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falling off the wagon with fifa

anyone who did business with us during the spyonit/724 years knows our office had some serious playstation EA Sports FIFA addictions. a day didn't go by when a meeting got delayed because someone was playing fifa in the conference room, and well, if any of my comrades say that fifa didn't affect their work, they are lying sons of bitches. i take full credit for being the pusher, having introduced fifa '97 for the PC to to this crowd and the epidemic spread from there. there were some good side affects, such as a bunch of americans being able to name entire rosters of the entire Serie A and La Liga Primera, and intelligently discuss why zidane could control the midfield like no other...such a shame he's french. In addition, an "all the ps2 you can handle" policy believe it or not, is a pretty good way to motivate a development team to "get shit done" and work late hours etc.

in the later years, i guess fifa lost it's effectiveness, heavy tolerances were developed, and the group started moving to the new street drug of choice, konami's winnng eleven (called International Superstar Soccer in Europe). i never took to winning eleven, mostly because they didn't have real teams represented, and it just wasn't as much fun pitting "Ronaldi" and "Figa" against "Savola" on "Team Catalonia" - and thus i went cold turkey, my addiction was broken. (back in the real world, i did finagle a ticket to a camp nou match last spring to see barça play, which was amazing, here it is, as seen from a nokia 3650).

with the advent of playstation online, however, and fifa 2004 supporting online play, i had to give this enhanced version another try. I've been slowly building up my chops again, getting ready for the online arena, and took the plunge last week into the online arena.

the major point here, is that online gaming has come a LONG way from the days of LAN quake, constantly wanting to be the LPB with your "shotgun" enabled double 28.8 modem (and anyone remember Quake Haiku?) - to everyone having high speed DSL and cable modems. last night, after a bout of insomnia, i decided to try a game at 3 am (and with kids, that's pretty much the only time i could play anyway) - as there was nobody in north america up, i had to play against some folks in the "N. Europe" room and the experience was pretty surprising. no lag, no coughs, no hiccups. playing FIFA "across the pond" was pretty much like playing on a LAN. the europeans have better online EA Sports names to - instead of "go b01l3rz" i was playing against the likes of "Rcarlos21" and "batigol".

with strides like this in online gaming, and wireless speeds getting faster, we're pretty close to having some good mobile gaming experiences on mobile devices - it should be cool. N-gage arena is a good first step. let's see where it goes from here.

in the meantime, anyone up for a game of FIFA?

"Really must get sleep
Definitely the last round
OK just one more"
  - Salt