PES Chronicles

I’ve given up on the FIFA10 demo. I’ll wait for the full game now. The demo’s 3-minute match just encourages the kind of direct, arcadey approach play that next-gen FIFA isn’t about. (Or shouldn’t be all about.) I’ve seen the good and bad in the FIFA10 demo by now. I’ve seen enough of the good to still be looking forward to getting my hands on the full game. And I’ve seen enough of the bad to still be looking forward to PES2010 with keen interest—what a story could be brewing there, eh?

[Late breaking news this morning: the PES2010 demo will be released tomorrow, Thursday 17th September. This is a lot earlier than expected. I am, needless to say, eager to get my hands on it.]

In the meantime I’ll be playing the Xbox 360 version of PES6. Offline. Against the CPU. As God intended football games to be played.

I made a big mistake the other night. A mistake that almost derailed my Indian summer with PES6.

I went online for a few matches. I should have known better. I do know better, really, but I was curious. Offline the game plays so finely that I was interested to see how it translated online.

The short answer is that it doesn’t. PES6 online is a poor shadow of its offline majesty.

‘Sprint-clamping’ is the norm—as with every football game online, sadly. Sprint-clamping is where you squeeze the tackle+secondary pressure+sprint buttons when not in possession of the ball. This keeps two players constantly sprinting after the ball.

Everybody sprint-clamps and puts you under constant pressure. I played 3 matches.Whenever I had the ball I always had two players charging at me, from start to finish. Always. Without pause. You just don’t get that against the CPU.

The counter-argument here is that it is possible, with time, to adapt. I bet it is indeed possible to play the average sprint-clamper off the park with a patient pass-and-move approach. But I haven’t got the time to get there, and I suspect that even if I did get there the football would still be more direct, more fast and furious, than suits me.

I mean no disrespect to the many thoughtful players of PES and FIFA who value the online side of things perhaps above all else. If anything, I have massive respect for them being able to get something out of online football gaming that I have very rarely seen. They see things in the online game that I never have, and never will. Not as long as sprint-clamping is the norm.

The session left me drained and doubting. I couldn’t face playing PES6 until the following night. I picked up my Master League career again, and was soon back in the groove. Offline is just a totally different ball game. It’s a better ball game. It’s the only ball game I want to play, and I worry deeply about where it is heading. Online practices and habits are huge influences on developers when they’re assembling the nuts and bolts of football games. Online is ruining football gaming, in my opinion. Ruining it.

I don’t expect people online to stand off and applaud while I play a tippy-tappy, pass-and-move game. I don’t expect people online to do anything other than play the kind of football that has sadly evolved there: 100mph, constantly pressuring, direct football. That’s the online game on PES and FIFA. Take it or leave it.

I’ll leave it.

My belated infatuation with FIFA09 was never going to last at such a high intensity. It’s been an unforgettable, eye-opening few weeks, but a healthy splash of realism has hit me.

I went and had a few games of FIFA09 online. Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. FIFA09 online is a terrible game.

Everybody pressures everybody for the full 90 minutes without suffering any consequence. So much for the fatigue model. I turned up intending to play a patient passing game, and did so for a while. But after a while, my good intentions went out of the window. I started pressuring all the time as well. What choice do you have if you want to compete?

This has happened to me before on FIFA09. Even when up against somebody who wants, in theory, to play a ‘proper’ passing game, by degrees you both end up exerting more and more pressure, eventually both strangling the controller in a death-grip (Sprint+Secondary Pressure+Tackle) until the game is just like every other game of FIFA09 online.

I confess that I only went online to play FIFA09 because I wanted to see what it would feel like to score a ‘floater’ goal in an online match against another person. And I scored one in my very first match.

My opponent was Barcelona, naturally. I chose Manchester United. I always let the other player choose the teams, and I always make a point of choosing a similar team to theirs. I’m not one of these Accrington Stanley heroes.

Twenty minutes into the first half, I got the ball with Cristiano Ronaldo out on the right wing. I was in the golden spot where I’d scored all my other floaters from. I had a bit of space (somehow), and aimed, pulled the triggers, and shot… The ball flew as fast and true as anything, sailing over the keepers head into the opposite corner of the net. A picture-book goal from all of 40 yards. My opponent watched the replay with me. I wonder what he made of it. Or are these goals as common as muck online in FIFA09? I don’t think they are, somehow.

I had a few more games. Maybe 5 in total. All but one opponent chose Barcelona. The one who didn’t choose Barcelona chose Monaco, pleasingly, and I reciprocated by choosing Le Mans. Sadly, he turned out to be just another pressurising runner. That’s all FIFA09 is online, really, when it comes right down to it: pressurising, and running.

This is the game that’s been played online 10 billion times, or whatever it is? Good grief. All I can say is that its players must have Popeye-sized forearms from all the controller-strangling they must do.

