PES Chronicles

A mixed few days of news about the 2011 games. PES2011 has had a major scare, with the appearance of several videos showing players indulging in chained rainbow flicks. If the final game’s trick system is that forgiving, PES2011 will be PES2008 part 2. I don’t even want to think about that.

Following last week’s great FIFA11 gamespeed scare, two lads from the FIFA Soccerblog went for a playtest on Monday. They reported the gamespeed to be ideal. Hopefully the Slow setting will actually mean something this year

Sadly, as is now all-too-typical and totally INFURIATING, the FSB boys mostly played multiplayer. 1p vs 2p. Yet again the state of the AI was ignored. The single-player game was totally ignored. Ah, but when it was all over and they were in the bar, one of them nipped back to the demo room for a few games against the AI. It was literally an afterthought.

This issue has been a bugbear of mine for a long time now. When did 1p vs 2p become the default method of previewing a football game? Why is there seemingly no awareness that they should be looking at more, doing more, exploring more, reporting back on MORE than simply how much chortling fun it was to go head-to-head against their pals?

I don’t have access to any precise figures. But I would bet quite a lot of money that about 90% of football game players still spend about 90% of their time playing against the AI in single-player.

A very illuminating moment cropped up in the latest WENB podcast. Konami’s Jon Murphy and Steve Merrett were guests, and one of them—I forget who now—remarked in passing that when they’re showing journalists their new game, they’ll often pause it to highlight something new. E.g., “Look at what you can do in defence now…” And the journalists will say how good it is, ignore it, and get back to playing, totally focused on beating their mates. My ears pricked up at this, because that description sums up exactly how I imagine it.

It’s the last full week of August. As far as I know there’s still no clue about the condition of opposition AI in either FIFA11 or PES2011. It’s a major failing not just on the previewers’ parts, but on the parts of EA and Konami, who allow it to happen.

Or do they want it to happen? That’s got to be a reasonable suspicion. But there’s probably no need to hide the AI from the typical PES/FIFA previewer, because he’s not looking for it.

And so to my current gaming. Oh, I’ll be happy when this period is over and the 2011 games are here, believe me.

I’ve gone off FIFA10 again. I had a good few days with the game, but the lack of anything compelling to do with it has got to me once more. No doubt I’ll come back to FIFA10 for a visit when I’m putting together my end-of-year review in a week or two. Other than that, compared to my extensive time spent in FIFAs 08 and 09, FIFA10 has more or less passed me by.

I’ve mainly played Dwarf Fortress for the past week. I woke up yesterday morning thinking about how I was going to channel an underground pool into a reservoir for my dwarves to use.

Valkyria Chronicles II for PSP is out next week. I’ve got my preorder in.

And there’s also PES6(360). Now, after a few weeks, I’ve settled back into it enough to have some perspective. I’m finally experiencing its well-known limitations as limiting. But I’d still say it’s the best pure PES gameplay available on the next-gen consoles so far, which is shocking and shameful. And I’m still enjoying it enough to plough on with my ML career. I’ve got a quarter of a season left in which the Treble is out of reach. I have a Double to go for in this season, and then a fresh assault on the Treble is next. This should occupy me—and the blog—for the next week or so.

So, I’ve been playing some Dwarf Fortress. It’s renowned as the hardest computer game in the world, with a learning curve like a sheer vertical cliff face. And it uses pure ASCII graphics. I grabbed a Mac client with a graphical tileset already built in (like a true wuss). I started with a step-by-step newbie guide open in a browser window.

After half an hour, I was kind of ‘digging it’, and after several hours, I think I’m hooked. My first fortress is hilariously bad. That’s the terrible surface area pictured—my first goblin invaders are going to just walk right in, and I don’t know how to stop them yet. There are several lower levels to the structure, all just as cack-handed. (DF veterans, please don’t judge me. That’s literally Day 1, Hour 1 work.)

