feltmonkey

Oh good grief

Another one of those irritating matches that aren't on a Saturday at 3.00, but still aren't on TV anywhere. We seem to have had loads of them this season.

Yeah, Madden is on the PC, but you can't do this particular quest on the PC. Most of them specify that you do the quest either on the Xbox or through cloud streaming. There is no option for cloud streaming on this one. The game isn't available through the streaming service. I don't know if there have been examples of games that you could complete the quests via an installed copy of the game on PC, but none of the games I've tried have worked. It has to be streaming. I tried to do the Injustice one last week by installing the game, because streaming was a mess. It didn't give me credit for any of the victories I cheesed, so I had to do it through streaming later in the week.

This is very helpful, thank you! I've been playing a round of Halo every day. A thoroughly joyless experience.

You can't do this quest on PC, and I don't have an Xbox. That's a big part of the shittiness of this particular quest. And as @DennyDifferent pointed out, and I mentioned in my post, the fact that there's going to be loads of people instantly quitting matches is the other part of the problem. It's going to be really annoying for the Madden players. Say, at a really conservative estimate, 100,000 people do this quest. That's 400,000 matches where one player immediately quits. Imagine being a Madden player this week.

On PC?

There's a new set of quests on the Game Pass app, and one of them is to play four sodding online games of Madden sodding 22. It's the 250pt quest, as well. You can't even do this on PC Game Pass, so that's me out, but even leaving this aside what a stupid quest. The existing Madden community will be annoyed by the influx of people who are just there to farm points. A game of Madden takes bloody ages and is completely mystifying to a new player. I don't know if you can just immediately quit, but if so, that's going to be even more annoying to the actual Madden players. Has there ever been a worse Game Pass quest? I hate calling them quests. The whole thing demeans everyone involved.

Yeah, I didn't like Tunic at all when I realised what it was asking of me, but I kind of suspect I didn't give it a fair chance. Norco I've been really meaning to play. I play games pretty slowly (twice as slow as @metallicfrodo for example ) so I think Norco is my best bet to not get stranded halfway through like I did with Dragon Quest XI.

Short? It's a 20-hour game, easily. (Edit - it took me just under 30 hours, according to the stats on my Game Pass profile.) It is worth playing. It's fun, it's colourful, and it tells a good story. The dialogue between the characters is frequently pretty funny, and the portrayal of a couple of the characters is deeper than any I've seen before, particularly Drax. There's a lot of spectacle and entertainment along the way. The combat can at times be a bit of a pain in the arse due to a combination of your reliance on your AI companions and enemies who's attacks make areas of the floor deadly. Of course your fellow Guardians keep getting caught in them. The game is trying to create these situations where a lot of crazy, spectacular action is going on at once and the Guardians are charging around chaotically, bantering and working together to win the day. When it works, it's great, but sometimes it boils down to the player running around trying to resurrect their teammates while periodically getting interrupted or stunlocked. I enjoyed it a lot, partly because you don't actually see very many of these linear story-heavy action games anymore. I like a curated experience like this better than an open world, I think.

Crazy start to the Newcastle game. A disallowed goal in the first 30 seconds, then Sky cut back from the replay of that to Newcastle scoring again. It's clocked at three minutes, but there had only been a minute's play at most.

From the sounds of it, Fred was immense in the last few minutes. Is that right?

With McTominay out as well, if we hadn't signed him we'd be looking at three games of Fred and Lindelof in the midfield.

Well, I'll be surprised if we hold on for the win now.

I'm listening on the radio as well. They reckon it's a ridiculous decision, that Casemiro was holding a Palace player back from getting involved in a melee. Is that a crazy take? It sounds like quite a crazy take.

Rashford

Hope we see Sabitzer and Sancho in the second half.

Nice that the fans are singing Sancho's name when he came out for a warm-up.

It is really sad, particularly as he has obviously been working on his game, and has improved his consistency. He talked in an interview a year or two ago about how he was aware that he took too long to get his game going, whereas Cavani was always at 3000% even if he only played a few minutes. I think pretty much every time I've seen Martial play this season he's hit a good level.

I think he's worth persevering with, and trying to find some way to keep him fit. To my eyes, twice this season the problem has been Martial coming back too early and playing while injured, which seems like a player that is desperate to play. I don't think we can say it's an attitude problem. We're a better team when he plays. He seems to be a key element in unlocking our forward players. I'm not saying we don't try to get a centre forward in the summer, but we need to keep trying with him at the moment.

Wales are getting a right battering off Ireland.

Chelsea's results continue to be very funny indeed.

They'll get shot, surely. The difference this will make is that now they will probably have to work out some kind of payoff. Tricky if Greenwood insists on the full value of his contract, because the club has no money, apparently. I have no idea if they have been paying him since the whole thing came out last year. If they haven't, he could probably claim the backpay for that whole period. I wouldn't be surprised to then see Greenwood pop up in the Middle East, playing against or alongside Ronaldo and earning a good living out of the spotlight, having got away with everything. For those wondering how the case got dropped, the victim stopped cooperating with the investigation and is apparently back with Greenwood. If the victim isn't going to testify against the defendant, and may testify in his defence, there's not much chance of a conviction. The possibility that they might be back together makes me feel ill. It's a horribly common thing in abusive relationships for the victim to take the abuser back, and the abuser rarely changes. I feel bad for speculating about football matters in the light of this realisation, to be honest.

Well that clears that up. Phew.

I wonder what will happen now. I think his contract will still be cancelled by United, but there might be some sort of payoff behind the scenes. The question is whether he will get a contract somewhere else and continue his career. Ched Evans plays for Preston North End, and the Brazilian goalkeeper Bruno who murdered his girlfriend was signed by three different clubs in Brazil. There's always someone willing to ignore morals if it gets them a good player, and Greenwood was on his way to being one of the world's best. I hope we don't try to integrate him back into our squad.

Archer is really back! 6-40 today.