Pro Evolution Soccer 2010 (PS3)

...Playstation: Grand Theft Auto and Pro Evolution Soccer (PES). This may well be why I have never written a games review before. Since the old days of the PS1, with International Superstar Soccer, I have followed with great keenness the various incarnations of this great game over the years; ISS became ISS Pro Evolution which moved onto the PS2 to become Pro Evolution Soccer. I had 4 versions of this on the PS2, buying each new version with metronomic ...
...Congratulations you are now a pro footballer. I've done this with my own face and the results are pretty realistic, it's really scary actually! I was a bit disappointed I couldn’t give Ugg a decently thick, shaggy beard, though; the options are all a bit metrosexual if you ask me. You can accessorise your creation with different boots, gloves, friendship bracelets (I told you they were metrosexual) and suchlike. And if that isn’t enough for motion ... more

INTRODUCTION

Generally speaking, I have only ever been interested in 2 games series on the Playstation: Grand Theft Auto and Pro Evolution Soccer (PES). This may well be why I have never written a games review before. Since the old days of the PS1, with International Superstar Soccer, I have followed with great keenness the various incarnations of this great game over the years; ISS became ISS Pro Evolution which moved onto the PS2 to become Pro Evolution Soccer. I had 4 versions of this on the PS2, buying each new version with metronomic regularity. For some reason, I never moved past PES5 on the PS2, becoming deeply involved in the Master League subplot, where you can build a team in your own image. It was difficult to move on from a side of serial winners, regularly hoovering up every trophy going with reliable ease. That was until now, with my shiny new PS3, eager to see what the new machine has done with my perennial favourite football game.

PES vs FIFA

There is a long and well documented debate regarding the 2 competing franchises. In short, you’re either a PES gamer, generally more interested in a “realistic” experience based on strategy and patience, or a FIFA gamer, happier with a more arcade like experience where it’s easier to score. One incident with FIFA 98 stands out, where, as David Batty, I dribbled from the halfway line with pace, got to the penalty area and juggled the ball over the last defender while simultaneously drawing in the goalie before finishing with an overhead kick. Remember, this was as David Batty, a man far more known for his mid paced, late bite yer legs tackling than speedy flair. Such folly would never be countenanced in PES. Over the years the 2 games have become more closely related, copying the more popular aspects of each other. I’m not particularly well versed in the topic, but I think FIFA has a similar team building game to the Master League, and PES has improved its background music and all round presentation. FIFA has been catching up in terms of gameplay and these days loyalty to PES has been stretched to the limit.

GENERAL GAME PLAY

The general feel of the game is comparable with the expected PES experience; sadly, I have always avoided using the analogue stick to control and got away with it playing the CPU almost all of the time. But with the advent of online play, it’s clear I need to step up my game. And so having to start to use the left analogue stick I can feel the benefit of the 360 motion, with the ability to move and pass anywhere you want passing using the right analogue stick too if you wish, once you master the prerequisite skills. Whereas in PES5, you felt fully in control of your player, the feel now is more fluid, as if they’re slightly off your leash and more dexterity and skill is required to move them around. I thought at first that pace wasn’t such a decisive factor any more because of this. In the past I would pick a team of speedsters to simply run faster than my opponents. But having played a lot online, it seems that pace still beats me as many times as skill. It’s definitely an advantage to have a pacy forward to receive the ball on the counter attack and go at the defence. As the defences seem to have got tighter, this is something you may want to consider. I have read reports that the goalies are prone to gaffes but I haven’t seen any evidence of this in playing yet. It’s as hard as ever to get long range shots in as there isn’t as much room to run into, so I assume that you have to have a long range specialist for this to actually work, which is the norm for me.

Passing seems to be bit harder, with blind passing and hoping it’ll go to one of your players not really an option. It’s easy enough to pass it around your defence but when you get into midfield it takes patience and skill to advance any further. One thing I’ve noticed regarding passing is that the through pass, such an effective tactic in PES5, isn’t nearly as incisive. Perhaps this is a good thing, as I am used to relying on a killer through pass to the forwards which would usually leave them clear, but now it seems more like a feeble dribble through that isn’t going to catch out anyone.

There are lots of special moves if you have the knack to learn them such as trapping the ball, 1-2 pass, step over feign and roulette (which I think is the Zidane pirouette round the ball). I really can’t be bothered though, I just like a quick fun game.

