Zell

The impression I get is that the current culture at Nintendo is so deeply rooted that it will take many years for a significant culture shift to take place. This may sound cliched but many of the strategic decisions that happen at Nintendo are based on maintaining and preserving the Nintendo Brand in the eyes of both gamers and developers (with a bigger focus on the Japanese audience). Nintendo see themselves as and independent free spirit within the world of electronics: they do not follow anyone; they believe in "lateral thinking with withered technology"; they make games with the intention of being fun for everyone etc. These philosophies play a major role in how their consoles are designed, what types of games they choose to make, and how they market themselves. The board at Nintendo clearly think this is a strong brand and in many ways it is. The trouble is, I think that the higher-ups at Nintendo believe that they do not have a brand problem when they clearly do. Western audiences are shunning Nintendo consoles and third party developers are not supporting them. These relationships won't improve unless Nintendo make significant changes to their corporate strategy. And I feel that, if Nintendo keep sticking with the same people, culture and principles that have served them for the last 30 years then nothing with fundamentally change.

I really enjoyed this game, but I felt that I would have enjoyed it a lot more if I hadn't have played A Link to the Past first. It's mostly due to the fact the overworlds and almost exactly the same - it takes the fun out of exploring a world when you pretty much know where everything is. It felt quite easy as well, which has become the norm for Nintendo games of late. Being able to pick a hard mode from the outset would be nice in the future. Apart from that, I loved it. A return to classic Zelda dungeoning of old. I liked how the story was kept to a minimum and it just allowed you to get on with the gameplay without interrupting you with cutscenes. And I can't believe I'm saying this, but the 3D was done really well and I kept the 3D on throughout my entire playthrough. I would love Nintendo to make another 2D Zelda game for the 3DS, only this time create a whole new entry rather than a sequel with the same overworld.

Seriously well done, you have been immense this season. I don't think I've actually had a particularly bad season yet I'm 8 points behind you. I'm extremely happy to have been able to get an away win against you. Also what do you mean by undisputed champion?

I'll take 11.

I lost a very tight match against Dud today. My team can create chances, but can't seem to convert them at the moment. Looking at the Elite League this season, the standard of teams has definitely shot up. I was hoping for one more season of challenging for the title before switching my focus towards long-term development and growth, but results could easily go against me this season as there are a lot of tough teams. If I want to have a reasonable chance of winning the league, I'll need to win all the games I can against non-title contenders as I don't expect the likes of Eights and Silverdale to drop many points. We'll see how it goes anyway.

Deal. Will pick some youths to make it an even contest. In sad news, I've sold Jon Lilywhite. At 35, he wasn't going to get any better unfortunately and a most of my midfield has overtaken him now so he became surplus to requirements. But he will forever be a Submarine legend. He was part of the original Yellow Submarine squad when the team were founded in season 22. He retires with stats of 112 matches, 66 points consisting of 35 goals and 31 assists, 7 yellow cards, 41 X11s and 8 X11 captains.

The Xpert Throne is mine, by right. All those that deny that are my foes. All hail Yellow Submarine, the first of their name, King of the Elites and the First Managers, Lord of the Xpert and Protector of the Playground.

Was a tad unlucky today, but got beaten by a good side. Anyone fancy a friendly?

We're going to have that situation anyway unless the number of groups is 2, 4, 8, 16 etc. Example for 6 groups of 5. The top 2 progress... that leaves us with 12 teams in the knockouts. We still need 4 more teams to bring the number up to 16. The way this would presumably be resolved is by having the 4 highest point scoring 3rd place teams go through as well. 5 groups of 6 would be better because more games would be played and we would only need one extra team to get to 16 (rather than 4). The best situation would be if we got rid of 2 inactive teams to bring the total number of teams down to 28. Then we could have 4 groups of 7: the top 2 or top 4 would progress to a round of 8 or 16 and there would be no need to "make up the numbers" - the same number of teams from each group would go through. If you're confused, look at my Google Doc. I also didn't know you could do 2 groups of 15, I thought the max for a division was 10.

