Fierce_LiNk

Happy Birthday, N-Europe! It's still my favourite website/forum of all time! So many great memories of this place and of ye olde Revolution and Cube-Europe. Needless to say, I'm grateful for this place for introducing me to my co-op partner for life @Eenuh. There's a lot of great people here and hopefully more to join to keep this place feeling fresh. I may not be Nintendo's biggest fan at the moment, but I'm glad that this is still a friendly place to chat and share views. Always look forward to the annual E3 hype threads and predictions, even if this has slowed down somewhat over the last few years.

Yeah, the rule is there to stop players picking the ball and running off with it. It doesn't really make sense why the hand should be treated differently to any other part of the body when the ball strikes it, say, if a player is taking a shot on the edge of the box and it hits a player's hand. I reckon that the only reason handballs are given so often is because the referees and associations don't know how to actually police it. How can you tell in a split-second (usually from poor angles and with bodies of players in front of you) if a player has motioned (even if slightly) towards the ball with intent with his hands or arms? The truth is that you can't. Hence why so many are given. It seems to be now that unless the arm is straight alongside the body, it's usually given as a free-kick or penalty. Another reason for video technology because we'd be able to see clearly how the hand has moved towards the ball. It would lead to the rule getting more complicated, but maybe more fair, too.

Heading online now if anyone else fancies joining.

I wasn't convinced it was a penalty and I still don't think it is. Dyer turns around (as the ball has already passed him) and he's swiveling on the spot to face the ball. As he's doing so, his arms swing and make contact with the ball. It's handball. He isn't deliberately knocking the ball away. If you watch every footballer (defenders in particular) turn on the spot, they do similar things where their arms will naturally follow through. Think it was harsh to give it. The only reason I think the ref gave it was because the ball had been knocked out of the player's path. Had the player kept in control of the ball, I'm not entirely sure he would have given it.

That's a very optimistic and simplistic way of looking at it. I think @Hero\-of\-Time's answer to this was spot on. Also, if EA do come on board...what will they come on board with? A gimped version of FIFA here, a party game there? The problem is to do with the perception of what developers regard as Nintendo's demographic. Would the next Nintendo system get the next Dark Souls game? Will it get Cyberpunk 2077? Will it get the next Mass Effect, or Street Fighter, or Final Fantasy? Nintendo will lose tons of credibility for not having these. Will it even have FIFA on the next system?! The fact we have to ask that is absurd. It's a given on the other systems. To me, third party games on Nintendo's systems are a real issue. I don't see any reason why this situation will suddenly change. Unless there is something that is absolutely earth shattering that brings the developers in, I don't see how Nintendo are going to entice these big games to appear on the console. Unless Nintendo firmly do decide to go down this "second console" route and play second fiddle to the bigger machines.

Play a game of Supremacy and watch what your team's reaction is to losing a Control Point. If you can see that one Control Point is in the process of being lost, look around and see how many are moving towards you and moving the other way. It's worth doing. On the whole, the game is awesome, though. Most of the time it's an absolute laugh and it never even gets me angry, even if I'm not doing well or if our team aren't doing great. It's just interesting from a gamer's mentality point of view.

That's why it makes more sense to use the shoulder buttons/triggers for racers now. It's absolutely essential for Drive Club and I could not have platinumed that game without it. My friends mentioned the analogue face button thing in high school and I thought they were having me on. Seems quite fiddly. Analogue shoulders/triggers makes more sense to me since you can clearly feel the subtle differences between hardly touching the button to knocking it all the way down.

6 points behind City, who are 3 points behind Arsenal. So, we're 9 points behind the leaders. I'm asumming you chose City because they're local rivals. 4 wins from 13 league games is relegation form. This isn't even counting the games where we went out of the Champions League or League Cup. 19 games, 6 wins, counting on from yesterday. @Blade gets it as he's seen us play and you'll only get it if you've seen us play more than once this season. This isn't bad form, this is how we play football now. Not playing well at the moment is the weakest way of putting it, they haven't played well since the opening day of the season where we got past Spurs through a calamity of an own goal. Yesterday was actually one of our better performances...we've performed worse than that this season, which is shocking for ANY Premier League club. When you see newly promoted teams playing better than established Premier League clubs, then questions have to be asked. In contrast, Swansea sacked Garry Monk after a run of 3 wins from 15 games. That record isn't too dissimilar from Van Gaal at United. Think the second game will be great and it'll be interesting to see what kind of team Klopp puts out. I'm glad he gave his youngsters a chance and it'll have been a great experience for them to play against another competitive team in my favourite competition. Liverpool should have enough to pull through, but you never know. Depends if they supply enough service to Benteke.