So far I haven’t managed to score so many goals, but it seems that, as ever, the number of permutations is limitless, so you will always score in a different manner, even if the difference is slight. This is one of the big attractions for me of PES; even after 3 years of playing PES5 I was seeing goals I’d never managed before.

As ever you can save replays of goals or nice bits of skills to relive in front of your friends, though strangely Ms Larsbaby isn’t appreciative of some of my barnstorming goals that I think she should be.

You stil get a rating out of 10 as in PES5 at the end of the game for each player though this seems ot have slightly changed as there seems to be no star to indicate a man of the match and there is no brief summary on each player, which although usually some tritr platitiude such as "showed his class with 3 goals today!", I still kind of liked. Finally, commentary is supplied by Jon Champion & Mark :awrenson. It's not bad and so far I haven't hear any of the usual daft comments PES throws up such as "can they avoid relegation in this game" when you're 10 points clear at the top. So not in the FIFA league but a definate step forward.

TACTICS

There are a myriad of tactical details within a game. You can invoke some assisted settings, where the computer decides for you the lineup, auto substitutions and various formations and game plans according to fitness or form. You can edit where each player is, how he marks other players, what formation you require and even the attacking and defending styles of each player according to what special skills he has related to the Player Index (which I shall explain a bit later). Team style can be chosen, where you define to what extent players look ahead for possession, how far the support the man in possession, attacking and defending styles (such as compactness and pressing). Even more confusingly you can assign a strategy to each button (together with R2) which I’ve never got the hang of so I make this automatic. I can imagine this is very powerful for the skilful player, changing how they attack or defend as play goes on with this feature. You can also edit who takes what set piece, and finally you can save formation data, including your favoured lineup in a team and reload it – though for some reason this doesn’t seem to save the assisted settings regarding which is rather annoying as you have to set it for every game.

The detail on the faces of the players is quite incredible, with some of the stars looking scarily realistic. However, though this is harped on about, in reality, unless you are playing as a super close up or watching a replay in slow motion, you won’t really notice this during a game; you’ll be far to busy trying to get the better of your opponent.

Well that’s pretty much what you’d need to know about the game itself. There now follows an extensive look into the intricacies of the game and what each option from the main menu does. If you really want to know all that this game offers, read on. If not, don’t say I didn’t warn you; feel free to skip to the conclusion!

TRAINING

The training menu starts with a picture of the basic controls on the keypads and is divided into several sections. Free training is just basically a kickabout where 11 players in training bibs on a full sized pitch attack a goal guarded only by a goalkeeper This is a great way to practice your passing and running without the pressure of a live opponent. Free kicks allows you to place the ball wherever you like and take a free kick. Left and right corner kicks options are self explanatory. I found this rather disappointing compared to older PES versions, where training was almost a game in itself, with various challenges to be undertaken and targets to aim for that I found really helped improve my set pieces, as well as being fun challenges on their own. Free form training isn’t nearly as entertaining or effective for me.

EDIT

As with previous versions, there is the ability to create and edit players. I have always been tempted to make a virtual me but never got round to it. He’d be useless apart from on the wing anyway, due to height. Choose from creating a player from scratch or editing existing players. One fun thing I usually do is make a huge, Neanderthal looking superhuman creation called “Ugg”, with maximum values for all attributes. Compared to previous games there are a huge amount of things to set. Player Index includes no less that 21 choices of player style, from “deep cover” – player focuses solely on defensive duties through to “Classic no.10” - an old style playmaker who makes use of deft touches and passes rather than pace or movement to “speed merchant” - pacy who likes to get forward. You can also choose from 21 choices of skills, from “passer” – the player will create goal scoring opportunities with perfectly timed passes, to “super sub” – improves player ability when introduced late on in the game. Amazing – and you can pick a mix of 11 of these 42 attributes for your monster, erm I mean player. You can also set head and physique attributes to a unbelievable degree; cheekbone and jaw size, arm circumference, neck width the works, it even takes scans of faces. This is actually quite good; for example you take a picture of yourself, import it to the PS3 and load it into the player you're editing. You then resize the image until it fits a face template and adjust skin tones until it blends in with the template et voila! Congratulations you are now a pro footballer. I've done this with my own face and the results are pretty realistic, it's really scary actually! I was a bit disappointed I couldn’t give Ugg a decently thick, shaggy beard, though; the options are all a bit metrosexual if you ask me. You can accessorise your creation with different boots, gloves, friendship bracelets (I told you they were metrosexual) and suchlike. And if that isn’t enough for motion you can even customise his dribbling style, set piece kicks and goal celebration – choose 2 from 160 celebrations!!! Once you’ve finished your creation, simply add him to the team of your choice and watch the fun unfold.

