#porting el to this game has been such a good decision

[redwayfarers]

And now you're playing with matches Come out of the ashes underneath you A million voices in the crowd they're screaming, "Stop, now" We'll let 'em swallow their pride, you're turning the tide to true believers Got them in the palm of your hand, you're playing God now

Elandrin Hawkmaze, the Painted Phoenix, one of my MCs from @exilethegame! Artist is my amazingly talented & wonderful bestie @just-eyris-things whomst I adore with all my might and who sparks all the joy. Thank you for making my arson son look absolutely fantastic and.. hot

Elandrin Hawkmaze is an AU version of my gw2 OC, Elandrin Aien. For more screaming about El, go on @i-mybrunettelady <3

[awayfromthedesk]

In the soil, underwater and on the table. A look into small food production in Monterey County during shelter in place.

By Marielle Argueza, Nick Rahaim and Ivan Garcia

Standing knee deep in rows of fennel, Mackenzie Leek, a vegetable farmer, grabs a bulb by the fibrous stalk, pulling it swiftly from the soil. She inspects the plant’s pale green layers before pulling out a knife to slice off the uneven bits “Everyone grows celery here,” she says. “No one grows fennel. That’s why I wanted to do it,” she says.

Except for her fennel and some carrots, the growing is sparse, with half her lot unplanted for now. But organic farming takes time and patience—except maybe during a pandemic.

Before the economic shock of COVID-19, 27-year-old Leek, was in between decision making. Her two-acre plot which she rents from the Agriculture and Land-Based Training Association, or ALBA, is where she grows vegetables for her business Basanti Organics. But the small dimensions of her farm restrict her from expanding her business in different ways like opening a farmers market stall, or selling to restaurants. 

Most of her operations are wholesale to Coke Farms in San Juan Bautista, just like of fellow ALBA neighbors.The other, much smaller side, is her CSA deliveries, or community supported agriculture, in which she prepares a box of her vegetables for customers on a weekly basis. On top of that there was a time crunch. She only has around two more years on the land before her lease runs out.

By the beginning of 2020, she started considering shutting down the CSA. “I was seriously thinking about stopping,” she says. “It didn’t make [monetary] sense. I’m only one person on this farm.”

But in early March with shelter in place orders from the county, her subscriptions to her CSA shot up. She went from having 48 customers to 59 in a matter of a couple weeks, which is big for a single-worker farm. She attributes the rise to people’s reticence to go to grocery stores and farmers markets. “I don’t know, maybe people who used to buy their food at the grocery stores are scared now,” she says. But she also thinks it has something to do with an entire demographic who have effectively stopped participating in the mainstream economy: seniors. “Little old ladies,” says Leek. “Most of my customers are these older ladies in Carmel Valley. So I drop their vegetables right on their doorstep.” 

While business is good now, she is hesitant to celebrate her success, because it all hinges on uncertainty. “Yeah, it’s really weird. In a lot of ways it’s good for me, but I wonder what’s going to happen after this whole thing is over.” Sheltering in place, at least tentatively for Monterey County ends on May 3. 

Leek is a very small piece of the greater picture that is Monterey County’s  $4.25 billion agricultural industry. As food production is essential work during the pandemic, even she and her two-acre plot business, are exposing consumers—who may not have previously given a second thought about where their food comes from—to what it takes to put food on the table. In just a matter of weeks for Leek, it has meant making real-time decisions like keeping her CSA going, but it is also a waiting game. She’s not alone, every local food-related industry from local fishing to the burgeoning restaurant scene has been adapting, but also bracing for the impact that will inevitably follow. Many small businesses, like Leek’s farm, are predicting it will be very ungraceful on their part.

“People will really see how important it is to support local producers,” she says. “That’s my hope anyway.”

--

On a sunny day in early April, Calder Deyerle motors his boat back to Moss Landing with a load of sablefish. He spots a pod of killer whales feeding on a baby gray whale. Schools of anchovies rise from the depths of the water and are closely followed by hungry sea birds.

After a decade of ecological flux, spurred by the climate-driven marine heatwave, commonly called the “blob,” followed by a strong El Niño, life on the waters of the Monterey Bay has settled back into a rhythm of normalcy. It’s on land where fishermen and women like Deyerle face unprecedented uncertainty as COVID-19 has left seafood markets in disarray.

“The markets are shot,” he says. “Most of the fishermen are shut down right now, they just don’t have anyone to sell their catch to.”

The small port of Moss Landing is quiet with restaurants shuttered, the normal flow of sightseers disrupted by orders to shelter in place, and marine science institutions like Moss Landing Marine Labs and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute closed. Commercial fishing is deemed an essential business, so fishermen and women try to stay on the water bringing sustainable, wild-caught seafood to consumers. Yet, how local catch is delivered to those customers has fundamentally changed.

Around 80 percent of seafood caught in the United State that is sold domestically is delivered to restaurants, says Noah Oppenheim, the outgoing executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations. With most restaurants closed the bottom has dropped out of the market. Some fishermen have kept their boats tied up because they have no one to buy their catch, Deyerle says. Others like Deyerle are earning less for what they harvest.

Deyerle hails from a fishing family and typically fishes around a small fleet of Deyerle boats captained by his father, uncle and younger brother. The family also owns the Sea Harvest restaurants and markets in Carmel Monterey. The markets remain open and the restaurants are serving food to-go, but business has slowed down significantly since the state imposed lockdowns to slow the spread of the novel  coronavirus.

Real Good Fish, a Moss Landing-based community-supported fishery that delivers boxes of fresh, locally caught seafood direct to consumers, has seen a sharp spike in business in recent weeks, says owner Alan Lovewell. But, the increased sales seen by Real Good Fish, and other direct-to-consumer businesses like Ocean2Table and H&H Fresh Fish in Santa Cruz, haven’t come close to making up for the lost demand from restaurant closures.

“There are fishermen who need jobs, they want to go fishing and there are still people who want their fish,” Lovewell says. “But without the restaurant market it’s still really tough.” 

Deyerle sells some of his blackcod to Real Good Fish, but both he and Lovewell say there’s more fish coming from fishermen than CSFs can handle. Another formerly lucrative market for Deyerle is selling live sablefish and thornyhead rockfish to Asian buyers in San Jose, but those sales have dropped off significantly. Most of his catch is now being frozen for the Japanese export market, but it’s less profitable yielding around a third of the value as local purchases.

There’s still activity on the Monterey Bay, squid have shown up and with them most of the California squid fleet, Deyerle says. Almost all of the squid caught in California is exported and that market already faced significant shocks through President Donald Trump’s trade war with China.

Most fishermen are now looking ahead to the salmon season on the Monterey Bay, set to open May 1. After four years of wet winters filling streams and allowing returning salmon to spawn, 2019 was the best salmon season in two decades. This year was expected to be another strong season until the economic impacts of the pandemic struck. Now fishermen fear there won’t be enough buyers to support the local catch and that the prices they can sell California king salmon will leave them in the red.

“Everything with COVID-19 is so fluid it's hard to make predictions right now,” Deyerle says. “But my main question right now is ‘what the heck are we going to do with the salmon once we catch them?’”

Organizations like the Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust have stepped in to try to connect consumers to fishermen in this time of crisis. The nonprofit has compiled a local catch guide where people support the local seafood economy while also providing themselves with a tasty, nutritious meal.

--

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced restaurants to radically change how they do businesses. 

For Villa Azteca, a family-owned Mexican restaurant in Old Town Salinas, this change prompted an end to the days of packed dining rooms, chalkboard specials and mimosas for Sunday brunch.

Adilenny Alvarez, the daughter of chef and owner Susana Alvararez, usually manages the payroll and serves. Since shelter-in-place has prohibited in-restaurant dining her duties have expanded to taking orders, prep work and developing recipe ideas. The change is clear to her.

“Right now our business is totally different than when people were able to come in,” Alvarez says. “It’s obviously slower but luckily we’ve been getting support from takeout orders.”

That support comes in the form of take-out orders can't compare to the consistent business from being open. Though evenings, especially Fridays, garner a sufficient amount of orders Alvarez notes midweek, days are sometimes too slow to stay open for. 

One saving grace has been an increased use of the restaurant's Instagram. 

“We are managing by staying active on social media,” Alvarez explains. “This has given some opportunity for my mom’s creative side to come out.”

Susana’s menu receives praise for adding innovation to traditional Mexican dishes and she continues this practice amidst the pandemic. Recent posts on Villa Azteca’s Instagram include a tall glass of vegan horchata made from oats and coconut and beer-battered cauliflower tacos nestled in bright green tortillas made with spinach. Since the shelter-in-place orders took effect in Monterey County, their Instagram has averaged four new posts a day. The content isn’t relegated to recipes either. One post features an image of trays of rice and birria delivered to the emergency departments of the Salinas Valley Memorial Hospital as a display of gratitude. 

A March 27 video post from chef Susana explains the choice to stay open.

