PES Chronicles

It’s the first week of August 2009. I’ve just started a new Master League career on the Xbox360 version of Pro Evolution Soccer 6. Exactly how I’ve arrived at this point is a long, meandering story that I won’t recap here.

FIFA10 will be on shop shelves in just 8 weeks from today (!); PES2010 will follow soon after. If the past few years are any guide, I’ll receive my FIFA10 pre-order on Wednesday 30th September. I doubt that I’ll have much appetite for PES6 when the new games appear. So I’ve got until 29th September (probably) to get as far as I can get in my new ML career. That’s seven-and-a-half weeks. No House Rules. Anything goes.

For the record, I love this PES6. Weirdly, I see a lot of similarities between it and FIFA09. That’s probably only because I’m also playing and enjoying FIFA09 right now. Maybe it’s the way the Default ML players can barely get a shot away without some super-defender smothering the ball at the very last moment. Sigh.

Before getting into my new  Master League (it’s really happening!), a replay of a goal. If there’s one thing that conveys the flavour of my current PES6 enthusiasm, it’s this replay. The goal isn’t anything special. Indeed, with its directness (up the wing, across, and in) it might represent everything that’s tired about PES for a lot of people. It really is just a bog-standard PES goal, but for me, in context, after a month or more of FIFA09 and its very different take on things, it had me sitting up and shouting:

Link:

That’s not in slow-motion. It’s the original speed. The speed of that replay is the speed of PES6. That’s the pace of its gameplay. And it’s brilliant.

There are still episodes of frantic midfield pinball, yes, but 90% of the time it plays out at that wonderful, stately pace. Over the past few years we’ve got used to seeing PES players running with motion-blurred legs in a completely silly way. I hope and pray that PES2010 plays at something like the pace of this PES6. Even slower would be even better, but I think that’s hoping for too much.

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Onto my new ML career itself, and immediately I was faced with a disappointment: you can’t edit teams in this PES6 on the 360. So there’s to be no Coventry City, or any other custom team name, for me this time around. I just had to pick one of the available teams. I stuck as close to tradition as possible and went with PES United.

You can’t edit kits either, so I’m stuck with their default kits. Here’s my current favourite ML player, Macco, modelling the home strip I’ll be playing in for the next seven weeks or so:

There’s also no strip selection before matches, except in Exhibition mode. An unpleasant echo of PES2008 for me. I believe that will be the last such echo, though. Fingers crossed.

I randomised the teams in all the leagues—all of them. So there are no equivalents of the national leagues anywhere in my ML game world. They’re all jumbled up with each other.

And I’ve had enough of playing PES with the same old 4-3-3 formation that I’ve been using for 10 years now. I decided to set aside that 4-3-3 love, and go with an edited 4-4-2, using a more withdrawn midfielder as a DMF and pushing my two wide midfielders slightly on. I’ve had lots of joy with a similar formation in FIFA09. I’m curious how I’ll do without relying on my beloved 4-3-3 in PES6 now.

I chose to start out with all the Master League difficulty settings on Normal. The overall game difficulty is on Professional. None of this strutting PES machismo for me. I want to be challenged by PES, but I want to enjoy it at the same time. I’m still a newbie and it’d be foolish to start out on Top Player. I’ll graduate up when I’ve got to know the game.

PES United are in League C, Division 2, along with… some other teams. I haven’t really noticed them yet. I’ve just got started. All the big rivalries, the bogey teams, the ups, the downs—they’re all to come. I can’t wait.

So: I lost my PS3 to the Yellow Light of Death. The latest on the repair is that Console Doctor have received it. I got a nice text message telling me so. All I can do now is wait.

Almost the last thing I did on my PS3 before it met its (hopefully temporary) End was to play Pro Evolution Soccer 3 with great enjoyment. I made concrete plans—this is true—to start a Master League career on PES3 and play it until October. It would have been interesting (to me at least) to see how far I would have got, and what I saw and felt along the way. That won’t happen now, post-YLOD. Even if I get my PS3 back next week in full working order again and it remains totally reliable, the PES3 moment is gone. But there’s a reason for that.

In an idle moment I suddenly found myself thinking about one old PES game that I never played. I’m talking about the Xbox360 version of PES6. At the time of its release, I was unemployed and penniless. I didn’t have an Xbox360 and the very idea that I would ever own one was laughable. When I eventually got a job and splashed out on a next-gen console, it was the PS3. By the time I went really large and got a 360 too, we were into the supposedly next-gen era of PES gaming. So the 360 version of PES6 really fell into a blind spot in my gaming life.

But now it’s very much in the spotlight. I’d seen the Xbox360 PES6 sitting on game store shelves for £2—two pounds!—over the past few months. On Monday I went into town and bought a copy. Not much of a financial risk, really. I got it home, installed it to the hard drive, and started it up, not really knowing what to expect.

I know that I have a way of hailing every new thing as the best thing ever, before ultimately pulling it apart a few days, weeks, or months down the line. I know. But that’s just the nature of a blogging approach to football games, rather than the journalistic one. It really cannot be helped.

I can only describe what I experienced in that first play-session—I can’t really anticipate future negatives and restrain myself. I love PES6 on the Xbox360. It’s bloody brilliant!

It isn’t quite a next-gen game, but it’s not a last-gen game either. It’s only vaguely like the PS2 version. It’s slow-paced, in the great way that I think every football game should be from now on. The graphics are impressive but not great. It looks like what it was: an early football game on a still-new console.

I played my usual routine: a handful of Exhibitions, then an International Tournament. I took a few beatings, scored a few good goals (nothing worth posting), and overall just loved the whole PES experience. For the first few matches all I could think was how great it felt, and: “PES2008! What happened?”.

