There’s a significant lag between issuing the remote command and having the on-screen players do your bidding, and the way the game buffers successive commands doesn’t help in the slightest. If you’re slightly too exuberant in hitting a long pass, the game often misinterprets it and has a second unintentional command queued up, so the player on the end of the ball winds up hitting it first time when you wanted him to bring it under control.

Also, any accidental movement of your hands can be interpreted as a command, which is a particularly irritating problem.

The type of command you’ve just issued pops up at the bottom of the screen, which is a fair indication that the developers knew how confusing it could be. We can’t think of any other soccer game in which it would be helpful - or necessary - to reassure players that they’d correctly performed a shot or a pass. Here, it’s sometimes the only way you’ll know what’s going on.

So the controls make easy things unusually tough to master, and there’s no option to use a Classic controller instead, which is a shame because there’s a solid game of soccer underneath the clumsiness. FIFA 08 has the internet features that made us so envious of the PS2 versions back in the GameCube days, including an online league in which fans of every club have three days to play their team’s current real-life fixture. The results are uploaded to a master league table that shows which team has the best FIFA-playing supporters. We were gutted (but not surprised) when the GC versions didn’t include this option, so it’s great to see it on a Nintendo system at last.