“As you know we are living in difficult times,” Susana says in Spanish. “My main concern is my employees and for them we are offering orders for take out.”

The initial announcement of shelter-in-place compelled feelings of uncertainty from some of Villa Azteca’s small staff. 

“The first few days it was really hectic here,” Adilenny says. “Me and my brother had to step up and take calls for orders because we had to cut on some floor staff.”

Now, nearly three weeks since restaurants have shut their doors to diners, Adilenny feels that she’s getting used to what is normal for now. 

A reliable access to fresh ingredients has helped ease the transition amidst so much change. Fresh produce staples like citrus and cauliflower are largely bought from Fresh Market Produce off East Alisal. And with business down due to closing the dining room, Villa Azteca isn’t suffering a shortage in its inventory. 

While the family behind Villa Azteca finds ways to remain open amidst this global crisis, Adilenny suggests ways the community can support their effort and their staff.

“The biggest way people can help now is just order from us if you can,” Adilenny says. “Because getting orders is what keeps us open.” 

--

On one of the bumpy dirt roads that criss-crosses over the ALBA land, a controlled burn sends soft billows of grey smoke into the air. Two plots away, workers sit on the back of their pickup taking a break from planting, while Mackenzie Leek greets her nextdoor farming neighbor. They talk about equipment and he helps her load the wheelbarrow into the bed of her Toyota Tacoma. 

“Not much has changed for them,” says Leek of her neighbors and their working conditions. She explains that though there are now new workplace rules, sometimes it’s impossible on a farm to keep six feet away, or bring a clean mask to work when there are none to buy. 

She has options at least. She knows she can make an extra profit, even if it’s for the short term. Many of the neighboring farmers around her, who are undocumented immigrants, don’t have the choice of starting a public facing business. 

With few lucrative economic prospects, and few other businesses open and hiring, farming to supply wholesale buyers is their only feasible option to make a living. That means, explains Leek, they can’t stop working or choose to stay home safe. “What else can they do? They have families,” she says.

She can commiserate as a one-woman farm—she is both the boss calling the shots and 90 percent of the time, the only worker. While the pandemic has forced business owners to make decisions, often without any planning, she hasn’t lost perspective. Hardwork puts food on the table, no matter who is making a profit. 

She points to her neighbors from her plot. “They’re here from when the sun goes up and don’t leave sometimes until the sun is way down.”

[imx-doomer]

Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus (A review of sorts)

[Image Credits: @CallegosY on Twitter]

The latest entry in the Wolfenstein franchise has left quite an impact in many ways. It is been four months since the release of the game but, has it really been said everything about the game? I don't think so.

(I mean, I wouldn't be writing this if that were to be the case, I think).

A disclaimer: This post will be very, very long (I think it has the right to be), and it will contain major spoilers about Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus and the previous games (The New Order and The Old Blood). Desist from reading this post if you have not played and finished the game(s) on its entirety, and go play them before reading this.  English is also not my first language so please excuse the grammatical mistakes I might have.

As of right now my experience with the game is based on me watching someone else play the game on launch, not because I prefer it that way (I heavily oppose that kind of practice, actually), but because I do not own Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus or the hardware to run the game on my PC. However, it is my intention to acquire the means to play the game as soon as possible, because I firmly believe that's how you're going to get the full experience.

It took 25 years for a Wolfenstein game to feature Adolf Hitler up front in its main story again. That same amount of time also happens to be the time Wolfenstein was absent from being in a position of controversy. But, contrary to what one would have thought a few years back, the inclusion of Hitler himself was not the cause of the controversy.

A lot has changed in those 25 years, but, as the saying goes: the more things change, the more they stay the same. And if there's something that I have learned from all my years spent playing videogames is that people will always complain about them no matter what. I don't have the exact percentage, but most of the time, those complains are dumb. Really dumb.

As a matter of fact, back in the day in 1992 when Wolfenstein 3-D was released it received complains about being "too violent" and "being heavy on the ketchup", and also even the Anti-Defamation League protested the inclusion of swastikas and nazis in the game (Source: Masters of DOOM, pages 114-115). This also ended up causing the game to be banned in Germany, because of the prohibition of nazi imagery in entertainment.

Keep in mind, this was way back in 1992. Of course, don't get me started when DOOM came out. That's a whole different story.

Another game that fell into controversy (as that franchise usually does, now that I think about it), was GTA: San Andreas. I remembered San Andreas while I was writing this post because I reminded myself of the days where I swore to not even touch the game, in part because of a portion of its fanbase (my experience with the game back then consisted of annoying kids playing nothing else but GTA:SA in arcades or cybercafes).

But then one day I decided to play the game myself for the first time, and after the first three hours I was sold. There's this one spot in the highway that connects Verdant Bluffs with Downtown Los Santos, near El Corona and the Los Santos Intl. Airport, where cars would go fast enough to crash with one another and cause huge explosions without any actual input of the player. Those who have played the game might remember that spot. You could just stand there and watch the show unfold, it was so hilarious to me.

That's how I learned to separate the game from the things that ultimately had zero impact on the game itself. A very valuable lesson.

But now, let's talk about the Wolfenstein II, shall we?

Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus is a videogame released in November of 2017, developed by MachineGames and published by Bethesda Softworks for PC, XBox One and PlayStation 4. In this year (2018) it is expected to be released on the Nintendo Switch with help of the same studio (Panic Button) that worked on the port of DOOM 2016.

Now. The game?

The game...is good.

Keep in mind, I said "good". Not very, or great, or excellent, or fantastic, or maybe even GOTY. "Good". There is definitely a feeling that the game could've been -at least- very good, or that it could've achieved GOTY status. In fact, even after some people claimed The New Colossus to be their own GOTY, it wasn't until very recently that Wolfenstein II received a nomination from an important institution for GOTY; a GOTY nomination that ended up losing in favor of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

Now, some of you definitely have issues with a few parts of the game, and I don't really know if we have the same kind of issues, but I'll give you the very short description of mine:

-The story happens, B.J. liberates America from the nazis (big spoilers there I know), but it doesn't really feel like it actually did. There's a feel of balance between the gameplay and cutscenes, but some key moments in the story lacked the necessary impact that was needed in order to strengthen their importance in a game where the story is supposed to matter. -The game also has some balance issues with the difficulty, or rather, the AI of a few enemies. -The gameplay enhancements (you know the ones) arrive perhaps a little bit late, and are not properly introduced in a way that could've improved the experience of the game for many players. -The main villain of this game doesn't even hold a candle compared to the main villain of the previous game, or even other villains of the new game itself. And this is further reinforced by... -The absolute STATE of the last sequence of the game.

There was also another issue. When the game was released there were two groups of people, those who couldn't run the game, and those who bought the console versions. Jokes aside, there were (and maybe still are) some optimization issues with the PC version of the game that stopped a lot of people from playing it, but then again, you had people with PCs that could actually run the game with little to zero issues. Such is life in the mustard zone, I guess.

(Wasn't DOOM 2016 plagued with those issues too? Someone help me with this)

I will expand on each issue in a moment, but before that...

-Wolfenstein: The New(found) Audience-

...Remember what I said about GTA: San Andreas and actually giving videogames a chance? That's more or less what happened with the new Wolfenstein game, I believe. We all were witnesses of that, because the moment when the first trailer for Wolfenstein II was shown back in last year's E3, people that have never touched or mentioned a single FPS game in their lives became instant fans of the franchise.

But, well, to be completely honest, there was more to that than just the footage of the first trailer that made people glued to Wolfenstein. I believe I don't need to go in full details about what I'm talking about. That's not (and will not be) what this post is about and that's an entirely different subject anyway. These series of events have naturally left a lot of people angry and tired. And it should be no surprise that people would latch onto the new game as soon as it was officially announced and started being promoted.

Quite frankly, if you didn't see that coming after the events of August of 2017 in the US, you were either looking the other way, or you haven't realized the kind of impact videogames have these days.

I mean, there's no gentle way for me to put it, that was bound to happen one way or the other. It's not my intention to brag (it isn't something to brag about anyway), but I hinted this scenario way back in a post made in January of last year, so I guess you could say my expectations were met on that aspect.

Though I must say, I genuinely did not expect to see people loving this game when last year they were part of the crowd criticizing DOOM 2016 for being "too violent"...

I did not expect to be proven wrong, that is! I thought their morals were firm about that subject, one can only guess they had a change of heart when they saw the trailer, too!!

(Image by @gamepadink on Twitter)

You have to admit that Bethesda and MachineGames capitalized on this. It took a while, but they did.

They initially choose to distance themselves from any comparisons with real-life events....

And here’s the [SOURCE] of that, by the way.

They did, however, a release of a partial demo of the game to various gaming websites featuring two sections of the game, one of them featuring a very peculiar chitchat between two nazi soldiers that served as a double hook aimed at the new audience gained by the E3 trailer.

It also hinted the very premature death of a certain character, that's also why I told everyone who were avoiding being spoiled to look away from the videos featuring that demo.

