PES Chronicles

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.

Perhaps this blog is best seen as a year-long review format. It’s not quite been a year yet for either PES2009 or FIFA09, but for me the football game season is over.

I’ve finally given up on the console football games for season 2008-2009. I’ve got plenty of other games that I want to play. I’ll still have the odd session on the 2009-branded games, no doubt, between now and October. I might amuse myself with PES6 on the 360 some more. I might stick PES5 into the still-going PS3 for a nostalgic session or two. I’ll play PES2008 on the PSP if I can ever bring myself to take out the Monster Hunter disc.

But PES2009 and FIFA09, for me, are now last year’s games. Today I’ll review PES2009; on Friday it’ll be FIFA09’s turn.

PES2009 was already over for me. I effectively gave it up a long time ago. Although it is rightly seen as a decent effort at a next-gen PES game, it suffers from one of its accursed predecessor’s main sins: it’s just far too easy.

It was hard to begin with. Lord knows I struggled—but I’m an average player. I really am. Perhaps even a bit below-average. So a period of struggling is only be expected. But I got over that stage, and never looked back. Some people never struggled with PES2009 at all. Some PES ninjas claimed 5-0 wins on Top Player within their first few sessions. Perhaps it’s this aspect of next-gen PES—its insultingly low difficulty—that has dismayed me more than any other.

When I think back over my entire PES and ISS life, moments stand out. Certain goals stand out. I remember an extravagant goal I scored in one of the later ISS games with Michael Owenn (sic). I remember my first satisfying goal in my PES4 Master League career: a half-volley with Mista from 25 yards that I watched the replay of over and over again, with an incredulous grin on my face. In PES6 I can still remember scoring a fabulous, dipping, swerving thunderbolt with my ML team’s new RB, Zoro, from the right wing—on his debut.

There are dozens of such moments spread right across the years. I doubt I’ll remember anything about PES2009 in a few years’ time, sadly.

HIGHS: Discovering in November last year that there was actually a lot to enjoy in PES2009. Master League, of course; and Become A Legend, briefly.

LOWS: That low difficulty. The sinking feeling in December that I’d already got nearly everything I was ever going to get out of the game.

My final rating for PES2009 is 6.5/10.

I subscribe to the Realist school of review scores. 6.5 is not only above-average, but a pretty good score. PES2008, by comparison, got 4/10 in the final analysis.

PES2009 was a great improvement, but still not really good enough. And so we come to the present day. The illustrious name of Pro Evolution Soccer still awaits its champion. PES2010, over to you.

The home of PES gameplay for the past few years has really been the PlayStation Portable and the PlayStation 2. Sad but true.

I’ve given some attention to the PSP version of PES2009. I’ve played my usual slew of warm-up Exhibition matches, and a couple of International Tournaments, on various difficulty settings.

The graphics are certainly improved from PES2008(PSP). They look smoother, less grainy. The pitches look lovely.

The game’s speed is roughly the same as PES2008(PSP). Possibly a little slower on occasions, but overall no different. Shame. I was hoping for a slower match.

It’s not just me who thinks fast-paced football, 100 mph all the time, is a bit 1990s, is it? Am I being too harsh in suspecting that the trend of the past few years to make football games play at dizzying speeds from one end of the pitch to the other (FIFA08 and UEFA2008 honourably excepted), is a concession to that bogeyman of modern sports gaming, the hypothetical ADD-afflicted 13-year-old?

My traditional first fixture: England vs Scotland, ten minutes, Regular difficulty. Say what you like about PES in recent years (and Lord knows I’ve done that), I still experience a frisson of glee at starting up a new PES for the first time. I won 2-1, with a scrappy couple goals, nothing special. The shooting seemed featherlight. Shots that would have rocketed goalward in PES2008(PSP) instead went at 45 degrees into the virtual stands.

Up to Professional level for my traditional next game against Germany. This is where I ran into a wall. I was still on Professional after a few hours: playing on Professional, and struggling. I was lucky to get 40% possession in most matches. The CPU has an uncanny ability to keep the ball. I can appreciate that saying this is a little like saying ‘water is wet’.

In the family tree of PES games, I think PES2009(PSP—and presumably the PS2 version as well) slots in somewhere between PES5 and PES6. In gameplay terms, I mean—what it plays like, how it handles. Maybe its got PES4’s nose, PES3’s chin, and PES2’s quick temper as well.

One massive drawback for the PSP version, as ever, are the loading times. It can take a couple of minutes to get from one match to the next. Staring at my own grim visage in a darkened screen while the UMD whirs away is not something I should be doing to this extent, I feel. It’s pretty poor in-game as well, with cut-scenes and substitutions entailing frequent, infuriating pauses in the action. Waiting 10 seconds just to see a linesman raise his flag? 20 seconds to bring on two substitutes? Not good enough.

My PSP is one of the old ‘phat’ ones (bought on PSP launch day 4 years ago), but I can’t imagine the loading times being much better on the newer slim models. It’s almost enough to make me want to get a UMD-less PSP Go when they come out—but at that price? No. I love my games and my games consoles, but there is a limit, even for me.

Overall, PES2009(PSP) is a good game, probably just as good as PES2008(PSP), but I’m already split between too many games as it is. No matter how great this new handheld PES experience might be, I’ve got no room to accommodate it in my gaming life right now.

