Fierce_LiNk

I've just finished Volume 26: Call To Arms.

I've agreed to let @Eenuh play this first and then I'll get on this after she's finished it. Trying to avoid spoilers. Tempted to play The Last of Us.

Mario Kart DS with Mario Kart 64 in very close second place There's something about the track design, multiplayer and game modes that I love about these two games. I played the multiplayer to death on each and it was quite fun going online with Mario Kart DS...when it decided it wanted to work. Super Smash Bros. Melee The pace of this game is electric. Ganondorf was my main and he was so powerful and exciting to use. I love the stages and collecting the trophies was addictive. It had that balance of just enough there to be plentiful and interesting, but not too much where it felt like a chord to go through. I enjoyed Brawl and would agree that it has more to do, but I prefer the general gameplay of Melee. Playing with the Wiimote wasn't as good as playing with the classic GameCube controller. The characters just felt better to control in Melee, too. Mario Party 4 I had a great time with this. Plenty of modes and mini-games and I loved the designs for the boards. We used to spend hours on this and it was pretty fun with a few close friends. I never really attempted playing it by myself because that would feel wrong for some reason. A bonus point for Mario Strikers Charged Football, which has a terrible name that doesn't fit in with an awesome game. Played this to death and loved every second of it. What a game.

#IBelieveInSerebii #nyahnyah #secrets #justnintendothings

Ahh, the England cycle. "New manager! Things will be different!" *plays Rooney* *win nothing/play shit* Repeat. Isn't it also depressing that Joe Hart can have a shitty Euros, receive a vote of no confidence from a world class manager in Guardiola before being shipped off to Torino and STILL start in goal for country? That tells you everything. Not enough competition and managers not being big enough to make bold decisions.

I've carried on with DuoLingo and have made tons of progress, so far. The PC version is great. Whilst the mobile version is awesome as you can sit in bed and learn, the PC version is more comprehensive and contains more information about the section you're learning about. E.g. about sentence construction if you're learning about conjunctions. I'm a big fan of DuoLingo. Would definitely recommend. It covers a lot of ground and the information is sticking.

I'm watching Italy vs Spain right now. Costa (obviously) got booked in the first half and in the second half clearly kicks the ball away after the referee blew his whistle. Referee lets it go and Costa is promptly subbed off. I'm all for referees getting less stick from players, the media, the fans, etc. They're only human. But it's decisions like this that does make it harder to empathise with them. There is no consistency whatsoever. The rule is clear as day. If you kick the ball away deliberately after the whistle has been blown, it's a yellow card. Two yellow cards = a red. Why is it so hard to just enforce the rules?!

I've downloaded the demo for FIFA17 and then switched back and forth between that and PES. Imo, FIFA is light years ahead in presentation, at least as far as the demo goes. There was no menu music when booting up PES and no commentary. The crowd noises sound very stock-like. It was all a complete contrast with FIFA and as much stick as EA get for rehashing the same stuff over and over, the changes they've made to penalties and corners are good changes, imo. You can't argue that they haven't made an appealable product as the whole look is fantastic. PES graphically looks outdated, imo. Even the menus and sounds seem very simplistic. Almost last-gen. I haven't seen anything with the gameplay that suggests to me that PES is the better game. Like I mentioned earlier, the interesting features that I wanted to see are locked out of the demo, so...It's not an amazing first impression. I'll probably get neither this year, but FIFA would be the one I'd jump into based on what I've seen of both. Hands down. It's just a better package.

Typical post-Ferguson United performance. Looking nice in places, players over-doing it to justify their inflated price tags but don't know how to take their chances clinically. Should have been 4-0 before half-time and the team concede a shitty equaliser when we finally do score. Need to get right back to basics and finish our fucking chances. Nobody will care at the end of the season about what you did in the 34th minute or that lovely ball you played in the 80th, but they will care if you drop two points at home against a poor Stoke side. The performance was actually good for about 90% of the time, but goals win matches and there were far too many missed opportunities today. Disappointing.

I've downloaded the demo for Pro Evo 2017 and it's not really done enough to convince me to buy it. I hear that the tactic options are very good, so the first thing I did when setting up a game between Atletico and Barcelona was to go into the Game Plan menu. The demo doesn't let you change formations, so...that's great. There's this lovely looking option for fluid formation which changes your formation when you have the ball and when you are without it, e.g. 4-3-3 with the ball, 4-5-1 without. Completely pointless when you're locked out of changing formations in the demo so can't see for yourself how this affects gameplay. My eyes lit up when I saw that option because I've wanted something like that for years! Pissed off at that. You can't adjust players positioning in the demo, so you can't move Koke further forward on the left side or bring him slightly infield from the Game Plan menu. So, I feel that I can't really see what's possible from the demo. The gameplay is nice and fluid, much more so than Fifa 16's slow gameplay. 15 had it right, but 16 was a backwards step and I hear that 17 is more of the same. Downloading the demo now to see. PES again feels minimalist. If you do want that full Premier League experience, you won't get it here. No commentary on the PES demo is weird and it does pull you out of the atmosphere slightly.

It was a strange situation, as I had a few "well done" comments from parents. I can't tell if that's just a general school thing or if it was specifically aimed at me. We'll see. I took charge of that team today and we won an away game 5-1. It should've been more like 25-1 as we were all over them like a rash. A few of the kids were a bit annoyed that we hadn't scored more afterwards as we had created tons of chances. I guess the standard has risen!

It's stupid what the press have done and its stupid what Allerdyce did, too. Idiots and pricks, the lot of them. He wasn't my first choice anyway, so I'm not cut up about it all. It's just another reason to laugh at England...all this talk about the country being a laughing stock isn't far off, imo.

