Hank: "Bobby, I hate to tell you this, but I'd be a bad parent if I didn't. Soccer was invented by European ladies to keep themselves busy while their husbands did the cooking."
Bobby: "Why do you have to hate what you don't understand?"
Hank: "I don't hate you, Bobby."
Bobby: "I meant soccer."
Hank: "Oh. Oh yeah, I hate soccer."

I rewarded myself for finishing two papers last week by going out and buying a shiny new PS2 game. V bought me The Getaway a month ago, a Grand Theft Auto-esque romp through London in the shoes of a former wiseguy being framed for his wife's murder. It's decent. The developers did a superb job modeling 40 square kilometers of central London, down to the store facades. The gameplay is a little ragged though, and once you're out of the car forget about it. So i changed gears, picking up Winning Eleven 6 International, the suffix-laden descendent of International Superstar Soccer, my all-time favorite soccer game from the Nintendo 64.

The strength of ISS was the realism with which it simulated the game of soccer. While i've enjoyed FIFA 2003, it suffers from weaknesses that you can exploit to essentially score at will. For example, the central defenders appear to mark only your strikers, so if you can slip a midfielder past your opponent's midfielders, he can basically stroll past the defense for an easy shot on goal. This lackadaisical approach to defense is characteristic of the game. Older versions of FIFA were also guilty of this: in the 2001 offering, your striker could spin and hop his way from end to end while the defense sat around looking befuddled. Enter the painstaking attention to detail of W11. You can control nearly everything: formations, on-pitch strategies, marking assignments, individual player attacking tendencies, you name it. There are a multitude of control variations allowing you to pass, cross, and shoot in an endless number of ways. For Christ's sake, you can set the announcer's bias! Of course, with all these options the learning curve is quite steep. I can do fine at one and two star difficulties so far, but just break even at three star, and haven't had the courage to yet go to four or god forbid five stars. The defenses play like real defenses: a center back isn't going to let a pass to a striker just roll right over if he can prevent it. Any downsides? Well, Konami doesn't have all the licenses that EA and FIFA do, so the club sides, while portraying actual teams, have new names. Chelsea is there, as "Liguria" for some reason. Ditto for many of the player names. Luckily you can edit most everything and thus make things right, but it takes friggin forever. My other curiosity about W11 is the goal celebrations. Now i usually don't pay them a whole lot of attention, but these antics have me scratching my head. For example, in one animation the scorer leaps onto a teammate, putting his legs around him and being held up as he pumps his fist. Okay, that happens all the time. But in the W11 version the two just kind of sit there locked in some carnal embrace, with the scorer rocking his hips every now and then. Nearly pornographic.

My weekend was otherwise occupied with finishing off the aforementioned two papers for work. The move back west is creeping up on us, beginning to worry me. A friend of mine just gave me a copy of his grant application so i can have a look at what's involved in getting research monies from the federal government. Holy god, i can barely pick this thing up. At any rate, V is back from England tomorrow, hopefully with goodies for little old me!