PES Chronicles

Another end-of-term post today. Tomorrow’s shadow looms large. It’s the UK release of the FIFA10 demo, in case you hadn’t heard.

What will FIFA10 be like? Can the demo possibly live up to the hype? It’s virtually guaranteed that those who are opposed to FIFA as a matter of ideology—and they are many—will be out in force afterwards, proclaiming: “Is that it?”. Perhaps lots of pro-FIFA players will be saying that as well. I just hope the demo does the game justice. The forums will be good reading tomorrow night regardless.

FIFA and I are not on speaking terms at the moment. My belated discovery of the scandal regarding the lack of midweek night matches in Manager Mode’s lower leagues is still fresh in my mind. Sadly, it seems ‘the community’ has largely moved on and let EA off the hook (after they promised and everything). Although I wonder how many people have missed the news completely, as I did, and still don’t know?

For most people the argument ‘gameplay is all’ is the beginning, middle, and end of the matter. That’s pretty much the case for me as well, but for various reasons I need a sturdy, realistic, offline career mode. That’s the only mode I’ve ever played and it’s likely all that I’ll ever play. I’ve waited two long years for a Manager Mode even close to the standard of FIFA’s overall gameplay. The night matches issue in FIFA10 is like a sucker-punch in the stomach. I think it’ll turn out to be forgivable in the long run, as the lower league teams teams can be assigned to night-enabled stadia, but it’s a nasty turd to find in the punchbowl.

I’ve still been playing football games over the past week. I’ve been getting my kicks from the Xbox 360 version of PES6—I’ll come to that later. First, I’ve acquired a handheld emulator and a stack of games, among them the SNES version of ISS Deluxe.

I picked up a Wiz games console a while back. It’s not available in any shops. Its primary function is the emulation of old games and platforms. And thus have I rediscovered a universal truth of gaming: old games are rubbish.

Seriously: back in the day, I thought European PGA Tour II on the MegaDrive was the greatest golf game/greatest game I’d ever played. I played it again the other day for the first time in about ten years and… I was shocked. It was really, really bad in every way. Remember the first generation of Java games on mobile phones? Worse than that. NHL94 and FIFA97, both decent games in their day, also seem poor now. I had a few minutes on FIFA97, playing in the celebrated indoor arena, but had to switch it off. FIFA has certainly come a long, long way since then.

Only the wonderful Cannon Fodder really stands the test of time. And, over on the SNES side of things, International Superstar Soccer Deluxe.

This short clip is out of focus almost all the way through. Sorry about that, but you can make out what’s happening on-screen:

Link:

I never played ISS Deluxe the first time around. The 1990s was mostly a games-free decade for me. I’ve played just about every other ISS/PES game in existence.

ISS Deluxe is a cracking game! Okay, it’s primitive even by the standards of the first ISS game on the PS1. But it handles decently, and it does to perfection what I first loved about ISS all those years ago: it forces you to pass the ball around and look for space and probe for openings. Wonder-dribbling—of the kind that has sadly infected the PES side of the family tree in recent years—is nowhere to be seen (except on the very lowest difficulty levels, which is fair enough).

I’ve played a few Tournaments. Naturally, the lasting appeal is limited. How could it not be? But I’m glad to have filled in one of my ISS/PES blanks. Now I do believe the only blank left is the mobile phone version of PES2008. Give me some time…

My main gaming time has been spent on PES6(360). I’m back in love with it. I’ve really got back into its rhythms. Dare I say it, I’ve really got back into a PES groove. Like its humble SNES ancestor, it forces a more pass-and-move style of play, but still allows you to dribble with certain players under certain conditions. It’s great.

The lack of Editing is a pain. I’m still not used to seeing my Master League team called PES United.

To finish off today, here’s a compilation video of some recent goals in PES6(360). To forestall the ‘licensed music ban fairy’ that haunts every video-hosting website nowadays, I’ve tacked on a classical tune that is presumably out of copyright.