And that’s just the individual players. You can also edit teams, changing the players in them, edit stadiums (though only the name seems configurable), league and cup names. Maybe you could watch Ciao United play in the Product of the Week Cup at the Reviewer Stadium.

GALLERY

This is quite useful, as from here you can change the background music tracks; hearing the same ones gets tiresome quite soon and there are 47 songs to choose from, including hits from Stereophonics, Paul Weller and Klaxons. Your track record is displayed in terms of results and goals, set pieces and fouls, matches played and consecutive wins, losses and possession, average goals, cards, free kicks etc, and rating in terms of goal scoring and defensive ability, fair play, play making and sportsmanship. Your performance in all the various game modes, cups and leagues is summarised in terms of time played and trophies won. In short it’s a statto’s wet dream. I was always sad the number of Master League wins I totted up had to be counted manually and was lost after a while – not any more. It might be scary however to see exactly how much of my life I’ve spent on this game. You can also playback any goal or action replays you’ve saved here, and finally you can see the rolling game credits to see the geniuses behind PES.

SYSTEM SETTINGS

Here you can set what button and controller does what (personally I like the FIFA button config for shoot so Always change that), the icons such as time, score and stamina gauge and if and where they appear, sound settings such as how loud the sound effects or music are, screen position and colour adjustments, language (sadly Spanish isn’t an option, I’ll have to settle for the Russian commentary for amusement), IP port settings (internet stuff), install and downloading any game updates when available. This is always a good idea, as bugs in games can now be fixed on the PS3 this way.

UEFA CHAMPIONS LEAGUE

Here you can either have an exhibition game or indulge in a competition. Each game starts with the signature pomp of the “champions” Champions League theme. In the competition you select a team and it then automatically generates the qualifying groups of 4 teams. You can set the match length and difficulty level and on you go. As in real life you have the group then knockout stages, ultimately leading up to the final.

EXHIBITION

You can play here either versus a friend, the computer or else customise, which depends on the number of controller you have, up to I think 8 players. You can pick any team combination you like for the match.

MASTER LEAGUE

For me this is the de rigour part of the game. Selecting a team from various league options such as the English Premier League, Spain’s Primera Liga and Italy’s Serie A (customising these of course, if you wish, to change teams around) and mucking around with ball type, match difficulty and if classic players (i.e. long gone player such as Pele & Maradona) & player development) is allowed, your journey begins. You can even set the currency to Pounds, Dollars or Euros!

This seems to have become fancier than I’m used to. When I started a league I was told my club has signed a sponsorship agreement with a French car manufacturer, a Belgian airline company and a Japanese oil company and that there would be annual sponsorship money as well as home win bonuses and other performance related bonuses. Kerching! The sponsors seem to change each time you start a new game; another time an insurance company was bankrolling me. But naturally there are team operating costs such as player wages. But wait, you can also rake it in from fan club membership fees! Although there are costs running it too. I can’t as yet find any American billionaire buys club then secures debt by plunging the club into a refinancing deal. Or indeed club induces youth player to sign illegally and has a transfer ban slapped on it. Now they would make it a bit more interesting.

There is a tips section giving some good advice to Master League newbies such as salary tips, dealing with fixture pileups and how to scout players. My own tip is to cut the players wages when you win somethingto slash costs; who wouldn’t want to be part of a winning team? There’s a harsh lesson in capitalism for you.

And so the season starts; if you’ve chosen so with player development, your players develop every season, peak and eventually turn into donkeys and retire. Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is wheel and deal players in and out on a budget, whilst making sure they develop and try to win a trophy or two along the way. Disappointingly, there doesn’t seem to be an option anymore where you can start with a squad of unknowns; in the case of Manchester United it’s the actual squad with their ages as in real life, with Van Der Sar already announcing his retirement at the end of this season. But now it’s the transfer window and time to dig out the old brown envelope for a bung or two. Good luck in the Master League – for me this is by far the most addictive and satisfying part of the whole PES experience. I have been running my last Master League on PES5 for over 3 years and never tired of the endless team permutations and developing a new team from the ashes of an ageing one every few years.

