Update

Haven't updated this in a while: work's been insanely busy. I've still been playing though, so here's a list of the games I've been working on:

Disney Sports Football
FIFA Street
Mario Strikers Charged Football
Pro Evolution Soccer 1-6

So as you can see, a good variety of games there.

#12: PES 2009 Cup Blowout!

PES 2009 (Xbox 360, Konami, 2008)
Trophies: Africa Cup (Cote D'Ivoire), Asia & Oceania Cup (Japan), America Cup (Brazil), European Cup (Scotland), International Cup (Scotland), Konami Cup (Celtic), UEFA Champions League (Celtic)

The three of you who check this blog regularly may have noticed that there haven't been many updates recently. This is due to two reasons. Firstly, I've had a lot to do at work recently: new responsibilities and the like. Secondly, I bought and have been playing PES 2009.

I'm a die-hard PES addict, and this version (the eighth edition) follows the typical PES tradition of being hated by the die-hard fans when they start playing it, only for them to get used to the slight differences in gameplay and start liking it again.

PES has a lot of cups: not only does it have numerous different league competitions and the main Master League stuff, it also has seven knockout tournaments based on real ones. So rather than do loads of different posts I thought I'd cover seven of them in one big post then do a special wee video to commemorate all seven trophy wins. Here's the list:

African Cup (Africa Cup Of Nations) - Won with Cote D'Ivoire
Asia & Oceania Cup (AFC Asian Cup) - Won with Japan
America Cup (Copa América) - Won with Brazil
European Cup (European Championship) - Won with Scotland
International Cup (World Cup) - Won with Scotland
Konami Cup - Won with Celtic
UEFA Champions League - Won with Celtic

The last two there are noteworthy: the Konami Cup is a completely made-up, custom tournament, whereas the UEFA Champions League marks the first time the PES franchise has had a real, licenced tournament (after Konami outbid EA for the licence).

Anyway, without further ado, instead of seven videos here's a single montage, along with the seven screens of proof:

Mental Moment #1 - FC Sonic

Virtua Striker 3 Ver. 2002 (GameCube, Sega, 2002)

This is the first in a series I'm calling "Mental Moments". I know it's slightly politically incorrect (you're not supposed to say "mental" these days) but I couldn't think of anything else that sounded half-decent. Basically, this is a series of weird and wonderful moments and strange features that set certain football games apart from any others.

The first of these is one of the two hidden teams in good old Virtua Striker 3 (don't worry, one more update and I'm totally done with this game). In the game's unique Ranking mode, where you play a number of games and are then given a rank, you collect a number of points depending on how well you did (anything from one point to five). When you collect 20 points in total you unlock FC Sonic for use in any game mode.

As you'd expect by the name, FC Sonic is a team comprising of Sonic The Hedgehog characters. Sonic and Tails are strikers, supported by Amy Rose and Knuckles in midfield. Dr Eggman (or Robotnik if you're old-school) is the goalie and the rest of the team is made up from those little Chao things that have been kicking around Sonic games since the Dreamcast days.

Anyway, here's a video of FC Sonic in action:

#11: The, Um... "Passion" Cup

Roby Baggio Magical Kicks Ver 2.0 (Online)
Trophy: Passion Cup

I'm currently at home in Glasgow for a fortnight and as such don't have access to all my games in London. As a result, the only stuff I have handy are my PSP, my DS, my mobile phone and the wonderful world of online Flash games. It's the latter I've dipped into in order to secure this little beauty.

I studied journalism at Uni for four years. One day early on in my third year I was hard at work on an essay, when an email arrived in my inbox from my classmate (and flatmate at the time). It was simply titled "F***ing Quality" (I'll leave you to fill in the stars yourselves) and featured only a link, with no other text in it. I clicked the link and before I knew it my essay had taken a back seat. For the next three hours.

The game was a little Flash game called Magical Kicks, and it featured on the official website of Italian football legend Roberto Baggio. It's pretty basic: it's just a series of free kick set-pieces which are presented to you at random, and it's up to you to score the free kick. You do this with four simple clicks of the mouse.

Click 1 - Starts the height meter moving.
Click 2 - Sets the height of your shot and starts the aiming meter.
Click 3 - Sets the area of the goal you want to aim for and starts the curve meter.
Click 4 - Sets the amount of curve and hits the shot.

That's it. In all it takes about six or seven seconds, yet a serious session at Uni could end up lasting hours. Many a time the staff at the Uni's computer lab threatened to kick us out as we let out an uncontrollable "YASSSSS" any time we finally scored a tricky free kick, and many an essay was delayed over the following two years.

