World Cup tech-fever

Going interactive

If you need something to do when you’re not talking about football at work, or watching the cup on TV, you could try the official World Cup game. As ever the only place you’ll be getting the real players and statistics of the world cup teams is though the FIFA game. Although it’s available on all current consoles, and the PC, EA’s 2006 FIFA World Cup plays differently on each format.

The best formats are supposedly the PS2 and Xbox versions of the game, while the Xbox360 and PSP editions offer decent gameplay with a few minor bugs. The DS and Nintendo Advance carts of the game are supposedly not so good, but the DS version at least looks pretty and uses the touchpad well, for making tactical changes, on the fly.

If the official games aren’t your bag, then arguably the best football game you can buy is Konami’s Winning Eleven, also known as Pro Evolution Soccer. Although the games don’t have the official teams and players, they more than make up for it in playability.

Avoiding the world cup

If you’re sick to death of the beautiful game, you’ll just have to find somewhere quiet to hide for the month – or flee on holiday to the Outer Hebrides. If you do find yourself somewhere vaguely Stateside, then at least you can stream a few recent TV episodes from the ABC website, where they’re hosting full episodes of Lost, Desperate Housewives, Alias and others for free.


The streaming trials are only available to US residents, but there are other sites that legally stream older shows for free. One such site is Like Television, which has a reasonably extensive list of old TV shows and movies available in Real Player format. With shows including To Kill A Mockingbird, and more episodes of The Berverly Hillbillies than we’d care to watch, there’s more than enough programs to keep you occupied while your entrenched pals enjoy all 64 World Cup matches on your 42” HDTV.

And if you're really bored... well, you could always read bit-tech. Nah, who're we kidding!