PWB: April

It's kind of like when Nintendo announce an anniversary re-release of Mario and it turns out to be three roms and an emulator for fifty quid.

sorry, what do you mean

Where can I buy that?

Where can I buy that?

Last fiscal year.

Additional PLAY:

South Park: The Fractured But Whole - The version with all the DLC was heavily discounted in a recent Switch sale, so I grabbed it. I'm really enjoying it, but then I enjoyed Stick of Truth and have an incredibly infantile sense of humour. Awful loading times aside, it's like playing the show and the presentation is great. So, that'll keep me busy for a while.

Additional Want: The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles, a belated localisation of the two Ace Attorney games set in Meiji-era Japan. I must admit I'd given up hope of these ever making their way to the West, so this is a fantastic surprise. Also, it's been absolutely ages since we had a new game in this series. Out in July on PC, PS4 and Switch.

Turns out the sticking point all along was their unauthorised use of the Sherlock Holmes character, which they have resolved by keeping everything exactly the same but renaming him Herlock Sholmes. Brilliant.

In the last Layton game, the talking basset hound was called Sherl O. C. Kholmes. Trufax.

I only ever played the first Layton game, years and years ago - it was pretty fun. Haven't there been loads of them since? Surprised they haven't found their way onto the Switch really.

It's kind of like when Nintendo announce an anniversary re-release of Mario and it turns out to be three roms and an emulator for fifty quid. Then everyone buys it anyway. Everyone is too invested not to.

I'm surprised mart wasn't taken to the burn unit for a check up after that.

I only scar on the inside, cav, you know that.

I only ever played the first Layton game, years and years ago - it was pretty fun. Haven't there been loads of them since? Surprised they haven't found their way onto the Switch really.

I want to say there are six proper games? Curious Village, Pandora's Box, the one with 'time travel' (not really, but that's part of the mystery), the fourth one, Miracle Mask, and then Azran Legacy.

(Research after typing the above tells me I mean Lost Future and Spectre's Call… not going to pretend I knew off the top of my head)

There's also the crossover with Ace Attorney and then the latest one, Layton's Mystery Journey, which was on 3DS and mobile before coming to Switch. That stars his daughter, not him.

Pretty sure at least the first three are out on mobile, which seems like a good place for them to live. Except they're priced like proper games (£15?) so don't be expecting £1 wonders.

EDIT: There's also a free one on mobile, but I never played it.

Stopped playing PW after the third one, planned to get Apollo Justice and just…didn't. I hear mixed things about it but I feel kinda' bad for Apollo himself, he didn't seem to take off given they seem to just go back to Phoenix and then relegated him to a side character (and did they…maim him? damn).

Is it fair to say that they're ALL at least a good time? Almost bought the trilogy on Switch but I dunno if there's any point when I get a fresh set of trials I don't know anything about.

Anyone played an old RPG called Lunar? It's a PS1 game that was also remade on PSP (but everyone hates that version sadly). It's rather lovely atm, nice anime cutscenes and has a nice 'Saturday Morning Cartoon' feel to it.

All the PW games are worth playing. The two trilogies both have a weaker middle episode (2 / 5) and end on a high note (3 / 6) but they are so self-referential you basically need to play them in order anyway. I’m honestly amazed they haven’t re-released the second trilogy yet because 5 and 6 are still stuck on the 3DS.

My 3DS is gracefully retired.

I've dismissed Hotshot Racing on here before because the rubber banding is terrible. But we had a bash on multiplayer last night and it's brilliant.

There were six of us online, and it's some of the most fun I've ever had in a racing game. Barrel Drop, which is basically Mario Kart with Outrun handling, is an all-time great. Thoroughly recommended if you can convince your mates to pick it up. (Free on Game Pass.)

Rubber banding in racing games only stops being an issue when all racers are human. When it's the AI doing it, you feel robbed; when it's a friend, it's just a laugh.

I can see why this would be great in that case.

Interesting, keys are available for a quid too. I didn't like the SP but might be a good choice for multiplayer.

For some reason - because I'm already playing several games that are so long I doubt I'll ever see the end of them - I've gone back to The Lord of the Rings Online.

I come back to this every few years and always have a good time. I've never made it past level 30 though, I always seem to take a break at that point and when I come back I've forgotten what all the little icons do.

It looks better than I remember it, I think the lighting and perhaps some of the character models have been enhanced since I last played. It's still very much a knock-off World of Warcraft clone from 2007, but its art design makes up for its technical limitations and it's still a really excellent (and almost inconceivably vast) interpretation of the source material.

Anyway, I'm having a fine old time collecting bear livers and red berries for an assortment of ungrateful hobbits, I wonder if I'll make it past Rivendell this time?

