PES Chronicles

Towards the end of my second season on PES2009’s Become A Legend mode, I’ve become a bit of a regular in the first team at Portsmouth. I now get to start roughly 4 matches out of 5. And I play for about 60-80 minutes in most of them before being substituted. Which is fair enough really—my stamina levels are still a bit dodgy. Sometimes I’m allowed to stay on the pitch for the entire 90 minutes. I love that, and I’m still loving BaL. In the light of all my signature moaning later on in this post, that’s something worth bearing in mind.

My meagre Youth stats have started to bulk up a bit. In BaL you can select specific areas of your stats to work on. You can’t fine-tune them individually. You can only focus on umbrella categories like, say, ‘Kicking’, which presumably includes passing, shot power, shot technique, and any other kicking-related attributes. The same goes for categories like ‘Power’, ‘Speed’, etc.

All told, I’ve started having a palpable effect on matches. Over the closing stages of the season, Portsmouth put in their best performances since the start of it. We won two and drew two. I have to cast aside all modesty for a moment and take all the credit. I set up two goals. I defended tirelessly when required. I dragged the team up by its bootstraps. This increasing influence all bodes well for next season, my 3rd. A season that should be taking place, by all rights, down in Division 2. But it’s not. This is a very touchy subject…

The end of the season came along, and despite our good little run, we still finished second from bottom of the Division 1 table, and thus should—SHOULD—have been relegated to Division 2. Except… There is no Division 2. Not in Become A Legend.

You get to the end of the season down there in the ‘relegation zone’, and nothing happens. Nothing. It’s one of the most anti-climactic things I have ever (not) seen in PES. I’m at least thankful that I was forewarned in a comment on a previous post about there being no relegation—otherwise I’d have been puzzled, confused, and very likely incandescent with PES-related rage.

Grimly I went through the post-season negotiation weeks. I wanted to see if the game would even acknowledge that I had finished in the Division’s nominal relegation zone. It didn’t. The weeks just ticked over, and then it was the next season, and I was looking at my first fixture against Middlesbrough. Not happy.

In and of itself, it’s not a big deal. I can cope with it. My enjoyment of Become A Legend is largely unspoilt. What grates on me is that this is just another little cut in the ongoing death of a thousand cuts that the PES franchise seems to be suffering.

This non-relegation thing isn’t really a big issue for me in terms of BaL. In terms of next-gen PES, however, it is an issue. The slapdash attention to detail is symptomatic of the ills that have haunted the series ever since those first disturbing rumours of v-sync screen tearing, slowdown, and ‘arcade handling’ started to appear in the months leading up to PES2008.

I don’t know. PES2010 doesn’t have to be an unprecedentedly great game that will amaze us and confound us and send us weeping and shaking with awe to the joypad every day. But it wouldn’t hurt if it was…

I’m still looking forward to seeing out the rest of my BaL career. How will season 3 progress? Will I start slamming in goals from distance? Will Portsmouth prosper with me in the team?

The end of the season provides a natural break for me to pause the story and drop in on FIFA09 to see how that game feels for me right now. On Friday I’ll post about my recent Ultimate Team and—yes—Manager Mode adventures. Season 3 of BaL will resume on Monday.

We’re now at the mid-point of the football game year. Here at the beginning of April, we’ve got about 6 calendar months before the start of season 2010 (2010?! how did things ever get this far?). Over the next month or two we should start seeing and hearing the first morsels of information and rumour. Despite myself, I’m still interested.

Long, long before its probable early-to-mid-October release day, we will know for a certainty one way or the other about PES2010. After everything that’s happened and not happened for PES since 2007, PES2010 will be one of the most scrutinised games in history. Perversely, this year I think the previews and reviews should be the most trustworthy they’ve ever been.

There’s little point in me trying to recap the current state of play regarding PES. I think everyone who ever cared about the series is painfully aware of the state of play. Which isn’t actually all negative. I will say again that I found PES2009 to be a perfectly decent PES game and a very good football game in its own right. But I concur with the majority of veteran PES gamers (if I may be so bold): decent and pretty good are simply not good enough. We expect more from PES than decent and pretty good. (And my estimation of PES2009 as decent and pretty good is by no means a widely-shared opinion…)

FIFA has superseded PES. This is old now. This is no longer very controversial. That’s the most shocking thing of all, for me.

