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M-K

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Posts posted by M-K

  1. Ian Wright may well be a cretin whose BBC appearances - at taxpayers' expense - are justified solely by his status as the only black player ever to gain popular approval among terrace thugs. But he's no less competent than most of the dull fools you'll hear commentating on other channels.

    I can hardly bring myself to watch football on the BBC or ITV any more, because of Shearer's monotone, Lawrenson's blind whining, David 'clueless' Pleat's inability to pronounce words of more than one syllable, Hansen's 10-year descent into self-parody, Lineker's punchable smugness...

    The way they all refer to England, or any English team, as 'we' is embarrassing. Most of them have no insight to offer. Why are they on TV? Footballers aren't famed for their communication skills.

    When I watch US sports, particularly the UFC, the commentary is funny, honest, informative and unfailingly accurate. Why can't we have the same in this country?

  2. But then again i don't think that they are going to need any width if they sign Tevez and Shevchenko. If those two sign on top of Ballack i think the league is already over. Manure, L'Pool & Arsenal would not be able to compete with their squad as they simply do not have the funds or the players to be able to match Chelsea man for man.

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    Isn't the general consensus that Shevchenko is nowhere near the player he was five or six years ago? I mean, he probably wouldn't add a great deal more to the team than Crespo currently does.

    Tevez: the new Djibril Cisse.

    Ballack: an off-the-pitch disruption waiting to happen.

    R Carlos: will sell a few shirts, but Real would be glad to get rid of him.

    I still don't think Chelsea will have anyone of the calibre of Rooney, Gerrard or Henry next season.

    (dredge up this thread when they've won the league next March...)

  3. This is from Time magazine, apparently:

    Nintendo gave TIME the first look at its new controller--but before I pick it up, Miyamoto suggests that I remove my jacket. That turns out to be a good idea. The first game I try--Miyamoto walks me through it, which to a gamer is the rough equivalent of getting to trade bons mots with Jerry Seinfeld--is a Warioware title (Wario being Mario's shorter, fatter evil twin). It consists of dozens of manic five-second mini games in a row. They're geared to the Japanese gaming sensibility, which has a zany, cartoonish, game-show bent. In one hot minute, I use the controller to swat a fly, do squat-thrusts as a weight lifter, turn a key in a lock, catch a fish, drive a car, sauté some vegetables, balance a broom on my outstretched hand, color in a circle and fence with a foil. And yes, dance the hula. Since very few people outside Nintendo have seen the new hardware, the room is watching me closely.

    It's a remarkable experience. Instead of passively playing the games, with the new controller you physically perform them. You act them out. It's almost like theater: the fourth wall between game and player dissolves. The sense of immersion--the illusion that you, personally, are projected into the game world--is powerful. And there's an instant party atmosphere in the room. One advantage of the new controller is that it not only is fun, it looks fun. When you play with an old-style controller, you look like a loser, a blank-eyed joystick fondler. But when you're jumping around and shaking your hulamaker, everybody's having a good time.

    After Warioware, we play scenes from the upcoming Legend of Zelda title, Twilight Princess, a moody, dark (by Nintendo's Disneyesque standards) fantasy adventure. Now I'm Errol Flynn, sword fighting with the controller, then aiming a bow and arrow, then using it as a fishing rod, reeling in a stubborn virtual fish. The third game, and probably the most fun, is also the simplest: tennis. The controller becomes a racket, and I'm smacking forehands and stroking backhands. The sensors are fine enough that you can scoop under the ball to lob it, or slice it for spin. At the end, I don't so much put the controller down as have it pried from my hands.

    John Schappert, a senior vice president at Electronic Arts, is overseeing a version of the venerable Madden football series for Nintendo's new hardware. He sees the controller from the auteur's perspective, as an opportunity but also a huge challenge. "Our engineers now have to decipher what the user is doing," he says. "'Is that a throw gesture? Is it a juke? A stiff arm?' Everyone knows how to make a throwing motion, but we all have our own unique way of throwing." But consider the upside: you're basically playing football in your living room. "To snap the ball, you 'snap' the remote back toward your body, which hikes the ball," Schappert says. "No buttons to press, just gesture a hiking motion, and the ball's in the hands of the QB. To pass the ball, you gesture a throwing motion. Hard, fast gestures result in bullet passes. Slower, less forceful, gestures result in loftier, slower lob passes. It truly plays like nothing you've ever experienced."

  4. I think you're being a little generous to Mourinho in your preview, philipl.

    How can it be Ranieri's squad when Mourinho has spooged around £150m on it? His tactical acumen was nowhere to be seen in the FAC semi, when he dropped some of his most creative attacking players and stuck a defender in midfield - the kind of gamble that would have him hailed as a genius in the unlikely event it worked, or fired if he was in charge of one of the Spanish or Italian giants.

    His drawing of attention away from the players and club isn't something I see as a calculated strategy - he is simply so full of himself, he believes he's the one man responsible for Chelsea's dominance. Hence his comments about how he's just won four titles in a row. Steve Bruce gives the porn baron more credit than Mourinho gives Abramovich.