They maintained their distance for a while, but then on October 5th they decided to bite the bullet and go all-out. I don't have the screenshot of the initial promotional message but at this point there's no need for a reminder, I think.

Naturally that move turned some people off, and not because they felt personally attacked by the decision, but because there were fears of the game being unnecessary meddled with references to modern-day political events, and making the game look and feel dated in the process.

At least that's how one group of people felt. You also have that other group of very fine tiki torch people that...well, you know the story by now.

Now, after the game was finally out in the shelves and people finally got to play it, personally, I think that was not the case. Keep in mind, there is a handful of nods to modern-day events here and there, but you have to really deviate from the gameplay and search for them in the game to find them; and there's nothing that genuinely gets in the way of gameplay and the main story, and barring three characters that may have been based on real-life characters of the time and a certain old nazi German, there's not a single character in the game that resembles someone in our current day or anything like that.

People will definitely have their opinions of the marketing moves made by Bethesda and MachineGames to promote the game, but you gotta admit that, marketing-wise, they played their cards very well. I mean, one of the golden rules of marketing is to make the consumer feel like they need your product, isn't it? It might be a poor move, but in general the basics of marketing have never been about morals. Whether they turned more people off compared to the ones being brought in or not, I feel it can't be guessed right now. The game was released four months ago and the Switch port is coming soon, I feel there’s something more to come to give a final verdict.

"But WHY were people complaining? Wolfenstein has always been about killing nazis!"

I mean, yes. Nice observation. That is absolutely correct, but let me ask you something:

Where were you back when Castle Wolfenstein was released? Where were you when Wolf3D or maybe Return to Castle Wolfenstein were released? Shit, where were you when Wolfenstein: The New Order was released?

Where were you these 24 years while Wolfenstein was a thing in the gaming industry? Where were you back when Wolfenstein was seen as 'yet another boring WWII FPS game'?

Feel free to not give an answer, I'm not expecting one anyway, but me and many others were suspecting, almost standing by for this to happen around the time of release.

But hey, who the fuck am I to be the unofficial Wolfenstein gatekeeper, anyway? As a matter of fact, fuckin’ welcome to videogames! Pick your favorite and feel free to disconnect a little bit from reality. That’s why they were made!

-The Right Game, The Wrong Time?-

In a way, Wolfenstein II can't really be compared with other games that don't rely heavily on its story like the ones from the new, current Wolfenstein timeline do; DOOM 2016 for example, it employs 20 seconds of the beginning of the game to show the player how much the story matters by making the main character push away a status screen during a cutscene while making a little bit of fun of the usual cinematic sequences that some modern FPS games have.

Wolfenstein II, on the other hand, uses the first 10 minutes to set up the tone for the game by going full narrative/interactive cutscene mode. Unlike the new DOOM, the current timeline for Wolfenstein sets the player in a game where the story takes a slightly bigger spotlight compared to the gameplay.

And from what some of the reactions I saw, most people who picked the game seemed to ignore this, expecting The New Colossus to play like DOOM 2016. Big mistake.

You're not an unstoppable inter-dimensional being of legend, prohibited by Hell itself from being disturbed from its involuntary and forced imprisonment (Doomguy/Doomslayer), you're a war hero that went back from being comatose for more than 20 years, barely survived a grenade blast, and is stuck with half health for half the portion of the game (Blazko).

(Some of) those who complained also seemed to completely forget the existence of The New Order, and treated The New Colossus as the very first time where a Wolfenstein game was more story-driven compared to previous installments. Now, I did not have the opportunity to time the cutscenes and the actual gameplay, but truth be told, and comparing it to other modern-day games, The New Colossus doesn't feel like you're "playing" a movie at all.

With that being said, the story portion could've definitely been expanded a little bit. Some side missions are somewhat important in terms of additional upgrades and missing holes in the main story, maybe they could've been included in a way where you can get to play them in a specific order before getting into the main missions of the game. It's definitely not the "interactive movie" that some people were painting The New Colossus to be. And while it may or may not have the amount of levels that The New Order had, it's still a good single-player ride. But...maybe it wouldn't have hurt if the ride lasted a little bit more?

I will touch the main story in a moment. And boy oh boy, there's a lot to talk about it.

-From 0 To 10, How Hard Do You Want The Nazi Dog To Kill You?-

The difficulty is also something that I've been hearing a lot about. I think this was something that an important portion of the people expected to happen with the buzz that Wolfenstein II got (me included). Now, like I said in the disclaimer, I don't own the game (YET), so I can't really speak much about the difficulty of the game as much as I would like to, but I'll say this:

A good game is not a good game without some kind of challenge. When trying a new game, let the game challenge you for a bit, see for yourself how much you can handle. If you're facing heavy opposition and you can't get past it, lower the difficulty, but JUST by one level.

And if you really can't help it, fine, go ahead and take the dive straight to "Can I Play, Daddy?", but please don't go around saying the only way to enjoy The New Colossus is on Easiest! That's just something you don't want to say in public, unless getting trashed on the internet is your kink.

(Not that I'm actively trying to kinkshame anyone, mind you. You do yourself!)

From the gameplay that I was witness of when I was watching a stream of the game, some enemies were just your normal, run-of-the-mill mobs, then you had the ones that had a little bit of a different dynamic that the player had to get accustomed to in order to advance, and then you had the bullshit nazi dogs that could just end your run in less than two seconds.

There's also another issue with some bosses of the game, because at the time, there were at least a couple of boss battles that the player could dismiss entirely without any punishment. One of them was definitely in Roswell. You could just, escape, run over a few nazis on the way and completely skip fighting that big ass robot. Was this intentional or not, I'm not that sure myself.

Apparently a patch was released recently in order to fix and balance the difficulty a little. Like I said, I really can't say much about it or confirm anything about it, my experience was obtained during the first days after the release of the game. But only those who are willing to give the game a second play might want to check if this ended up benefiting the game or not.

What could also benefit from a patch of sorts is the plot of the game, if you ask me...

-The Story-

Boy...

Except for a couple of people, the characters were fine to me. There was a continuity between some of the characters in terms of their background, but some others were kind of dismissed as the story went along.

Barring the obvious changes that he went thru before The New Colossus, Blazkowicz was the same good ol' Blazko from the previous game. His struggle is pretty damn present throughout the game, and we get a bit of background in regards of his childhood.

In regards to how the game starts, it goes more or less like this:

The game starts with B.J. Blazkowicz back in General Deathshead's compound on the brink of death. A grenade just exploded right between him and Deathshead, which obliterated the nazi leader's head to pieces and left Blazko with a nasty open wound, laying on the ground. Blazkowicz starts having flashbacks as he's being rescued by his comrades before an atom bomb hits the compound. One of the flashbacks involves his mother Zofia (with a very visible black eye) feeding him on his bed, another flashback is the "Make A Choice" scene where you pick between saving Wyatt or Fergus, which is the same choice you make in The New Order that determines which timeline you play in both games. It seems like they decided to make the player pick a timeline again.

After you make a choice, you see Anya (B.J.'s girlfriend) with the rest of the search group (and the person you saved) rescuing B.J. before an atom bomb hits Deathshead's compound, which is something I assumed was going to happen *after* the bomb hit.

B.J. Blazkowicz somehow surviving an atom bomb would've kicked major ass. Oh well. Letdown City - Population: Me.

Someone gives the order to Bombate to drop the bomb, and as soon as it hits the compound Blazkowicz blacks out again. Back to his childhood, his mother (with no black eye this time) hands him a heirloom, an engagement ring that was handed by her father. Then, Blazkowicz's father is back home, and she quickly tells him to hide it.

And speaking of which, yeah. B.J.'s father. Not the very best example of a model dad.

-Rip Blazkowicz, American Traitor-

MachineGames took some ballsy decisions with the direction of the sequel to The New Colossus. One of them being turning B.J.'s father into basically the complete opposite of his son.

On one hand, you have William Joseph Blazkowicz, undeniably a war hero, hardened by one tragedy after another, and caring of his close friends and loved ones, going as far as willing to give his own life to save theirs. On the other, you have Rip Blazkowicz, a good for nothing, selfish, avaricious and failed salesman, and a traitor to the country.

Oh, and he's also racist.

The game tells you right away that Rip is not a very good person. It actually gets you involved with B.J.'s childhood in such a way that the very first interactions you have in the game are throwing jars at him after he hit Zofia, and the other one involves taking yet another impactful decision over the family pet dog. And I really, really hope you were part of the group who intentionally missed that shot.

Rip is straight up a bona fide asshole. And while you may have the usual crowd that will complain about its inclusion because they feel projected on him, some others might be concerned with the prominence of the role he was given in the story

He actually plays a key part, not only in Blazkowicz's childhood but also on the events of the game. And again, more to that in a moment; but if you still can't get over his existence in the game and the role he takes in Blazkowicz's life, just remember that this current timeline is set in an alternate universe where the nazis won WWII; it does not rewrite the events of Wolfenstein 3-D, and in that timeline Blazkowicz still lends a hand in helping the Allies beat the nazis and win WWII, he's still a war hero with a proud family behind him.