Even with its many faults and the lack of a really great in-depth offline mode, FIFA has superseded PES in the here and now. PES is like a faded, fat old footballer reminiscing about the glory days, while a lean young whippersnapper listens politely, and laces up his boots…

There’s still hope—mad, desperate hope—but it’s tinged with a realism (even a fatalism) that was mostly absent over the past few years. I now expect to to be disappointed, whereas last year and the year before I expected greatness. That was always what we’d had before with ISS/PES, right? We’d get it again, surely? How could anyone even doubt?

Old ground, old arguments, old times. Times that may never come again. For PES to be resurrected in 2010, it doesn’t need to live up to the Evolution in its title. It doesn’t even need a Revolution—it needs to drag itself up by its bootstraps. It can’t have the same incremental progression. PES2010 can’t just be PES2009 with better graphics, which is what my darkest fears tell me it’ll be. Evolution has got to go out of the window. We need PES2010 to be as much a whole new take on the game of football as FIFA08 was.

Ah, the eternal issue. When I started this blog, pre-PES2008, I had no idea that I’d be posting frequent opinion pieces—virtual bleedin’ editorials—on the general theme of ‘Whither PES?’ Will I still be talking like this in a year’s time? In April 2010, will I still be going on (and interminably on) about the disappointments of three years, and earnestly wondering if PES2011 might be, you know, the one…?

No. Never, never, never, never, never. It’s PES2010 or bust for me—for lots of people. PES fandom has carried the series through these dark, depressing years, but we’ve been running on fumes for far too long. It’s now or never. Put up or shut up.

For the first time since I started playing PES2009, I’m seriously challenging for the Division 1 Championship. I’m slightly disappointed that it’s taken me until season 2017 of this Master League career to get to this stage. I’m usually a bit quicker about it than this, historically speaking. But better late than never.

With one game left I was on top of the table, and thus in a position to determine my own fate. I was one point clear of the 2nd-placed team, AC Milan. The 3rd-placed team, Roma, were two points behind me. The critical thing about my situation was that my goal difference was appreciably worse than both of these sides. I had to win my last match to be sure of taking the title.

My opponents were AIK Athens. They’ve been my bogey team so far in this PES. It was Osasuna last year. PES games traditionally burden you with relatively obscure teams snapping at your heels even when your team is tricked out with the equivalent of 11 Maradonas.

So I was wary of the match and what it might do to me. I felt that I had to win it—that a draw wouldn’t be good enough. That’s the way PES works, with me at least. You have to do your bit.

But I was too cautious. I should have just played my own game, bogey team or no bogey team. Athens scored a ridiculous soft goal midway through the first half. It was one of those goals that gets deflected off your defender’s arse, and then bobbles across the virtual turf to take another deflection off your goalkeeper’s arse too (just for good measure, to really rub it in) before trickling into the net.

Thankfully I scored my equaliser almost straightaway. Otherwise the nerves would really have been jangling. I went in at half-time with the score 1-1. That’s when I decided to check the other matches’ results—something I almost never do except under circumstances like these.

I discovered that my match was the sole evening fixture. AC Milan and Roma had already played their matches. Milan had lost their match. Roma had drawn theirs. It didn’t matter what happened in the second half here. Coventry City were already the Division 1 champions.

Anti-climactic? A little, I confess. I would have preferred for the title finally to be won with a grandstand finish in the second half in this match against Athens. But a title is decided over a season made up of 38 matches. Not just 1.

In that second half I naturally played with a more relaxed outlook. It didn’t matter if Athens thrashed me 100-nil. I’d won the title. The match carried on at 1-1 despite me having the lion’s share of possession and chances—many of them solid gold chances that mysteriously failed to translate into goals (the same old PES2009 story).

Then, near the end, I got this odd little goal with Shaw. In the clip I’ve switched the camera view to track Shaw. He runs to receive the floated through-ball—and apparently breaks his leg to flick the ball into the net:

The clip’s poor quality. (Aren’t they all—I do keep meaning to pick up a high-quality camera, or even a DVD recorder, but so far I, er, haven’t.) You can just make out Shaw’s lower left leg suddenly jumping out at a right angle to his body. I’ve heard of similar glitches in PES2009 but this is the first one I’ve seen for myself.