FIFA09 offline I’d still say is a satisfying 9/10 game of football. FIFA09 online is a tedious 2/10 game of ‘who’s best at squeezing their controller’. Nice lag-free experience; shame about the game. I hate it and will never play it online again at all.

After all that it was a struggle to get back to any semblance of normality offline. I played a few more games in my Atletico Madrid Manager Mode career. I was unable to recapture the heights of a few days ago. Having had the awful, grinding gameplay of online rubbed in my face, it was difficut to find the beautiful game again. I did rediscover it, eventually, but I’m not as smitten with FIFA09 as I was a few days ago. Instead I’m back on a more healthier, even keel.

I’ve removed the Monster Hunter Freedom Unite UMD from my PSP for the first time in a week. I’ve put in the PES2008(PSP) UMD, and taken my Master League team out for a spin. I was struggling with them last time I played this career. Now? After a few weeks of FIFA09? I’ll tell all next week now. There’s some other business first…

Because another old-school PES game has seen some action again. I’m talking about PES3. Three. I don’t really know why either. I’ll tell all on Friday.

Today’s news in a surprising nutshell: I’ve started playing Ultimate Team online. I’ve only been playing it online for a few days but in that time I’ve played several matches per session, over three or four sessions. Which probably doubles my amount of online play for the entire year.

Regular readers will know that I dislike online gaming. Lots of people dislike online gaming, for lots of different reasons. My main axe to grind against online play isn’t the kids, the exploiters, the griefers, the glitchers, the cheaters, the racists, or even the vegetarians (damn them and their stinking hairy cabbages; damn them all to hell). I have nothing against online play per se. It’s the time for online gaming that I don’t have. Didn’t have.

Timewise, this week has been a good one for me. I had a few days off work, and I set aside lots of that free time specifically for gaming. I finished the penultimate mission in Valkyria Chronicles and I started its final mission. And then, crazily, I found myself playing FIFA09 online without meaning to. One thing led to another, and here I am a few days later, kind of addicted to playing a football game online. Me. Playing online. With great enjoyment. What gives?

It really was an accident, officer. At some point I intended to try out Ultimate Team online, but not until I’d utterly exhausted its offline aspect. And I have still got a lot to do offline. My team still isn’t much better than the Default one I started out with. I keep having to buy new Bronze packs of cards to get contract cards in order to hold onto my best players. At least one of them is up for renewal often enough to make me spend, spend, spend.

So I was actually looking for an offline tournament to play in. I needed a good wedge of coins to beef up my Ultimate Team in so many ways. I thought I’d at least get an offline tournament started, save my progress, and come back to it later.

But something went wrong (or serendipitously right), and I found myself pitched into an online tournament. Groan. I groaned. I didn’t have time for this, and should have quit and gone off to do other things, important things, but I thought I might as well play at least this one match. I was probably going to lose it anyway.

I did lose it, but not by much. It ended 0-1 to the other guy. I was disappointed to find that things haven’t changed much with FIFA09 online. The most popular tactic is still to feed the ball to a fast striker and run with it. My opponent had Yakubu playing up front on his own, and that was pretty much that. Little or no passing, no build-up play, certainly no wing-play. He just got it to Yakubu and started running, again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again. I stopped him every time, except for once. He got past my defenders and slotted the ball under my keeper’s body. It won him the game and thus, in his mind, justified his entire tactic.

I was out of the tournament—a tournament that I’d never meant to enter, so I wasn’t too distraught. But it whetted my appetite and I went to play a one-off ‘club match’ online. I lost that one badly, 0-3, and couldn’t have played worse if I’d deliberately tried. The online and offline games are very different. You don’t get as much time on the ball online. You don’t get to pause the game and make a cup of tea. Online play is an abomination!

I played on. God help me, I played on. Another match, and another, and another. An hour passed. And another hour passed…

The opponents came at me randomly. I took pride in fending off the speed demons of a four-star team (my team is still a two-star team). I earned a creditable 1-1 draw in that match, and I just knew the other player was annoyed by my possession football.

In another match I went down to 10 men with a mistimed tackle. My opponent scored from the free-kick, and it was the winning goal. Afterwards he sent me a message saying, and I quote, haha you play like a cheating asshole but I still kicked ur ass.

In another match I was the one with 11 players against 10. But I lost it in the last minute to a good goal scored by my opponent on the break. That opponent had a microphone on and occasionally she—yes, SHE—would exclaim or laugh out loud over my TV’s loudspeaker. When she scored her winning goal all I could hear was her saying “Oh my God, oh my God”, as if she couldn’t believe she’d won the match either.