NB: these goals are all at PES6’s actual game speed. If PES2010 is faster than this, I for one will be extremely disappointed. (Also—after some computer maintenance, I’m temporarily running a browser without an ad-blocker for the first time in years. Have floating adverts always randomly appeared on Sevenload clips?!)

Link:

My two favourite goals appear together late on. First at around 0:55 there’s a vintage strike from Mathieu, which had me sitting up and punching the air. It’s a good strike in its own right, but in context it was a GREAT strike. I was 0-1 down to West Midlands Village and despite having all the possession and all the chances it was one of those PES games when nothing would go right. In the 89th minute I thought ‘I’m not having this’, and you can see me adjusting Mathieu’s run to take the venomous shot… That, in a nutshell, is the famous ’special feeling’ of PES that people keep banging on about. Good old PES.

Immediately afterwards comes probably my favourite goal overall so far in PES6. It’s a flowing movement that culminates in a delicate through-ball that sets up a first-time rifled shot high into the corner.

So. On the eve of the long-awaited FIFA10 demo, I’m seriously hacked off with FIFA, and I’ve fallen back in love with PES. Interesting times indeed.

Speak, memory… An extra special Saturday post for this Bank Holiday weekend, to mark a very special occasion. In town the other day, I popped into one of those ‘Cash Generator’-type stores on the off-chance that they’d have a copy of NHL09, which I’m still hunting high and low for. On my way out, for some reason I glanced at the store’s Retro games shelf. Among the Mega Drive FIFAs and the Dreamcast Ecco the Dolphins and the like, I saw a lone PlayStation game.

It was… International Superstar Soccer Pro. The legend itself.

I picked up the box and looked at the price on the back. £1.99—bargain. I thought that even if I got it home and only played it once, and then never again, it’d be worth two quid. Let me put it another way: if I was walking along a street, and I saw a magic door with a sign on it that said ***STEP INSIDE AND PLAY ONE MATCH ON THE ORIGINAL PLAYSTATION VERSION OF INTERNATIONAL SUPERSTAR SOCCER PRO FOR JUST TWO POUNDS***, I’d be straight in there.

I took the game to the counter and paid. The usual kind of spiky-haired kid behind the counter bagged it up. I couldn’t contain my delight. “Two quid for this is a bargain!” I said, with what may have come across as psychotic glee.

On my way home I realised I should have checked the state of the disc. It had to be over a decade old. How many owners? Likely dozens. And, unless they’d all been the kind of gamers who scrupulously held their discs by the edges and never left them lying around and always replaced them in their own boxes (gamers like me, in other words), this ISS Pro disc was likely to be in a fearful state. And, sadly, it was:

The picture doesn’t do it the full (in)justice. The surface was probably the worst condition I’ve ever seen a game disc in. What do some people do with their discs? I once lent a much-loved copy of Tiger Woods 2003 to a work colleague for a single weekend. When I handed it over it was in spotless, mint condition—literally as good as the day I bought it. When I got it back it looked like the cratered surface of the Moon. I just don’t get it.

Was I really going to put this thing inside my PlayStation3? Would it work? I would have to see.

The instruction manual triggered faint memories. I remembered, very dimly, chuckling about the pitch diagram, with its ‘corner posts’ and ‘goal nets’…

Tee-hee. Ohhh, memories. Speaking of which. Here is the intro. Turn up your volume for an instant nostalgic trip back in time:

There was no need to worry about the state of the disc. It worked perfectly.

And now here’s a gameplay snippet. I played my traditional opening fixture, England vs. Scotland (still the classic International fixture, and in dire need of a revival IMO). Using my new camera I recorded a whole half of play. The resulting AVI file was about 350MB. Er… So I snipped out this 30-second clip from the start of the second half:

Hey, I hadn’t played this game for 10 years or more. ISS98 and its successors, and then the PES series, have all taken me to other places in the meantime.

The graphics were the most shocking thing at first. These clips actually make its graphics look a lot better than they are. I watched the teams coming out, and then the first few seconds of play, and felt utter dismay. Were graphics really this bad on the PlayStation? I’m certainly no graphics snob, not really, but I’m clearly not a born Retro gamer either.