United were superb yesterday. The balance of the team looked much better and Herrera completely bossed it in that holding role. I would play that exact same team or near enough to that lineup every single week. Alter it slightly depending on the opposition, but the team should be built around the likes of Herrera, Pogba, Rashford and Martial (even though he was unavailable for yesterday).

I've run an after school football club for about 6 years and my club has the highest number of sign-ups and is notorious for over-running by up to an hour as the kids and parents love it. For the past few years, I've been taking the kids to matches and tournaments and we had a really positive season last year with some great results. This year, it was decided that the person who got the almost-Head-of-Junior role would take my team to fixtures and matches and I would be given the older pupils. I basically had one "training" session with the team last week where I was given a random selection of pupils, half of which were ineligible to play as they were too old. (it was ridiculous as the players I wanted weren't even selected for the under-16s team...) We had our tournament yesterday and, whilst we weren't quite humiliated, it was clear that this team had never played together before. We lost all four games (1-0, 3-0, 3-0 and 2-1) and the referee blew the full-time whistle when we had a corner and then made an incredibly shitty comment in front of our players - "at least you finally scored a goal!" Whilst that was happening, the same team that I work with week-in, week-out at my club and the same team that I've moulded together for years made it to a final and only narrowly lost out. The guy who took charge of them basically walked around with this huge swagger like he was Billy-Big-Balls and was full of it in work today...despite all the hard work and countless hours that I put in. Ine will vouch for that. I've not had a Friday night on a school night for years now because I'm usually knackered after the training and regularly fall asleep on the sofa at around half 9. I went into work today completely gutted. Although we had some great results last season, we had some shocking ones, too. We've had our arses kicked at times, numerous comments from shitty parents about why we weren't better, jibes from the opposition after games, mood swings from players, shitty weather, shit organisation from some other schools (one game had us playing in full-size goals last season!) and...yet I didn't get to have the one moment that we should have had together. I didn't even get to see them collect their medals. I've got no real idea about why he was given the team and I wasn't. It may sound petty, but it meant a lot to me and I've put hundreds of hours into it over the course of years. I'm not sure there's any point in me running the club now and I'm tempted to do something else after the Christmas term.

I've been watching @Eenuh play the Death Star dlc and I'm not sure what to think, so far. The Battlestation mode seems a bit messy, tbh. It's very bitty. If you're a rebel, your team has to kill 10 tie-fighters before waiting for a 10 second y-wing "loading bar", after which you have to hit the imperial ship's defences. Once your y-wings have outlived their use, you have another 10 second cool-down before you repeat the process. There's two parts you have to attack on top of the ship and then one underneath before you're even allowed to attack the bridge. The crazy part is that this is the first part of the 3-part game mode. I've watched her play as both imperial and rebel and not a single game has gone into the second part yet. It's almost like there's one defence too many on the ship, or if the time limit isn't great enough.

I've started lifting again. Squats. My arse hurts.

Allahu Akhbar!

I don't know who that guy is either. (we had to google it) You're both white and have a stubbly beard, so I guess you're pretty much 90% identical.

Mourinho isn't at the top of his game after a disappointing season last year with Chelsea and United themselves had a not-so-great year with LVG. Both aren't particularly high on confidence. Benching Rooney is the right thing to do to start things off but there's so much that needs to be done.

Cool thread. I grew up being a massive fan of Ridley Scott's Alien and each of the subsequent sequels. The original holds a special place in my heart and a large part of that is down to the look of the Nostromo ship, the sounds, the aesthetics of the machinery and clothing that the crew wore. It felt very metallic in places yet warm and homely, too. The sound of the sirens as Ripley made her escape stayed with me for a very long time, as did the footsteps of the deadly Alien as it prowled the corridors. Alien : Isolation absolutely nailed all of these aspects, most notably the sound design. It is like somebody created a portal that you could jump into and land in Ridley Scott's nightmare. It's fantastic. Even down to the little details like the sounds of the air shafts opening and closing, the doors opening and making a thudding sound as they slam shut, the sound of your footsteps on the ground, the sirens echoing throughout the hallway, the motion tracker detecting signs of movement...it's all perfect. I'm a huge fan of that game anyway, but the sound design contributed so much to it being more than just an average horror game. The AI, the graphics, the lighting, sound and gameplay all came together to make one of my most memorable experiences of the past decade.

Awful performance, arguably worse than the one midweek. Too many players playing in the wrong positions. Why do managers do this? The team looked very disjointed and we looked second best in all areas of the pitch. The only player who I think had a decent-ish game was Fellaini. Rooney is finished at the top level. He's been lacklustre for about three years now and he's playing to the detriment of the team. If he was from Italy or Spain or anywhere else outside of the UK, there's no way in hell he'd get into this team. Him being English is the only reason he gets into the squad at all, let alone him being in the first 11. He was off the pace again today, slowed things down, didn't contribute any critical passes or shots, didn't really do anything defensively and didn't link up well with his team mates. The frustrating thing is that he'll start the next game or he might sit one out but be back the week after. Moyes' biggest failure as United manager was giving this guy a huge contract with obscene wages, thus making him unsellable. It's ridiculous that we're basing the team around him.

This is the one I've been waiting for the most. Chewwyyyyyyyyy.

I'd agree with that, but it's still a poor showing. A competition is a competition and there's still a trophy at the end of it. Quite a high scoring weekend, so far. Looking forward to Match of the Day tonight. Sad that Bournemouth got destroyed, but expected it to happen.