Laivasse

Benteke is our biggest threat and he always tires quite badly after the 60th, so we need to push hard at the start of this half to nick something.

Very good football from us, in general. I love the way our young lads are sticking the boot in on these dirty **** cloggers, giving them plenty to be frustrated about off the ball.

XCOM and The Walking Dead are up there for me. Sleeping Dogs, Max Payne 3 and Hotline Miami are in the 'almost but not quite' bracket, because despite them all being excellent, they're also all a bit too shortlived for what they offer. Sleeping Dogs had some substance but was short for an open world game; I just couldn't return to MP3 with all those unskippable cutscenes; Hotline Miami was a great experience, just lacking in levels and replay value. Admittedly, it's not as if I'm still playing XCOM or TWD either, but I feel like I could return to XCOM to replay it at any moment, while TWD offered a solid couple of hours for every episode, minimum, and strung me along for several months of worthwhile anticipation. Plus TWD has one of the best stories I've ever seen in a game. Some criticise it for not being much of a 'proper game', with controllable action and gameplay - but to me the lack of those things just means it isn't a candidate for game of the decade. It's still an excellent release and holds its own against most stuff from this year. XCOM is just a juicy succulent cake made of satisfying, compulsive, strategic gameplay. Probably the only reason I stopped playing it in the first place was that I traumatised myself with Impossible mode. One potential contender, which arrived too late for me to be sure, is Natural Selection 2. It's an online team-multiplayer, class-based shooter and my early impression is that this could be the next great online shooter to take over my life, following in the footsteps of TFC, CS and TF2. It is overwhelmingly deep, so at this stage I just suck too bad at it to make a pronouncement. Also the team autobalance is kind of broken and I've joined a lot of matches where teams just get steamrolled by an enemy team with 2 extra players. However it is in a constant state of improvement and the devs seem very active and involved with the community. Biggest disappointment: Hitman, no question. In so many ways it crystallises what's wrong with modern gaming.

Some pretty poor footballingz. No bite, little composure, lack of real talent. Get Ireland on. No point leaving subs too late, since we tend to fade horribly past 70 mins regardless of whether we have subs remaining or not.

Has Lichaj had his mouth in a bag of melting chocolate buttons?

How the **** is that not a yellow for dissent?

Scot commentator bitching out Guzan for passing to bannan under pressure. Maybe if Bannan could hold off the mildest of challenges, like most players, he wouldn't have to spin and get rid of the ball like a hot potato.

Jesus christ, Weimann, no excuses there.

Nothing against the lad personally but I can't say I'm happy to see Lichaj on, especially at LB.

I've let off farts with more physical presence than Bannan.

Oh wow, congrats! As for learning to play, I remember outlining the basics for someone before, but my most recent experience of the series was just the 2012 demo so I'm getting increasingly out of touch. I assume that the principles remain the same though: identify your best eleven with the aid of coach reports and attributes, settle on a tactic or three based on your best players' best positions, and then hit 'Continue' until Match Day. Set your scouts to roam around and the rest kind of falls into place intuitively. The arsehole part is figuring out which buttons on the interface are the ones you want, but that's just rote memorisation.

I've obviously gone on about it at length already so I won't harp on, but I don't think Absolution is anything like a good representation of the Hitman series. If you're at all interested in the core concept then Blood Money (about a fiver on Steam atm), Contracts and Silent Assassin all do a much better job of showing off the gameplay that made the series popular. Then again, for an occasional gamer, the Hitman games might have always been a bit harsh, verging on tedious. You have to be willing to put yourself through a lot of trial and error and memorisation. The real satisfaction of these games comes from working your way undetected to your target and then squeezing off a single silenced pistol shot or staging an 'accidental' death, or from hiding in plain sight in a range of disguises. In Absolution that sort of thing has taken a back seat to a lot of crate-crouching and enemy avoidance. However, none of the games have been like LA Noire or RDR in the sense of offering a true open world so they just might not be what you're after. Maybe read up on Sleeping Dogs though...

Yep, I mean the game does manage to be quite fun when it does old-style assassinations, but like you say it's a handful (so far, anyway; I'm at the top of Dexter Industries at the mo). It's further frustrating that the two best levels I've played so far re-used the same map.

