PES Chronicles

Things are slowing down, but in a good way. I’ve just taken a few days off PES2010 to attend to some real-life business. That business is ongoing—I’ve got a big assignment to put together for a course I’m doing. All told, I think I’ll be playing fewer matches over a longer period of time for the near future. I’m not stopping or anything. Just taking a bit longer. Where I usually get through a whole season in three or four posts, I think it’ll now take five or six posts, on average.

Not only have I got life stuff to attend to, but there’s a World Cup looming. And I want to play other games as well. I’m 21 hours into Final Fantasy XIII and still liking it. Uncharted 2 is still waiting for attention. And I’ve more or less made my mind up to give FIFA10 some belated attention at the end of my current season in PES2010, whatever happens.

In that season—season 18 of my most epic Master League career since 2005—I’m looking good for a second successive Treble at the moment. I’m still in the D1 Cup. I’ve qualified from my Champions League group stage with ease. At the halfway stage in the title race, I’m 9 points clear at the top of the table. I’ve never had a cushion like this at this stage before. I’m suspicious before every match that the game will be out to get me. And indeed, in one game it was out to get me: Liverpool thumped me 3-1, but in truth I played badly.

One of the most interesting aspects of my long career is the progress of Castolo. I’ve got him as a Regen at the moment. I detest the toxic Myth that surrounds his piss-poor Default original, and was accordingly biased against his Regen for a long time… Until he started getting good.

Now he’s rated a 73 OVR, and seems to gain a couple of points every season. I play him every chance I get. It’s addictive, seeing how good he can become. He’s no longer a passenger in matches—no longer the player you grudgingly bring on for a while just to give him some experience. He’s a talented player in his own right.

Castolo is getting goals. Most are poacher’s efforts, but this next one is a bit special. It came about after a ball over the top, a diagonal aerial through-ball from my full-back. This was a favourite move of mine in PESes past, but it’s been nerfed so much in recent PESes (and probably rightly so) that I rarely try it now. But sometimes I do, almost for old time’s sake, and when it comes off…

Link:

The close-up portion of the replay is awkward viewing for all PES fans. Look carefully and you’ll see that the ball drops through Castolo’s upper torso and neck before he hits the volley. I winced to see it. But it didn’t really spoil my overall enjoyment of the goal, and that’s got to be a worry in itself. Something like the above is so common in PES that it’s become an accepted part of the package. Which is not a good situation for the game to be in.

I happened to be listening to WENB’s current podcast while playing this match. Just before the goal I’d got to the part where the guest speaker was saying it’d actually be okay if Konami completely dismantled the archaeological layers of code that PES is built upon, and started again from scratch. When you look at collision non-detection like the above, it’s hard to disagree.

Season 8 of my Master League career in PES2010 has come to an end. My Coventry City team finished in 9th place in the table. I avoided relegation, which was the main thing. But after being in the top 6 in mid-season I confess to a tiny twinge of disappointment at not clinching a European place. On the bright side, I won’t have fixture pile-up at the start of next season.

Switching up the difficulty from Professional to Top Player had a lot to do with me finishing in mid-table. The game really is very well-balanced on Professional; on Top Player, it’s balanced in the AI’s favour, as is only to be expected. How else is extra difficulty going to manifest itself?

I did notice one very negative thing after the change up to Top Player. It was an extraordinary increase in the amount of dodgy collision-detection that the game permits itself at times. PES has always had appalling collision detection; PES2010 may well be the worst PES ever in that respect.

There are four particularly ripe examples at the beginning of today’s mini-movie (below). As an example of what I mean, see the picture on the right: in the very next instant, that ball warps squarely through my player’s chest and into the possession of the jostling AI player behind him. It left me absolutely fuming. The other instances of atrocious collision detection also left me fuming, or faintly disgruntled (even the ones that went ‘for’ me), but that one is the granddaddy. A magic ball, passing straight through his chest and out the other side! Think I’m exaggerating? Look:

Link:

My goals in that movie brought relief and pleasure, and did much to alleviate the sourness of the collision detection issues, but it still rankles with me. Why do we put up with that kind of thing? (Those of us who are still playing PES, I mean.) Is there any coherent explanation as to why we put up with it? Some of us don’t put up with it, of course; some of us have abandoned PES for various reasons. With a more compelling career mode in next-gen FIFA, I’d have long jumped ship too. Seabass & co. can’t keep dodging that particular bullet year after year. Sooner or later EA will really nail FIFA’s career mode, and that’ll be the definitive end of PES for a lot of people.