Then I won a few matches in a row. Then I got beaten, slaughtered actually, 0-5. That opponent was a very good player who had a range of different tactics. All 5 of his goals were different in approach and execution. I tried to implement some of his strategies in my next match, but my connection dropped and I took it as a hint that I should get up, stretch my legs, go out into the weak April sunshine….

At the end of that accidental first session, two hours had passed and my morning was gone. That is why I tend to stay away from online play. I have since been back for another session or two. I plan to go back for more.

Played offline, Ultimate Team is interesting and even engrossing, but only up to a point. If there was a full Master League-style single-player mode to play in, well, fantastic—I’d happily play that for six months; just wake me up in September. But Ultimate Team has none of that. It almost hurts me to say this, but to get a real sense of occasion and accomplishment out of your team, it needs to be taken online.

These players are my players. I picked them all. I went hunting for them in some cases. Ultimate Team is effectively an online Custom Team mode for FIFA09. It’s almost certainly too late for EA to make it into anything more for FIFA2010. But for FIFA2011, why not go all-out for glory and institute a proper, comprehensive, offline league mode for Ultimate Team? I think it’d be quite popular, you know…

Chess was the very first game I ever played online. This is going back years now, to when I first got the Internet at home. (When 576kbps was considered broadband!) Almost the first thing I did was head over to Yahoo! Games, and played chess against some random person. It was all very new and exciting.

But I have never really warmed to ‘proper’ online gaming. I played CounterStrike intensively for a few weeks (who hasn’t?). I played EVE Online for a few months. For a year or so I was even one of the top 50 players on an online snooker game. For one reason or another, I drifted away from all of them.

So why poker—why do I like playing poker online, but not any other game? It’s a number of things. Poker is something that materially rewards me. It’s a deep, decent game. I’m not saying that Call of Duty 4, Warhawk, and even Pro Evolution Soccer aren’t decent, deep games in their own ways. It’s just that, well, I’ll say it: the likes of poker, and chess, are more in tune with my temperament.

Poker is a game of decisions and instinct and timing. It’s not gambling, as any of the books will tell you from the start. Playing a single-table tournament the other day, I was dealt this for my first hand:

Pocket fives. It’s always a great feeling to see a pocket pair pop up as your hole cards. But you have to be careful. A low pocket pair looks good, but you have to see the flop, and you have to see how other players will bet, and it all depends on your position, and the chip stacks, and…

I was in good position—on the dealer button, the best place to be with a small pair. The player to my immediate right raised the pot to 120. We all still had our starting 2000 chips. I called. Everyone else folded. It was me versus the player who’d raised. I’ll call him Steve.

I needed a good flop, otherwise I was probably folding. I’m nowhere near good enough yet to nurse an unimproved small pocket pair through a hand and win it. This was the flop:

YES! I’d made trips on the flop and was a huge favourite for the hand. That’s just about the best possible flop you can hope to see with a low pocket pair.

Steve bets the pot,and I call. The only thing I have to fear here is pocket Aces or tens. Steve’s pre-flop raise could have been with those hands, but somehow I don’t think so. I don’t know precisely how I don’t think so. I’m not good enough at this game yet for my reasoning to be anything more that hopeful instinct. I know nothing about Steve, but most players in low-limit online poker are maniacs, and so I think that he would have raised to more than 120 with Aces or tens. I think he’s definitely got one Ace—I hope he’s got one Ace. If he has, I’m probably going to win big here.

The turn came:

I’ve made a full house. Three five, two tens. If Steve has Ace-10, I’m screwed, but as Dan Harrington says in one of his excellent books, you’ve got to win your chips sometime. You can’t always be scared of what the other guy might have.

I decided to go all-in, figuring that if he had an Ace he’d most likely call anyway, thinking he must have the best hand. My wish came true—he called. Both of us were now all-in on the first hand of the tournament for all our chips.

Before the river card was dealt, our hole cards were revealed to each other. I imagined his dismay as he saw my pocket fives. I saw his cards, which were:

Ace-Jack, eh? I was right, he had an Ace. The Jack is better than I thought, but still not good enough. Only an Ace on the river could save him by making his own full house. If it came, it came. Bring it on. The river card dropped:

The second Jack was scary, but it only gave him two-pair. My full house was the easy winner. Steve was wrong to call my all-in bet.

I went on to finish second in the tournament, winning about $5 for a $0.90c buy-in. Whenever I finish in the money, it’s nearly always in second place. My heads-up play (1 versus 1, at the end of a tournament, to decide 1st place) is a massive weakness in my game right now. I’m still a heads-up dunce. I nearly always get it all wrong. You’re supposed to loosen up in heads-up play, but I remain tight, and the other player always cottons onto this and steals my blinds. Then I panic and go all-in with rubbish, and he calls and usually wins. I’m working on it.

MONDAY ON PES CHRONICLES, we’re back to FIFA09. I’ll save the poker talk for every now and then.