It’s so tempting to start up a Master League career to tide me over the next few difficult months to PES2010 and FIFA10. But several factors are against that right now.

The number 1 reason is that my PSP is occupied for the foreseeable future. Another game lives inside it, and won’t be coming out much—if at all. For I have other grand gaming passions beside PES, and one of them is called Monster Hunter. This franchise, although big in Japan, is hardly known at all in the West. I’m one of its adherents. The latest MH game—Monster Hunter Freedom Unite—just came out last month, and it has more or less lived in my PSP ever since. I racked up 90 hours on the previous MH game and even so I barely scratched its surface (500-1000 hours’ playtime isn’t unusual in the MH community). So I’m going to be busy with the new one.

Another reason why I won’t be burrowing into PES2009(PSP) just yet is that I also have a perfectly fine ML career going on PES2008(PSP), thank you very much. I’d more or less ‘completed’ this career in year 2021, but after picking it up again a month or two ago, I found that I could barely string two passes toegther. The game is very much back on. I’ll be going back to that when I go back to PES on the PSP (Monster Hunter permitting).

And I also have FIFA09 to be getting on with on the big console. Yes, it has its ups and downs (more downs than ups at the moment), but I’m still getting things out of it that I never thought I would. Some great, satisfying goals for one thing. Friday’s post will feature some more of them.

I was never going to get PES2009 on the PSP. I was quite proud of this stance. I already had PES2008(PSP) and that was all I needed. PES2009(PSP) was reportedly just a minor update. Why get it? Why be a robot, automatically buying anything with the words ‘Pro Evolution Soccer’ on it? The whole point of being a PES fan nowadays is that we’re not helping PES by following the franchise no matter what. So, no, I wasn’t going to get PES2009(PSP). This was going to be the start of the rebellion.

But now I’ve ordered PES2009(PSP). It’s on its way. (I know—how quaint of me to be buying games to play on the PSP. I keep meaning to, er, arrange for God or someone to make new games materialise on a memory card, but I still haven’t got around to it.)

I made sure to get it online, from an Amazon seller, preowned. It’s costing me £11, which is very reasonable. Every penny is going to the seller on Amazon.

It’s all PES2008(PSP)’s fault. PES2008(PSP) is an amazing game. It has re-whetted my appetite for quality handheld football gaming.

I thought FIFA09(PSP) would be the place to go. I had that purchase all cued up, my finger quivering over the mouse button. Then something stayed my hand, I know not what. I went and had a look at some reviews and videos. I wasn’t too impressed with the FIFA09 videos. The game looked just like bad old FIFA to me.

Then I had a look at PES2009(PSP) in action, and instantly knew that I was going to get it. It seemed indefinably different from PES2008(PSP), both in the speed of gameplay (slower) and in the animations. And there are a few new ones in there. I’ll see, anyway, when it arrives, which should be next week now.

———-

In other news, I carried out an experiment in Edit mode on PES2009(PS3). Me, in Edit mode. It’s a whole new world in there.

Over the past few months I’ve heard occasional rumblings about in-depth ‘realism editing’ on PES2009. This is where you reduce all players’ Speed and Agility stats by 30%, and boost their Stamina by about 10%.

It should make for a slower-paced, more simulation-oriented PES2009. I could see the appeal of it in theory. Sadly there is no Global Editor for PS3—something to do with its save files being incompatible with something, or something—so it has to be done by hand.

There’s no way I was spending tens of hours Editing every player. All I wanted to do was test this theory out. So I edited just two teams: England and Germany. I went through their squads and reduced all outfield players’ Speed and Agility stats by 30%. A player with 90 for speed went down to 62-ish,for example. Most players were in the 75-85 zone and found themselves reduced to the 50s. I boosted Stamina to around the 80-90 mark, across the board. Every other attribute remained the same.

Rooney still has his strength and shooting power. It’s just creating the chance for him in the first place that is made so much harder. With this Editing regime, you can no longer burst away from opposition players. I’m used to receiving the ball, jockeying for it, then bursting away from the defender, arcing in on goal, and having the shot.

That signature PES move is about a thousand times harder to pull off with these Edited stats. In fact, I never managed it once in the space of three 15-minute Exhibition games on Professional difficulty. Every chance I made had to be worked hard for, with pass and move wholly taking the place of kick and run. It could be argued that this is just as unrealistic as the default gameplay, that a happy balance should be found. But it’s a welcome change. If it wasn’t for the game’s crude 8-way directional movement, I could almost have been playing FIFA08 through a PES-tinged looking glass.

One drawback is that I found it encouraged even more ’sprint abuse’. My finger wanted to squeeze that sprint button all the time, even more than usual, because the players were now just so slow.

It was a successful test. I really enjoyed the games. It was a completely different PES2009 experience, and worth exploring in more depth. It’s tempting to plunge right in and start mass-editing every player in the game, and seeing where it might lead. (How would Master League work? Player growth would have to be disabled, and I don’t think I’d like that.)

But I’ll save it for a rainy day. I’ve got quite a few back-up plans now if PES2010 fails to impress. FIFA10, of course; the PSP version(s) of PES; even the older PES games. Now there’s another back-up plan.