Ooooh, was that my first nextgen-PES-bashing tirade of 2010? I think it was, you know.

I didn’t see much transfer activity in the mid-season window. I got an offer I couldn’t refuse for Al Ghani, one of my early-career Youth Team recruits who is now a grizzled veteran of 24. He’s in the ‘good but not great’ category, and so an offer of £4m felt too good to turn down. I could have sold a few other players for a total of £8m or so, but I learned in Division 2 that I need to hold onto my better players, and sell very sparingly, if at all. I’m holding steady in upper-mid-table and occasionally grazing the top 6 with what amounts to my Division 2 squad. Something is going right, and I’d be an idiot to jeopardise it.

I’ve covered this first season in Division 1 very quickly on the blog, because I played through it very quickly. It took me just four long sessions over the space of two days. There were many highlights, not least my good performances against the top teams. I avenged Arsenal’s early-season thrashing of me with a fine 2-1 victory in the return match (the late, late winner from my created player, ‘not-Greg’, is in the mini-movie above).

The usual suspects, Liverpool and Manchester United and Chelsea, are very good too. But, as ever in Master League, it’s the teams you don’t expect to be great who cause you the real problems. FC Porto are monsters in this Division. Seriously, they play at 1000mph and I’m lucky to keep the ball for longer than a few seconds. They beat me 3-0 in one of our fixtures, and in the other I managed to maul my way to a draw like an exhausted boxer hanging onto his opponent for the bell. Are Porto a bogey team in the making? Possibly.

Season 8′s final table:

That’s not bad at all for my first season in Division 1, after everything that’d gone before. 9th place is much better than I expected. I was only 2 points off Europe in the end.

The very end of the season brought a nice surprise. I was starting to wonder which player(s) I’d have to sell to cover my debts—a depressingly familiar scenario from the lower division. But there was no need. The prize money for a 9th place finish was £3.5m! That cancelled my remaining player and staff debts at a stroke, and left me with pocket money. Now I can afford to hold onto all my players.

Roll on season 9, in space year 2017-2018. Another few seasons and this will officially be my longest ML career since PES2008(PSP/PS2). That career’s stalled in 2023 or thereabouts. I still play a few matches on the PSP, very occasionally. I believe this PES2010(PS3) career will eventually overtake it.

So I’m expecting PES2010 to arrive today. [And indeed it arrived, but I only managed to play 3 matches on it before I had to go. VERY tentative early impressions are at the bottom of this post.] I pre-ordered from two sources, one using Royal Mail, one using a courier service, and both were dispatched early yesterday. One is the PS3 version, one is the 360 version. (I’d only ever do this for PES.) I’ve got a good chance of getting both today. I’d have to be very unlucky for neither to arrive.

This post is just filler. Hopefully I’ll soon update it at the bottom with a photo of the game in my sweaty clutches. So now I’ll just waffle on for a bit about PES2009(PS3) and PES6(360). Then I’ll do some reminiscing about PES release weeks in years past. Then I’ll get out of here and go back to waiting by the front door. Sorted.

PES2009 on the PS3. Over the year I certainly had my downs and ups with it. In my end-of-year review I gave it a score of 6.5/10. If I was doing that review right now, I’d give it a 7/10 but no more. Its zig-zag dribbling was too exploitable, even by me, a confirmed non-dribbler under normal circumstances. Overall it was too similar to PES2008 for comfort. Having said that, it was a very worthwhile PES and I enjoyed it far more than its predecessor.