But I suppose you have to fail in order to succeed. (Seabass’s next-gen journey in a nutshell?) So far Dwarf Fortress has been a delight. I was looking forward to spending much quality time with it until PES2011 happens along.

But now another factor has entered play. Could I be playing PES2011 on Monday? This Monday coming?!

A full Beta test for PES2011′s Master League Online mode will start this Monday, the 16th of August. It ends on Sunday 29th of August. I have duly put my name down. Successful (i.e. lucky) applicants will be informed on Monday morning via email. I’m one of thousands of hopefuls all waiting to see if our Wonka bar’s got a golden ticket inside.

I await Monday morning with interest. Will I be checking my email at 11 a.m.? Will I? Will I?

I have no idea what criteria Konami will use for invitations. The only information you have to provide is PSN/XBL username, email address, and date of birth. Hopefully it’s a purely random selection and I’ve got as much of a chance as anyone. Hopefully it’s a simple lottery. There are whispers of a ‘first come, first served’ system, in which case I’m probably out of luck. Registration was up and running for about 9 hours before I cottoned on.

If I get in, the nature of this blog will change pretty abruptly for the period of the Beta. This gentle winding-down of the 2009-2010 gaming year will come to a crashing halt as I go all-in with my beloved Master League mode’s latest adventure. Poor old PES6(360) might suffer yet another ignominious, premature abandonment.

Part of me hopes I don’t get into the Beta. The edge would be taken off my excitement in the weeks and days before PES2011′s release. And I’ve got a fledgling dwarven fortress to look after.

How will Online Master League work? Will there be persistent worlds, a la Football Manager Live, with a set pool of players for everybody to battle over and with? (I.e., if you have Schwarz, nobody else has him.) Or will it function more like FIFA’s Ultimate Team, where anybody can have any player at any time? I hope it’s the former.

Monday’s regular noon post will be an episode of Loss Time. It’s pretty much a placeholder while I wait to see which way the Beta wind will blow.

Briefly, PES6(360) is still going great. I’m gathering the goals for the planned mini-compilation in a week or two. I’ve won most of my next batch of games in the league and Europe. I’ve qualified for the full European Championships. I’m 2nd in the league table. The Treble is still very much on.

But will the hand of Fate let me finish it? Probably it will, yes. I need to be lucky to get into the ML Online Beta and I’m rarely lucky with such things. We’ll see.

For a football gamer, this time of year feels a lot like the interminable run-up to Christmas. Round about late November, everybody starts gearing up for the Big One, mentally bracing themselves to get through it and into the clear blue waters of January.

From late July until the release of the new football games in late Sep/early Oct, things feel pretty much the same. Uncertainty and confusion and paranoia. I’ve only managed to drop in on the PES forums a few times recently, but there are signs that the beast is rumbling back to life.

This year’s a big one for PES2011. Oh, they’ve all been big, but this year is different, whatever anyone says. I can predict the inevitable backlash against the game when it eventually appears, just as I can predict the over-compensating, lavish welcome that it’ll receive from other parties.

I experienced last year in particular the hazards of over-eulogising a new football game, so you can bet I’m going to be cautious. If I’m lovin’ either of the games, of course I’ll say so, but I won’t be declaring the end of time and the arrival of the perfect football game. And if I hate them I will of course say so too.

Over the weekend just gone, I did a bad thing and got myself hopelessly addicted to a game called Minecraft. (It’s got a decent Mac client, which helps.) I heard about it a few months ago and thought it sounded like my kind of thing. I’ve always yearned to get into Dwarf Fortress, a similar concept, but I didn’t fancy the time commitment required just to learn the basics of that game.

Minecraft seemed as though it would have a much, much shorter learning curve (and it has), but at the time I didn’t want to give up any extra time to anything else at all in my life. But then over the past week a wave of hype has washed over the parts of the Internet that I frequent, and I finally took a look. And… oh… oh dear God no…

You know what people say about World of Warcraft? They call it Warcrack, right? As if it’s a drug?

