PES Chronicles

The home of PES gameplay for the past few years has really been the PlayStation Portable and the PlayStation 2. Sad but true.

I’ve given some attention to the PSP version of PES2009. I’ve played my usual slew of warm-up Exhibition matches, and a couple of International Tournaments, on various difficulty settings.

The graphics are certainly improved from PES2008(PSP). They look smoother, less grainy. The pitches look lovely.

The game’s speed is roughly the same as PES2008(PSP). Possibly a little slower on occasions, but overall no different. Shame. I was hoping for a slower match.

It’s not just me who thinks fast-paced football, 100 mph all the time, is a bit 1990s, is it? Am I being too harsh in suspecting that the trend of the past few years to make football games play at dizzying speeds from one end of the pitch to the other (FIFA08 and UEFA2008 honourably excepted), is a concession to that bogeyman of modern sports gaming, the hypothetical ADD-afflicted 13-year-old?

My traditional first fixture: England vs Scotland, ten minutes, Regular difficulty. Say what you like about PES in recent years (and Lord knows I’ve done that), I still experience a frisson of glee at starting up a new PES for the first time. I won 2-1, with a scrappy couple goals, nothing special. The shooting seemed featherlight. Shots that would have rocketed goalward in PES2008(PSP) instead went at 45 degrees into the virtual stands.

Up to Professional level for my traditional next game against Germany. This is where I ran into a wall. I was still on Professional after a few hours: playing on Professional, and struggling. I was lucky to get 40% possession in most matches. The CPU has an uncanny ability to keep the ball. I can appreciate that saying this is a little like saying ‘water is wet’.

In the family tree of PES games, I think PES2009(PSP—and presumably the PS2 version as well) slots in somewhere between PES5 and PES6. In gameplay terms, I mean—what it plays like, how it handles. Maybe its got PES4’s nose, PES3’s chin, and PES2’s quick temper as well.

One massive drawback for the PSP version, as ever, are the loading times. It can take a couple of minutes to get from one match to the next. Staring at my own grim visage in a darkened screen while the UMD whirs away is not something I should be doing to this extent, I feel. It’s pretty poor in-game as well, with cut-scenes and substitutions entailing frequent, infuriating pauses in the action. Waiting 10 seconds just to see a linesman raise his flag? 20 seconds to bring on two substitutes? Not good enough.

My PSP is one of the old ‘phat’ ones (bought on PSP launch day 4 years ago), but I can’t imagine the loading times being much better on the newer slim models. It’s almost enough to make me want to get a UMD-less PSP Go when they come out—but at that price? No. I love my games and my games consoles, but there is a limit, even for me.

Overall, PES2009(PSP) is a good game, probably just as good as PES2008(PSP), but I’m already split between too many games as it is. No matter how great this new handheld PES experience might be, I’ve got no room to accommodate it in my gaming life right now.

It’s so tempting to start up a Master League career to tide me over the next few difficult months to PES2010 and FIFA10. But several factors are against that right now.

The number 1 reason is that my PSP is occupied for the foreseeable future. Another game lives inside it, and won’t be coming out much—if at all. For I have other grand gaming passions beside PES, and one of them is called Monster Hunter. This franchise, although big in Japan, is hardly known at all in the West. I’m one of its adherents. The latest MH game—Monster Hunter Freedom Unite—just came out last month, and it has more or less lived in my PSP ever since. I racked up 90 hours on the previous MH game and even so I barely scratched its surface (500-1000 hours’ playtime isn’t unusual in the MH community). So I’m going to be busy with the new one.

Another reason why I won’t be burrowing into PES2009(PSP) just yet is that I also have a perfectly fine ML career going on PES2008(PSP), thank you very much. I’d more or less ‘completed’ this career in year 2021, but after picking it up again a month or two ago, I found that I could barely string two passes toegther. The game is very much back on. I’ll be going back to that when I go back to PES on the PSP (Monster Hunter permitting).

And I also have FIFA09 to be getting on with on the big console. Yes, it has its ups and downs (more downs than ups at the moment), but I’m still getting things out of it that I never thought I would. Some great, satisfying goals for one thing. Friday’s post will feature some more of them.

A single game in my Become A Legend career yesterday. It’s literally all I had time for. One game. I was ready for more games by the end of it, but I had to run. Literally run, for a bus. (Such is adult life. I’ve never liked it much.)