We might need to be a bit sensitive around feltmonkey for a bit. Seeing as his team has fucked up football and led to large swathes of people putting their team in the Bin

Sorry to go back to this days late, and indeed after the whole thing collapsed in one glorious evening, but yeah, I would completely agree with anyone who Binned Man Utd or any of the other eleven teams involved. I was considering binning them myself. The non-football fans probably wouldn't get what a seismic thing this is, but believe me, it's something that I have never considered doing before, and am not even sure I would have been capable of actually doing.

Why do we put up with it? Well, this is the first time in my memory where football fans have realised that we can do something about the direction football is taking, as long as we all stand together. (Actually, there was a hint of it earlier this season when teams tried to introduce a pay-per-view model which existed on top of the subscriptions to Sky, BT, etc for £15 per match(!) and everyone boycotted them, donating money to charity instead.) If you love to watch football, and millions of us do, what do you do? You support a team for decades, it genuinely becomes part of your identity, but it's out of your hands. I'd supported Man Utd for 20 years and then suddenly in 2005 the team was bought by the Glaziers, an American family of billionaires, in a move that mind-bogglingly meant that the club itself was saddled with the debt for the purchase (they are still miles away from paying it off, while the Glaziers take tens of millions of pounds out of the club every year.) I went to protests, but they achieved nothing. Some fans disowned the club and formed a new non-league club called FC United of Manchester. I stayed supporting the team back then, despite hating the situation. It wasn't the players or the manager who were to blame. The phrase "Love United Hate Glaziers" was first coined around then, a chant that was still heard at every United game until the doors closed due to the pandemic, and was heard in Manchester today at protests by Man Utd fans over their club's attempt to ruin football by forming the ESL and removing the pretty important element of actual fucking competition. Perhaps this anger will lead to something - there are calls for the implementation of a 50%+1 system, where fans own the majority stake in clubs. That would help, but will it happen?

As for this being a reflection of society at large - well, I don't know. I can't imagine us ordinary people being able to stop non-footballing billionaires being shits in the space of 48 hours - can you? We absolutely could if we realised our power, and how many more of us than them there are, but where is the will to do so? The actions of the clubs' owners is completely in line with general capitalism though of course. Marcelo Bielsa, the manager of Leeds United, who were one of the teams not invited to join this closed league, was asked to comment on the ESL, and what he said sums up not only that situation, but the problems with the world in general -

"The fundamental problem is the rich always aspire to be more rich without considering the consequences for the rest. As they gain more power they start demanding more privilege over the rest."

It's been pretty wild seeing this stuff from the outside. The fact that we seem to have finally found a limit on what can be sold off in the eyes of the British public. The dawning realization of fans that have loved something their entire lives that they're less important than the opportunity of a 3 year contract with a Chinese streaming platform. The creeping feeling that if the ESL had bothered to get a single Murdoch paper in on the ground floor, we'd be hearing nothing but 'finally, the best of the best can show us what they can really do, unfettered by their lessers' like some kind of Randian uberfütball player.

It's sucked and been really pretty depressing, least of all because the owners of these clubs got their fingers burnt, so they're going to do it again, but slower.

I still don't entirely understand what the hell happened. Or was about to, but then didn't. Or did it?

In hindsight, maybe I could have done more than just trying to decipher it on Twitter, from vague references made by people only half-interested themselves, while possessing none of the fringe context required to piece all the outrage together into one coherent, furious jigsaw. But I could tell it was something about football, so it didn't seem worth the effort.

I still don't entirely understand what the hell happened. Or was about to, but then didn't. Or did it?

6 teams in the UK - the richest ones, maybe not the best ones - decided that they were tired of not making enough money, so they and 6 clubs from Europe decided 'hey, we should make our own clubhouse!' where they could set their own rules. Pay Per View matches! Rules for what can get shown in clubs! Shorter matches, maybe! Deals with Saudi and Chinese streaming platforms than FIFA and UEFA won't let them have all the cash from!

The rules would be changed a bit. There'd be no relegation and no promotion, meaning the 12 founding teams would always have a spot. They'd invite some other teams to take part but it was extremely a rich-kids club.

They announced it, some pundits got upset, then the fans got upset. UEFA threatened some stuff like the players not getting to play in the Champions League - the current European Super League - or being able to play for their country or whatever. The teams then bottled it and decided 'actually, no, we made a lot of people quite upset with this so lets not.' People seemed pretty mad that the sanctity of the game had been corrupted or some shit, carefully forgetting this is pretty much exactly how the premiere league was founded.

They're going to try it again, but more progressively. Late stage capitalism leaves clubs like Totenham half a billion pounds in debt which is extremely sustainable, so you can kind of see why the clubs were like 'oh shit we need cash now'.