The game was eventually taken off Baggio's site, much to our disappointment, but it recently surfaced again in its Version 2.0 form, which basically means it's on a different site and can be played full screen instead of in a small window. And it's just as addictive as ever.

So how do you get a cup in it? Well, every four free kicks you score you win a "Passion Cup". Simple as that.

Here's a video of me winning one of those cups, as well as the ever-necessary screenshot.

CLICK HERE TO PLAY MAGICAL KICKS YOURSELF

#10: The Virtua Striker 3 International Cup

Virtua Striker 3 Ver. 2002 (GameCube, Sega, 2002)
Trophy: International Cup (Scotland)

As you may remember, I won the European Cup with Scotland a few weeks back, but that only occurs halfway through the Road To International Cup mode. The other half, as you'd imagine, involves winning the International Cup which seems very much like the World Cup but I'll let them off with it because I'm sure it's a coincidence.

Anyway, I've already explained this game in detail below so here's a video showing off a rather sneaky tap-in from a free kick, and the celebration:



And here are the required screenshots:




I'm pretty much done with this game now in terms of trophies, but there's one final (and bizarre) update still to come involving a couple of secret teams...

Change to YouTube

I've decided to change from uploading my videos to Blogger, to uploading them to YouTube instead. This is because I found some sneaky code which lets me embed YouTube videos in their new high quality setting, allowing you to actually see what's going on in the games where the camera is zoomed out quite far. It also means that you can view videos in full-screen.

See, I'm nice that way.

#8 and #9: My First Captaincy

UEFA Euro 2008 (Xbox 360, EA, 2008)
Trophy: European Championship (Scotland)
Trophy: European Championship: "Captain Your Country" mode (Scotland)

Much like in 2002 FIFA World Cup, UEFA Euro 2008 lets you play in the tournament as a team that didn't qualify for the tournament in real life. It does this by letting you start from the beginning of the qualification stage, rather than the actual tournament itself.

There are two different ways of playing the tournament. The first is the usual way, where you play through each match as if it were a normal FIFA game. Here are my goals in the final and the final celebrations from that mode (note the dodgy controllable goal celebrations):





The other mode is called Captain Your Country, and lets you create a player then control that player only, in an attempt to be good enough to (as the title suggests) become the captain on the route to Euro 2008.

When you play in this mode the camera is in a sort of vertical position which zooms in behind your back as you approach the goal. You can see two of my goals from the final below as well as the extra clips that appear during the celebration whcih feature the created player:



Here are the pics, as usual, including final stat screens from the Captain Your Contry mode:

#7: Scotland's First World Cup

2002 FIFA World Cup (GameCube, EA, 2002)
Trophy: World Cup (Scotland)

Remember that time Scotland was in the 2002 World Cup? Remember? The one which took place in Japan and Korea? Remember how well we did? Oh, that's right. We didn't even qualify for it. So how did I managed to win the bloody thing with them in the video game version?

Well, not wishing to remind any Scottish fans that their team is rubbish (or, more importantly, not wishing to discourage Scottish gamers from buying the game), EA decided to make it so that, if you wish, you can enter the tournament as one of a handful of teams who failed to qualify, in this case the Scots. All the game does is kick out a low-ranked team who did qualify. In this tournament I was placed in Group H with Japan, Belgium and Russia, with actual qualifiers Tunisia politely asked to leave so I could make way.

The game itself isn't going to win any "best football game ever" awards, or even any "best World Cup game ever" ones (that accolade going to World Cup 98: more on that another day). It's slow, it's sloppy... it's FIFA at the turn of the millennium, basically.

Still, I managed to beat Brazil and Germany on my way to a final against Spain, who I beat 1-0 by scoring in the last minute. Here's a video of the winning goal:



And here are the celebrations, as described by the least enthusiastic sounding commentator of all time. Considering that a below-average team has just won the World Cup he doesn't seem that bothered by anything.



And, of course, the required images (including a ridiculous pink inflatable mascot in the background):

#6: The Virtua Striker 3 European Championship

Virtua Striker 3 Ver. 2002 (GameCube, Sega, 2002)
Trophy: European Cup (Scotland)

Every gamer has a guilty pleasure: a game that everyone else thinks is rubbish (and sometimes they do themselves) yet they love playing. For me that game is Virtua Striker.

It shouldn't be fun: the controls are sluggish, you have poor control over passes, dribbling makes you so slow that defenders catch up within seconds and when defending your players seem to have a mind of their own and are nearly impossible to control. Yet when you manage to overcome all that and score a goal, it feels like you've beaten the system and tamed an untameable beast.