In lots of ways it’s a miracle I made it to June before feeling overcome with football game fatigue. The next-generation games are both pretty good, in their own ways. Yes, even PES2009. But neither PES2009 or FIFA09 can hold a candle to the brightness of the mid-2000s games. In particular PES3 and PES5, my personal favourites.

Poor old next-gen FIFA has got a lot of ground to make up with me. I can see how great it is. I do still enjoy playing it. But it’s never really, how shall I put this, grabbed me by the balls. Not even FIFA08, when it was all brand-new. It’s all to do with the lack of a truly satisfying offline game mode.

I know, I know. A proper Manager Mode, FIFA10-style, is coming. Three years late, but it’s coming. I’d have been a lot more charitable toward FIFA08’s and FIFA09’s Manager Modes if they weren’t such puzzling, strange steps back from the fully-featured Manager Mode that was in FIFA07 on the PS2. All the things that EA are promising us for MM in FIFA10 were already in it on the PS2. Why has it taken until now for it to appear in next-gen?

But hey—BaL and all that. So I had time for that one game. It was a League match against Wigan at our place. I was in  the starting line-up, of course, as I always am these days. Before this game started I flicked R2 to check on my form arrow. I rarely do that, but this time I had a Feeling.

Disconcertingly, the form arrow was a purple, down-pointing one. Ouch. In Master League I’d never pick a player with a purple form arrow, but the CPU manager in BaL has no such qualms.

I believe a purple form arrow denotes a -10 penalty across the board. Something like that. My stats are pretty meagre as they stand. (Snapshot of them on the left. The leftmost column shows my stats when I came to Tottenham; my current stats are on the right. They show quite a growth in less than a season. Starting regularly for a top team has really helped.)

I made up my mind before the match started to stick to my position. I’d play the simple passes. I’d go off on adventurous runs very occasionally (rather than all the bleedin’ time, which is the default BaL behaviour).

And I stuck to the plan. But what thanks did I get for it? I was subbed in the 60th minute—one of my earliest substitutions ever—after having had a pretty decent game in my estimation. I played a dozen good passes. I sent over a couple of floated through-balls that the strikers got a hold of. I even had a shot (keeper’s midriff). I laid off the sprint button. At the point where I was taken off I still had half a stamina bar. I was starting to find space and put in dangerous crosses.

The match ended 0-0 and I checked my post-match rating. 6.0. Not good. Not good at all. If that’s what I get for playing the game properly, I think I’ll have to go back to trying to tear up trees.

Ah, but when will I be playing the game(s), PES2009 or FIFA09, again? There’s no guarantee that there’ll even be a post on Monday—or if there is one, what it’ll be about.

I haven’t played either PES2009 or FIFA09 over the past few days. And I haven’t tried to force myself to play them for the sake of something to blog about.

My original intent for this blog was simple: to chronicle my day-to-day experiences of playing Pro Evolution Soccer. Nothing more, nothing less. I’ve stuck to that vision over the past 20 months. FIFA stuck its nose in from an early stage. I’ve occasionally mentioned other games.

If my current experience is of not playing the game(s), well, that’s just what it’ll have to be. The blog format is precisely that—not a review format, and certainly not a regular games website. If you browsed to Gamespot one day and it said “Sorry, we couldn’t be arsed playing any games today, here’s a picture of a dolphin to look at while we’re chillaxing with War and Peace“, you’d rightly think something was askew there. Here, though? Not so much. I’m having some downtime.

Last year I was somewhat mortified to find my first PES2009 impressions linked to on a stormy WENB comments thread and described there as a review by a well-meaning reader. It wasn’t a review. I don’t do reviews (or if I do, they’re year-long reviews in an episodic format). Thus you will see me praising one or other of the games to the skies one week, and cursing the day their creators were born the next. This is not inconsistency. This is a blog! Nobody would read an autobiography, say, and take the author to task for declaring that he is 20 years old in one chapter, and 40 years old in the next.

I didn’t mean to get all meta there. This was just going to be a ‘back in 5 minutes’ kind of post, similar to some of the ones I was doing last summer. Maybe a mention of PES2010/FIFA10, then goodnight. I had no intention of starting to talk about the blog.

There are two areas I’ve always been reluctant to go: talking abut PES Chronicles itself, and talking about real football. I haven’t shied away when appropriate, but they’ve been rare occasions. I’ve always felt that my task here was to talk about how, why, and when I’m playing PES/FIFA, and nothing else.

