Saturday evening and for the first time in absolute ages, Karl-Heinz, Terrance, Ryan and myself got together for an unadulterated evening of PS2 FIFA football action at Karl’s newly renovated flat.
For the first time in history, we could actually comfortably sit on TWO sofas while playing games on his big screen, that in itself making the entire evening worthwhile right there!
(Naturally the snacks and drink was plentiful, though Dr. Storbeck did renege on the agreement and failed to provide his portion of the chips, meaning that by the end of the evening we did indeed run out of snacks, but I guess I’ll have to forgive him because at least this time we had TWO couches for a change! ;P)
Surprisingly enough, I actually managed to locate his new flat first time around (and without the help of Mr. TomTom) and after a whirlwind tour of Karl and Pat’s new domain, the four of us settled down on the TWO sofas (Ryan however opted for the ground for some strange reason) and got straight down to business.
Teams for the evening was Ryan and Karl versus the venerable Terrance and myself and the matches started off with T and me taking most of the early victories. However, Ryan was not to be outdone and with a lot of whip swishing, shouted verbal cues and just general constructive cursing, he set about molding Karl into a ‘proper’ FIFA player and soon they were catching up to us in terms of gameplay and even goal scoring. As the evening progressed the games got tighter and tighter, the winning margins smaller and smaller and in general the games became just that much of a higher level.
We even managed to pull out some draws for a change, something pretty unusual when considering our general historical team ups. (Naturally the resulting penalty shootouts were a bit of a joke, with the majority of the boys failing to ever shoot the ball in a direction other than straight at the keeper!)
So I’d say we ended off a solid four hours of FIFA on a pretty even keel and it pretty much looks like we’ve now at last found the team up that works the best for the four of us combination. There are still plenty of shouts and curses of ‘button memory’, ‘oops’ or ‘oh crap’, but I’d say that we are definitely improving as a bunch of decent FIFA sharks. (It is good however to note that the best way to distract Karl and score an easy goal remains to start play just as his hand enters the chip packet – it would seem that in that position he is as completely helpless as a little toddler stuck in a broken walking ring.)
So anyway, after the PS2 inexplicably shut itself down during our last match for the evening (it was getting pretty late, Karl needed to wake up early for his bike ride on Sunday, and I still needed to drive through back to Gordon’s Bay anyway), we called it a night, stole the last of the drink and then headed off home, bringing to a close a rather successful, first for 2009, footy foursome.
Awesome, I know! :P