periods. I drew that one 0-0 – one of the very few 0-0 draws I’ve ever had in PES2008.

Elcherino was back on the pitch and still on form in a 3-0 win against Genoa – this time he ‘only’ got himself a brace.

To round off this set of matches, Elcherino returned fully-fit to the starting line-up against Blackburn. Here’s the score, and the scorer:

Blackburn 1-5 Singers FC (Elcherino 5)

Below is a single short video showing three of Elcherino’s goals from these matches. The last goal is a nice straightforward wonder-strike. The first two are bog-standard dribble-and-shoot goals. I barely even watch the replays any more. I have to re-emphasise that I really am playing this game on the hardest difficulty settings. Behold this tangle of thorns:

That’s 14 goals in four games from Elcherino. After scoring five against Blackburn, he was rated 9.5 in the post-match screen; again, no other member of the team rated anywhere close to him.

The standard Elcherino goal: get the ball anywhere on the pitch, then run at the opposition, dribble insanely in any and every direction, twist out of dead-ends, double back, loop the loop – and score.

The sad thing about PES2008 (next-gen) is that these goals are not peculiar to the Elcherino-style superstar players. They can be scored with too many players too often for comfort.

I’m not really enjoying the game at the moment.

I could introduce a very strict House Rule. I could allow myself no players of above-average ability.

It would mean having no good players at all. None. And I ask myself: what’s the point of Master League without the various thrills of struggling to improve, and nurturing young players, and then guiding them through their years of superstardom? Why should I have to play in shackles just to accommodate this game’s deficiencies?

I could abandon PES2008 altogether. I should abandon it. I’ve only hung on this far due to stubborn sentimentality. Behind the gorgeous next-gen facade, the game’s a broken, arcadey mess.

It hurts but it’s true.

It was my first game after the mid-season negotiations in my new Master League career.

I’ve had a pretty torrid time of it (again) with the Default players. In the transfer window I bought a clutch of pretty good players, among them one Elcherino, a star striker.

After the game kicked off I won the ball from Newcastle and fed it forward to Elcherino on the left. It was his very first touch in the very first minute of his very first game for me. Well. It’s probably better if I just show you:

If you can’t look at the clip, what happened was that I went down the wing with Elcherino, spun around, cut back inside, and sent an unstoppable rocket of a shot high into the top corner of the Newcastle net. The replay doesn’t do justice to the sheer bullet-like unstoppability of the shot. It was a true net-buster.

I was pleased. It worked off a lot of frustration after my terrible first part of the season. Elcherino, I thought, you little beauty…

The game went on. All except one of my other new signings were on the field (Postma was unfit).

For a 17-year-old rookie, Jackson acquitted himself admirably in the centre of defence, heading everything away and tackling efficiently. Camacho was slow but adequate out on the right wing. He picked up a booking but passed the ball well. My other two strikers, Altintop and Caracciolo, were strong but unspectacular.

Elcherino, though… Different class.

Before the first half was over he’d got another one. Again I basically just gave him the ball, dribbled until I had a shooting chance, and scored.

After that I started trying to do it all the time. My whole game was a) get the ball, b) give the ball to Elcherino, and c) try to dribble through the entire CPU team to score.

If you have ever played PES2008 (next-gen) online, you will know that roughly 95% of all online players choose to play with either Brazil, Barcelona, or Inter Milan. Their entire gameplan consists of feeding the ball to the likes of Adriano, Ronaldinho, Ronaldo & co., and then simply running with the ball. I am usually pretty good at defending against this ‘tactic’. Taking a minute before the match to set up an alt 5-4-1 formation and map it to a strategy button usually stops them, and makes them whine afterwards. But that’s not the point. It’s cheap and it’s ‘gamey’. It’s just one of the reasons why I am less than enthralled with PES2008 online.

But here I was, in my humble Master League, doing exactly the same thing with Elcherino.

Half time came and went. I kicked off in the second half. Caracciolo tapped the ball to Elcherino, and I raced him upfield to score. No effort involved. Hmmm.

3-0 to me, and cruising. Then I got Camacho sent off. I was down to 10 men. Then Newcastle put one into my net. Ouch. Was this the start of a collapse?

No. It wasn’t. From the kickoff, I raced upfield with Elcherino again, and scored again…

4-1 to me, and Elcherino had scored all 4 of my goals. That’s how it ended. I substituted Elcherino after his fourth goal, hoping to keep him fresh for the next game.

I never usually bother to look at the player ratings after a match, but I was curious this time. Elcherino only a 9? What do you have to do in this game to get a 10?

My next highest-rated player was only 6.5. That alone speaks volumes.