BECOME A LEGEND

This was also in PES 2009 but is new to me, and brings an interesting twist to the game. It starts with creating a 17 year old player; creating the attributes such as name, nationality, favoured position and height of your player. Then, you play a game for some minor team in your chosen country, with a limited menu compared to normal for team changes (e.g. you can’t choose the lineup or formation, the manager does all that). You then get a top down view of the pitch which zooms in and out depending on your proximity to the ball, kicking away from you for both halves, which is very confusing if you’re used to a side on view, but a lot of fun at the same time. You can actually choose any camera angle you like, and the normal side on long view is quite good for things like shooting I find. However, this novel view makes you almost feel like you're on the pitch, showing some positional discipline and spatial awareness. It also makes things like successfull long passes very satisfying as you ping them away.

You only control your man, and so depending on your position you need to impress the watching scout by defending or attacking well. I chose attacking midfield and managed to set up 2 goals. It’s hard at first as you have to make sure you just stay in the area of the pitch you should, as you watch play unfold around you. It can be quite hard to see what you’re supposed to be dong at corners for example, with a very long view of the pitch.

After the game, I got offers from 3 clubs and chose to join West Ham (or East London as they’re called in the game). After you sign you can participate in an 11 a side training match, where you have to catch the eye of the head coach. I recognised many of the names as each team was a mix of first team regulars and reserves; your players seems to be in the mostly reserves team at the beginning, progressing to the better team with the bib on as he improves. After each game you can see how much each of your attributes such as speed and short pass accuracy have improved (or otherwise as you get older). After a few training matches if you do well, you make it into the first team squad and onto the subs bench. At this point rather ingenuously, you can speed up watching the game (notably shown with the usual side-on view) to up to double speed to hasten your hopeful supersub appearance. This is a bit like watching the chase at the end of an episode of Benny Hill (for those of you old enough to remember). Really though you just want to participate from where you are on the pitch, so it’s a shame it isn’t possible to directly skip to that. Finally you get to appear and you’re pro career is off and running. The manager’s rating seems to go up or depending on how you did in the last match. All the while the season goes on and you wait patiently for your chance to start which finally comes. Eventually you get to start games, but regularly a little icon on your head appears in the second half to indicate that your number is up and off you come to Benny Hill watching brief until the end of the game. From then on it’s up to you; transfer offers come in from other clubs and ultimately you can win awards and even get national team call ups.

I found Become A Legend a hugely enjoyable and addictive addition to my PES experience. It's particularly fun if you scan your own face in, then you can effectively indulge your own footballing fantasy, which is exactly what I'm doing. You can also get help from a dedicated tips section, which is pretty handy. You can choose to incorporate your player in your Master League team, which makes it even more interesting, as you can follow an individual and use him elsewhere if you so wish. Brilliant.

LEAGUE CUP

There is a fair few tournaments and competitions here, where you choose the teams or leagues competing. Many things seem to be already set such as 32 teams in a European Cup and 8 teams in an African Cup. The English, Spanish leagues etc have the same number of teams as in real life. Though note that many teams don’t contain franchises and so have funny names; as I said West Ham are East London, Man City are Man Blue, Bolton are Middlebrook – you get the idea. I don’t mind this but pedants might find this annoying.

ONLINE

If you already have a Playstation Online account you can create an account for PES through this, which is an automatic process. One signed up, you are brought to the online menu, where you are shown your user details and results so far. After this, you are into the main online menu.

A vs match is the first option. Here you can either play a quick match, where you are matched up with an opponent (note you can choose beforehand if you want an opponent of a similar skill level) or go into the match lobby to see who is around and who wants to play. From here you can see the various servers (European in my case) and who is on each one. Several times I have been matched with opponents in the quick match from places like Thailand and Morocco, but the games have never started, which made me wonder if they’re even possible, though occasionally they have happened.

It seems that you can see if the other player leaves games early as happens when playing poor losers, from a little icon on their name. The penalty is not being allowed to have a rating. There are also abuse safeguards against the text chat being abused, which is good to see.