If we're only going to do it for one season, then all 30 teams should be involved. If it's going to become a semi-permanent thing, then I would be in favour of a 7-7-8-8 format. There are more ways than that: 5 groups of 6, 3 groups of 10... In my opinion the best way to do it would be 5 groups of 6. Top three plus the highest point-scoring 4th place finish would progress to a round of 16. Everyone would be guaranteed 10 matches and over half of teams would get 11 matches.

Sent my challenge to Fedex. I was bored at work and made a spreadsheet with some of the options we have for the Champions' League structure (please note that I'm unsure which of these are allowed). I also do not have access to N-E at work because it's blocked so I couldn't contribute/read any of today's posts but was still thinking about it all day. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AsENbEXZo-p7dFlwWXZOdThfQWhVZkwtbHV0ZkRYWFE#gid=0 I also wrote this assuming you could have a 1:2 format, i.e. 1 CL competition with 2 leagues below it a la Conference North & South. My preferred choice would be option P in the table, which is 2 CL groups of 7 and 2 Leagues of 8 below. The bottom three in each CL group get relegated to the League groups and the top three from each League get promoted to the CL.

Change Report: Happy with this. The only reduction is Lilywhite who is now surplus to requirements. Disappointed Delipiano and Falcao didn't visibly raise their skill as they had 15 and 16 dv respectively. I like the concept of a CL style season, but you haven't sold it well enough to me that it would work well in practice. I would like to see what the changes (permanent or temporary) it would make to the league structure and also what the consequences would be in terms of dv and change reports. I would definitely be up for it if it was a true off-season cup (as an aside it would be nice to have a proper cup structure rather than having to mess around with friendly matches and having to manually do the draw).

Manager of the season trophy? Is this a new thing? I'm hoping for a good change report as I don't have a lot of money to buy players. This season I've ran a deficit thanks consistently spending money on form training and win bonuses. In previous seasons I've been able to save money up and buy a solid player in the transfer window.

Fantastic win today. Was hoping for a draw to be honest. My last three games are all games that I should win, but I can't get complacent as they are all fighting for survival. All I can do is get maximum points and hope that Silverdale drop points in their remaining games.

I said in a press release that I was hoping to get ten points from my last six games and as it turns out I got exactly ten. That's the hard part of the season over. I now have arguably the easiest run-in til the end of the season. Now if someone could just beat Silverdale, that would be great.

There goes our unbeaten run. Was hoping for a draw against Chesterfield and we came close a few times, but it wasn't to be.

Maybe playing defensive is a better overall strategy, but you need a good defence for that. My team's strengths have always been in midfield and up front so I've always played more attacking tactics to take advantage of that. Next week is the double trouble from Eights! Probably my two biggest games back-to-back.

999 has a fantastic soundtrack.

And Yellow Submarine sneaks into the lead thanks to a penalty!

That's more like it! Score more goals than the other team, that it the Yellow Submarine way.