I’ve played a few Champions League tournaments on PES2009 over the past few weeks. They were very enjoyable. I’d never even glanced at that new mode until now. (Champions League will be one of my warm-ups for Master League in PES2010. I won’t start Master League probably until Monday or Tuesday of next week.)

PES6(360) was the game that turned it all around for me and PES this year. Without it I doubt I’d be sitting here now, as hyped up for PES2010 as I am. I picked up PES6(360) for just two pounds at the start of August. It was an amazing experience, rediscovering what I loved and still love about PES.

This time of year always reminds me of PES years gone by. 2002 was my first year of getting PES on release day. I was a poor (in every sense) PS1 owner until then, relying on preowned ISS games from the bargain bins.

After saving up enough for a PS2, on a certain weekend in late October I went into town. At Virgin I bought a new PS2 with PES2 bundled in. I remember counting out the £20 notes at the counter. I picked up a copy of Metal Gear Solid 2 from the GAME across the street. And I took a taxi home. I have a clear visual memory of sitting in that taxi, seven years ago. The skies outside were gunmetal-grey. I kept glancing at the large box in the crisp Virgin bag on the floor of the taxi.

A year later—a very happy year later—I bought PES3 from a shop on release day after work. Straight home. No messing about. PES4—ahhh, that was the year when all the stores broke the street date on the Wednesday of release week. I was off work and I went into town just to have a look around, on the off-chance, and literally couldn’t believe my eyes when I walked into GAME, and there it was. Not a promotional case, but the game itself. Right there. Was there a grin on my face as I bought the game? Was there? A grin? On my face….?!

PES5. I was unemployed and poor again. I had to trade in PES4 to afford PES5. By PES6 I was back in work, and completely up to speed with this new ‘Internet’ thing. I decided to pre-order online for the first time. I used… Amazon. Once and never again. At the time (and still today?) they were probably the worst to pre-order games from. You were lucky to get it on release day. PES6 didn’t arrive on release day, and I had to make an emergency dash into town. I traded in the Amazon copy when it eventually turned up (on the Saturday).

PES2008 and PES2009 both arrived at least a day early over the past few years. And so to PES2010. I’m happy that release week is comparatively uneventful these days.

Sadly, I have to go to work today. I seriously considered calling in sick, but—without going too deeply into it—that’s not a viable option for me right now. If the game arrives any later than 1pm, I won’t get a chance to play it at all today. I’d love to get at least one match in before I have to go to work. Here’s hoping.

@12.15—-IT’S HERE

—VERY, VERY TENUOUS EARLY IMPRESSION AFTER PLAYING 3 (JUST THREE) MATCHES—

My tradition for the first day with a PES game: I always play the first match on the default difficulty as England vs Scotland (the big annual fixture of my youth).

Match 1. I was worried that the strong feeling of PES goodness I got from the demo wouldn’t appear. It did appear. It handled slow, slower than I thought it was going to handle. I’d heard they’d sped it up and was worried. No worries. It was a 15-minute match and I dominated, but only won 1-0.

Match 2. Up to Professional difficulty, still ENG vs SCO. I have to win this tie on Professional before I can move on and play anything else. It’s non-negotiable. I lost it 0-1, with Scotland at times playing PES5-style keep-ball. Remember how pleasantly shocking that CPU possession football was back then? It is again now. I couldn’t get it off them. I resorted to the olde sprint-clamp claw thing late on, nothing doing. Very positive sign.

Match 3, because I lost Match 2 I have to play it again. 0-0 this time, and I won on penalties (but it doesn’t count—I’ll have to replay this again tomorrow morning, until I win).

I had to drag myself away reluctantly.

It’s the first PES in years—since PES6(PS2)—where I really feel some unfamiliarity at the start, and that I have to relearn how to play it. Note that I scored 1 goal in 3 matches, and I was only playing on the default and default+1 difficulties. I really am just an average player though.

What’s the longevity going to be like? That’s the big question and there’s no way of knowing. But my gut tells me this really is PES writ large, at last, on next-gen. The already-hoary old cliche “this is what PES2008 should have been” both applies and doesn’t apply. Technically I don’t think PES2010 would have been possible two-three years ago.