The Legends mode involves your Become a Legend player where you participate in a multi player game involving each person’s respective made up player. As in the normal online mode you have a quick match or find players in the match lobby. A great idea if you’re sick of getting beaten easily online; you still might lose but at least it’s not all your own fault. It might take a while to get a game though, as online legends players seem to be few and far between at the moment.

Competition mode is where you can enter online competitions which start every few hours, but you seem to have to sign up early as they’re always full when I arrive. In any case I fear I would be knocked out of the Konami Cup in the first round by a telephone number score. But you can see the progress of rounds and your progress in previous competitions.

Community is where you can create a password protected community and add members from online players. You can have you own friendly matches or competitions. I haven’t managed to use this much yet, but did manage to briefly play a friend online after creating a community and it seems to work fine. You can edit your personal data including birthday and favourite team – just what an ID thief is looking for, as you can also search for users. Game plan data, where you’ve saved team settings, can be loaded for online games too. Server information can also be checked, as can your online ranking and invitations to join other communities.

SO WHAT IS ONLINE PLAY ACTUALLY LIKE?

It’s not bad actually, and it’s a refreshing change to be able to pit your wits against a real, live, unpredictable opponent. You can make the Artificial Intelligence of the CPU as clever as you like, it’s still not going to try and skin you by running from its own box all the way down the pitch, as annoying as that can be. I’m in the bottom division and I have learnt that I am so far off the pace it’s embarrassing. It seems that playing this game for over a decade hasn’t taught me so much, perhaps as a result of playing the computer most of the time. I must admit I’m not finding it much fun being totally outplayed and losing 4-0 many times, but as time goes on, I have found people of my limited ability online, as opposed to early adopters who are more likely to be the next Playstation Zidane.

At times, the play can be jerky and glitchy, which may be related to whoever has the slower internet connection. It seems to have got better since the initial launch of the game, so maybe this was due to teething problems. This has certainly got a lot better over the last week or so.

The most annoying thing for me is when I have gone all the way to selecting quick play and having picked a quick match opponent you are told the game cannot continue “due to unforeseen circumstances” or “lost connection”. This is also evident in the Legends mode. You then have to go through the quick play selection yet again, which takes another minute or 2. As this can easily happen several times it can be easily 5 or 10 minutes. This can happen at any stage, so you might have spent a couple of minutes picking your team and modifying tactics only to be disconnected before the game even starts. I also find navigating around the various online menus painfully slow and this is the most frustrating aspect of the whole game. They’ve made a huge effort to make this extensive online world and yet the basic function of navigating around it puts you off quite a lot if you just want a quick go. Going in and out of menus can take up to a minute each time. It adds up very quickly indeed.

The next most annoying thing is when people pull the plug on games when they are losing heavily. Konami try to crack down on this with the aforementioned rating penalty, but nevertheless there are sneaky ways to end the game and not have the resulted counted against you with the stats, which I won’t furnish you with but are fairly obvious. Having said that, I’m not angel myself when I come across some smug showboater, so I can see why people might do this.

HOW QUICK IS A QUICK GAME?

Here is an example:

Time 22:38 – signed in, testing network environment, then “an error has occurred, connection to server lost” so back to the online menu.

22:42 - testing network environment, quick match, choose vs match, quick match, choose 1vs 1 game, matchmaking in progress, “unable to connect with other user”, back to quick match menu.

22:45 – quick match, choose 1vs 1 game, matchmaking in progress, matchmaking complete! This was successful, and the game started at 22:47 after I faffed around with my tactics for a couple of minutes.

So in this case it took me 7 minutes to get a quick game.

CONCLUSION

As I said in the introduction I have always been a PES fan and perhaps my loyalty is blinding me, but I can’t see it changing any time soon. The Master League & Become a Legend will keep things fresh for me for literally years, and the online play, despite it’s issues, allows me to play friends around the world (if I can connect to them). The lack of full franchises for teams has never really bothered me and I have always been far more interested in the gameplay. In this respect, Pro Evolution Soccer 10 is as pleasing as ever, and for me, as nice as the mind boggling array of features this game has are, it’s always just going to be essentially a simple kick about for me with a bit of strategy thrown in for the Master League. For those prepared to learn all about tactics and special moves, this must surely be an amazing experience.

I am however, only giving four stars due to the online difficulties. If you have features in a game that don't work properly what whatever reason, no matter how good the rest if it is, you have to take that into account in the final evaluation.
 

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