To anikify it a bit: Godzilla, Gidorah, Destroyah, MechaGodzilla and Mothera decide they're going to make their own new franchise and never allow any other monsters to come into it. Fans got mad. Monsters decided to not do it.

the sanctity of the game had been corrupted

ikr

They're going to try it again, but more progressively.

Isn't this the way of all things though, things are rushed through and receive massively negative feedback before taking a more softly-softly approach and becoming the norm without anyone complaining? Swinging wildly from one comparison to another, see also:

• Videogames needing an 'always online' connection
• Supermarkets raising prices on everything
• Right-wing politics and those in power basically taking the piss in broad daylight without any fear of retribution

…

…

Wow, that escalated quickly.

I approve of the concept of anikification, though. In future I will attempt to understand more complex situations through the medium of giant monsters.

I look forward to cav applying anikification to Martanomics.

To anikify it a bit: Godzilla, Gidorah, Destroyah, MechaGodzilla and Mothera decide they're going to make their own new franchise

Mothra is definitely the Tottenham Hotspur of this group.

God knows what Arsenal and Spurs were doing trying to pass themselves off as part of the European elite. Milan too, as they have been crap for many years, and rarely qualify for the Champions League these days.

Anyway, from my understanding of the situation as The Society's defacto Sports Correspondent -

(Sorry, this got very long. It's all about football, so feel free to ignore it and go back to discussing Hitman 3)

The driving force for the whole thing was the two big Spanish clubs - Real Madrid and Barcelona. If you want a laugh, have a look at anything the Madrid president Florentino Perez has had to say about the situation. He still insists it's going ahead, even though there are only three clubs left in it. They operate with staggering debts, and their bubble has now burst. The fallout of this has yet to be fully felt, but the idea of either of these historic, legendary clubs going to the wall is not unthinkable, far from it. They create their own problems by having to be the biggest clubs in world football, paying the biggest transfer fees and wages, and competing with each other. They spend over £100m on players pretty regularly. Messi gets paid half a million pounds a week. These two clubs are locked together in a death charge to their own oblivion. A game of chicken where they both continue to accelerate towards a chasm. The ESL was their attempt to hastily construct some kind of bridge in front of themselves as they hurtle on.

Of course, as the potential of getting even more money and removing the possibility of failure was put forward, the greedy owners of Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal and Spurs jumped at the chance. The current model of top-level European football, which is where the most money is, includes the possibility of failing to qualify for the biggest competition - the Champions League - and missing out on money that they may have already factored into their budget. This was what they really wanted - an elimination of the possibility of failure. Chelsea and Man City joined seemingly reluctantly. They don't need the money as they are bankrolled by morally reprehensible oil billionaires, and joined for the prestige and to be part of what seemed about to become the top European competition. It's ironic that it was the withdrawal of these two clubs that sparked the scheme's collapse - the two most morally bankrupt ownerships triggered the right thing being done, and could only afford to do so because of their immorally-aquired money.

The scheme itself involved twelve of the biggest clubs in Europe forming a new breakaway competition. As these were most of the biggest clubs, and would become by far the richest on the back of the money they would make from this competition and the TV deals on the back of it, the ESL would become the biggest, most prestigious European football competition. A key to this would have been that the twelve "founding clubs" would own, regulate, and control the competition themselves. This would cut UEFA and FIFA out of the picture. UEFA and FIFA are themselves corrupt, greedy, and deeply problematic organisations. They are nominally not for profit organisiations, but in practice have billions in the bank and fund the extravagant lifestyles of their delegates. This ownership and control was a key component in the scheme for the twelve clubs. They were unhappy with the way UEFA and FIFA run football. We're all unhappy with UEFA and FIFA, but I suspect that (particularly in the case of Real Madrid) the biggest objection was with the fact that they sometimes allowed other clubs apart from them to win things, and that they didn't give the biggest clubs a far bigger slice of the money than anyone else. As far as they are concerned, the only reason anyone watches football is to watch the biggest clubs, so they should get all the money. The other clubs would be allowed to fight over the scraps they deigned to sprinkle in their direction. This was literally part of the ESL model - they would give some of the money to the football pyramid, presumably to placate them. They would keep most to themselves to ensure that none of these urchins could ever actually compete with them, of course.