Did I care that I’d scored what looked like the winning goal with a glitch? Did I hell. It didn’t matter anyway. It was just nice to beat my bogey team.

Or so I thought. Naturally, they swept upfield straight from the kick-off and scored their equaliser. 2-2 it finished. Never mind. We are the bloody champions!

After sitting through the above celebrations on the pitch, it was time to feast my eyes on the dressing-room celebrations that I’d heard so much about but not quite been able to believe. I watched, bemused, as several players dressed in strange black kits jumped about and danced and sang in a fluorescent-lit dressing room. After a moment I realised that I recognised none of the players and the kits they were all wearing were AIK Athens kits. I was witnessing a stupid bug. AIK Athens were being shown instead of my team. I have no idea why. Athens were the home team for this fixture. Maybe that’s the bug: only the home team can be shown celebrating in the dressing room after a title win. Ah well.

Here’s the final table:

Here’s the intriguing final statistics for season 2017:

With that record I had no right to win the title. A win % of 55.26 is not a title-winning performance. I think the game threw me a massive bone this season. But sometimes it’s best not to peek behind that curtain where the great Wizard named Seabass sits and operates his infernal machinery. So I won’t.

But that poor end-of-season record does at least mean that I still have something to aim for. A ‘proper’ league title win, with a healthier win % (and lots more goals scored).

Oh, and there’s still one more thing to go for, of course, in season 2018 and beyond. The Holy Grail of Master League. THE TREBLE.

——————

My next post will be on Thursday. I’m taking tomorrow off to, ah, rob a bank or something. From now on I’ll probably take a day off after the completion of every season. A day’s gap provides some natural breathing space between seasons for readers—and for me.

So now it’s November, and I’m playing FIFA09 as my main game. That’s how it looks like being from now on. We’ll see how the land lies in January and beyond, but I never thought I would ever see the day that the new PES gathered dust while FIFA—for the love of God, FIFA!—stayed in my console as the nights really started drawing in.

I’m sure I’m not the only PES fan who still feels shellshocked about what has befallen the PES series over the last year. In the run-up to FIFA09 and PES2009, although I gave it the big talk and brayed that I’d play FIFA instead of PES if it came to it, I never really believed PES2009 would disappoint me. I believed (in spite of all evidence to the contrary: the mark of a true believer) that it’d be a triumphant return to title-winning form for PES, and that I’d come running back to the fold after my dalliance with FIFA.

Things haven’t worked out as I thought they would. PES2009 barely gets a look-in. I might play it for a few mornings per week, but that’s all for now. Inevitably, at some point in the future I will tire of FIFA09, and I will play PES2009—and I’ll enjoy it. I know this because PES2009 is an adequate football game, and I will still be able to get a lot of joy out of Master League.

It’s just a shame PES2009 is not so, so much more. Like most PES fans, I anticipated a lot from PES on the current new generation of consoles. The reality of PES2008, and now PES2009, is like the taste of bitter ashes in my mouth.

I think this current generation of consoles has effectively been written off by Konami and Seabass (curse his miserable hide). Annual incremental updates are all we’re going to get.  I believe that we won’t see PES truly evolve until the next next-generation range of consoles. I’m talking Xbox720 and PS4. Mark your calendars for 2011 and beyond. And even then it might not happen.

Below is a random picture taken during my two games in Master League. I’m so dissociated from PES now. I just went through the motions, listlessly pushing the analogue sticks hither and thither, tapping the buttons… What has happened to me? I can’t even be bothered to talk about the Regulate Condition screen. (Now that’s not something you see written down every day.)

I’m not going to talk about these couple of games on PES2009. It’s not worth it. I didn’t enjoy them. There were flashes of the old PES fire, here and there—points of light winking in the velvety blackness—but they made me feel sad rather than hopeful. PES isn’t dead, but it’s fast asleep, almost comatose, and its doctors and nurses don’t seem to want to wake it up.

Will I be just as deluded for PES2010? I can say now with conviction that I won’t be. I will also swear right now—and come October 2009, I will be held to this—that I will not buy next year’s game if it’s just another incremental update to this year’s game. I’ll probably wait a few weeks or months and then pick it up second-hand. I’d rather give my money to a games store or to an eBay seller than to Konami and Seabass.

Yes, I know it’s ‘only a game’. I do leave the house occasionally.