The prototypical ISS gameplay is there. You remember it (you feel it) within a few seconds of starting to play. ISS Pro, in its day, was a huge paradigm shift in football gaming. It’s the Citizen Kane of football gaming. After ISS Pro, nothing was the same again. It took FIFA over 10 years to catch up. That’s how good ISS Pro was.

So many things feel weird about it now. Aerial through-balls… maybe it was me, but I couldn’t work out how to do them. Maybe they didn’t exist in ISS Pro. And for another thing, you can’t change direction whilst sprinting. That was very weird. Early on in the clip you can see me running at the Scotland defence. I try to change direction, but nothing happens and I just run into a defender.

I lost this match 1-2. It was on the Medium difficulty level (there are only three). Here’s one of Scotland’s goals. My keeper gets a hand to it, but it goes in anyway. The pause at the start is due to me trying to figure out which button did what in the replay controls. It turned out that the Replay playback button was Triangle in ISS Pro. Ten years consumes a lot of memories…

I did score a goal, just to make me feel good. Shooting in ISS Pro feels HEAVY compared to the latest PES games. I had quite a few shots but just couldn’t seem to hit any sweet spots. I barely managed to get any shot above knee-height. Here’s one that I at least placed reasonably well—well enough for the keeper to fumble it into the net. The keepers were pretty solid overall. The two goals I’ve posted here make them seem like PES2008 keepers (the version that must not be named), but they were actually pretty solid:

And that was that. I finished the match, removed the disc, put it back in its box, and it’s still there now. I’d like to be able to report that my brief game inspired me to start playing ISS Pro on the PS3, but it hasn’t. I’ve got too many games to play, great games, modern games, and I want to play them. Retro gaming is all very well as an occasional one-off, like reading a classic book, watching a classic film, etc., but I’m far more interested in contemporary games and would never pretend otherwise.

Still, it’s nice to have ISS Pro there if I want it. I have no idea what happened to my original copy all those years ago. I must have traded it in for ISS98. I was poor back then. There was no sense in keeping a game on the shelf when it could be traded in. It’s always possible, of course, that this copy of ISS Pro is my original copy, returned to me via a devious route….

Why isn’t this game (or ISS98) out for download on the PSN yet? If I had ISS Pro available to play on my PSP I think I’d draw a big fat line under my gaming history so far, and declare myself completely satified with everything.

I might have found the answer to the riddle of PES2008. Assuming that the riddle is: How can I play PES2008 with enjoyment for longer than I have already played it?

I fired up PES2008 on my PS3 this morning with a considerable lack of enthusiasm. The game’s faults are well-documented across a hundred different websites. (The print magazines are strangely quiet. A token one-page, semi-humorous feature on the problems with PES2008 is all we have got out of Official PlayStation Magazine since their disgraceful 9/10 review that failed to mention the horrific technical problems that marred the game until two months after its release.)

I didn’t feel like playing England vs Scotland, or resuming either of my two Master League careers (the Coventry City one and the Singers FC one). I fancied something different. I decided to try out PES2008’s League mode.

I’d never really bothered with League mode in PES. Ever since Master League came along, Master League is pretty much all I’ve ever played.

Before Master League – back in the days of ISS – I don’t remember there being a League mode. There was one of sorts, but it was composed entirely of International teams. It didn’t feel right. I used to play tournaments all year round on the old ISS games. It was great fun going through the alphabet and trying to win the World Cup with every team in the game. Teams like Nigeria and Ukraine were pretty easy, but it took me about 20 separate attempts to win it with Wales.

League mode on PES2008 is unknown territory. I’m sick of the English league and English teams – I’m hip-deep in an English FIFA08 right now – so I leaned toward the Italian league. I chose to play with Juventus.

I set up my beloved 4-3-3, with Del Piero slightly out of position as a left-sided CF. I don’t really know some of the Juventus players, so it took me a while to sort through them. I arranged the subs’ bench to how I wanted it.