You can tell quite easily. On Supremacy, where you can see the control point that you have and can clearly see that we are losing it. YET, you have players that will actually move away from that control point and go in the completely other direction. Saw this looooooads on that Jakku level where you have that control point in the middle of the map. Cargo, where you have players that will sit in one corner of the map (particularly on that hanger level in Sullust) and don't even attempt to grab the cargo or defend ours. You can just tell by watching them that they don't have a clue what they're doing. Especially as the opposite team will just literally run past them with the cargo and they make no attempt to kill them and retrieve it. We saw that loads yesterday. There is a definite difference when you've got a team who can defend or attack well and actually know what they're doing. We finished a game of Supremacy in somewhere between the 2 and a half minutes - 4 minutes marker just because we played to the mode and the other team didn't. I got something like three kills in that map because I actually didn't need to kill that many. It was run to the control point uncontested. Capture. Run to the next one. Capture. Final one, capture again.

I've accepted it. It lessens the pain. *cries self to sleep*

I think the Destiny lot need a lot of credit, too. There have been raids and strikes organised since release and that thread is still going strong. Not sure what I think about Worms. I loved it back in the day, but I bought @Eenuh a copy of...that one for the Wii. Can't even remember what it was called now. We never touched it. I thought we'd spend hours on it and we never got into it. I'll have a think about this one. Tbh, I think I'm enjoying Battlefront a bit too much to really give anything else a go.

You were unlucky. If this were to go to a replay, I wouldn't fancy our chances at all. We struggled to create anything and defensively you were tight. You do raise a point though about teams performing well in the big matches and then not so well in the "ordinary" league games. To earn promotion or to win a league, you have to be consistent in every single game. It's what Bournemouth did last year, they played exciting football but went into each match as if it were a big cup game. If Sheffield United were to do something like that, then there's no reason to say that they couldn't be a good Championship club. Us, on the other hand, are fucked as long as LVG is here. Fellaini played deep to start with and was, tactically, all over the fucking place. He played defensive midfield to start off, then wide right, then number 10, all without doing an awful lot really. Herrera had one of his worst United games today in my opinion. We had no width, we had no threat from the middle and we struggled to create chances. All of our attacking players played in the wrong positions. All of them. LVG is a big part of the problem and we are now going backwards. We've regressed since last season and are continuing to regress. Last season's football was inconsistent, but at least we were trying to win games. Van Gaal has had time to adopt a system and a style of play and this is what we are seeing now. He's had last summer, last January and the summer before to bring players in and mould the team to how he'd like it. He has another transfer window now. We are playing shocking football. There's no excuse for players not even attempting to take a shot from outside the box or for being so slow in the build up play. This is how it is now. It's not down to injuries. In all honesty, the only player we're missing through injury is Luke Shaw. One player. A left back. We have cover there through Daley Blind. That shouldn't destroy a team's ability to attack. If we have attacking deficiencies, then Van Gaal is to blame. He brings in the players, he lets players go and above all he motivates (or is supposed to) the players. He gets them to play how he wants them to play. If they're not playing how he wants them to play, then he has to drop players. But he isn't doing that. The only real way we're going to get out of this hole is when Van Gaal goes. No single player is going to dig us out. There isn't a star player to come back from injury. Van Gaal's job was to get United back in the top four and playing competitive football. He is not doing that. As far as the quality of football goes, this is the absolute worst I've ever seen us play in my lifetime. We've been useless since the very first game of the season up until now. In every single game. All of them.

Great fun tonight @kav82 will appreciate this as it was voice chat at its finest. For two games running, the three of us did all of the work whilst the rest of our team took up really retarded positions and did fuck all. In the second game, we were 7-3 down and I think we'd just had someone take our Cargo. Pretty much out of the game. We pulled it together, fantastic communication and brought the game back level, until we got the final Cargo delivered to our base with about a minute to go. There's absolutely no way we would have won that game (or probably the one before) had there been no party chat or communication. We were covering for each other, deciding who would stay back and defend, which one of us would go to attack, where the enemies were. It was a really exciting game, one of the best I've played so far!

I agree with all of this. Part of me was annoyed that we did get the penalty because it was an easy way out for us. Van Gaal got his victory and Rooney got his goal when really the match should have ended 0-0. I don't really understand why Van Gaal is getting us to play in this style of football and why he isn't just doing all he can to win games. He's only here for the short term and he's trying to be a bit too clever by playing "technical" or "robotic" football which isn't working. It isn't working. We're so fucking boring and we can't attack to save our lives. The next manager who comes in will play his own style of football anyway, so getting us to play one way and the next person coming in and changing it all back is just....ahhhh. It isn't even about the winning or losing. It's about the performance and we are not performing. The 7-14 year olds I had in my football club yesterday had much more attacking energy than we did today! It's pathetic. It's disgraceful we've gone so many games without scoring a single first half goal. That's RELEGATION form. Sheffield United should have got a replay and I wouldn't have begrudged them that one bit. Not one bit. Wouldn't even have begrudged them a victory had they won it. We've deserved to either draw or lose every single one of our games this season and we're looked thoroughly awful. All teams go through rough patches, but we haven't had a rough patch, we've been awful for the entire season. All of it. The only player who I think has looked any good for us this year is Chris Smalling. I said a few months back that Van Gaal would lose the fans if this continued and that point has come. Very few people actually support what he's doing now. This isn't a rough patch that we're suddenly going to come out of and start scoring for fun. This is it. This is how Van Gaal wants us to play. And it's shite. All of it. Going back to that Leicester City game last season where we lost 5-3. I would take that performance over this shite today. Sure, we lost, but at least we tried to attack and look entertaining! That's what football is for. It's a sport. It's entertainment!