I mean, the Blazkowicz from the Wolf3D timeline married a (seemingly) all-American woman, I guess that's all you need to differentiate him from this Blazko (who married an ass-kicking Polish nurse of Jewish descent).

Now back to The New Colossus and back in 1961, B.J. Blazkowicz wakes up after remembering those traumatic moments, and barely manages to sit in a wheelchair in order to defend Eva's Hammer (the submarine he captured in The New Order) from an assault of nazis leaded by Frau Irene Engel, seeking revenge after Blazko killed her lover, Bubi, and destroyed Deathshead's compound.

Blazko receives a gun from a guy that looks a lot like Dolph Ziggler back when he had brown hair, and then goes to town killing nazis while he's sitting on a wheelchair.

Surprisingly enough one of the most enjoyable points in the game. It was also a really big introduction of Blazkowicz's all-out approach against opposition to the newest players, because nothing beats the feeling of killing nazis while strapped on a wheelchair.

(Well, maybe being Doomguy can beat that).

After being (re)introduced to the Jewish scientist Set Roth and seemingly killing all the nazis that got inside the submarine, he gets rescued from a sneaking nazi soldier by a pregnant Anya (pregnant with twins!).

Holy shit, Anya. She became the low-key MVP of the Resistance, and she also plays a few roles in some of the most ridiculous moments of the game. It can be argued that she doesn't really have to do the stuff she does, but if some of the info. I gathered about The New Order is true, she might as well be one of the most heavy-tempered women in any WWII game.

A few moments later you are re-introduced to two returning characters (Frau Engel, the main villainess, and Caroline Becker, the leader of the Resistance) and a brand new one who is directly related to Frau Engel. Engel takes her sweet time to both call out Blazko while she holds an unconscious Caroline captive as well as reprehend her daughter, Sigrun Engel, for not being tough enough to be part of the Regime and their antics. The player can't help but reflect back at the flashback moments that transpired between Blazkowicz and his father, which is definitely something that was put there intentionally by MachineGames to get you involved even further with the story.

Blazkowicz lets himself get captured with the intentions of saving Caroline with help of the friend who was saved during the first cutscene of the game. Inside their ship, Frau Engel taunts Blazko as well as Caroline, orders the nazi guard to knock her down and hands over an axe to Sigrun. Engel wants her daughter to kill Caroline herself by chopping her head off, but Sigrun refuses. Engel insults and berates her own daughter, makes her cry, slaps her, takes the axe, and does the job herself. Frau Engel proceeds to take Caroline's lifeless head and taunts Blazko with it.

Yet another traumatic moment for poor B.J., and boy oh boy, unfortunately the trauma won't be stopping there.

I think the game failed to set up the importance of Caroline for the Resistance, as she was the former leader of the Resistance before her unfortunate demise. She also played an important part in the previous game, which is yet another reason why you should play it just so you can get the idea! Caroline inadvertently becomes a martyr, and one of the main reasons why Blazko pulls himself thru all the bullshit from the first half of the game, to the point of murmuring to himself, asking her to "borrow her wings" for a moment (he actually wears the Da'at Yichud Power Suit that Caroline wore during the first game).

Once she's done, Frau Engel attempts to harm your comrade with the same axe, but Sigrun prevents her own mother from killing him, and then you either get Fergus with only one arm or Wyatt with severe ear damage, depending on which one you rescued. Blazko kills the guards, gets inside the Power Suit and proceeds to fuck up the nazis on their own ship. Having played the first proper level of the game, you end up freeing Eva's Hammer from the nazi captivity, and proceed to carry over Caroline's headless body alongside your friend and a poor Sigrun who wants to redeem herself and distance from her vile mother.

And who wouldn't want to distance itself from your parent who is a fucking nazi general, anyway?

-Sigrun Engel, Too Pure For This World-

Okay everyone, raise your hand those of you who did not like Sigrun at all. Okay, lower them down. Now close this tab and be gone from this post. Leave her alone, you of little faith.

In the midst of the most gruesome global conflict planet Earth has seen yet, Sigrun Engel takes a role that she wouldn't have wanted to play if given the chance. It's one thing to be born a German during WWII, but being the daughter of a nazi general with thirst of world dominance and revenge? Shit, man.

It's pretty clear that before meeting the Resistance (and even after doing so), Sigrun had nobody to talk to and help her cope with her grief. She suffered abuse from her own mother because of her condition, and she goes as far as describing in her diary an encounter with fucking Hitler himself where he orders Frau Engel to put her daughter in a body conditioning camp of sorts.

If you don't side with someone who got fat-shamed by fucking Hitler, I'm letting you know right now, I don't fuck with you.

Now, naturally a few interactions were to be expected between a descendant of a nazi and a descendant of a Jewish family, and this ends up being the case with a heated discussion between Sigrun and Anya that takes place in the dining area of the submarine of the Resistance. Blazkowicz can't help but feel bad for her, and Sigrun seems to understand that virtually nobody wants her to take part in the group.

And things just get uglier when Grace joins the Resistance as their new leader.

After you're done with the first proper level of the game and finish paying respects to Caroline, you are now free to wander around the submarine. You can do a few side missions, interact with some of the members of the Resistance, and you can also end up killing a few nazis that were pretty damn hidden inside the submarine! Apparently they were the reason why they were captured by Engel at the beginning of the game, so your second mission ends up being cleaning that hidden area of the submarine.

After doing that, your next stop is New York, which ended up being victim of an atomic bomb from the nazi regime that ended up causing the defeat and surrender of the US. Caroline's will was to liberate the US from the nazis and make it the central base of operations with the purpose of liberating the rest of the world. With that objective in mind, it seemed that Caroline had made contact with another resistance group hiding in the Empire State Building. And Grace Walker is their leader.

Now, Grace is uh...well, she's tough, and she's got a deep sense of assertiveness that makes her naturally a leader. But she's far from being a great, let alone a perfect leader.

She naturally hates nazis and the white supremacists that oppressed her and her people before, during and after the war, and that's completely understandable and justifiable. But what I find hard to justify is the severe trust issues and prejudice she has.

First of all she points a gun at B.J.'s head the moment he arrives at their base despite the fact that she may have been told by Caroline beforehand that there might be a chance of a white, tall dude with blue eyes named William Joseph Blazkowicz to show up in their base and contact them. Maybe she completely forgot about that, maybe she didn't. Then Grace pulls that idiot prank on him with the grenade that wasn't a grenade but actually it was a dud. Like, come on.

Then you have the inevitable clash with Sigrun Engel. Grace doesn't hold back and just kept calling her names and calling her a 'nazi spy' until the poor European girl had enough. Grace genuinely spend her moments as leader in the game bullying Sigrun whenever she dared to speak, and this isn't up to debate, it is a fact. 

And if you ask me, Grace is a downgrade from Caroline when it comes to leaders of the Resistance. Anya actually ended up being the interim leader while the New York mission played out (a pretty damn fun mission, I might add), and she seemed to be pretty good at it, so why Grace ended up being the new leader, anyway? Yes, she has a good amount of experience, but so does Anya. Oh well, apparently it was part of Caroline's plan for Grace to become the new leader (according to some dialog found in the game).

Grace is also married and has a child. Her husband is Super Spesh, which is a lawyer that successfully defended her on a trial for a murder that Grace didn't commit (and ended up being a trap from the FBI). This trial happened before the events of WWII. Super Spesh (real name Norman Caldwell) is also a little bit paranoid and an avid conspiracy theorist with a certainly unhealthy obsession with UFOs and space alien technology. This takes further meaning when the next mission after the contact in New York is Roswell, New Mexico itself, with Super Spesh's front of operations taking a role during this mission.

Blazko meets with Grace and Super Spesh, they're found by the nazis but they manage to escape with their fellow members of their resistance group while Blazkowicz mows down all the nazis invading the building. Blazkowicz successfully recruits Grace and co., and they part to the submarine again.

With Grace as their new leader, their objective now is Roswell. Grace's plan is to drop a fucking atom bomb in the nazi-filled, underground Oberkommando base in Roswell, which was originally a site of an unearthed Da'at Yichud cache. For those who are not aware, the Da'at Yichud was (is?) an ancient Jewish mystical secret society that designed and created many inventions and artifacts, centuries ahead of the time. This secret society has played a huge role in the development of this timeline and it might be further explored in the next game of the franchise. In fact, the suit that Blazkowicz was wearing during the first half of the game is of Da'at Yichud manufacture and is originally from the first game.

Back to TNC, Blazkowicz is sent to Roswell with the disguise of a firefighter, while carrying the atom bomb inside a portable container. There are ads everywhere with Blazkowicz's face on them, with the intention of selling him as a “dangerous terrorist”, going as far as to label him "Terror-Billy".