Then I played my first couple of games. I played four in total. I won 2, and I lost 2. I found PES2008 to be a pretty good game again, to be honest. It was challenging. I had to defend well and be careful not to attack too much. I had to take the chances I created or be punished. At times, it was frustrating. And, best of all, I was unable to go on any mazy, dribbling runs with the players at my disposal.

I tried to – of course I did. I’m human. I tried with Camoranesi, with Nedved, even with Del Piero (too slow). I tried and failed to score ‘Elcherino goals’ with any of my team. This was good.

After the four games I felt something of the old fire. The urge to get on and see what happens next, see how far I can take this thing. In League mode, of course, there is no player development and no transfer market. The players you start with are the only players you’re going to get. This, too, is a great plus-point.

Here’s a random kind of goal I scored during one of the games. A corner comes over, is partially cleared by the CPU defence, then Juve’s rangy CF, Iaquinta, gets his head to it (let’s ignore the CPU goalkeeper’s Paul Robinson-style flap at the ball as it crawls past him into the net, eh?):

League mode could be the future for me and PES2008. I’ll say that right now. Could I play nothing but League mode all year? Yes. In conjunction with the very involving Manager Mode on the very good next-gen FIFA08, I might yet salvage something out of this terrible year. Trying to win every PES2008 League with every team could be a lot of fun, and genuinely fulfilling. I could even go down the road of setting up custom Leagues – Superleagues! – and trying to win them with the likes of Reading.

Ah, but first I have to give Master League one more chance. I owe it to PES after all these years to go that extra mile. Before I can think about jumping ship to another game mode, I will resume my Singers FC career for at least a few days, using some devious House Rules. One of the rules involves keeping some of the Default players, permanently.

It’s Day 2 of FIFA08 week on peschronicles – a week that’s guaranteed to anger, aggravate and alienate a sizeable number of the PES-playin’ public. Never let it be said that I like to play things safe on this blog.

Before we hit the main action tomorrow, today’s post is a look back (with some anger, naturally) at my bumpy history with the FIFA franchise.

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At the end of the 1980s I swapped my ZX Spectrum and a stack of games for an acoustic guitar. Then I grew my hair long. It was all done to impress a girl. She remained unimpressed, but that’s another story.

I never learned to play the guitar, and eventually I got my hair cut. But I never went back to gaming. 10 years passed. I lived a little. I read a lot.

In 1998, I was unemployed. One week I randomly blew all of my dole money on a pre-owned MegaDrive and a stack of games. Two of those games were FIFA96 and FIFA97.

FIFA96 was the first to go into the Mega Drive’s capacious slot. It was my first experience of a computer football game since Match Day 2 on the Spectrum all those years ago.

I was impressed with FIFA96. After just a few games I was bending the ball into the net from all angles and distances. Aftertouch. What a game concept.

An hour or two later I felt strangely restless. Almost bored. So I stuck FIFA97 in the slot.

It was the same game, but it was different. The graphics were a little sharper. There were a few new features. Gameplay was subtly altered. I couldn’t say how, I just knew it was different.

(Hands up everyone who loved FIFA97’s indoor football 5-a-side and wonders why no one has ever replicated it since? Okay, hands down, people.)

I drifted away from the FIFA games and started in on the rest of my new MegaDrive games. Cannon Fodder was superb. I became addicted to PGA European Tour II. (To this day I rate it the best golf game I have ever played.)

FIFA96 and FIFA97 simply gathered dust. I still played them occasionally. But not for very long. The gameplay was repetitive. There was only a formal resemblance to the real-world game of football. Where was the enjoyment in repeatedly beating the computer 8-0? [Curse you Seabass!]

A year or so later, I’d found a job. I could afford one of those sleek PlayStation things that had been around for a few years. To hell with paying off my Poll Tax arrears.

I picked up five games with my PlayStation. Tomb Raider (of course). Wipeout 3: Special Edition. Civilization II (a neglected console classic, IMO). International Superstar Soccer Pro. The fifth game was FIFA99.

I played FIFA first. I had two matches, and then I tried ISS.