Completed my first workout of the year on Thursday and then played football for almost 2 hours last night. My arse absolutely hurts from squats. I fully appreciate how much better it feels when you do them more often. I've not experienced this for aaaaaages. It feels like somebody is squeezing my arse so tightly whilst also pulling it in different directions, as if the whole thing is some form of play-doh. My quads aren't much better. Walking up the stairs earlier was agony. Virtually every muscle I have (except my pen0r) is aching at the same time. Can't wait to get back into the routine again so I don't have to experience this. It feels like my body is punishing me for having a break.

Why? It looks awful and all of the impressions seems to say the same thing. The Tarrantino wave is over and he's now been exposed for what he is.

I use an app called FitNotes. It's brilliant, tbh. It's got a calender which actually colour codes the different body parts that you've worked that day, so leg exercises are one colour, chest is another, etc. I love it. It's easy to input the information in and it's also very easy to see what your previous results were. It tells you if you've achieved a new PR, which is veeeeery good for your confidence. Without a doubt, it's made a difference to my workouts and it's made me far more competitive in lifting heavier than I have done before. You can also input new exercises quite easily. So, if you have an exercise that isn't already listed, you can input this in. You can also record cardio on it, too. It's far better than just doing it from memory. Much better to look down and see the evidence right there and then that you've definitely improved since last week or month or even year.

I'm so sorry @Blade that you've been subjected to our shite football. We're playing a system with two holding players at home in a cup game and we've yet to have any shots on target. At least, none that I can remember. We are so fucking boring to watch. If you can't play the ball through, what's wrong with taking a shot from outside of the box? At least attempt to test the keeper.

Yeah, it's downright annoying. You play the mode. Otherwise you may as well just play Blast. It's great when you do get a good game, though. I've played some crazily good people on Cargo who were just so well co-ordinated. Didn't stand a chance.

This threeeead. Star Wars Battlefont - A typing adventure where you play as all of your childhood heroes. Features lots of scrolling text. Earaway - Vincent Van Gogh makes his stunning videogame debut in an origin story which explains the story behind his history of self mutilation. Super Money Ball - A Lottery simulator where you can experience the thrills of winning the jackpot. Pcman - Become the zealot of your dreams into this GTA-style third person adventure as you infiltrate internet forums and kill filthy console peasants. Rain Age - An immense downpour has flooded your town in this survival horror as you battle a host of creatures who are mysteriously part of this weather phenomenon. Cunter-strike - You get spawn killed over and over again by an army of campers who proceed to teabag you and trash talk about your mother down the microphone. Welcome to Cunter-strike!

Have to agree with this. There are more cities in the UK rather than just London. It's only the biggest because it's overcrowded and it's only got the largest amount because all of the money gets funneled there instead of being distributed to the rest of the UK. :p

I prefer the analogue placement of the PS4 pad, there's a better balance with that controller. I might try and design the NX controller. @RedShell's GamePad looks more aesthetic than the real thing. Hate how clunky the real one looks. It's enormous.

I would be up for GTA stuff. Buuut, I've done fuck all with the online. The problem with GTA is that every time I try and get into it, something else awesome comes out and I have to play that other game immediately. First it was Shadow of Mordor, then Bloodborne, then The Witcher 3, then Battlefront. I better get back on it.

What kinda scam you trying to pull, Hero? *opens up brower, brb, game.co.uk* I'm not even sure that I want the game. I am in the process of suffering from gamer guilt. That feeling where you know you already have loads of stuff to play, but always want moar.

Had some hilarious matches on Cargo tonight. Being able to speak to @Eenuh really helps! She grabbed the cargo and ran back to our base. I covered her and acted like a bullet magnet to keep them from shooting her. Ended up dying at the control point but the cargo was secure. There are some rreeeeeaally shit players though who don't even attack to get the cargo or defend ours. They just treat it as Blast...that doesn't help your teeeeeammmm. Had a funny kill, too. Ine was using one of those mounted guns and this guy was meleeing her from the back. She had no idea. I pretty much shouted, "behind yooooou!" and took the fucker out. He was about one hit away from killing her.