Now, there's no gentle way for me to say this, but Roswell has been culled. I don't recall seeing a single non-white person in the town (which had a fucking nazi parade going on during the mission), and this is further reassured when you listen to some of the dialog the NPCs have during the first part of the mission in Roswell. One person talks about slave auctions as if it were the simplest thing in the world, and then you have another person trying to play nice with a nazi officer by speaking German in a poor manner. And then you have some of those white wizards (you know the ones) walking around fully clothed and shit.

All of that was just fucked up.

Your first objective is to locate the base of operations of Super Spesh, which ends up being a diner that he inherited from his father. A nazi officer walks in and you get to see that one scene from the first trailer where he questions Blazko about his whereabouts. The one that ends up killing the nazi officer is Super Spesh, and after doing so, proceeds to lock down the deli and hide Blazkowicz inside.

Once inside his bunker, Super Spesh tells him about a secret tunnel that connects his base to the Oberkommando, not before going into yet another space aliens conspiracy rant while Blazko was there. After he's done, you're set to go through the underground tunnel and reach the nazi base where you naturally dispatch as many nazis as you can, while also finish the job of putting the atom bomb inside a reactor within the base for maximum damage. Once Blazkowicz escapes the base, he detonates the bomb while strapped on a pretty damn cool unicycle, obliterating the Oberkommando in the process.

With that mission done, Blazkowicz is set to return back to the submarine, but then for some godforsaken reason, he decides to take a quick detour to Mesquite, Texas, which was where he used to live.

Now, you have to admit that this ended up being a damn stupid decision. Why would he even return there in the first place? I mean, sure, the heirloom that was mentioned at the beginning of the game was there all this time and Blazko wanted to give it to Anya, but that was actually a setup. Blazkowicz had no business being there. Oh well.

Anyway, Blazkowicz ends up having even more flashbacks to his childhood, one of them being the actual encounter with the African-American girl that his father wasn't happy to learn about (her name being Billie).

Apparently Billie is somehow an easter-egg/reference of a real-life African American jazz singer and musician called Billie Holiday. Now, I'm not entirely sure if this is real or not, but this is what I remember reading on a post in Reddit (which has been deleted by now, but I'm leaving a reply made to it), so take this with a grain of salt.

Blazkowicz enters his former home, and starts wandering around, having even more flashbacks to his childhood and the handful of amicable interactions he had with his father.

I would also like to take the time to point out and remark that, at one point during this section of the game, you may end up interacting with a piece of newspaper located inside the house.

This piece of newspaper in the game was titled "Fragment of Old News Article", and quotes an excerpt of a piece written by Henry Louis Mencken, a newspaperman and political American commentator of the first half of the 20th century. Here's a screenshot of said piece:

This is an exact quote of what Mencken said all the way back in July of 1920, in an article titled "Bayard vs. Lionheart". This quote has been passed around for almost a century, and it had a resurgence because of certain real-life events that have no business being mentioned here.

Now, I won't question what was written by Mr. Mencken, but what I'd really like to question here instead is this: How this piece of paper ended up being there, when we later learned that Rip Blazkowicz had been hiding there all along ever since he learned about the attack to the Oberkommando, and he doctored and moved around a few things inside the house?

Why this particular piece of newspaper didn't include a date that matched the setting of the game, while the rest of the (fake) newspapers bits in the game had a date each, and matched the particular time? (From the early 30s to early 60s)

Especially when this quote was written all the way back to the days before The Great Depression (started in 1929) and the date could match the settings of the game with zero issues? (July 1920)

Why would Rip Blazkowicz keep a piece of paper that could ultimately contradict the way he thinks about the new regime that governs his country?

This particular interaction made me think a lot about whether or not there was an intention to send a message thru the game with the inclusion of this particular piece, even if it ultimately can be ignored completely and has no impact in the gameplay. What I'm trying to say is that this piece could've fit better inside Grace's personal space in the submarine rather than being in Rip Blazkowicz's setup in the house. That detail felt kinda out of place.

Moving on, Blazkowicz finally arrives to the room where he used to sleep, and finds the heirloom. And his father, somehow still alive. Fucker. Rip and William start having a heated discussion, where is revealed that Rip ratted out his friends and his own wife to the nazis and sent them to extermination camps in New Mexico. William has heard enough, and despite being held at gunpoint by his own father (branding the same shotgun he used to kill the pet dog), he takes the gun off from him and kills him with an axe.

His father musters his last words, revealing that the Nazis heard everything thru a telephone. After what could arguably be considered the best non-interactive confrontation in the game, the player now has to deal with nazis falling down the sky while Blazkowicz tries to find a way to escape the house which has been ripped from the ground by Engel's nazi spaceship

Unfortunately for B.J., he ends up falling from the house to the ground, severely hurting himself in the process. He wakes up only to find Engel putting the heirloom in her own dirty hands while he is stripped apart from the Da'at Yichud supersuit.

And this, my friends, is where things...they don't fall apart, but...keep reading and you'll find out.

Blazkowicz is captured, and he somehow wakes up inside a small room in an undisclosed area, only to be greeted by Super Spesh himself, who apparently is now your lawyer (?) for a trial for murder and treason (!!) with heavy implications that you could end up being publicly executed. Spesh claims that the Resistance have a plan, and that they're going to get you out of there (wherever you ended up being sent to). In order to do so, he hits himself on the table in order to bleed, and he's going to pretend that you attacked him so he can stab the officer from behind. Okay?

This obviously doesn't work the way Spesh intended, and he ends up being killed by Engel herself after pretending the nazis didn't knew he was there to rescue you. Now apparently the Resistance is being attacked in the parking lot by the nazis guarding the building, while you're being subject to the weirdest, most awkward attempt of torture ever conceived in videogames by Frau Engel, who puts the same gun she used to kill Spesh in your mouth. Finally, you're punched in the back of the head and they put the black veil on his head again.

And now we arrive at everyone's favorite part of the game: The courtroom level! Yayyy!

Boy, what a shitshow.

The game took a huge jump in difficulty, because at some point the player didn't knew if the enemies were endlessly spawning or not, and it was definitely the hardest level in the game so far and arguably the hardest in the entire game, pre-difficulty patch.

And not only you're out of your supersuit, making you extremely vulnerable to damage, you also have very limited armor and you're also fairly limited in terms of cover in some points of the level. If you were begging for more action after the first levels of the game, the courtroom level was definitely the answer to your prayers.

And what was the reward for your efforts, you might ask? A cutscene where Blazkowicz somehow finds his mother in one room, falls to her knees only to be comforted by her and told that "You just have one more hardship to go through". The screen fades to black, and you're back at the beginning of the courtroom level, only to realize that you're actually being sentenced to death.

All of that was for nothing.

You never punched that nazi in the face. It was all a dream.

Damn.

That was genuinely a criminal move by MachineGames. Think about it, they made you kill all those nazis, reload the level I don't know how many times, and just for "heh, Blazko was hallucinating all along. time to die lol". If I were to be playing that game blindly (as in, first playthrough ever with no spoilers), I would've been so upset. Why didn't you make it into an entire cutscene in first person? You're making the player think that his actions are actually going to influence the outcome with no confirmation or hint that it won't be the case. It wasn't until the last moment where they pull the "it was all a dream" card. Damn.

And then you have the public execution scene. That one moment that cemented two things:

- Frau Engel is genuinely a main villain with no major impact in the story of the game. She might as well be replaced by someone else entirely and there'll be zero impact in the game whatsoever. - In terms of how unrealistic a Wolfenstein game can be, they might've jumped the shark with what they did in The New Colossus.

Blazkowicz is sentenced to death for treason, and beheaded personally by Engel at a heavily vandalized Lincoln Memorial in front of millions in a televised event (or so the game thinks it's making you feel; more to than in a moment).

“The old and the weak are doomed” - Blazkowicz’s “last thoughts”. You get your head chopped off your body, and then you “die”.

"Look, guys, Blazkowicz is dead. For realsies!"

Now, a parenthesis. There were some rumors going on before the game was released that Blazkowicz was apparently going to have his head reattached to a new body because of the heavy damage he suffered from the previous fights with the nazis in the timeline. At the time, I decided to dismiss them, thinking that they were too far out there to actually become reality. Boy I was wrong.

Not only the game hints, almost spoils the fact that Set Roth might've found a way to reattach someone's head on a different body, there's also the omniscient reminder that B.J.'s body is failing him. Anya actually confronts Blazko because of this; she knows something's wrong but Blazkowicz doesn't want to admit it. He knows he must be strong, for Anya, for his future children, for the Resistance, for America.

But as the game went on, I kinda settled on the idea that this was going to happen. And it didn't dawn on me at the time, but it does now, they pulled it off in a mediocre way.

Okay so, you have the cutscene where Engel throws the head of Blazko down the furnace, and it apparently it goes all the way down...

Except not. Because apparently we've been watching a screen all this time, as a tape apparently starts rolling back, and we see Blazkowicz's head fall down the pit, but then some kind of 60's styled drone picks Blazko's head, and replaces it with someone else's head (presumably just another nazi), and flies away from the scene.