These twelve clubs would also not be able to be relegated out of the ESL no matter how badly they (and I'm thinking of Arsenal here) were thrashed by everyone else in the league. A select few other teams would be invited to play in the ESL to make the numbers up to 20, but to my knowledge it was never laid out exactly how these would be selected. This lack of actual competition, of jeopardy, was a key benefit to the twelve, but also the thing that every football fan objected to. Every fan - not just those of the clubs who were left out, but of the clubs involved as well. Even the players and managers of the included clubs seemed horrified. Sportsmen are by definition hugely competitive. They understand to their very core that sport is about competition, about proving to yourself and others that you are the best, or at least pretty good, or in my case, hopeless. Many, many players - including a number who would have been able to massively increase their earnings if this had gone ahead - condemned the idea. Kevin De Bruyne, one of the four or five best players in the world, who could probably have commanded wages that would make Messi jealous, tweeted that the most important thing in football is competing. Luke Shaw, who plays for Man Utd, tweeted that any player or team should be able to dream of competing at the top. This closed shop system is the key difference between the ESL and the Premier League. The PL in the end became a rebranding of the top division of English football, the implications to fans in terms of how the game is televised has been massive, but crucially the likes of Brentford or Sheffield United can still find a way into it by footballing means.

And of course the ESL collapsed. Why did it collapse? Everyone hated it, but that doesn't always stop these things from happening. Chelsea and Man City dropped out, for reasons I've mentioned above, and this opened the door for everyone else. Perhaps UEFA and FIFA, and the Premier League, won a game of chicken. The clubs thought that they were too big, and that they would force their national football organisations such as The Premier League and La Liga to allow them to play in their own league and play in the ESL in midweek. This was their plan - they weren't leaving their domestic leagues. UEFA and FIFA threatened to exclude clubs and players from their competitions, including the World Cup. The Premier League threatened to kick the teams out. This is interesting. The twelve clubs wouldn't give a monkeys about their players not appearing at World Cups, but they couldn't survive on eighteen games a season scattered across Europe. The six English clubs surely realised that The Premier League would suffer financially without them - you only need to look at the drop-off in viewing figures for games not involving the "big six" to realise this. But the Premier League would suffer hugely even if they let these teams stay in. When all of a sudden the battle for the top four didn't matter anymore, when any of the big six could tank any season when they're out of the running for the title safe in the knowledge that they couldn't fail to qualify for the ESL, when smaller teams could perform massivly above expectations but it wouldn't count for shit because they wouldn't be allowed at the top table anyway, when instantly there were far fewer meaningful games in a season, what would the Premier League have to lose by kicking the big six out? They couldn't co-exist with the ESL without it ruining their own competition. This put the Premier League in a stronger position than the ESL clubs.

The other massive miscalculation was that they didn't court a TV company in advance. Sky, BT, the BBC, and even Amazon, have expensive deals in place to televise the Premier League and Champions League and of course recognised that the things they have paid huge amounts of money for would be massively devalued if the ESL went ahead. So of course they reacted by stirring up feeling against it. I completely believe that the likes of Gary Neville (who was brilliant on the day the news broke) honestly and passionately believed that the ESL was bad for football, not just bad for Sky, but their condemnation was very much in line with their employers' interests. What if the ESL had courted Sky? Given them a cheap deal on the first couple of seasons in exchange for a bucket of hype? What if when the news broke Sky told us it was exciting, and the prospect of seeing the game's elite playing each other more often mouth-watering? They probably would have had to lock Gary Neville in a cupboard and tried to drown his yells of objection out with fanfares, of course. I wonder if the fans would have been as united against the ESL if the media were telling them it was a great idea.

This is how the zombie corpse of the ESL will return. Not in a more progressive or palatable form, but one with better PR. The ESL by design simply cannot exist in a more palatable form. The big draw for the clubs was the idea of being able to control the flow of money themselves, and they can't do that without owning the concept themselves and ensuring that they could not be relegated out of it. That is the essence of the idea, so any other version would likely contain the same thing that everyone hated about this one, but they'll tell us it's better and probably enough people will believe it. Already you can sense the appetite for fan revolution subsiding. There was another round of games. Liverpool conceded a very funny last-minute equaliser, Man City won the cup they win every year again, and the complacency is setting back in.

TLDR - I don't think there is one here. Football is probably fucked anyway. Football clubs should never have been allowed to be privately owned in the first place. Florentino Perez is a twat. I don't know.

That was a really good summary, and must have taken ages to type, so thanks! I feel much more informed (if no more invested).

Continuing this sudden onset 'Boomer RPG' phase, I've been playing Wild Arms 3 and hot damn this is something I thought I might like but now I feel like I've needed it for a while. It's a JRPG set in a Wild West type world (still magic tho because jrpg) called 'Filgaia. it opens up with the four main characters first meeting in a mexican standoff on a train where you are then prompted to choose each one individually for a short playable prologue explaining somewhat how to play and how they ended up on the train, as openings go I thought it was super neat.

It's a PS2 Classic so I can play it on PS4 too, yee, and I can't stress this enough, haw.