After that first match where I basically tried the usual next-gen PES run-and-gun tactic, I was forced to pass and move, pass and move, pass and move. I had the same kind of buzz that I got from session 1 with FIFA10, but that session was 5 times longer. I’ll post detailed first impressions sometime tomorrow afternoon after I’ve had a good long session in the morning.

‘PES is back’? That’s what they’re saying on the forums. Is it mass hysteria? Or is it… could it be… true? I don’t know yet, but early signs are good, put it that way. Early signs are very good.

Right then, if  FIFA10 is so flippin’ great, why is this blog still called PES Chronicles? The short and simple answer: I’m still playing PES; when it’s on its game, I prefer PES gameplay; and I think PES2010 is going to be a special game. If things pan out as I sincerely hope they will, this blog will be dominated by PES2010 from the 23rd October.

Last Monday night, I think it was. I’d just had a very frustrating FIFA10 session. The much-heralded new game wasn’t doing what I wanted it to do, on or off the pitch. That dissatisfaction would turn back to delight (at least on the pitch), but at that moment I was seriously unhappy with FIFA10.

So I picked out my PES6(360) disc, stuck it in the console, and had myself a little session. It was fantastic. The passing. The movement. The weight and momentum. The BOOM of the shooting. The next morning I gave FIFA10 another go and it was love again, but the lesson of the previous night’s mini-session was clear. PES had not gone away. PES is never going to go away.

The demo for PES2010 promises a great game. I still play at least one game on it every day. I’m baffled about the flak it’s taken on the PES forums. I totally agree with the many heroes who have risen to defend it. I’m bemused about people wanting the response times and through-balls to be ‘fixed’—shorthand for ‘made exactly like all previous PES games’.

Why not have a PES that’s a bit different? One with different response times according to player skill and situation, where the through-balls aren’t guaranteed to glide like marbles to their destinations every time? Why not have a different PES, finally, for the next-gen?

I hope Konami have kept their nerve. If I knew the full game was going to be exactly like the PES2010 demo, I’d be confident of a Return of the King scenario. As it stands, I worry that the chorus of boos might have turned PES2010 into PES2009.5. Really, if that happens, it’d be a worse disaster than next-gen PES2008.

My PES activity over the past week hasn’t just been on PES6(360) and the PES2010 demo. I’ve also played PES2009(PS3) nearly every day.

I was influenced by some people revisiting PES2009. They talked it up as an unjustly neglected minor classic of the PES canon.

I exhumed the PES2009 box from the pile. My last save data was from mid-May. I decided to take PES2009 for a spin via a game mode that—shockingly—I hadn’t touched all year. Champions League.

Really. I’d never once played the Champions League mode. I’m shocked too, now that I have played it. I’ll return to the subject in more detail next week (when I’ve played it some more), but for now I am regretting my Master League fixation of the past few years. There’s a lot to be said for playing PES with a fixed-ability team and seeing how far you can take them.

I’ve got to nail my colours to the mast here. Enough shilly-shallying. For me, PES gameplay is better than FIFA gameplay. Even after a glorious week with FIFA10. The PES ball is an appreciably heavy object that takes effort to pass around and is generally more pleasing to my hand/eye. PES players have weight, momentum, inertia. When a ball gets hit it stays hit—no floatiness.

I do need more time with FIFA10, but I don’t think it has the same kind of vital rhythms. I’m not heading down the cheap route of saying FIFA has no ‘soul’. It certainly does have soul, one that I’ve seen and felt many times, it’s just a different kind of soul.

PES2010 has a chance to make football gaming history. It’d be the greatest comeback since Lazarus. I’m really, really, really tired of talk about winning back the crown, and FIFA this, and PES that. But I would never deny how massive a deal it would be in football gaming if PES2010 does indeed turn out to be a special PES game.

It’s all up in the air. I won’t know for 10 days or so. For now it’s back to FIFA10. I’ll return to talking about PES on Wednesday 21st October—hopefully I’ll get PES2010 the following day.