Then you're told that Set Roth, Max Hass, your companion and Anya are trying their damnedest to rescue the head in order to make the quick transplant to a new body. The drone arrives where they're hiding, they proceed with the operation, and it is a success! Hooray!

Why did this felt way unrealistic to me? More to that in a moment!

Blazkowicz wakes up in the submarine, and he's told by Anya that they reattached his head to a super-soldier body stolen from the nazis. Somehow they survived the assault at the parking lot from earlier (how they did it is never addressed in the game), and now you're told to make a choice between what kind of upgrade do you wish to have.

You can choose between Battle Walker (some huge ass sticks), Ram Shackles (shoulder pads that can fucking gib nazi scum) and Constrictor Harness (they literally make you a snek).

You go from being literally a dead man walking to a nazi-killing Megaman X

After choosing one of the upgrades, B.J. proceeds to murmur to himself: "Caroline, thank you. Take back your wings. I don't need them anymore". And proceeds to go back to New York in order to retrieve a location of another resistance group located in New Orleans.

Not before catching Sigrun and Bombate having sex in a boat.

If this ends up in the Nintendo Switch port I'll be pretty damn impressed.

After the sequence where you get accustomed with the new contraption, the side missions will be unlocked. These side missions can be unlocked using Enigma Codes, cards that some mobs in the game often dropped during gameplay after being killed. These side missions are pretty entertaining, and like I said previously, they could've enhanced the experience for a lot of people if they were to become part of the main story, because not only they unlock all the contraptions and help you reach their maximum potential, you can also discover new things about some characters.

Like for example, the one side mission where you return to Roswell (the one where you can get to kill the white wizards? Yeah, that one), it is explained that Spesh was actually aware he was going to die one way or another during the fight of the resistance, and had left a goodbye letter to Grace. There's another couple of notes in a side mission in New York where the real name of Super Spesh is revealed (Norman Caldwell).

And of course, like I said, there's also the fact that once you finish all the side missions you'll end up with all the three contraptions fully upgraded. Wouldn't have ruled to have all three of them before the final mission, or the ones before it? You don't really need all of them, but they could've been of great help and could've improved the experience for many.

Now, let's address what bugged me in the second half of the game.

-Where. Is. Everyone?!-

“Hewwo...? Echo, echo, echo...”

Remember what I said about certain moments of the game that felt like they were "not actually happening at all" and needed more impact? Well, let's go back to the execution scene.

Do you recall seeing any American person watching the execution live, regardless if they were pro-nazi or not? Do you recall anyone of the Resistance watching the nazi shitshow before the execution? That's right, we didn't see anyone. The same thing happens a bunch of times later on. For a "highest rated TV hour in history" (according to an article found in the game), it seemed like nobody was actually watching his execution at all (I even recall hearing some 'boos' while Engel was holding Blazkowicz' head).

Why you didn't show any Americans watching the execution live? Where are they?

Barring the members of the Resistance that end up joining you in Eva's Hammer and the people at Roswell on the first half of the game, you never get to interact with a single regular citizen of the US during the game.

They're all either members of the small resistance groups that you recruit during the game, or they're part of the group of NPC white Americans that were inadvertently being oppressed by the nazi regime.

For a game where rising against your oppressors is the main message that is trying to be conveyed, I'm sure as hell that I didn't see any regular citizens that could've felt identified with the liberating actions of Blazkowicz. If your game is meant to be narrative and story-driven, make sure the player is genuinely feeling it, make goddamn sure like it's actually real.

Fuck, I mean, the only regular person that the player could witness in the game got instantly killed by some nazis in the very next level (New Orleans). Barring that single moment, it seemed like all the levels in the game were exempt from any humans other than Blazko and the nazis. And again, yes, the members of the Resistance that join the group and become NPCs inside the submarine exist, but they were all active members already.

Postcards and letters won't just cut it this time. Make sure the next game has some regular citizens, otherwise it'll feel like there is no actual connection between the Resistance and the regular people.

Moving on with the game, Blazkowicz arrives to New Orleans, who has been affected by the nazi regime in a hard way. Basically they have separated the people deemed as "undesirable" in one part of the city and the other "fine people" in the other. The problem is, they basically wiped both these sides at the time of your arrival.

Your objective is to meet Horton Boone, a leader of a small resistance group hidden deep within New Orleans. Horton is a man with strong communist beliefs, an avid alcohol consumer, anti-capitalist as well as a "preacher" (even though he really isn't). Horton didn't seem to have that much of an impact in the game, and was relegated pretty damn quickly. Which is unfortunate because he was a such a refreshing character in the sense that he actually put some resistance (hah!) before joining the group.

When Blazkowicz finally meets him, Horton seems surprised that he's still alive. Blazko initially tries to recruit them, but Horton doesn't seem to be that motivated, as he hands him his "Horton Special" (a liquor of his own craftsmanship). They start having a heated discussion about political beliefs and the way they thought of each other's side during WWII, which ends in Blazkowicz kicking his chair away, claiming that he won't be raising his future kids in a world dominated by nazis. Horton is surprised by Blazkowicz resilience, and as Blazko starts blacking out because of the strong liquor, Horton accepts his proposal to join them.

Grace advises Blazkowicz that they're about to be assaulted by nazis soon, so they escape New Orleans by using a goddamn atom bomb to impulse themselves. The New Orleans stage was pretty damn fun from what I saw. Unfortunately you don't get to mount a Panzerhund in the game after that, which is a shame because the Panzerhund fucking rules.

When you get back inside Eva's Hammer, you're told that the nazis employ the Ausmerzer (the ship they used to trap your friends at the beginning of the game) to shut down any attempts of revolt. Naturally, the Ausmerzer is heavily guarded, and after the events of Roswell, the security codes to deactivate the heavy weaponry were secured in a place far away from our planet. Venus.

Jesus Christ they also conquered Venus.

-It Was Space Nazis, Maaaan!-

Your next stop is naturally Venus, and in order to get inside the new Oberkommando headquarters, you must disguise as an actor named Jules Redfield trying to participate in an audition for a propaganda film based on the capture and execution of "Terror-Billy". Once you get inside their facility, you're greeted by the director of the film, Helene Winter, and the rest of the people trying to get the same role as you, and then...he arrives.

One of the game's highest points, arguably the best moment in the entire game, is when Hitler shows up to the audition. Goddamn. Godfuckingdamn. These twenty-five years of wait were so fucking worth it.

Holy shit, Hitler's portrayal is fantastic. KEEP IN MIND, it is fantastic in an historical and logical sense, don't get confused and start calling me a Hitler-lover. He is (clearly) old, senile, has severe mental issues, aggravating paranoia, he pukes in the floor, he attempts to pee but fails miserable (indicating some severe issues related to pissing blood), mistakes Helene for his own mother...yeah, basically the Fuhrer is not with us anymore.

And it makes sense, because it has been thoroughly documented that he used to be a heavy cocaine and drug addict, and he was malfunctioning already before his death; it only made sense for him to go on a downward spiral at his 70s.

I've been clamoring for Hitler to come back in this current timeline, because who the hell doesn't want to kill that fucker again? Good on MachineGames for having the balls to do that after all this time.

Going back to the main story, Hitler demands immediate respect from the auditionees to his persona, and because of his paranoia against Jewish people, he ends up killing one of them after an hilarious exchange.

RIP Arizona Man

Something to point out here, some people started throwing around the idea that this person was actually Ronald Reagan. Initially I didn't see the resemblance at all, specially when you attempt to align his timeline and age with WWII, but then the developers started uploading the concept art and model designs to ArtStation (preeety beautiful and thanks to every single game developer that does this, by the way), and as it turns out, this character is indeed a reference to Ronald Reagan!

I still don't get it. Maybe because I'm not American?

Blazkowicz in the disguise of "Jules Redfield" is told by Hitler to recite the lines of his role of Terror-Billy. Blazko barely manages to do so, and then Hitler proceeds to ask another participant to do the same. This other guy does a pretty damn good job at it, and both Hitler and Helene get ecstatic about it.

Later on they move to the second part of the casting, which consists of taking down a nazi soldier and recite a monologue inside a glass panel. A participant enters the panel, does a poor job, and gets out not before getting shot in the head by Hitler. Now there's only two of you, and Blazkowicz is asked to participate next. William then proceeds to kill the nazi soldier for real, slams the panel and asks the directors if that's "good enough". Hitler seems perfectly pleased with his "realistic" performance, and ends up killing the other participant left sitting in the room with another bullet to the head. The audition is over, you got the role.

Hitler leaves the audition and is not seen again for the remainder of the game. Until Wolfenstein III, old fuck.

The Venus level is goddamn fantastic, and if you played DOOM 2016, you'll definitely be reminded of the extraterrestrial/futuristic scenery of the game. The mechanics involving the space suit may seem bothersome to a few players, but it only makes sense once you learn about the temperature of the planet (over 400 Celsius/752 Fahrenheit!!).

