Noticed something pretty weird last night.
We all know about those unsaveable free kicks the CPU likes to score. Less than 30 yards out, facing the goal, player with half-decent free kick stats... bang. Almost every single time. Ball arcs slowly into the corner, goalie staggers over at 1mph and just dives under it like a twat, even if it would have been easier to make the save. Makes you spit.
Anyway, like many people I've been trying L1+R3 to move my goalkeeper along the line. It looks totally stupid, of course - in real life the wall will stand in a certain place, and the goalie will stand the other side of it, meaning he has to shuttle along his line to save a good shot, but we all know that in PES2011 he never gets there. So you have to move him into the middle of the goal, so that he's standing behind his wall. Realistically he'd never stand there because he'd be unsighted, but hey, that's the way it is. At least he'll now save free kicks, sometimes (and when he does, it makes the previously unstoppable FK look appalling... because AI free kicks rarely fly into the top corner, they seem to drop into the net very slowly at about waist-height, so if the goalie's there, it's a simple catch).
So far, so shit. I'm sure we've all tried this. Is it just me though - sometimes L1+R3 won't give you control of your keeper? It just won't switch, however many times you try, or it does switch but he won't move, he's just frozen and you have to quickly switch the cursor back to a defender. Right? Well I think there's a pattern to this.
Seems to me that when you can't get control of your goalie, that means the AI is going to miss the target. Every time the cursor wouldn't switch to the keeper I was thinking "oh shit", but in every case that FK either hit the post or went wide. Whenever I did manage to get control of the keeper, guess what? The shot was on target.
If this isn't just a coincidence then it's pretty crap. Sure, the outcome of an AI free kick (cpu-controlled FK taker v cpu-controlled goalkeeper) is going to be scripted, and the script will be in place before the shot is taken. It has to be that way. But this issue makes that scripting a bit too obvious and intrusive, and kind of ruins the drama and tension of a free kick situation.
It's bad enough as it is - moving the goalie into an unrealistic position makes the free kick saveable (sometimes), leaving him standing where he should be standing means the cpu will score 9 times out of 10. That's crap. But effectively letting you know in advance whether the shot will be on target or not... that's completely ridiculous. Has anyone else noticed this? Am I going mad, or is this actually a definite pattern?