PES Chronicles

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.

How about a whistlestop tour of my gaming history? I want to give some flavour of my gaming tastes and habits. They’re peculiar in some ways, as today’s post title may suggest…

I’m primarily a console gamer. The only PC gaming I tend to do is on strategy games, with the likes of Civilization III and IV, Hearts of Iron 2, and even older titles like the Combat Mission series being particular favourites.

I entered the next generation of console gaming in August 2007. That was when I finally buckled under the pressure and headed into town and returned with a gleaming new PlayStation3, looking forward to the day—not far off—when PES2008 would arrive and be the Best Football Game Ever. I know that I wasn’t alone in this. How many thousands—or tens of thousands—of consoles were snapped up by PES fans in that period? How naive and trusting we were back then. Sigh. I just don’t like to think about it now.

The next generation is now the current generation. PES seems to be withering on the vine, but that’s another story (one to be revisited as 2009 unfolds). Over the past 18 months I’ve spent hundreds of hours playing PES and FIFA and assorted other football games (hence the blog, natch). But somehow—I don’t know how—I’ve found time to play other games as well. In no particular order, I have completed (or ‘beat’, as American gamers say) Bioshock, Metal Gear Solid 4, Portal, Mirror’s Edge, Uncharted, and no doubt several others that I’ve forgotten about for now.

In addition I have played pieces (bits and bobs; odds and ends) of many, many other games. I played over 30 hours of Oblivion before stopping suddenly. Things came crashing to a halt when I suddenly needed a lot of money to bribe a key character in a crucial mission. I didn’t have the money and it would have taken me an hour or two to get it by playing another few missions. I saved my game and meant to come back, but I kept putting it off and putting it off, and that was over a year ago now.

This is one of the perils of being  a mature gamer with a full-time job and lots of other commitments besides. You end up gaming in fragments, playing bits of games here and there, never settling into one game and just playing that one alone to completion. After a certain amount of time away from a game, you are less likely to go back to it. Which is why I have been—and still am—so attracted to the pick-up-and-play ethos of sports games, in particular football games. There’s no story to remember. No fiddly controls to relearn after a week or two of letting them go rusty. Oh, yes, that button brings up the map. Now, what zooms in? Oh, crap, I’ve accidentally sold the Amulet of Rathgorn. Uh? Who’s this Breenow the Bold fellow, and why have I got to kill him? Oh, where’s my PES2009 disc… So it goes, with me anyway.

The best game I’ve played on the current generation of consoles is, without question, Bioshock. That game still awes me just to think about it, and there are only two or three other games I’d ever say that about. Yes, Bioshock’s last hour is weak in comparison to everything that preceded it. The story twists are predictable. The final boss battle is surprisingly easy. But, oh my God, look at the whole. Look at the package. I have to think back to Metal Gear Solid 3 on the PS2 for a comparable feeling of being immersed in the kind of gaming experience that I play games for.

It’s tempting to go off into some kind of top-5 list of My Best Games Ever, but I won’t. I have peculiar tastes in games. For one example, one of my most favourite-ever games, even more of a favourite than Bioshock, is, wait for it, Final Fantasy VIII.

Yes, I said Final Fantasy EIGHT. You know, that one. The Final Fantasy that people love to hate. Speaking personally, I’d put FFVIII in my top 3 games of all time. I loved it in a way that I never loved FFVII—the one you’re supposed to revere without question. And I did love FFVII, but I loved FFVIII more. I loved the battle system, the magic system, the Triple Triad card game. I even loved the love story. I’m a hard-hearted, unsentimental son of a bitch—but I loved this computer game’s soppy love story.

I replayed Final Fantasy VIII three times in total, each replay lasting about 40-60 hours. I’ve never even considered replaying any of the other Final Fantasy games. I’ve never actually completed either FFX or FFXII, and I’m not looking forward to FFXIII (the phrase ‘action RPG’ makes me feel ill).

After that wander down memory lane, back to my recent gaming history. Over Christmas I completed Mirror’s Edge—a great gaming experience for two-thirds of the time, but a curiously empty-feeling and frustrating one for the other third. It deserved its slew of lukewarm reviews, but it was still well worth playing and I don’t regret paying full price for it on release day. (I also got a free promotional t-shirt that remains in its cellophane wrapper to this day. I doubt it’ll ever come out. I think that if I ever unwrapped it, much less wore it, I would instantly morph into Comic Bookstore Guy from The Simpsons.)

Just in the last week I completed Uncharted. I will talk about this amazing game in its own post, but I just have to say—what a criminally neglected masterpiece this is.

And then in the middle of last year there was Metal Gear Solid 4. Another great but flawed masterpiece. Even I, a dedicated Metal Gear aficionado, grew weary of MGS4’s aimless, rambling cutscenes towards the end, and the boss fights were the weakest in the whole MGS canon. But the game, what there was of it, was excellent.

And that is mostly that. This summing-up post is not the shape of things to come for the blog. I’ve got a backlog of unplayed games like you wouldn’t believe. What I intend is to work my way through them, one by one. I will treat my games-in-progress in much the same way as I treated my PES Master Leagues. I’ll blog about exactly what I’m up to, how I’m enjoying things, and so forth. We’ll see how the PES Chronicles format holds up.

First out of the blocks, naturally, is the game I’m playing at the moment, right now at the end of January 2009. Valkyria Chronicles, half of whose name is shared auspiciously with this blog, has got the PlayStation3 community buzzing. Could this game be the platform exclusive that we have been waiting for? Or, like Uncharted, is it doomed to inhabit the ‘cult classic’ niche?

