It’s the mid-season 2010 transfer window in my Manager Mode career as Atletico Madrid on the Xbox360 version of FIFA09. (I can’t get over the new Xbox360. With games installed to the hard drive, it runs quieter than the PS3, and is just as reliable. No more freezes.)

I haven’t brought any new players in. As it is, I already have enough. The transfer market in FIFA09 is… not a good gameplay feature. To put it mildly.

As long as you have the money (and it’s easy to get the money if you haven’t got it), you can have any player you want. The transfer market is really a case of picking what players you want from a list. There’s absolutely zero sense of negotiation. This goes for any team in any division in any country. You want ‘em, you got ‘em.

The same rule applies in reverse to players you want rid of. Want to sell a player? Just put them on the list. After your next game, you’ll get an offer. Sometimes the offer will be for less than their value. If so, just wait another week, and a higher offer will come in. This is how it goes, always. ALWAYS.

Sigh. And the transfer market—if it can even be called that (it really is just picking players from a list!)—is just one of Manager Mode’s problems.

I’m not going to lie and pretend that everything is rosy in FIFA09-land. It’s not. I’ve got a big problem with Manager Mode, and the problem’s not going to go away.

When it comes to FIFA09’s core gameplay, everything is still pretty rosy. I still think it’s a superb football game. I have misgivings about its speed (even on Slow, it’s a bit too fast) and about the way it’s a bit too easy to dispossess the AI (leading to tiresome passages of ping-pong in midfield). But overall, the rest of the game stands up.

However. Turns out there’s more to a football game than its gameplay. It’s what you do with that gameplay that counts.

I only ever play a football game’s career mode. That’s how it is for me and I don’t think anything will ever change it. Online play is a very occasional pursuit—if online play ceased to exist I really wouldn’t miss it. I still haven’t even glanced at either FIFA09’s Be A Pro or PES2009’s Become A Legend modes, although I hear great things about both.

Looking back, I should have named this blog Master League Chronicles. That’s the game I’ve been playing for the past several years. That’s what I became addicted to. Not PES as such. Master League. When I started liking PES2009 over the past few weeks, I was actually liking Master League. One of the reasons I loathed next-gen PES2008 so much was that its low difficulty wrecked Master League. You couldn’t help but ‘complete’ your Master League after a few seasons.

Over the past few days of playing Manager Mode, something has become clear to me. There is no contest between FIFA09 and PES2009 for me. No. FIFA09 wins, and PES2009 loses. Yah boo sucks to Seabass, and all the rest of it.

Where the two games conflict, and where I am conflicted, is in the game modes. Master League is currently more attractive for me, by some considerable distance, than Manager Mode. In fact, I’d go as far as saying that I struggle to take Manager Mode at all seriously. It lacks too much that Master League has been doing for several years. A proper transfer market. Variations of time of day and weather (don’t underestimate the power this has to pull you along through season after season).

It’s crazy that FIFA09’s fully-licensed career mode feels primitive and somewhat empty next to PES2009’s fantasy-world equivalent. Even Master League’s menus are ridiculous. And the less said about that notorious dog the better…

But the only thing that Manager Mode really has going for it, in my opinion, is FIFA09 itself. The better core gameplay. Is that enough to sustain me through an inferior career mode? I don’t know yet.

What’s becoming clear to me now, today, is that in the medium-to-long term, it might not matter to me that FIFA09 is the superior football game (and it certainly is that). What’ll matter to me is which career mode of the two on offer—Master League or Manager Mode—I most want to play. I certainly won’t force myself to play Manager Mode if it goes on feeling pretty hollow, as it is doing at the moment.

My 3rd season of Master League in PES2009 is about to start. I’ve decided to go ahead and play it rather than returning to FIFA09 at the moment. I’m waiting for the PS3 version of FIFA09 to be patched—the through-ball bug really makes it all but unplayable.

Yes, I do also have the Xbox360 version of FIFA09, which is largely free of the accursed bug. I’m in the midst of a very enjoyable Atletico Madrid career. But my 360 is far too prone to random freezes that require complete restarts, losing any progress made in a match. It’s deeply annoying when you only have a limited time in which to play.

So I’m carrying on with PES2009. Patch or no patch, I’ll be back on FIFA09 after one more Master League season. Yes. I can stop any time I want to. Just… one… more… season…

If I don’t get promoted in season 2010-2011, it’ll make this career officially my worst-ever ML campaign in all my time playing PES. I’ve never spent more than three seasons in the lower division. Not that I can remember, anyway.

I’ve decided to leave the difficulty on Professional for the upcoming season. I started this career on Top Player, but then played FIFA09 for so long that when I returned to PES2009 I couldn’t adapt back. I felt I had to drop down to Professional. Playing at this level seems plenty hard enough for me right now. 

There’s one long-standing Master League routine of mine that I’ve so far not mentioned on the blog. Anybody who has watched my PES5 goal compilations (Volume 1 and Volume 2) may have wondered why my Coventry City team are always wearing differently styled and coloured kits. All the goals seen in those two videos were from the same ML career. (I got to season 2045, passing through two whole generations of Regens—and then PES6 came out.)