After all, Virtua Striker is meant to try and make you lose: it's based on an arcade game after all, and most arcade games try their best to do anything in their power to stop your pound coin lasting ages. So every time you win a match you feel like you've overcome the odds.

Another reason I love this game so much is the over-the-top goals that can be scored. The goalies are notoriously random: sometimes they're fantastic and can save anything you throw at them, sometimes they'll miss a low shot that's trickling across the ground. When you combine this with the fact that the game's shooting system is very forgiving, and that even high-powered shots have the tendency to find the extreme corner of the goal, you can score some pretty spectacular goals with relative ease, complete with a ridiculously dramatic yell of "GOAAALL" by the phoney American commentator.

The game's main mode is the Road To International Cup, where you pick a team and make them play friendlies and go on continental tours in order to improve your players and move up the world rankings. It takes place over four years, and two years in you get to play in your continent's national championship. As I was playing as Scotland, this meant I was taking part in the "European Cup".

As luck would have it, the final ended up being against England, who I beat 2-0 (sorry English readers). Below you can find two videos. The first shows the first goal I scored: a header from a corner which comes shortly after two spectacular saves by the keeper.



The second shows my second goal - which comes in injury time and is a great example of the "easy spectacular goal syndrome" I was talking about above - followed by the win celebration.



Finally, here's the required celebration image, as well as another image displaying a fine grammatical error.

#5: Celtic Win The Champions League

UEFA Champions League 2006-2007 (Xbox 360, EA, 2007)
Trophy: Champions League

The one statistic that most Celtic supporters are proud to boast about is the fact that in 1967, they became the first British team to win the European Cup, a feat that Rangers have never yet come close to achieving. Over 40 years later though (with the European Cup since renamed the Champions League) they've yet to repeat this. So I thought I'd take it upon myself to change that.

EA's Champions League game uses a modified version of the FIFA 07 enging and is a reasonably enjoyable game, but there are much better football games on the 360 in my book (such as, obviously, the latest PES and FIFA incarnations.

Anyway, the tournament was relatively straightforward and I managed to get through the twelve games needed to get to the final without too much hassle. The final (against Valencia) was a slightly trickier affair, and it took a goal in Extra Time to secure a win.

Anyway, enjoy a video of that Extra Time winner, a video of the subsequent celebrations, and three screenshots highlighting 1) Celtic lifting the cup, 2) how ugly and generic the Celtic players look, and 3) the ever-necessary screen that just shows text saying you won the cup, even though you've sat through a perfectly clear video sequence showing this.

Oh, and have a look at the stadium where the final takes place: it's a bizarre made-up arena with a big Champions League "star ball" logo for a roof. Fair enough, I suppose.

#4: Italian Cup Champs In FIFA 08 Mobile

FIFA 2008 (Mobile, EA, 2008)
Trophy: Coppa Nazionale

Continuing with the whole mobile theme, here. One of the main reasons I boguth my phone was because it's a Nokia N-Series phone, which means it makes use of Nokia's new N-Gage service. As you probably know, there used to actually be an N-Gage phone which ended up being a failure because... well, it was rubbish. Going back to the drawing board, Nokia has decided to make N-Gage a service instead of a platform, meaning some phones can download fancy 3D games through an N-Gage program and save their progress to a profile which is a bit of an Xbox Live rip-off. Anyway, for registering to N-Gage I got the mobile version FIFA 08 for free, so naturally I decided it should be the next game on my quest.

There are nine leagues in the game: English, Italian, Dutch, French, German, Spanish, Portugese, Korean and American. Naturally, I'm sure you could understand my rage at the lack of the Scottish Premier League and therefore the lack of Celtic. There is a Rest Of The World option when doing friendlies and custom tournaments, but they're not in there either. I don't mean to moan but surely Celtic and Rangers are more popular than Arka Gdynia, Mamelodi Sundowns FC or the one-star rated AC Lugano?

Either way, I decided to go for the Coppa Nazionale, the Italian club cup, and since my brother just got a Juventus shirt recently I decided to play as them.

For a mobile game, FIFA 08 is actually pretty good. The graphics are of PSOne standard and while the controls take getting used to, you do eventually get the hang of it. As an N-Gage game it also has "Player Points", which is basically a complete copy of the Xbox 360's Achievement system. Each game has 1000 points allocated to it and you get points for certain challenges: win a trophy, score a hat-trick etc.

Anyway, here's a goal I scored in the final, conveniently from kick-off.