The nazi Venus facility is far, far bigger compared to the Moon facility of the previous game, and it also features a brand new gun called the Ubergewehr (roughly translated as the "Supreme Gun"), which is basically the BFG9000 equivalent of the game, and perhaps the franchise. According to the game, this weapon is partially powered by energy from micro-portals of extra-dimensional origin. And I don't know about you, but the energy that emanates from this weapon is red, and it bears a striking resemblance to the Argent Energy of DOOM 2016...Unfortunately this weapon appears in a later stage in the game, and you really can't enjoy it as you could've wished for.

B.J. obtains the documents pertaining the secret code to shut down the system, and leaves Venus for good. Back on Earth and back on the submarine, Blazkowicz hands over the code to Sigrun so that she could analyze it, and she finds that the code to shut down the Ausmerzer is VALHALLA. Happy with this discovery, Sigrun proceeds to tell Grace and everyone else about it, but is completely dismissed by Grace and is once again berated.

Sigrun has had enough. She yells at Grace, and proceeds to slap her. Following that, Grace seems to attempt to return the favor, but is stopped and overpowered by Sigrun who shuts her shit down and asks her to start respecting her by stop calling her something that she is sick of hearing (being called “a nazi”). Grace admits defeat and swears to not call her nazi again.

That was an amazing moment. To top this off, NOBODY intervened. Grace had it coming, for all the time she spent literally bullying and bothering Sigrun with that nonsense. If you were to ask me, she should be glad she didn't die at Sigrun’s hands in an hypothetical betrayal plot. I was actually surprised myself because I thought Sigrun was going to betray the team at one point of the game, but fortunately that wasn't the case. Please forgive me for not trusting you, Sigrun.

Now, moving on to the final level...the Ausmerzer. Blazkowicz and Anya (!!!) end up being the ones spearheading the assault to the airborne platform. The level is similarly great to the Venus level, except that it is relatively shorter in comparison. Lots of nazis to kill, including two super soldiers that end up becoming the final bosses of the game (I know, I'll discuss this in a moment). The final encounter with the Zerstörer isn't that much of a hassle if you finish the regular mobs first and then dispatch them later. Add this that you get to maneuver the Ubergewehr again, and the fight shouldn't be that much of an issue.

Before reaching the final room, a door opens revealing a good bunch of enemies, and Blazkowicz is about to be obliterated, but suddenly Anya appears out of literally nowhere, throws a grenade, catches flames from a Panzerhund, takes off her jacket (the only thing covering her naked upper body) and proceeds to shoot everyone and everything on her path.

...Oooookay?

I mean, after the execution scene, the over-the-top silliness of this scene was kinda pointless for me. I personally found unnecessary that Anya ended up playing an active part in the actual fights against the nazi forces, I mean, for God's sake, she's pregnant with twins. I had fears that she was going to die during the entire game, and that scene didn't help at all.

I'm glad that she's still alive, but please, keep her at home in the next game. Blazkowicz has suffered enough, losing her would be devastating for all of us.

Blazkowicz and Anya proceed to enter the VALHALLA code, and the defense system is finally shut down.

And now...the final encounter with Frau Engel...boy oh boy.

-Frau Engel: Die Neue Enttäuschung-

So...Engel is in Los Angeles a guest on The Jimmy Carver Show, but Blazkowicz and co. have taken control of the Ausmerzer, traveled to L.A. and infiltrated the studio. The last thing you ever do in the game is to sneak past the public and get in front of her, she tries to shoot him but Blazkowicz chops her arm off, and proceeds to split her face open with the hatchet. Engel dies immediately afterwards, and that's it.

No fanfare, no spectacular last boss fight, no nothing. That's it. She's dead, Jim.

Here Lies Engel, She Never Scored.

Before I give you my overall thoughts about her, let's recapitulate what Engel did in this game. Let's ignore whatever happened in the previous game and let's focus on what happened in The New Colossus:

-She kills the leader of the Resistance (at the time), Caroline.

-She berates her own daughter for not being nazi enough.

-Kisses Blazkowicz, steals the heirloom from him, and puts a smoking gun in his mouth in what apparently was meant to be a torture scene.

-"Kills" him on a public showing that who knows if it was actually watched by anyone on the planet and felt completely ridiculous.

Now, let's compare what happened in the previous game with Wilhelm Strasse, Deathshead, the previous main villain of The New Order:

-Assumes control of ancient Da'at Yichud technology that helps the Reich take over and gain advantage in WWII

-Captures Blazkowicz's squad in his compound, incinerates some of them, and proceeds to toy around with the rest, forcing Blazkowicz to decide between one of his teammates (Wyatt or Fergus) to sacrifice.

-Then he proceeds to vivisect that teammate on the spot, in one of the most gruesome sequences ever recorded in the Wolfenstein franchise, and saves that person's brain for later.

-HE FUCKING TOOK YOUR FRIEND'S BRAIN

-Successfully invades the original hideout of the Resistance, and his squad captures/executes some of their members, one of them being totally-not Jimmy Hendrix himself in one of the timelines. -Remember the brain of your friend? Well, now he put it inside a goddamn war machine, and now that machine is trying to kill you.

-He basically forces you to kill your friend again to end his suffering.

-And after you're done fighting with that nazi fucker during an actual final boss fight, he somehow pulls a grenade (probably out of his ass) and attempts a suicide attack.

-He dies but he definitely left you for death at mercy of your own friends who are about to drop a goddamn atom bomb.

Well, I don't know about you, but I guess it's unanimous.

Not only Engel’s death resulted in perhaps the most disappointing moment of the game, but overall she was perhaps one of the most pointless, inconsequential main villains of the franchise. She doesn't even come close to what Deathshead did in the previous game, and not just because Deathshead may have put the bar way too high for her, but because she really didn't to much at all during the game to warrant her becoming the final person to be killed at the hands of Blazko in the main story of game.

You know what would've ruled? An actual boss fight against Engel.

Now that her lifeless body is laying on the desk, Horton, Grace and Blazkowicz walk up to the screen and tell the American people watching the show to rise up against the nazis, and start revolting. Game logo on the screen. The End.

(Cue some really, really horrible version of 'We're Not Gonna Take It' playing in the background as the credits roll)

In a post-credits scene, Blazkowicz takes back the heirloom ring from Engel's lifeless body, and proposes to Anya with it. And if you picked either Wyatt or Fergus, you get one of them ranting around in front of the screen.

Well. What can I say?

The main story was okay, it could've definitely been polished a bit in order to turn it great. The liberation of America from the nazis was kind of a given, and when you look back at The New Order and compare it to The New Colossus, the ending of the latter ended up becoming the lowest point of the story. In the New Order the game ends on a cliffhanger, while The New Colossus doesn't offer much in terms of what could possibly happen next.

There's not that big of a difference if you pick Wyatt or Fergus, I think. The interactions with Fergus are more leaned towards your typical "heh, remember the time when you threw away your bionic arm while you were drunk?" war stories, and Wyatt's timeline is more focused with the problems he has to overcome because of war trauma.

Max Hass was fantastic. Max Hass!

The side missions on the submarine are fine. You actually get to explore the same areas but in a different way each. The side missions for the additional upgrades on the other hand, not so much. The majority of these missions are just revisiting old areas, discovering hidden areas, and that's it. The DLC doesn't seem to offer much in terms of new areas to explore except for maybe one or two stories.

Overall, Blazkowicz's father ended up becoming a better and more meaningful antagonist than Engel, and maybe he could've become the actual final boss of the game. Imagine if the Rip Blazkowicz that you killed in your old home was actually a clone, and you end up fighting him at the top of the Ausmerzer while he's controlling a clone of the London Monitor (remember the giant nazi robot machine from the first game?).

The way they handled the story, and adding the fact that some encounters were lackluster, and how they completely missed the opportunity to build some characters that needed more spotlight, leaves the feeling that The New Colossus ended up being a rushed project. I definitely hope this isn't the case and we can get a few explanations about some of the issues I wrote in this post (thanks for reading it, by the way).

With that in mind, I would like to take the opportunity to advise you all to give the game a try. If the contents of the story bother you in some way, try to dismiss them as much as you can, and focus on the gameplay itself. I don't know, you might end up liking it despite of your initial opinions about this game!

Would I recommend The New Colossus?

Well, here's the deal. As of right now, the game is sitting at $60 USD on Steam, and with the DLC added is $80 USD. And look, I'm not the kind of person that prefers to engage in the "is it worth X amount of price" debate for any videogame. Ultimately, a videogame costs what you want it to be. You can buy it right now, you can buy it later at a certain discount, you can visit some third party site to obtain a cheaper copy, I don't know. That's not my problem, it's yours. You should know by now how much money you can (and you're willing to) spend for something, and you should also know by now what you value the most about what you want to obtain in life.

Yes, yes I would recommend The New Colossus on the virtue that, if you want to play the third game, you might want to get some background first about the first two games (The New Order and TNO) before diving in to the third.