It's not that I'm complaining about the score system, but rather the score system as it fits into some of the scenarios in this game. Being a 'silent assassin' makes sense when you're a hitman working for an agency that's trying to avoid attention. It doesn't make any sense when you're just a guy with no contract, being hunted by 30 goons who want to kill you and killing all of them should actually be beneficial (I'm thinking of the Orphanage level here, but there are several like it). Logically speaking, leaving any of them alive shouldn't be a positive thing and who are you supposed to be trying to fool by tidying away the bodies? The police already know all about you so the idea of avoiding notoriety is meaningless. With the story the writers have set up, 47 should be able to do whatever the hell he wants in order to survive. It's basically an abduction/revenge spiel like Max Payne, which doesn't make me want to kill 1 in 10 enemies and hide them in cupboards - it makes me want to blow hired goons away. I just don't think they've come up with a setting where sneaky play makes rational sense. But they want you to be sneaky anyway 'because it's Hitman'. In the funeral level in Blood Money or the Church assault in Hitman 2, it was like: okay, everyone wants to kill you now, so who cares, go and slaughter them all. No need to be a silent assassin. This game sets up that same kind of scenario over and over but the score system is still saying 'remember to be quiet!' My reaction is, 'why?? oh yeah, because videogames.' I realise it's a kind of trivial complaint, but it's symptomatic of how jumbled and dumb the story feels IMO.

The final episode of The Walking Dead was truly excellent. Great, emotional writing. Not much of a 'game' in gameplay terms, but the story itself provides more enjoyment than most other games provide with their conventional, action-heavy gameplay. Which brings me neatly to Hitman: Absolution. Not enjoying this one at all. I've played all the others and I guess I'm a fan, but I don't dislike it because it's different. It's not really all that different at all. It's just kind of **** bad. The disguise system is pretty much useless, the story is garbage, all the guards respawn when you reload and the levels are more of an ordeal than anything else. The entire premise of being a 'hitman' doesn't even make sense in most of the levels any more; much of the time you won't have a target to kill and you'll just be surrounded with people who know who you are and are out to get you, yet the score system still penalises you for killing. Really, what? It's like every level is the final massacre-type level from Blood Money/Silent Assassin, but the game still wants you to play as if tidiness were a factor. If I was Nathan Drake on the run from these guys, I could slaughter them all and not give a shit. But because I'm a genetically engineered super assassin I have to worry about sticking my corpses in the rubbish when I'm done, or else I get a shit score. No thanks. It just seems to be riddled with horrible design decisions, which is weird because the graphics and art direction are mind-blowing, so it's not like this game wasn't lovingly crafted. If I want a good-looking, cinematic third person shooter, I'll play Max Payne 3. If I want a bad stealth game... well, I just don't want a bad stealth game, so never mind.

Nowhere have you explained why the linesman isn't to blame for the 5-0 defeat.

Officials ruined the game. Coming back from 1-0 was within our power. Coming back from 2-0 wasn't, especially when it appeared as if the officials were prepared to conjure goals out of nothing for City. Last time I checked, the Villa squad was not composed of emotionless T-1000 cyborgs, therefore when they saw that there was little point trying, they stopped trying accordingly. I don't blame them. Having said that, the defending all the way up to the first goal was shaky and needs to improve if we want to avoid relegation. We are a fragile team in every sense. Ireland MotM for a great showing before the officials made the game into a joke.

I actually don't feel positive at all, I feel like there's a bigger threat of getting relegated this season than any over the past few years. But today in particular, I know exactly who to be **** off at. This wasn't a game of football.

On a psychological level, the fact that someone's motivation can be destroyed by an unfair call shows that they're in it for more than just money. Only if your pride wasn't at stake would you play exactly the same whether you're winning or you're being treated like a mug by officials.

Stopped watching. This game is now a waste of everybody's time and our lads have no incentive to fight back. Let's say we were to score 5 now, who's to say some bent **** lino wouldn't disallow them all? This could easily be 10-0 by the end because the Villa players don't want to be on the pitch, and I don't blame them. Who wants to play a rigged game?

I can't find it in me to criticise the players for anything that happens at this stage. Their heads are gone, Guzan included. If it was me I would have struggled to stop myself from walking off the pitch after that first peno decision.

This entire sport is a joke as long as we have officials of this calibre.

Every corner they've taken has ended up either on a City head or bouncing around in our area. This is the inevitable consequence.

Today's Gabby = great, smart running; shocking, awful first touch.

Some players are looking panicky, others (Ireland) are looking as confident as ever. This is the kind of situation where lots of good work gets undone by stupid errors.