Tigranes

Even kids are starting to dive around in the little league. What I mean by that is that some of the growing generations (in which I'm included) are beginning to accept diving as a *legitimate* attempt at something which is perfectly fine if you get away with it, and should be congratulated. Diving needs to be minimised, not left to fester as it is now. mkreku: football players are expected to do that, too. But only after rolling on the ground and earning a free kick. THEN they can bandage their whatevers and fight on heroically!

Practically, diving is a good idea to employ in 'moderation' in modern football. That's practically. I also know that we now see diving in little kids playing soccer, and some (especially under 20) believe it is 'entertaining'. I don't know. I think it's horrible, and while it will never be eradicated, this kind of "oh well" attitude makes it worse. Diving is a horrible thing, because if everybody stayed on their feet like their lives depended on it we'd see much more flowing, and much more entertaining football. IMO diving should be abhored and their dedicated disciples (e.g. Drogba) attacked much more severely. The Italians have always been guilty of it in the past, but since I haven't seen the semi-final I won't presume to apply the law of precedence there. Italy are a good team and they can sometimes play very entertaining football, but there's a reason I don't support them. Anyway, Frenchies. Scolari's Portugal is aggressive and isn't afraid to use such tactics, so we shall see how the older French squad rides out the frustrations, I don't think they'll snap like the Dutch did. The fitness question might come into play, however, if it goes into extra time, especially since Ribery and Henry will be exhausted during normal time as the main sources of pace in the team.

Monsieur Zeedane disagrees with your assessment. So I woke up at 7:30am and saw 0:0 at half time, and decided the game wasn't worth watching. Guh?!

That is really out of this world.

Hubba hubba.

Yeah, protect himself from an Argentine being rapidly pulled away from him! They have guns!!111!!

Brazil didn't deserve the free kick at the end since Ronaldo made a blatant dive. A pity, the rest of the game was fairly clean IMO, and the kick itself was a near thing from Ronaldinho. It's probably going to be a Germany - France final, based on their momentum.

They would only be able to allow 10% scaling or something in any case, or things would go wrong (equipment, animations, possibly even spellcasting)

Sawyer said scaling is not in the character creation screen, I think i saw it on one of my nwn2news catchup sprees.

Yeah, but he's certainly earned Khanship:

zing'd indeed. Anyway, Oblivion is playable with FX5500 with the proper tweaks, but evidently you didn't feel it was worth the bother. Not my philosophy, but who am I to harp on about it. Of course, now Hades needs a new graphics card.

Running in front of Henry is no problem, the elbow barging is. Although without Henry's fall-slash-dive, a bad ref might have let it go. Meh. I support Henry here, but that's only because I believe this was a bad decision from him and he will move on and return to the cheat-free player he is. Especially in the modern game, I think you can only have problems if a player dives consistently and deliberately (Drogba).

Funny thing is, Puyol was an idiot for fouling Henry when he was never going to get to the ball; then Henry was an idiot for exaggerating the damage done. So I don't think anybody can complain, really. I just thought it's easy to simply say the Spanish suddenly fell down a pit of suck in the second half, but to me it looked like the fact that the French were very good at cutting Spanish play out in the midfield, esp. with Vieira/Makelele (and even Zidane) and they couldn't react when their midfield control dissipated. It remains to be seen whether France can do that to a more technically gifted Brazil, whose strikers won't be as easy to mark as fall-down-lots Torres. Also entertaining to see all the Henry offsides, some of them were really funny because Henry made the run, but the man with the ball didnt pass, instead held it, then when Henry stopped and started coming back they release the ball, as if to deliberately catch him offside. That was actually most of the offsides, though after a while I think he got pissed off and started ballwatching. They really need to work out their teamwork to beat Brazil.

Yeah, when the through ball came all the defenders instinctively looked at Henry, looked back, "Ohshiez its someone else" In other news, Aragones looks like your friendly neighbourhood grandpa betting at a horse race.

While it's always dangerous to assume anything that could be contrived as suspicious IS suspicious (e.g. Korea/Turkey upset in 2002, "home advantage" teams, etc...), the refs this cup don't seem to need any incentive other than their own to suck horribly. On the other hand, I was also disappointed by Portugal... they didn't usually play like they did against the Dutch, deliberately stepping up the agression and late tackles to break the game. While I have no doubt that it was 'efficient' and the Dutch could have done better, none of that matters when the football is sacrificed.

Atreides: Yeah. As I said, most people were just disappointed. I think once the storms calm down they'll all accept that Swiss beat us fair and square. Oh, and after Totti thought he was in the WWF and tried to throw Korean defenders onto the floor all the time, not much of a 'case' is left to the Italians. There are plenty of games where ref decisions are crappy or disputable, in that game Italy was on the wrong end of the stick. It happens and you move on, instead of whining about Koreans bribing refs 4 years after it didn't happen. Anyway. No TV access right now, are Sweden even playing well or just being dominated?

Crappers. Lots of Koreans started blaming the ref (naturally), but I have to say the 2nd goal wasn't offside, if there was anything to complain about it was the linesman confusing us but the cardinal rule is you play by the whistle and we forgot that for a minute. The Swiss defence was too good for us anyway, methinks, and since France won 2-0 even a draw would kill us by goal difference. Ah well. We did show that we're not the 5-0 pushovers we were before 2002, and no team can assume they can beat us.

The issue is that the degree of description possible with pre-era RPGs (up to BG2, even) cannot yet begin to be rivalled by the newer technology. Instead of waiting for the possibilities of that technology to mature so that there is an actual improvement, we are left with a *replacement*, thanks to a rushed implementation (and domination) of a system whose technology has and will for some time numerous drawbacks. The most obvious? The limited nature of facial expressions / animations.

I don't know, the Shining was decent but never actually held me by the ropes. Perhaps it's because it's dated enough that most of its tricks are common knowledge (but then, that was probably true back then, too) or I simply don't care for horror films. It did have a few moments to remember near the end.

No real bad calls in Czech game, at least, the red card was deserved. I'm gutted, Koller was their only decent striker, scores in 10 mins then gets himself stretchered off in their first match. Pity for Nedved too.

Look, I am interested in purchasing neither 1/ Overpriced massive console 2/ Even more outrageously overpriced, but marginally smaller console Amazing! Thank you, mr. epi! Oh, thank you!

Been wonky recently, yes. Not sure what's up with it.

Yeah, and since I'm watching the Korea match with other Koreans, there will inevitably be cries of "OMG FRANCE IS LOSING/WINNING/EXPLODING" to my great dismay. But hey, nothing like watching a footblal match after you know the results, huh?

Luck worked well in Fallout because the random encounters portion was a huge part of the game. So it all depends on what the game is built for.

Who's good at rugby? NZ is good at rugby. Is the NZ rugby team white? No.