    Ungracious, unlikeable and undeserving. My prediction: we'll lose very heavily.

  5. Maybe I'll convince you. DS is my most played games machine at the moment.

    It's cheap, it's durable, it's practical for commuting (it doesn't take several minutes to load a game).

    There are plenty of very good games at the moment - Advance Wars, Wario Ware, Tetris (online!), Animal Crossing, Nintendogs - plus some promising things in development, like Mario Bros and Zelda.

    Basically, it has the widest choice of software right now, and a lot of it is quite unusual because of the touch screen and microphone. Plays Game Boy Advance games, too.

    But... you probably shouldn't buy the standard one right now. The screens are quite poor, the buttons are rubbish and it looks like it doesn't belong outside of a playground.

    Wait until they release the DS Lite in Europe or buy one on import. It's so much nicer - the case and buttons are redesigned, the screens have a wider viewing angle and are brighter than a PSP (hurts my eyes on the brightest setting indoors)

  6. Anyone see Pongo in the 'on the bench' section in today's Grauniad? One of many hilarious football comedy articles in said paper.

    Most memorable moment: Appearing suddenly on the pitch to celebrate second Rovers goal with Craig Bellamy. Shook clenched fist at crowd, realised he might actually look a bit silly, but showed decent turn of speed making himself scarce again.'

    God bless Harry Pearson.

  7. Found something out, when I listen to the music it keeps it's battery, when I hook it up to USB to download it uses battery very quickly.

    I knew USB used quite a bit of power ut sheesh.  Hopefully this fixes my problem.

    395871[/snapback]

    Well, that shouldn't happen. It's supposed to charge when you plug it in a powered USB port. I tried it with mine, and it charges when plugged in to the computer but drains like yours when it's plugged into an Xbox. Weird.

  8. Maybe you bought a dud battery. Although if two successive batteries are only lasting 20 minutes each, there could be something else wrong.

    I swapped mine when my original battery started dying in under 90 minutes - it's never been as bad as 20 mins.

    Given my experience of getting Apple products repaired in the past (£380 to get one poxy part replaced on a 1-month-past-warranty iMac) you'll probably find it cheaper to buy a complete new one rather than get the motherboard changed.

  9. As is anolouge control.And online gaming although Nintendo pulled the plug on this during the nes' lifespan cause of dissintrest in Japan

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    As far as I'm aware, the first console to ship with an analogue controller was the Atari 5200, in 1982. There were loads of 'TV game' systems that had analogue controllers in the 1970s, but for the most part they only played a few built-in games and so do not fit the modern definition of a console.

    Online - the NES, SNES and N64 all had online services but I'd class the Dreamcast as the first console with out-of-the-box online functionality.

    I'm a big fan of Nintendo, but they do seem to get credit for a lot of things they never invented.

  10. I've dropped mine a couple of times, it's quite sturdy

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    You were lucky. It's got moving parts and a laser lens and everything.

    At the Nintendo store in New York they've got an old Game Boy that was supposedly bombed in the first Gulf War. It looks like a toasted marshmallow but it's still going, playing the Tetris cartridge that was melted into the slot.

    That's what I want from a handheld - bulletproofabilityness.

  11. The browser is a bit slow and the text entry (via a phone-style virtual keypad) is the clunkiest thing ever, but it's great for text pages. This site looks a bit of a mess (some sigs are wider than the PSP's screen) and you get an 'out of memory' error on a lot of the more complicated sites.

    I do like the updateable firmware feature - my PSP now does loads more stuff than it did when I got it. Less charitable people might say Sony released it before it was finished.

    Here's my mini review of the PSP, by me.

    Good things:

    - GTA makes a two-hour train journey seem like five minutes

    - It looks impressive

    - One day, somebody might make a great game for it that isn't a stripped-down PS2 conversion

    - Battery life much better than you'd imagine

    Bad things:

    - Play it for an hour, and you will never, ever remove the finger grease and scratches from the front

    - If you drop it, it's dead

    - The shiny, reflective screen is no good outdoors

    - And if you do ever whip it out in public, you might as well have 'MUG ME' tattooed on your face

    - Loading...please wait

    Verdict:

    - Too expensive for what it is, and packed with features that are either half-functional (internet) or not entirely practical (plug in some headphones and it becomes the world's heaviest, least durable MP3 player)

    7 out of 10

    Thankyou

  12. The UMD format doesn't seem to have much of a future for movies, so you might as well buy the cheapest import you can find (unless you really want to pay £20 to watch American Pie on a tiny screen). It's doomed to go the way of pre-recorded Minidiscs.

    Gameswise, well, I only use mine for the internet at the moment - it's perfect for browsing Gamefaqs while I'm playing decent games on a proper console. GTA was amazing, for 30 hours or so, but there's not much else. I'll keep waiting for Vice City or something like that. In all, PSP is not the best purchase I ever made.

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