What else is a blog but a public diary? It’s like a private journal that anybody can read. This blog is—or should be—a daily record of my ups and downs, ins and outs, good times and bad, in the halls of Pro Evolution Soccer. So here we go, warts and all.

PES2009 and I are going through a bad spell at the moment. Today’s post is the final one of this week. I’m skipping tomorrow’s post (Saturday) due to a combination of sheer idleness and—temporarily, one hopes—a mounting sense of disgust.

No, it’s nothing to do with ’scripting’. That’s one of my favourite topics on the blog, and one of my biggest bugbears with the whole PES franchise over the past four years. I do talk about scripting a lot, but that’s moot today. I’m not worried about scripting at the moment.

I’m in the doldrums. I’m starting to lose interest in playing PES2009. I have no motivation. In truth, for the last few sessions I have only played for the blog’s sake, to have something to write about. Back when I started PES Chronicles that’s something I swore would never happen. Well, it’s happened.

Could this be the beginning of the end for me and PES2009? I don’t think it’ll come to that, but never say never as they say. It could come to that—I could abandon PES2009 in the future. There’s no point pretending it’s not possible. There are various faults with PES2009 that have only really come to vex me after all these many hours’ play. My in-game Track Record shows that I have now played for 165 hours. That’s a lot of time to spend with any game. And we all know what familiarity breeds.

I’ve discovered and pretty much mastered the PES2009 equivalent of PES2008’s notorious wonder dribble. The ‘wonder dribble’ was my name for the way PES2008 (next-gen) simply let you dribble all over the pitch and score a goal with any player of above-average ability, on the supposedly hardest difficulty setting.

That wonder dribble has been taken out of PES2009, but it has its own version, and it’s just as dispiriting. The zig-zag dribble, I call it.

The zig-zag dribble does exactly what it says on the tin. Whilst running at a CPU player, just change direction 90 degrees. The CPU player will be left floundering. Then, when necessary, change back—and so on, thus zig-zagging your way through to goal.

It’s not 100% effective, as the wonder dribble virtually was. You need good timing to perform the zig-zag dribble, and a player with a nice burst of pace on him. But the fact is that it is possible. It’s usually worth roughly one goal per game, and a hatful of good chances.

I feel disenchanted and disillusioned with the whole football game scene, really. I haven’t even looked at FIFA09 for a month now. I haven’t loaded up my Football Manager 2008 save for a week or two. PES2009 is crumbling to dust before my eyes.

I think I know what started this off. Over Christmas I played Mirror’s Edge, and it’s given me back an appetite for playing other games. Proper games. Games that aren’t football games. I want to go and play Uncharted and Lost Odyssey and Valkyria Chronicles and Monster Hunter Freedom 2 and Fallout 3 and Ninja Gaiden 2 and… many more. They call me. So I think that I will go and play them.

For the record, I’ve won a few matches in my Treble campaign. Then I lost to Palermo, as shown by the screenshot (with some wonderfully twee Japanglish phrasing). Then I won a few more. I’m still top of the League and still in both Cups. The Treble is still very much on. At some point I will drag myself out of this mental slump and take that Treble. I should be back on Monday to resume the ‘fight’…

I interrupt my usual Master League-related schedule to talk about an intriguing development out there in PESland. It’s only mid-January 2009, but more and more people are reaching this site after Googling ‘PES2010′. The blog stats tell me so. I started noticing it about a week before Christmas. And now ‘PES2010′ is the #1 search term leading people to these pages.

PES Chronicles currently doesn’t even appear in the first few pages of search results for ‘PES2010′—I’ve barely mentioned it. Which means people must be hunting long and hard for PES2010-related news. Now. In mid-January.

There was a time when thoughts of the next PES didn’t seriously begin until late spring at the earliest. It’ll be May or June before we see the first substantive PES2010 news appear—probably in the form of an uninspiring screenshot that the Internet will gnash its teeth over. But people are hungry for PES2010 now.

I find this trend interesting and disturbing on a number of levels. It’s a reminder that time seems to pass at an increasing rate of knots as I get older. And it also shows that there must be a lot of PES fans out there who are not as keen on PES2009 as I  (mostly) still am. Otherwise, there’d be no reason for them to Google ‘PES2010′.

Things were easy last year. “PES2008 is teh suXXor” (or whatever) was the majority opinion, and I agreed with it. Boy did I agree with it. PES2009 is a better game. I think almost everyone would agree with that, with the main arguments centering upon how much better it is.

Some would say it’s not very much better at all, others that it’s a lot better. I’m inclined towards the ‘lot better’ camp, but have sympathy with the ‘not much better’ crew. Somehow I cannot shake the memory of all my anticipation, in 2006 or so, of what next-gen PES on the PlayStation3 was going to be like. It was going to be the most amazing, fantastic, stupendous football game ever.

PES2008 was a lesson in cold, hard reality. PES2008 was a disaster. PES2008 was our 9/11. And PES2009 is just… okay. It’s competent. It’s decent. It’s just so much less than PES should be. So I have a lot of sympathy with the phantom ‘PES2010′ Googlers. I know exactly where they’re coming from, because I’m there too. We still believe in the myth of next-gen Pro Evolution Soccer. We still believe that it’s really going to happen.

Will it be 3rd time lucky for the prodigal son of football gaming? It’s possible, I suppose.

Wouldn’t it be marvellous if Konami ‘did a FIFA08′ on PES this year? What if Seabass really did take the franchise to the next level that we all confidently expected it to reach? I’m talking about the same kind of qualitative leap that saw ISS on the PS1 eventually morph into PES3 on the PS2. Could it happen with PES2010? I’ve started to dream about it happening. It’s like 2006 all over again…