The next game, and the ones after it, were very interesting indeed. There may be repercussions for the future of my troubled relationship with PES2008. I might be playing PES5 – and FIFA08 – again sooner than I thought.

Yesterday I forgot to post one of the goals I scored in my last two games before the mid-season negotiations. The goal is worth posting now for a couple of reasons:

First and foremost, it was the winning goal in the 2-1 win over Feyenoord, which was my first win after a run of nine consecutive defeats.

Second, it’s a pretty nice goal – rarely for the Default team, it’s a long shot from outside the box that curls into the bottom corner of the net past the CPU keeper’s reach.

Third, it was almost the final kick of a ball in my team from Van den Berg, one of the better Default players. Now that I’m at the mid-season point, my House Rules have kicked in, and Van den Berg has left my team forever.

I have mixed feelings about getting to this stage, this time around. As I hinted yesterday, I have started to feel that PES2008 – or PES2008 Master League, I should say (99.99% of my PES year is spent on ML) – is simply a waste of my time. The arcadey gameplay of PES2008 makes the ML feel lightweight and unimportant. It lacks almost everything that made Master League “arguably the greatest game mode ever created, period”.

(I’m paraphrasing from memory from an article I read in a games magazine back in 2002 or so, when I was trying to pluck up the courage to spend literally every penny of my meagre savings on a PS2. Eventually I took the plunge and got myself the console+one game – PES2. It was the best £180 I ever spent. )

Still, I’m here now, so let’s see what kind of business I can get done.

My first House Rule has come into play: I am not allowed to have any players that I had in my last career. There are only two exceptions: Beerens and Maldini. I had them for such a short time that I want to see more of them. It’ll be a good few seasons before I’m in a position to get them, though.

My second House Rule: I will maintain a squad of no more than 28 players. This seems reasonable to me because no matter how well I do in this negotiation, I’ll still have mainly default players. In time I want to go down to 25 players or even to 20 players. We’ll see.

——————-

I released Stremer and Huylens and Dodo and Lieberman. I did put them up for transfer first but no one came in for them. In the final week of negotiations, I simply let them go.

I sold Ettori – another one of the better Default players. I was sorry to see him go, as I don’t think I kept him for very long last time either, but I have to be ruthless if I want this new Superleague ML with House Rules to work. Away he went.

I traded Van den Berg for a 26-year-old striker called Caracciolo. Who he? I have no idea, but he was on the ‘Openness to Negotiation’ list. Big and strong, albeit with no pace and very little shooting ability- but he’ll do. He’s better than any of the Default strikers.

Also on the Openness to Negotiation list was one Halil Altintop, a highly-spoken-of striker aged 24. I traded El Moubarki for him. At the moment, Altintop seems to be as mediocre as Caracciolo, but I suspect that things will change. His development curve is very steep.

I also went shopping on the Youth Player list. I got three 17-year-olds: Jackson (CB), Postma (SB), and Camacho (AMF).

Camacho also plays at DMF, and he has the all-important Middle Shooting ability. I keep seeing his name in people’s lists of good buys in the Master League, so I have high hopes.

As for Jackson, I had him in my PES6 ML team. He was reliably solid, if not quite superstar material.

Postma will easily supplant the shambling Griersen at right-back. In fact, putting all of my Youth players straight into the team is a no-brainer. I’m rock-bottom of the division. What is there to lose? Nothing.

I got one other player. This one was a bit special. I snatched him from the Unbelonging list, paying several thousand points that I could ill afford and potentially risking a Game Over at the end of the season. I think I’ll be all right, though…

The player is Elcherino – a 23-year-old CF based upon the legendary Eusebio. I tried to get him a few times during my first PES2008 ML career but failed every time. I was very surprised to get him (and most of the others) so quickly this time around – especially with the ML difficulty set to Very Hard.

(I last had Elcherino in my ultimate team of galacticos back in PES5. He can be seen knocking in a couple of corkers in the opening stages of my first PES5 compilation movie. In that team he was overshadowed by Bergkamp (as the movie demonstrates). What I loved about PES5 was that even though I had a massive squad packed with superstars, I had to work hard every season to be consistently successful. It took me 15 seasons to win a Treble, and I only won two or three more Trebles in the 25 or so seasons after that. I was playing PES5 until the day before PES6 came out. No, it won’t be long before I’m back there…)

Here’s my all-new First XI. It looks pretty good, I have to say:

Neither Elcherino nor Altintop are natural wide men up front, but I want them to play there nevertheless. For now. It’ll be a rare game when all three play together anyway, so they can deputise for each other.

Immediately after the negotiation period, I played my first game with my new players. It was very interesting. So interesting, in fact, that it deserves a special post all of its own. That’ll be for tomorrow.