One thing I've noticed from playing PES2012 lately is how much of a pity it is that newer football games have so little fouls. I cannot stress how important those are to football, for so many reasons, the thing is, I already knew that, but after playing this and experiencing first hand how fouls affect the game, I'm seriously even more dissapointed that those are pretty much gone from newer ones. They allow us to have a moment to breathe, a break from all of the action, and also allow for a moment of strategic thinking without having to act fast, you have options on what to do and it's interesting to thing about what the best approach is for a specific free kick. I've had a match in my ML where I won 2x0, and both of my goals were from free kicks, the first one I took directly, the second one was from a play, a give and go, passed with the free kick taker, made him run forward with the right stick, passed back to him and then passed to the middle of the box, very efficient play in this game to be honest. Nowadays it's so common to have matches with no fouls, or when they do have it, it's usually for the CPU only and feels like it wasn't even a foul most of the time, it's so much worse now.
Another thing that I've been thinking about is the CPU itself, in the PES2022 thread we had a nice discussion about difficulty settings, and my perspective is that, well, we're playing a game where we can only control one player at a time, out of eleven, so a lot of the time it will feel cheap when we concede, we'll think about how there was nothing we could've done, or that we didn't do anything wrong, which is the worst because I do want to blame myself always, because if it's my fault then I have the control to fix it next time, if it was the AI's fault then it can happen again and I can't do anything about it. Then I started thinking about the games I currently own for PS3 and PS4, most specifically PES2012, PES2015 and PES2018, and I've realised something, that to beat us the CPU will always have to use a trick up its sleeve, there's not much that can be done about that, what can be done is not making it too obvious, and the way to achieve that is to make it so the CPU is cheap in different ways every time.
I'll explain what I mean, by comparing the games I've mentioned, and how the CPU scores in them:
PES2012
1. A low long ball through the middle. This is one of the most traditional ways for the CPU to score in a football game, a pass behind the player's defense, creating a situation where the striker only has the goalkeeper to beat, this is common in football and not too difficult to do against the CPU here, so it feels the most fair.
2. A cross from the wings into the box. This one also feels somewhat fair for the same reasons mentioned above, the main problem is that your defenders stop when a cross is made, that feels incredibly cheap, the only way around this is to manually select them and position yourself in time to head the ball, but this can be very difficult.
3. The CPU players become Messi on the ball. This kind of defines this game and it's annoying, not only because it's unrealistic, but because it artificially creates all of the other attacks mentioned here, the reason you either commit a foul, which we'll be getting to next, or that you give them space to play a long ball on the middle or wing is because you either can't tackle them, or are afraid of tackling and giving them a free kick, this is the worst one.
4. Free kicks. This is the one that feels the most ridiculous to be honest, I'd rather concede a penalty than a free kick near the box, not even kidding.
PES2015
1. A low long ball through the middle. My feelings on this are identical to before, so I won't go into much detail, since I'd just be repeating myself.
2. A mix between the cross and the Messi effect from PES2012. Here the CPU will pass until they have the ball on the wing, but instead of crossing it they'll start dribbling like Messi until they can either pass into the box or do a finesse shot, which goes in often, this is very annoying for the same reason as it was annoying before, it artificially gives them chances and it's easy to commit a foul or a penalty, even in a game like this which pretty much began the whole thing about having no fouls.
PES2018
1. A pass to the unmarked striker, who does a perfect lobbed through ball to the wings, and then they cross. This is the most used method of attacking by the CPU in this game, it's the only attack you'll be defending against pretty much all of the time, every match.
So, we went from 4 attacks, to 2, to 1. I think this demonstrates why people are getting more and more fed up with playing this series offline, as time goes by there is less variety, so matches feel even more identical. The CPU will always be a bit cheap, but if it's always cheap in the same manner it becomes very obvious and we get tired more quickly, because we're defending against the same attack again, and conceding the same goal again, if the CPU is cheap, but in a variety of ways, it'll take longer for it to become stale and frustrating, depending on how much variety there is it'll never become stale at all. Of course, there are teams in real life that only attack one way, and that's a fair argument, instead of having an AI that always attacks in different ways, we could simply have teams that attack in different ways, it'd have the same positive effect while also feeling realistic, but right now this isn't being done, for years playing offline has felt like playing the same match with minor differences, I believe that the game with the most variety is probably PES2015, believe it or not, I recall Spain being absolute possession hoarders there, in a way that I had to let them go forward to have a chance of getting the ball, they forced me to defend in a low block, much like real life Spain do to their opponents, also Real Madrid loved lobbed through balls to Ronaldo and Bale, much like in real life, we need more things like this again.
But i think it was to play, not to install, the problem.
, or try a different Disc, in case your copy is damaged, or try your disc in a different PC & system to check how it functions, or since you bought it and did your duty, put it in your shelf and download an abondonware version (sic!) to make some tests.
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