I would say my body is a mixed bag. Let's start with the positives. I'm quite tall, 6'2", which always comes in handy in a lot of situations. I've always been reasonably athletic and energetic even though I go months on end without proper exercise. I was a fussy eater as a kid which made me quite skinny up until my university years, I'm currently around 11 and a half stone which is the heaviest I've ever been. I think I've got a pretty good metabolism considering I eat a fair amount of junk food and still remain fairly lean. No allergies or conditions, no broken bones or long-lasting injuries, all organs working in fairly good shape. Pretty decent tolerance to alcohol and good lung capacity thanks to swimming a lot when I was young. Now on to things I don't like. I have pretty oily skin and naturally get a lot of acne. Not so much on my face, but on my back and a bit on my chest. Anyone who's ever had severe acne can know how much it can affect your self-esteem. It pretty much cost me sex one time at university simply because I was afraid of taking off my shirt. I always thought that after puberty it would slowly go away, but if anything it got worse once I went to university and by my second year I had had enough and started investing in some proper treatment for it. Nowadays it's all fairly under control, but still comes back from time to time if I forget to apply my regimen as strictly as I should. Still it means my quest for achieving a better body is now focused on other areas, like going to the gym and staying in shape. The other thing I don't like is my teeth. Thanks to genetics I had rather large front teeth with a bit of an overbite. When I was 11, I fell over and smashed my face, chipping on my of front teeth. I've had caps on them ever since so they don't look very pretty. Combine this with having a retainer to fix my overbite and me not being very disciplined with my brushing means my teeth are yellow. I'm pretty good at keeping my teeth healthy nowadays though. One day when I can be arsed I'll go and get them properly whitened. Other little things: my eyesight used to be awesome, but it got worse around the time I left school and started noticing in my second year at university when I could no longer read the black boards from the back of the lecture theatre. I don't need glasses yet, but it's still a bit of a bummer. I also get a decent amount of torso hair, but because of my weird genetics it grows unevenly. It looks silly, but then again shaving is a pain. Anyway, I would say my body is a work in progress. I've conquered my main adversary, my next quest is to get into shape and gain some muscle, because I'm a weak fuck. Biggest barrier really is trying to fit exercise into my hectic working life. It was a lot easier to find time to do these things before I got a full time job. But I'm going on holiday in December so I have a goal to get into shape by then.

Me and my brothers all watched the TV show every morning before school on Sky One. My brother got Pokemon Red as soon as it came out (I think this was October '99). Me and my other brother naturally wanted to play it as well, expecting the standard 3 save slots, but were disappointed and could only watch on as he had all the fun. A few weeks later, our family went on holiday to Florida. On Halloween evening, we all went to a stereotypical US shopping mall. We were stunned to see how much of an obsession Halloween is over in America. There were thousands and thousands of kids, all dressed up, forming a gigantic snake-like queue around the hallways of the mall. Outside every shop there would be an assistant holding a sack full of sweets to give out to these kids being hauled along by their parents. Some of the kids were too young to be described as kids: there were infants and babies being dressed up like dolls basically being paraded around like they were in a circus. Thousands of kids, so much screaming and crying. Such a surreal experience that I will never forget. Anyway, the Pokemon craze was in full swing at this point so many of the kids were dressed up like Pokemon. Pikachus and Charmanders were the most common. As we were walking about the mall, we went into a games shop (I think it was EB) and we could see a big queue of people buying Pokemon Yellow, which had just come out. Then and there, my parents bought Pokemon Blue for me and Pokemon Yellow for my brother. We both already had our own Game Boys (I got a Color earlier in the year with Link's Awakening DX - still my favourite GB game ever) so we all played Pokemon for the rest of the holiday. Everyone back at home was massively jealous of my brother for having Pokemon Yellow, I don't think it came out in the UK for another year. He would also initially boast that Yellow was the best one because you got all three starters plus Pikachu. Later he became jealous because you couldn't do the Missingno glitch. So Pokemon Blue. Starter was Bulbasaur, of course. We would make sure that we chose different fossils and different fighting pokemon. None of us were particularly good at Pokemon, probably because we were so young. My squad eventually ended up being something like Venusaur, Machamp and two of the legendary birds I think. Took me a fair while to beat the Elite Four until I realised it was easy with Articuno and Zapdos. We eventually got a strategy guide and learnt about the Missingno glitch and generally how to not suck. Me and my brother with Red traded loads of Pokemon and we both got to all 150 Pokemon at the same time (I've never bothered to catch all the Pokemon in any of the subsequent games, although I came close in Silver). I was massively disappointed because I thought that we'd get Mew instead of a bloody certificate that we couldn't even print anyway because we didn't have a Game Boy Printer! When we bought subsequent games, me and my brothers would stick to the same convention: I would always buy the "second game" (i.e. Blue, Silver, Sapphire); my brother would by the "first game" (Red, Gold, Ruby); and my other brother would buy the later one (Yellow, Crystal, Emerald) when it came out. Not sure why we did this, we just did! Ahh childhood memories. I need to stop posting now, I have to get up tomorrow at 6 to go to work.