Just for kicks

by ERIK LEIJON

Huge international soccer tournaments are impossible to ignore in this city. The second Portugal pounds some poor Eastern European upstart, the flag-bearing cars congregate en masse in a congratulatory sea of red and green. Montrealers can delude themselves all they want: catch an Impact game, subscribe to Setanta Sports television or buy a shiny pair of shorts, but the real soccer fans still live across the pond, or somewhere south of New Mexico.

There’s nothing wrong with that, and if anything it only enhances UEFA Euro 2008 (X360, PS3/EA, EA Canada), a game that unabashedly attempts to cash in on the biggest soccer tournament of the year, but does a better job than the multitude of college sports titles that slap on an NCAA logo and a price tag without capturing what makes those events special.

I’ll let the experts debate the authenticity of this soccer title (they will probably drag you into some argument about how Winning Eleven is the only true player on the pitch), but as a video game, Euro 2008 introduces the digital equivalent of driving down the street, honking your horn.

CASHING IN:
UEFA Euro 2008

Upon creating a user profile for the game, players must choose their home country. Then, anytime someone plays a game, tournament or online match, they will be assigned a player score that will reflect the country they’re aligned with. All the scores then appear in the Battle of the Nations ranking board. Sure, playing on gamers’ nationalistic pride is an easy way to create false tension, but it works. Online games are especially nerve racking, since a loss means your country carries the shame with you.

Euro plays no different from any other soccer game, but the character animations are lifelike and the shadowing is impressive. A long overdue change all sports games could use is the default camera angle. We’ve been playing soccer games from the same perspective for too long, and it’s time for more dynamic action shots.

The idea is that sports games require precise balance for competitive reasons and messing with the static visuals would somehow make the contests less equal. With such a large field of play, soccer is a sport that could benefit from feeling closer to the action, especially since players don’t have a clear shot of the net (only from a side view).

Euro isn’t the game to usher in the next generation of sports games, but I’m sure Portugal’s biggest supporters will be satisfied with the final product. The Battle of the Nations competition ends June 30.

Kicking drugs

The original plan was to write a full review of Haze (PS3/Ubisoft, Free Radical), but this first-person shooter is so painfully derivative and unoriginal it seemed counterproductive to rehash my favourite gaming-related insults of the past year.

Free Radical has a solid pedigree—from TimeSplitters to being members of the original Goldeneye 007 team—and the premise of drug-dependant killing machines hunting down civilians had potential, so where did Haze go wrong? Everywhere, actually.

The quirky pacing may have made sense on a storyboard, but a couple of levels into Haze, your character leaves the evil army/corporation and kicks his nectar addiction, thus losing all the enhancements the drug provides.

There was considerable hype placed on the drug concept, since players could give themselves extra juice in the heat of battle, giving them super speed and shooting abilities. Players could even OD on nectar, so taking away all these gameplay elements so early into the game makes no sense. It doesn’t help that Haze is drab-looking and your teammates keep repeating the same two phrases.