“Where The Fuck Are My Custard Creams?”

Obviously, things are different here, but it’s HOW different that comes as the surprise. Even something like making a simple cuppa takes on a whole new dimension. Teabags are harder to get hold of for a start. Over here, the preferred drinks include fruit-flavoured coffees and iced teas. A hot cup of tea is relatively unusual. And if I want a biscuit with my tea or coffee, well, that’s a bad idea – because a biscuit over here is actually a bread item served with dinner. The closest equivalent is the ‘cookie’ – and there’s not a custard cream in sight.

Right biscuits. Proper biscuits. Custard Creams – the mark of a sweet-toothed man.

When it comes to games, things are even more maddening. The American year is split into four seasons: baseball, basketball, ice hockey and American Football. With the exception of golf, almost all other sports are irrelevant.

To a true footy fan (and footy game fan) like myself, this is not good. Thankfully, FIFA ‘Soccer’ is picking up in popularity and can be found easily. A bit of searching will even turn up a copy of Winning Eleven, but it’s a rare find. If I want Championship Manager (and I DO want my Championship Manager), then it’s import time – despite the game achieving Game Of The Month in the US edition of PC Gamer magazine. Nope, the ‘other’ football is THE game of choice.

Rugby for lasses, etc.

Now, I’m sure in England you can pick up a Madden game quite easily. There might even be an Activision-developed American Football game available. What you probably aren’t aware of is the sheer number of different titles you can buy, all featuring the same sport, all fully licensed. It’s just weird. Not only do they produce four or five videogames based on the professional game, but also the same number based on the college game. It’s all very, very strange – you can buy games featuring college kids playing sports.

Walking into a videogame shop any time around the start of any sporting season is hazardous to a Brit. The minute you’re through the door, you get: “Hey, dude, you like football?”. Now of course, being momentarily caught off-guard, I’ll answer: “Yes!”, only to be told: “The new Madden is out.” I don’t care. The new Curly Madden is NOT football, “dude”.

Listening in on any discussion of the game (or any sport) irks me, too. Here, EVERY sportsman or woman is an ‘athlete’. To me, an athlete is someone who wears shorts and spikes and spends most of their time pegging it around (or at least in the vicinity of) a running track. An athlete is NOT a twenty-eight-stone man buried beneath multiple layers of padding, whose sole purpose is to get in the way of another similarly padded twenty-eight-stone man in pads. American Football – it’s like British Bulldog for Big Girls’ Blouses.

Football.

In spring, a young man’s fancy turns to love. Love of baseball, that is. College baseball isn’t so big, so there’s no pre-pubescent rounders games on the shelves. However, the number of major-league baseball games clogging up the racks is horrendous. Last year, I counted seven different titles, all licensed, all much the same. It’s all stats and ‘franchises’, with a bit of a game thrown in, if they could be bothered. The fact that they’re all marked down to half price after a few weeks should really tell the games companies something, but come March, I’ll be wading through piles of MVP, High Heat, All-Star, Major League and the like, trying to find something that actually resembles a game. Why are they all suffixed with ‘2005’, too, when 2005 is a whole year away?

The baseball season lasts for fucking AGES, which at least increases the odds that a games company might release a game I have an interest in. However, the autumn (well, ‘fall’), brings a double dose of gaming indifference, via the basketball and ice hockey seasons – which start AT THE SAME TIME. So, not only do you get three or four ice hockey games, but you get loads of basketball games, and loads of college basketball games, too. Now, I don’t mind ice hockey – it’s got fights and goals, two things which give it a significant lift over the other main American sports.

”He’s on fire!” Hang on. That’s not NBA Jam…

Basketball just baffles me, though, and videogame basketball is even worse. A few blokes running one way for a few seconds, chucking a ball into a small net, then running the other way for a few seconds, repeated for three quarters of an hour. I don’t find it entertaining in real life, less so in videogame form. I don’t care if I’m seven-foot tall digitally, pushing right then pressing a ‘shoot’ button then repeating the movement the other direction – for an entire game – isn’t much fun. Doing it as a schoolkid is no fun at all. This is one sport where EA SHOULD have a monopoly, so we don’t have our suffering multiplied with the sheer number of games released.

Maybe three years isn’t enough. Maybe I’m judging too soon, and in a few years I’ll be tailgating, eating half a pig and not caring about the sport, preferring the spectacle. Or maybe I’ll never get over the culture shock, and will remain clueless about North American sports and their videogame equivalents, relying on mercy packages from home to provide me with reminders of my own culture. Now, where the fuck ARE my custard creams?

PAULEMOZ, February 2004.

Comment Here.

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Things to 'Make' and 'Do'.

Tea, biscuits, cakes. Ooh, lovely.

Aaaand the American version.

Freakishly tall, basketball-loving gals.

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*PaulEMoz lives in Americaland with his wife and his kid. So we thought we'd call his regular column: 'With my kid in America' which is a clever play on the old Kim Wilde smash - 'We're the Kids in America - whoo oo'. PaulE is originally from Consett, the town that invented tortilla chips and drunk fat lasses in night-club queues, wearing only mini-skirts and boob-tubes in fucking December, and eating chips out of each other's cleavages so as to earn advancement towards the door. It's grim up North.