The rest is history.

Whenever I tried to play FIFA99 after playing ISS, I switched off in disgust before the first half was over. What were these players supposed to be? What was this shooting all about? Why all the music and frills and so forth, when the gameplay was so utterly poor in comparison to its shabbier, more cheerful cousin – ISS?

I never played FIFA99 again. It was ISS all the way. ISS98 came along in due course (£10 from the local GameStation – bargain). It took over my life.

Time passed, and in mid-2002 a PlayStation2 appeared on the shelf in my bedroom. (It wasn’t magic. I bought it.)

PES. PES2. PES3. PES4. PES5. PES6. You know the drill. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t.

All this time, FIFA was seen by every right-thinking PES-player as a brainless, arcadey, kid-oriented shoot-’em-up that may have been themed along the lines of football, but had little or no resemblance to the actual game. PES had it in the bag, every year. There was no competition.

I did try out FIFA2003 at one point. I played a demo and thought it seemed, well, okay. Having an alternative football game to play to fill odd periods of PES-fatigue would be a very good thing. I went out and bought the full game.

I took FIFA2003 back to the shop the very next day. This was at a time when you could return games and get your money back without a murmur from the shop staff. Happy days.

I remember going into work and telling a colleague that that was it as far as me and FIFA were concerned. I would never, ever be fooled into buying a FIFA game ever again. He was a PES fanatic too. (There’s lots of us about. We’re everywhere.) He simply nodded slowly. It was not even worth discussing. PES good. FIFA bad.

More time passed. FIFAs came and went. Then along came FIFA06. A couple of posters on PESfan commented that they had played the PS2 demo and it was uncannily like PES. You could even alter the controls to your liking. Square to shoot. Circle to cross. Just as God intended. No more shooting when you meant to cross, or crossing when you meant to shoot. Hmmm, I thought.

I got hold of the demo, played it, liked what I found, and went out to get the game.

Overall, it was another disappointment. Not as crushing a disappointment as FIFA2003 had been, but it was still lacking. The players moved like spiders, springing this way and that in an utterly gamey fashion. The ball flew through the air as if it was on the end of a rubber band.

Still, it was a massive improvement on previous efforts. I played it for a few weeks and then traded it in.

FIFA07 came out in 2006, and was surprisingly well-received by the PES-leaning press and public. I tended to agree.

The players handled better. Cricket scorelines were (mostly) a thing of the past. It was harder to make space for shooting at higher difficulty levels. Clive Tyldseley’s dry asides and outbursts of schoolboy enthusiasm made him arguably the best-ever commentator in a football computer game. (Replacing him with the relatively sedate Martin Tyler for next-gen FIFA08 was a mistake, in my opinion.)

For the first time ever, I find myself still playing a FIFA game now, today, in the calendar year after which it was named. The PS2 version of FIFA07 is gathering dust along with the rest of my old PS2 games….

…but I am still playing the PSP version with great enjoyment. My first controversial assertion of FIFA08 week is that the greatest handheld football game produced thus far is not either PES5 or PES6 on the PSP. It’s FIFA07. I mean it.

—————–

Let me make one thing very clear. When it comes to the big consoles, even the best FIFA so far is not as good as PES6, or PES5, or PES4… or any old-gen PES game, full stop. FIFA08, as much as I like it, is not better than my personal favourite Pro Evo game, PES5.

Is FIFA08 better than PES2008, though? Now there’s something worthy of debate.

In the middle of the year 2007, thousands of PES gamers decided it was time to upgrade their consoles in order to get their hands on the imminent next-gen version of PES. The game was PES2008, and we all know what happened next. A good game, but deeply flawed in so many ways. A profound shock to all our systems. (I’m still in denial. I still can’t quite accept that a PES game was released and it wasn’t brilliant.)

Just before next-gen PES2008, though, there was next-gen FIFA08. And this little beauty — yes, I’m talking about FIFA08 — could well have the power to change everything. Neither FIFA nor PES can ever be the same again after next-gen FIFA08. All will become clear.