The most sensitive topic, for me, has been real football. I love the game, and follow all the latest developments with keen interest, but I don’t engage in discussion about it on the blog.

I had a spurt of interest in Football Manager about 6 months ago. Eagerly I downloaded the official Sports Interactive podcasts, featuring none other than the game’s creators and an assembled panel of FM enthusiasts.

That should have been a pretty bloody great podcast, right? It should have been packed with anecdotes and insights and tips and general chit-chat about the peculiarities of liking a game just so damn much that you’d give over a significant portion of your life to it. Right?

No. Not right. The actual game ‘Football Manager’ received no more than cursory attention at the start of each podcast. The bulk of the supposed Football Manager podcasts were taken up by the gang yakking on (and on, and on) about the real football world’s latest talking points.

It wasn’t a Football Manager podcast. It was a football podcast produced by the Football Manager team, with occasional mentions of the game.

I’d absolutely hate to see the WENB podcast go the same way. At the time of writing WENB’s last two efforts have featured a ‘transfer talk’ section. I really hope this is just a symptom of a quiet time in the PES/FIFA world—a bit like my current post…

The sooner I get back to playing the games the better. I’ve got a strong feeling that my next post will be about the PSP version of PES2008. Either that or what I had for breakfast.

A bit of a lull in my Become a Legend adventures. If my BaL career was a boat, it’d be bobbing in the water with its sails hanging limp. Since last time, I’ve only played a few more training matches with my new club, Tottenham. The matches didn’t go well and I’m still in the reserves.

I’m kind of back where I was near the start of playing the mode. I don’t just mean in the sense of having to play my way out of the reserves with a new club. I’ve been playing a few other games (see below). At the moment I feel curiously detached from BaL, from PES2009, and from football games full stop. I feel a disconnect with the action out there on the pitch. I spent large chunks of these training matches (only three of them, admittedly) just turning on the spot and going on aimless runs. I’m seeing far less of the ball than I did with Portsmouth. Perhaps all of this is partly due to being among better players at Tottenham.

I could tell rightwaway that they were better players. They passed it a lot better and lost it less often whilst dribbling. They even managed to get some crosses in.

SPEAKING OF CROSSES, ahem, I had this strange incident in one of the training matches. It was a rare sight of goal, only it wasn’t. I was making a run into the box anticipating the cross, and it came over. But I was sandwiched between two defenders, and the ball squirmed loose. Great, I thought. I can get to that loose ball and take a snapshot at goal. But my player went into this weird shuffling animation that I don’t remember seeing before in PES2009. Looking at it close-up, I thought it might be a defending animation – ?

Whatever it is, it’s damned odd—something like the kind of move Elvis Presley wasn’t allowed to do on TV in the 1950s:

(At the start of the replay the ball is just out of sight at the bottom of the screen. The focus is, as ever, on yours truly, whom I might as well have named Narcissus…)

Peculiar one, isn’t it? I was more intrigued than annoyed. I doubt I’d have scored anyway.

I’ve been playing a few other games, finding myself a little fatigued with PES2009 and with football games in general at the moment. It’s a measure of my addiction to football games that even when I’m disenchanted with ‘em, I play ‘em.

It’s partly habit, partly convenience. Football games fit in with my way of life. They can be played for 10 minutes or for three hours. They can be left for a day or a week, and resumed without any difficulties. There are no complex stories or fiddly controls to remember. I don’t have to remember that SELECT opens the inventory, or that I’m supposed to be fetching the Amulet of Ratbum from the Citadel of Dread for the Archduke of Plinth, and that kind of thing. I love those kinds of games—proper games—but I just don’t get the time needed to play them. Well, not very quickly anyway.

I’ve been playing my way through Valkyria Chronicles since January. I’m glad to say I have now finished it. It was one of those games where I watched the final credits all the way through, with reverence and goosebumps. It was worth every second of the 40 hours I spent playing it. (I left probably 5-10 hours of side-quests uncompleted.)

My next ‘proper’ game will probably be Lost Odyssey, but I might finally get around to Mass Effect. One latecomer that might leapfrog the pair of them is a PS2 title called Persona 3, a Japanese RPG that I’ve heard a lot about. Or possibly God Of War 2, which is still unplayed from my PS2 days, two years ago now. I loved the original God of War back in the day. Or there’s always Fallout 3. Or Assassin’s Creed. Or, or – I don’t know. I’ll see.