Minecrack. Do not go there. The graphics alone will put a lot of people off. Also the requirement to spend about twenty minutes reading a newbie guide and implementing its advice.

I’m building an underground lair. That’s the first room of it on the left up there. It’s since got much, much bigger…

I’m also still playing PES6(360). Why have I conceived such a passion for this PES game in particular? It’s a good game in its own right, of course, but also it’s at least partly to do with context. I came to it off the back of what I now see was a pretty torrid time with PES2010′s Become A Legend mode. Even when I was enjoying BaL I was dreading the next instance of having to watch CPU vs CPU action.

And before that, alongside it, I was playing FIFA10, a puzzling sort of game: utterly superb in its core mechanics, but empty. I’ve blamed its lack of decent single-player modes, and I believe I’m correct in that assessment—for me anyway.

Manager Mode in FIFA11 has got to be better, surely? If what I hear is true they’ve changed its name, probably for the same reasons that BP will soon undergo a name-change. The taint of the past is just too strong. Manager Mode in FIFA10 was supposed to be a major imprvement, but somehow it achieved the feat of being the worst version yet. People should have been playing it obsessively all year round and swapping stories and hints—but they’re not. Manager Mode has been a catastrophe for FIFA10.

That’s my rambling for today done. My mining, however, has not yet begun.

Finally, I have finished a season in FIFA10′s Manager Mode. I doubt I’ll finish another one, but never say never. At least I have now finished one season, and the basic football game side of things was, on the whole, very good.

The actual game mode might as well not be there at all. I loathe Manager Mode. I never felt this crawling sense of disgust with it last year or the year before. But this year it’s up against PES2010′s Master League—the greatest-ever version of the greatest-ever game mode in any game.

I’ve been trying to think of a new name for Manager Mode, something—tee-hee!—witty and clever. Manky Mode? Minger Mode? Those slangy attempts wouldn’t have much traction outside the UK. Mangy Mode? That’s getting there, but it could do with more syllables. What’s needed is a pejorative word with three syllables that starts with ‘M’ and ideally sounds a bit like Manager, or at least echoes the word’s rhythm. Malady Mode? Sigh.

I’ll stop that now. Whatever I finally settle on, I’m going to make a post on the EA forums abusing Manager Mode and calling it by the new name! That’ll soon show the EA bozoes! The lalalas.

I finished 8th in the Championship, for what it’s worth. My form was up and down. Some matches I stitched together the sublime passing moves that next-gen FIFA in general, and FIFA10 in particular, are notable for. (Yes, yes, yes, these passing moves take place between players who are pretty much all the same as each other—FIFA10′s shortcomings are well known.) And at other times I just couldn’t get anything going at all. Was that me, or was that hardcoded? Scripting in FIFA10? I haven’t played it enough to feel comfortable pronouncing one way or the other, so I won’t.

As I outlined on Monday, various factors have turned me, hopefully temporarily, into that most awful thing: a casual football gamer. This is the kind of football gamer that the developers have to please, or else they don’t have a viable marketable product. Those of us who sit in our bedrooms, quivering and groaning over the latest news about a dropped animation frame as seen by somebody whose cousin is a cleaner at Konami, are totally in the minority.

I’m okay with things as they are. I don’t want or need to be hip-deep in console football at the moment. Currently the World Cup and Football Manager 2010 (plus a few other games besides; and a good book I’m reading; and the high summer weather) are more important in my life right now.

Football Manager 2010 has taken off for me since I allowed myself to ignore most of its complexity. I just want to pick my team, tinker with the tactics for no more than a minute, and watch the matches. I am to Football manager what most people are to PES & FIFA: a casual, a dilettante, the kind of player for whom they’re endlessly devising new methods to lure me deeper into the castle.

But I am not losing sight of the fact that this is a blog called PES Chronicles. What is PES, for me, now? It’s not gone away. I still have unfinished business with my Master League career. And there’s always Become A Legend. With the World Cup group stage coming to an end, I foresee a return to proper football gaming for me. I just don’t really know yet what form it’ll take.