It’s got glaring faults. There’s some penalty box slowdown that’s rather PSP-like, but bearable for now. And you can’t save replays—but I’ve got my digital camera for that. I’m sure many other things will come to light as time goes on.

‘As time goes on’…? What does that mean, exactly?

It means MASTER LEAGUE. I think I’ll play a few more International Tournaments before jumping in. I’m not quite acclimatised just yet. But Friday’s post should be all about the setting up of my new ML career here on the Xbox360 version of PES6.

When I lost my poor old Xbox360 a few days ago to the infamous RROD, my football gaming hit another hiatus. Or better to say, it extended the hiatus it was already in…

My football gaming had been a 360-only affair since I started playing the peerless Valkyria Chronicles on the PlayStation3. And I was already missing a few days of football gaming on the 360 after having to move all my gaming stuff out of my room for some new radiators to be put in. That was a few days (not) to remember, let me tell you.

Then when I set up the 360 again, it went straight into the RROD routine. No, this has not been a great week.

I don’t know about anybody else, but I hate having random workmen, no matter how ’sound’ they otherwise are, in my personal spaces and able to see my personal stuff. I’ve got nothing that’d really make me feel embarrassed or ashamed—and even if I had I’d bet they’ve seen it all before and then some, making my shabby little room seem rather tame. But it’s the principle. It’s my room and it’s my precious limited free time, and I wanted it back but I couldn’t have it back until they’d finished and gone.

Getting back to the Xbox360 issue, I was in a quandary. On the one hand I’m easily within Microsoft’s extended three-year warranty to cover the RROD phenomenon. So I could pack the broken 360 off to wherever they go and receive a refurbished replacement in 2-3 weeks, on average. That’d be fine. Or I could just go into town immediately and pick up a new Xbox360 Arcade, stick my hard drive on it, and carry on regardless. Or I could do both… which is what I did. Yes, I do have more money than sense—but with the Arcade model relatively cheap (£129), it was too tempting. A no-brainer.

The new Xbox360 works like a dream. It’s one of the newer models. (Jaspers or something?)  The power supply unit is of a lower wattage, and the console seems to run quieter overall, even with a disc in the tray and spinning at full speed. I stuck my hard drive on the end and was up and running with minimal fuss. The only downside is that I had to reinstall my games—FIFA09 among them—all over again, for some obscure DRM-related reason. But that was a minor bump in an otherwise smooth road. I’m very happy with the new and better Xbox360. I think I’ve done the right thing. When the refurbished 360 comes back I’ll take it into GAME and trade it for some games (hopefully NHL09 among them).

My old 360 was collected this morning by a man in a grey uniform who was driving a grey van. In RROD lore, it’s traditional for this man to impart grim news about all the hundreds of Xbox360s he spends his working weeks collecting. And he goes on to divulge (in a throaty whisper) the fact that there are warehouses dotted around the nation full to their brims with broken 360s waiting to be shipped on somewhere. However, this man just smiled without looking at me in that way that busy deliverymen do, got me to sign a form, and drove away with my ex-console in the back of his van.

I’ve played about 5 more matches in my Coventry City career in Manager Mode on the new 360. I lost a couple quite badly and feared the sack, but turned it around with a draw and a win—a lucky 1-0 from a deflected goal. I drew the fifth match and remain perched precariously at the foot of the table, with a manager approval rating of 39%. It’d only take another defeat or two to get me the sack. Having somehow made it this far into this career I don’t want that to happen.

Last week I had to move all my gaming equipment to another room during some work being carried out at my place. I unplugged and bagged the PS3 and the 360 and all of the various leads and plugs. Yesterday evening I moved them all back and set up everything again just as it was. A small voice in my head told me to switch everything back on and check the health of both consoles. The PS3 was fine—thank God—but the 360 was… not fine.

I’ve had my Xbox360 for about sixteen months now. On it I’ve played what for me is still the greatest ‘proper’ game of the next generation: Bioshock. It’s hardly been used otherwise—maybe one hour of play for every ten hours I’ve used the PS3. I’m a careful console owner. They never get banged or moved about (except for the past few days, through necessity).

I’ll cut right to the chase. When I switched on the Xbox360, this is what I saw:

I’ve read up on all the troubleshooting and self-help advice there is. I’ve unplugged and tested and cleared the memory cache and done all sorts. I refuse, on principle, to try the ‘towel trick’.

I never really thought it would happen to me. Well, I knew it was a theoretical possibility, and a very strong possibility given the 360’s notorious reliability issues. But I thought that the care I take of my 360 and the lesser amount of time I spend using it should count for something. Seemingly not.

I don’t know what I’ll do yet. Famously, Microsoft would accept delivery of my broken console and ship me a refurbished one in a few weeks’ time. I might go for that option. Or I might just buy a new Arcade model—they’re so cheap, and I would prefer to have a new console instead of a refurb—and attach my hard drive to it. I’ll see how I feel. I’ve got a great Manager Mode career going on FIFA09, and plenty of other unfinished business on the 360 besides. I’ll definitely do something. The 360 is a fine console with a great range of games, many of which I was looking forward to playing over the next months.

I am considering getting the PS3 PES2008 out of mothballs and starting a BaL career, but with Valkyria Chronicles still to fnish, I’ll probably put off BaL until then. In the short term, it looks as if I’m sticking with my PSP PES2008 Master League career. I’ve moved onto season 2023 and ditched lots of my bloated squad. I made a great start in the league capaign but lost a few matches, and then lost the first match in my European Cup group. Overall, though, there is no reason why every season on PES2008 shouldn’t be a Treble-winning one, and a massively high goal-scoring one as well. Assuming that I don’t run out to town later today to pick up a new Xbox360 (as I’m actually kind of itching to do), I’ll return to my PSP ML career tomorrow.