feltmonkey

well played to your lads. i've been going on all day in the Man Utd thread about how we (United) seem to be drawing too many games this season, so a game in which we're drawing for 85 minutes and then lose... i feel like it was my fault!

i can't help but feel partially responsible for spending all day going on about draws. sorry guys. i suppose Everton proved my point about having a positive approach and not settling for a draw.

hey, i've explained what i meant. i'm not talking about years of underachievement, or a slide away from a period of success, i'm just talking about the draws! the draws! i know i'm lucky to have fluked into supporting a hugely successful team, and i don't take the team's success, and the good times for us supporters for granted. i know we're not entitled to it. i've supported United since well before they were good, i started supporting them in the early 80s. we hadn't won the league in decades, and it was nearly another ten years before we cracked it. but since then we've been absolutely spoiled. so i'm not saying being a United fan is as horrific, traumatic, or mentally cruel as being an Everton fan. i was just fucking saying that this season we've been drawing a lot. for fucks sake.

hyperbolic? me? that's the most ridiculous thing anyone has ever said in the history of all history!

i'm just saying we draw an awful lot. that used to be their trademark. there seems to be a fear about the team - fear to try for too much. we get a one goal lead and try desperately to hold onto it. i'm not talking about Everton's style of play (although they always played more football than they were given credit for to be honest) more their mentality, which tended to lead to them not quite doing enough to win games rather than drawing them all. there have been glimpses of breaking out of this mentality at times this season, but it does seem to be our default position. of course, perhaps we're actually no better than our league position suggests. perhaps we don't have better players than some of the teams ahead of us. what is it? negative mentality? poor players? just poor form? bad luck? or something else?

we won't win. we're generally too afraid of losing, and lack the bravery to go out and win games, rather than drawing a lot and nicking the occasional win. we're more Everton now than Everton ever were.

they fixed the Dishonored mistake. i was just about to buy it for a mate of mine who has it on his wishlist when it changed price.

roger that! i'm quite tempted to get Farming Simulator 2013 from Greenman. £6.79 for the Titanium edition.

too late! damn you, Spork! never mind, it's entirely possible i'll stick just to PC next gen anyway.

roger that.

so far, i have managed to not spend any money. it's not been easy. anyway, i have a few questions: is the PC version of Dark Souls worth it, bearing in mind i already have it on PS3 and haven't played it a huge amount? i found it a bit repetitive (literally - i couldn't get past a certain bit and had to keep repeating it, then going back and forth between the same two campfires for hours trying to level up or get cash or something.) i'm not great at difficult games, i don't really have the time required to invest, and i have a baby to look after, so can't be playing grim terrifying games in front of him. i'm still tempted despite all this - the fighting was good. is it worth it, or do i just have Steamsale fever? should i get Outlast? i do quite like scary games, although i'm a bit of a wuss about them. i finished both Condemneds, and System Shock 2, amongst others. this looks a bit too scary for me though, possibly. i never got past the first couple of hours in Amnesia. also, see question one for baby problems. i've done well not to buy them during the course of writing this post, i think. so, should i? or should i restrain myself?

Great stuff tonight. Giggs and Rooney were fantastic. Nani and Kagawa had good games too. I loved Nani's goal. Rooney ended up with four assists. Those two crosses from the left were fantastic. I think he could play there, on the left of a 4-2-3-1 with Kagawa in the middle. Kagawa gives the ball away in silly areas on the left, something he doesn't seem to do in the middle.

Have we got Kagawa playing at number 10?

Yeah, that's very fair. He's a ridiculous, expensive mistake.

I wish Trott well, hopefully he can make a recovery and come back in the future. It sounds like a Trescothick situation unfortunately. I feel for the guy. Reading what Tresco went through was pretty horrible. He's made the right decision I'm sure - some things are more important than cricket.

i'm really not happy with the mentality of the team this season. we go into games with the attitude of scraping ourselves in front, probably through a set-piece, and then trying to hold on to it. we don't have a good enough defence to do this, and even if we did i don't like it as a philosophy. we need to play with a bit more style. style in the way we set up to attack teams, not a vague concession to football by picking one flair player and sticking them out on the left wing with instructions to track back first and attack second. we're shit, yes. but we're also shit to watch with it. i can see the first one turning around a bit, and ending up with us becoming a top-four team, but the second doesn't look like it is going to change. and because we're too negative, too cowardly, we'll not be champions.

