Pitch Invaders

Technically this post could go in the soccer blog, but it's not about soccer as much as about a soccer video game (some would say "same difference," but whatever), and anyway that blog has a readership of maybe three if I'm lucky. And ultimately it's more about me than about anything else, but you do kind of have to wade through some stuff first. Good luck.

Ever since we found out about FIFA 2006, Drew and I had been really excited for it, which was kind of annoying since we had to wait about a month for it to actually get released Stateside. Yesterday we finally got a chance to break it out and played a few games, the results of which follow. (I know this looks horrifying, so let me promise that a recap of video game results will most likely be a one-time thing. Anyway, I'm sort of building up to a point here, though you may not find it interesting.)

Juventus 0-0 Liverpool (Juventus wins 3-1 on penalties)

I had no idea that there were extra-time options, but when a game ends in a draw you can take kicks, a period of ET, or just take the draw as it stands. I know Drew loves penalties, so we went with that, but it took us several shots to figure out how you were supposed to bend the shot so that it wouldn't just ram right into an immobile goalkeeper. Since Drew went first (he was Liverpool), I figured it out sooner, and thus was able to take the victory in none-too-impressive fashion.

Chelsea 1-2 Manchester United

I'm pretty sure this is the first goal I ever scored in this game, including playing the demo (which was even harder than the Gamecube version, unsurprisingly because try playing anything with a standard computer keyboard). I was already down 2-0 when I scored, though.

AS Monaco 2-0 Manchester City

This time I was the road team, City, and even less got done. I must have hit the woodwork seven times between this and the Chelsea game combined; it was like what watching last month's Bolton game must have been like. Plus my defense seemed to be getting worse.

Brazil 0-2 Finland (abandoned)

My annoyance with the woeful play of my teams' A.I. culminated in this game, in which Drew's first goal came less than two minutes in when my goalkeeper mishandled a shot from the end line that no goalkeeper in the world would have let in (how anyone can score at a one-degree angle from the goal-mouth, I have no idea), and his second came just before halftime when, for some reason, two defenders hanging off Mikael Forssell were completely ineffective. Meanwhile, Brazil couldn't do anything offensively, which, I mean, come on. I was so irritated at halftime that I simply quit the game.

Brazil 7-2 Cheltenham Town

Desperate to find a scoring touch of any kind, I forced Drew to play this game, matching up the best team in the world with a middling English League Two squad, the rough equivalent of having the 1992 Dream Team play your high school in a basketball game. Ronaldo had four goals and Robinho three, thanks mostly to the ridiculously superior team speed enjoyed by Brazil that allowed any player to simply outrun the defense and more or less score at will (when I was hitting the right buttons). Drew actually got a couple goals back later in the game, which if you ask me is a pretty impressive result for Cheltenham Town. Let the record show that I offered to quit the game at halftime since I only wanted to get a scoring touch of any kind, but Drew plugged on. (I think he may have won the second half 2-1, though I wasn't trying quite as hard to score at that point - he doesn't want to hear it, but that happens to be true.)

Anyway. Do I have a point here, you're asking? (Assuming you've even made it this far, and if you have, hi Drew.) And I guess the point is this: I'm really not all that good at video games. (Better points coming, I think.)

For someone of my age this might seem ridiculous, but I didn't have video games for a long time growing up - I think we got our first gray-box Nintendo in 1992. 1992??? Can that even be right? It sounds ridiculous to think about it but it probably was (since Super Mario Brothers 3 was the game that came included, and that was released in 1990 and wasn't bundled with the console right away). So relative to some people, I was introduced to video games pretty "late in life," and we never had that many. I was like someone who tries to learn a language as an adult - it's just harder than doing it in your formative years.

It didn't help that I've always been rather legendarily impatient. My mom describes how I never wanted to do anything I couldn't do well - I basically refused to walk until one day I just stood up and crossed the room, as though I'd been practicing in secret. It's this level of impatience that wouldn't have suited me for a musical instrument and held me back on the guitar - why would I want to play scales when I could play songs, even if I was never going to be able to play more complicated songs without practicing? I was always very bad at this sort of thing, really - while I consistently made the honor roll in middle school, I was almost never - possibly only once - a member of the "effort honor roll," because I always had at least one 3 comment on my grades ("Usually satisfactory in effort and attitude" - 1, which I'm sure everyone remembers, was the always popular Mike Tobin away message "Interested, alert, and eager to learn").

So what was my deal, exactly? And what is my deal today, since a lot of this continues? (Though I bought a book/CD set to work on learning Tagalog, I did the first chapter months ago and have yet to pick it back up, though I really should one of these weekends.) I think it's just something to do with a strong dislike of failure. I don't want to say a "fear of failure," because I don't know that I'm scared of it; I think I just find it annoying that I could be bad at anything.

The problem, of course, with this way of thinking is that it extends to things that people would expect me to be bad at. Am I going to get laughed at for missing a couple notes on a guitar when I've just picked it up? No one's expecting me to be some kind of prodigy virtuoso, after all. But it's not so much that I think I'm going to be laughed at for failing as that I don't like associating myself with failure. Essentially, I'm a perfectionist of the worst type - if something can't be done well almost immediately, it isn't worth doing at all. You can see the language parallel here - to be struggling with something in my head is awkward to me. Alma sometimes likes to hear me say things in French, but I constantly find myself correcting and revising what I've just said while she reassures me that she wouldn't have known any better. No, baby, but I would know. To say something I know is wrong and not correct it is anathema.

So what does all this have to do with video games? I'm getting to that. My impatience extended to the idea of playing a game for a long time and not being able to get past a certain level, or enemy, or that sort of thing. I beat Mario 3 using a Game Genie (embarrassing!) just to be able to beat it, though I didn't know that you had to hold down the up arrow after doing so and the game went into permanent pause mode. More recently, I used a walkthrough guide to easily beat the original Legend of Zelda just so I could see the whole thing. If you think I would ever have had the patience to wander Hyrule looking for secret doors, you're kidding yourself.

And that's where we get back to the soccer game. Drew, having played more video games than I have over the years (and likely for longer overall), adapted more quickly to the relatively complex controller setup; at least that's my theory. Certainly I made passes in several situations where I was intending to shoot, which isn't going to help you score. But the historical impatience explains why I'm not as good (though I was blaming it on the A.I., that really just seems silly, doesn't it?), and that I'm not as good explains the current impatience, as well as why I hate playing sports games on anything but the easiest settings. (Why would I want to waste time getting up to the computer's level when I can throw it down past my own, and then beat it 200-0 in every game? That's what Drew and I do with our NCAA Football game, to the extent that we created a team, made every player's rating as high as possible, and just trounce the CPU in every outing while playing on the same team.)

So I guess the point of this whole thing, aside from explaining a little bit about me to anyone who actually had the fortitude to wade through the game results, is this: Drew, you're better than I am at video games in general and this one in particular, certainly for the moment and quite probably, based on the above, for the foreseeable future. Let's create some awesome players, play on the same team, and just kick the computer's ass a whole bunch. We both know that's more fun.