And, as ever, here's the celebration pic (which is slightly disappointing and accompanied by the game's one song, "Goodbye Mr A" by the Hoosiers):

#3: Going For 2006 In Real Football

2006 Real Football (Mobile, Gameloft, 2006)
Trophy: International Cup ("Go For 2006" mode)

I recently got a new mobile phone because my old one was so old that I'd charge it in the morning and the battery would be dead before I went to bed. Of course, as a gamer the important thing to me wasn't the quality of the camera or much standby time the thing had, but how many games it could play.

When I got it I downloaded a basic Java football game, just for fun. The game's called 2006 Real Football and it's not that bad, actually. It has a "Go For 2006" mode in it which is basically a World Cup knock-off. So, during a couple of Tube journeys I won six of the seven matches I needed to get to the final, then came home andused my phone's video output settings to show footage from the last match.

Here's a goal from the final:



And here's what happens when you win the cup. Bizarrely, one of your players does a little Riverdance-type spasm shuffle thing, then you see the cup while a rubbish MIDI version of "Atomic" by Blondie plays. Fair enough.



And here's the required image:

#2: The PES 08 Wii International Cup

Pro Evolution Soccer 2008 (Wii, Konami, 2008)
Trophy: International Cup

The natural progression from one of the earliest football games I played is to take on one of the most recent: in this case, the Wii version of Pro Evolution Soccer 2008, the last football game I reviewed for ONM. I decided that the first trophy I should go for would be the International Cup, the long-running Konami trophy that "isn't the World Cup, honestly mate", despite being a 32-team International tournament.

Anyway, said cup was claimed without too much trouble, thanks to the game's excellent control system which sees you pointing at players and directing them around like some sort of weird real-time strategy football game. Think Command & Conquer + Camoranesi and you've got the right idea.

Anyway, here are two of the goals I scored along the way to Scotland's first (virtual) trophy win, and a couple of celebration photos of them with the cup:

#1: The "Soccer" Friendly

Soccer (NES, Nintendo, 1985)
Trophy: Won an exhibition match

I decided that the best place to start would be near the beginning. My first proper console (that I owned, not my dad) was my NES, which I loved to pieces and still do. One of the early NES titles was Soccer, a really basic game with a cheery music track.

As the NES controller only has two buttons, there are only two things you can do with the ball: chip it or shoot it. Not quite Pro Evo.

As it's really basic, there are no Tournament or League modes in Soccer, so as the rules suggest I simply played and won an exhibition game, beating a generic, nationless "CPU" team 2-0 as GBR (who I'd assume are Great Britain... I chose them since Italy weren't in it).

Beating them was easy enough, though they did have a ruthless offside trap. As you can see in the video below, they caught me with it twice in a row before I unleashed a devastating shot from the edge of the box.



As the rules state, here is proof of the victory:



Not a bad wee start, if I do say so myself.

THE RULES

Although I have memories of playing Super Mario Bros when I was three when I visited my aunt in America, I've been told that my first exposure to gaming was when I was a baby, lying in my crib next to the TV while my dad and his work colleagues played Football Manager on the ZX Spectrum.

In the 25 years since, I've developed to become a fully-grown hardcore gamer, and have played more football games (or soccer for those in the States) than I'd care to mention. Some great, some decent, many awful.

Recently though, I started wondering... almost all these games have some sort of tournament mode or league mode in them. Has anyone ever won every single type of cup in every single football game ever created?

Probably not. Nobody's mad enough. I'm certainly willing to give it a go though.

Here are the rules I've set for myself:

• I have to win a tournament in as many different football games as possible, regardless of age or format.
• If the game has a tournament mode and a league mode, I must win both.
• If it has no tournaments or leagues (some very old games don't), I need to at least win a match.
• I need to take photographic or video evidence of victory screens for each tournament.
• If Celtic is a selectable team in the game and is eligible for the tournament, I must play as them.
• If Celtic is not in the game or is not an eligible team, I must play as Scotland.
• If Scotland is not in the game or is not eligible, I must play as Italy.
• If neither Celtic, Scotland or Italy are in the game or eligible, I can choose any team I wish.
• If a game has multiple trophies (for example numerous club leagues for different nations) I do not need to win them all unless you see the trophy in the game and it clearly looks different. Otherwise the leagues are considered clones with different teams in each, rather than unique leagues. I can do them all if I want for the sake of completion, however.
• If possible, as well as proof of the trophy, get a video of a decent goal scored en route to the tournament in order to 1) make this blog more interesting, and 2) gather loads of clips eventually for a big montage video thing.

I've not set myself a time limit for this because it's clearly a huge task and I don't want to dedicate my life to it. It's just a bit of fun that I'll work on any time I'm bored.