Cardiff deserved it though, if only because Rooney should have been sent off. But that miss at the end when he tried to square it to Welbeck... <shudder>

Adebayor is on now though! Surely he will lead a dramatic comeback! He's well-rested if nothing else.

Should we stick with Tremlett? He's not the bowler he was before his injury, he seems to have lost a lot of pace. He may look like a terminator, but if he's bowling at 78mph he's not going to terrify the Aussies. He bowls short too, so decent batsmen can wait on the back foot and have all the time in the world to club it through square-leg for four. Perhaps our strategy needs to be to try and get Warner to punch Joe Root again and get himself banned.

It's obvious to say it, but the problem is our batting lineup is riddled with deep issues that are not going to be solved before the next test. Trott and Prior have serious long-term technical problems. Carberry and Root are new guys, too new to be relied upon. So we really only have three decent batsmen at the moment - Cook, Bell, and Pietersen. These three are all genuinely world-class, which goes some way to papering over the cracks in the rest of the line-up, but something needs to be done long-term. In the short-term the coaching team are going to have to earn their money, and the players are going to have to show some backbone. I don't like the way some of them appear to be scared of Johnson. In a way, the difference between a good team and a great team is how they deal with collapses. Wickets always bring wickets, that's a truism of the game. Anyone who's played or watched it knows that. Sometimes you will lose three in quick succession, the key is to have batsmen who can come in and stop the slide and rebuild. In the summer, Bell kept doing just that. I think Root might be able to one day. But in this test in both innings we collapsed to oblivion. If these two or three wickets keep becoming four, five, six, ten, then we'll get battered this series.

Two real bonus wickets so far. Long hop from Broad ends up in the hand of point, then Tremlett gets Watson to hit an innocuous sub-80 mph delivery straight up in the air.

Yeah it's all about the England innings. Last tour we won because the top order scored heavily, but that was against a weaker attack than Australia have now. In the summer our top order wasn't great, and if we hadn't had Bell digging us out of trouble time and again the overall result could have been very different.

The hypocrisy of the Australian fans booing Stuart Broad is hilarious.

so i continue my bleak, futile odyssey through my Steam and PS+ lists, and bring thee findings. Dustforce is a stylish hardcore platformer that is, frankly, too hard for me. it doesn't seem to have pad support, which is a shame. this makes it even harder than it is by design for me, as i'm just not used to using keys. i couldn't make my fingers do the gymnastics they needed in order to maneuver my little broom-wielding man around. it seems quite good, reminiscent of Strider, in fact. English Country Tune is a boring puzzle game that involves pushing balls into squares. i have no idea what the title is about. it's off the stack. Star Command is a brilliant little Android game. it's like FTL with cutesy graphics. it's about frantically managing crises as your ship is on fire and invaders are beaming in. a fine toilet game. Intrusion 2 is like Metal Slug or Turrican or something, but from level two you get to ride a big wolf. it has physics, but they only get in the way. it's bizarre. at one point a rope bridge is blown up and the two halves hang down. you have to push them aside to get down a tunnel, but you sort of stand on them and can't push them, and you have to wriggle your way past them by going back and forth. the physics don't even add anything to the game really. every now and then you can push something down on top of some enemies, but it's very obviously set-up for you to do this. the game is worth playing though, if only to see the peculiar animation of the wolf. they have animated each limb separately, and at times it sort of works, but at others it just looks hilarious. Gone Home is perfectly described elsewhere as System Shock meets My So-called Life. it's a deeply unsettling first person game in which you explore your deserted home during a creepy thunderstorm. playing it, i'm terrified but i'm not sure why really. nothing scary has happened yet, it's all manipulation and suggestion. Tiny and Big: Grandpa's Leftovers is a third-person platformer in which you can slice and manipulate your environment with a laser and a grappling hook. you can also attach rockets to things and fire them into the air. an indicator of the game's sense of humour is that there are frequent mentions of pants. you're looking for pants, i think the villain is being driven mad by the pants, and so on. pants. haha. to be fair that is marginally more sophisticated than my own attempts at humour. graphically, it looks a bit like Psychnauts which is no bad thing. i really need to play some proper games.

England's Sam Burgess for some reason gave his shorts to a fan after the England vs France game. here's what happened next. http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/rugby-league/24974574