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.