I had a routine of changing the kits every season. Just for variety’s sake. I never got round to resuming this tradition on PES2008. The next-gen version had relatively few Editing functions, and was in any case a bad game. I wasn’t motivated to care enough about my team to want to dress them up anew every season.

This year, strangely, I do care. I never expected things to be this way, but there you go. For season 2010-2011, I’ve altered the Home stip, ditching the stripes and the all-Sky-Blue colouring. Black trimming and sleeves are in.

No, it’s not a masterpiece of a kit. I’ve really got to do something about that badge (and would it be too self-regarding for me to have a peschronicles.co.uk shirt logo?). But I traditionally don’t spend all that much time on the new seasonal kit. I tend to just flick through some options and stop at the first one I like the look of. I’m a slovenly, random-hearted kit-creator. Those PES5 videos will back me on this one…

———-

Down to the real business: actually surviving to see another season. I was running a serious risk of Game Over. My end-of-season salary bill was going to be about 7500 points. And I only had about 6000 in the bank. Since the mid-season I’d had several players on the transfer list but, as ever in Master League, none of the CPU teams had ever shown any interest in them. In FIFA09, the opposite problem is the case: you are guaranteed to sell your players in the first week after putting them up for sale. Both are preposterous extremes. Why can’t either PES or FIFA ever get it just right?

So I couldn’t rely on the transfer market coming to my rescue. I set up five pre-season friendlies in order to try to acquire points. I wanted to set up more, but the game wouldn’t let me. It said my team’s reputation wasn’t big enough. Humph. No matter: with an average of 800 points for a win, I could secure the future of my team with just a couple of victories. A few more victories, and I might even be able to get some new players. These pre-season friendlies are great!

I lost all five games. The picture on the left tells the story.  Each X in the picture signifies a defeat. One of them was a thumping 6-0 defeat against a pretty impressive World XI. It was one of those matches where I was lucky to get nil. The mistake I made in this sequence was accepting the opponents that the game chose for me.

I was still in trouble. Thankfully, heading into the last few negotiation weeks, a miraculous thing happened. A CPU team bought one of my players. No, I couldn’t believe it either. Libermann was the man in question, and I couldn’t get rid of him fast enough. That was 1200 points in one go. Only a couple of hundred more to make up now.

In the last negotiation week, I knew what I had to do. Releasing players is a last resort but often there’s nothing else for it. I released Huylens and Burchet.  This brought my squad down to just 21 players—a dangerously low level, with player fitness from game to game being what it is. But I had to count myself lucky. Without the timely sale of Libermann I’d have had to release probably another three or four players. Obviously the game had seen I was in trouble, and it threw me a bone.

Here’s the final tale of the tape—I squeaked through with just 30 points to spare:

And so to season 2010-2011. With zero new players and no money in the bank, it’s going to be tough on a number of fronts. And if I don’t get promoted, it’ll be my worst-ever ML start. No pressure.

I’ve played all remaining games in my current Master League season on PES2009. There are no ’single-year’ seasons this year. In older PES games you started a Master League in season 2005, say, then the next season was season 2006, followed by season 2007, and so on. In PES2009, the first season is called 2008-2009. And I’ve now finished my second season, 2009-2010.

It’s been a pretty bad season, one of my worst-ever in Master League. First, the positive. Just before the end of the season I enjoyed my one and only victory, a hugely enjoyable 1-3 result at Gothenburg.

As much as I enjoyed the win (and after an otherwise winless season, believe me I enjoyed it), it gave me a certain sinking feeling for a brief moment or two. I’m very suspicious of PES2009 in the post-PES2008 world. I’m permanently on my guard. I’m forever watchful, waiting for the overhwelmingly positive experience that I’ve had over the past couple of weeks to change into a nightmare.

Any sign whatsoever of me playing well or scoring a few goals in PES2009 immediately makes me suspect that this could be the beginning of the end. That I’ll soon be literally running circles around entire CPU teams and scoring hat-tricks for fun, just as in PES2008. I’ve already seen enough of PES2009 to know that this probably won’t happen. But what if PES2009 has its own monsters lurking in the basement? Its own versions of the things that made PES2008 into A Game That Will Live In Infamy?

It does preoccupy me. I think I’ve mentioned the worry, in some form, every day on the blog since I started playing PES2009 again. I won’t be able to shake it off until I’ve grown very familiar with the ins and outs of PES2009. Which means winning Trebles in Master League, of course. How easy or hard that proves to be will ultimately determine how good or bad PES2009 is—for me, of course. This ‘Treble Test’ of a PES game’s worth is an entirely personal thing. Other evaluatory procedures are available…

Okay, enough hand-wringing and fretting about the future for PES2009. How did my current season end?

Badly, as I said. Here’s the final lower end of the table—who’s that at the bottom?

Ouch. Finishing bottom of the league with a W1-D9-L12 record is possibly my worst-ever finish in the second season in any Master League. I did fail to win a single game in my first season on last-gen PES2008. That was the worst worst-ever.

A win percentage of 4.55 is laughable. Even in my first season on Top Player I did better than that.

That final win didn’t do much to improve my transfer funds, really. I’m left with 6000 points in the bank and a 7500 salary bill. Negotiations are next. I’m thinking that pre-season friendlies might come to my rescue here.