Like I said at the beginning of this post, I'm not the kind of person that prefers to watch someone else play a game rather than experience the game myself, so at the end of the day if you want to watch a LP the decision is yours. I definitely won't agree, but I'm willing to respect it if you give a good reason about why you don't want to play a videogame.

With that being said, and this is something that is definitely worth pointing out, as of right now you can buy the first two games (The New Order, and the prequel The Old Blood) for $30 USD on Steam. These games were released four years ago, and they're in sale on a regular basis on many sites. If you want to keep your money for whatever reason and wait until a “tri-pack” bundle is released, go ahead. Unlike a handful of games that unfortunately ceased to exist because of pettiness from the developers (looking at you, Konami), The New Colossus is going nowhere. It's going to be there for the moment you want to give it a shot.

Now, if you were part of the group of people who got pissed after what happened with the promotional campaigns for the game, I'd say that you should still give the game a shot, at least one play. If it changes your mind, good, if it doesn't, it's okay. But just be careful not to say dumb shit that could reveal that you're talking out of your ass about things that don't exist.

I will be expecting news about the third installment of Wolfenstein, and there's no other choice but to have Hitler be the main antagonist of the game. I mean, who the hell could it even be other than fucking old Hitler himself?

Any question/comments/suggestions? Let me know! My inbox is open! Thank you for spending your valuable time reading my post!

[droneseco]

Samsung Galaxy S21 Review: Flagship Phone, Mid-Range Price

Samsung Galaxy S21 5G

9.20 / 10

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The Galaxy S21 offers a competitive balance of performance, design, and camera capabilities while being $200 cheaper than its predecessor, the Galaxy S20.

Specifications

Brand: Samsung

Storage: 128G/256GB

CPU: Exynos 2100/ Snapdragon 888

Memory: 8GB

Operating System: Android

Battery: 4,000mAh

Ports: USB-C

Camera (Rear, Front): 12MP f/1.8 main, 12MP f/2.2 ultrawide, 64MP f/2.2 3x telephoto, 10MP f/2.2 selfie

Display (Size, Resolution):  6.2-inch, 1080 x 2400

Pros

Great design (especially with the new camera module design on the back)

Flat display

Good cameras

Cons

Lacks an SD card slot for expandable storage

Bloatware is still prevalent

No more MST (Magnetic Secure Transmission)

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Since the launch of Apple's iPhone X back in 2017, smartphone makers have steadily increased the prices of their phones with every launch. Last year Samsung's base S20 started at $999 with its S20 Ultra costing $1399. This year Samsung dropped all of its flagship prices down by $200, with the base S21 costing $799.

The Galaxy S21 is Samsung's answer to the highly competitive premium mid-range market. Out of the entire lineup, the S21 is the most polarizing, because it seems more of a successor to the Galaxy S20 FE than it does to the original S20. Thankfully, that's a good thing.

Design

The design of the Galaxy S21 is one of the areas Samsung intentionally spent most of its time perfecting. Coming from the bland slab that was S20, the new design of the S21 is strikingly beautiful. The new metal camera bump gives off the illusion that the phone was machined from one solid piece of metal, and it does look well polished.

The only minor annoyance would be the volume rocker being above the power button, making it a little hard to reach with one hand. The mirror-like finish of the metal sides makes the phone easy to grip.

On the bottom, you'll find the SIM card slot, which does not support microSD anymore, and the USB-C port for charging and data transfer. Like the S20, there is no headphone jack.

The big elephant in the room is that back cover. The matte-polycarbonate back is one aspect where Samsung cut back on to save on costs, and to be frank, unless you're directly comparing this to another glass phone, you won't notice it. The only way you will know that the back is plastic and not glass is if you knock on it (but who knocks on their phones?).

It's fair to say the plastic back is a downgrade from the S20 from the year before, but it's such a minute thing to sway your buying decision. The plastic back is technically more durable and should allow for better shatter-resistance with the caveat that you will get scratches more easily. Overall, the finish on the back mimics glass so well you really won't notice it, but we recommend a case or a skin to help protect it from scratches.

The Phantom White color I have here looks good when the light hits it. One fun Easter egg with the plastic backs of the S21 is if you turn on your flashlight, the back of the phone will glow along with the Samsung logo; it's a nice touch.

Onto the front, Samsung has done away with the curved screen; this is a great change. You will encounter little to no accidental touches. The bezels have also shrunk a bit giving the device an 87% screen-to-body ratio. The front hole-punch is centered again like the S20, so it should look familiar. Overall, Samsung's approach to the S21's design is a welcome addition, especially considering the blandness of last year's initial launch of the S20 series.

Performance and Battery-Life

The performance of the S21 is superb. The Snapdragon 888 or Exynos 2100 coupled with the 8GB of RAM makes this a true flagship device. The RAM is 4GB less than last year's S20, but the differences between 8GB and 12GB don't affect the day-to-day performance but will affect the longevity of performance down the road.

Since the S21 series this year has done away with MicroSD card expansion, we recommend you pay the extra $50 to upgrade your device to the 256GB variant if you have a ton of files and photos, but you can always use the USB-C port to plug in a flash drive.

Samsung also removed MST (Magnetic Secure Transmission) this year which previously allowed you to use Samsung Pay with credit card terminals that didn't support NFC. This means you won't be able to use Samsung Pay at those terminals anymore.

The unit I tested is the international Exynos variant, and this device has no problems keeping multiple apps running, gaming with little to no frame drops, all without significantly draining the battery life.

You should note that the Exynos 2100, while a major improvement from the Exynos 990, is still behind the Snapdragon equivalent in many ways; the Snapdragon chip overall still performs better, runs cooler and sustains performance longer than the Exynos 2100. The Snapdragon variant of the S21 will only be available in the US and China while every other market will get the Exynos 2100. You can find all the nitty-gritty details of Samsung's Exynos's 2100 compared to Qualcomm's Snapdragon 888 but in day-to-day use, you won't notice a huge difference in performance.

The UI is snappy and well optimized, but the prevailing issue with Samsung's skin on top of Android is those preloaded bloatware apps that take up storage for no reason. This device came preloaded with Facebook, a carrier app, and at least a dozen of Samsung's apps, which have ads. Yes, ads on a flagship device in 2021. This is one of the pitfalls of the Galaxy experience; it takes away from Samsung's incredible overhaul of One UI 3.1.

One UI 3.1 is one of Samsung's cleanest software to date; the entire UI feels streamlined and organized, and the inclusion of Google's Discover Feed makes this the most stock-like Samsung software experience ever, for what it is.

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The display panel on the Galaxy S21 is a huge factor in making One UI feel so fluid; the new adaptive refresh rate can go all the way down to 48hz and back up to 120hz based on your usage. The adaptive refresh rate is a good step up from last year's devices since it helps preserve battery life.

The display is no longer a 1440p panel like previous Samsung Galaxy S devices; Samsung has scaled back to a 1080p display to save costs, but all of Samsung's flagship phones from last year only supported 120hz at 1080p so you shouldn't notice a difference at all.

As mentioned, the Galaxy S21 also flattened the display this year, and this is a great change. It's the same 6.2-inch size as the Galaxy S20 but now with little to no accidental touches when using it one-handed. The bezels have also been streamlined, having a uniform border around the panel with the chin being ever so slightly thicker than the top and side bezels.

The AMOLED display has vivid punchy colors with deep blacks. It's great for watching movies, playing games, and just general day-to-day tasks. The in-display fingerprint scanner is also back, but this time it's slightly larger, and faster than the S20's fingerprint scanner which is great for quickly unlocking the phone with or without a mask. All this to say, you won't be disappointed having this display at this price point.

As for the battery life, the S21 has a sizable 4,000mAh cell that should get you through a full day of use with little to no issues. While the battery life is good, you can certainly exhaust it in a day, especially if you're doing heavy tasks like gaming and taking videos.

In our testing, the device averaged 5-6 hours of screen-on-time with most days having at least 20% left—this is with the screen set to adaptive 120hz, maximum brightness, and all of bells and whistles (Always on Display, Bluetooth devices) enabled.

It's safe to say you're not going to be disappointed with the performance and battery life of the Galaxy S21. This is one of the areas Samsung didn't compromise on, and it goes a long way in keeping this phone good for at least 2-3 years of use.

Camera

The camera system on the Galaxy S21 is nearly identical to the Galaxy S20; the S21 has a 12MP f/1.8 main, a 12MP f/2.2 ultrawide, a 64MP f/2.2 3x telephoto, and a 10MP f/2.2 selfie camera. On a hardware level, this is essentially the Galaxy S20, but where the real changes are is in the software.

Samsung has a bucketload of different camera modes and features baked into its stock camera app, which are surprisingly useful. Sure there are still gimmicks like the AR Doodle and 8K video, but you'd be hard-pressed to say Samsung hasn't done a good job here.

Things like Single Take and Director's View are great for utilizing all 4 cameras on the device. Single Take works well for taking quick photos and videos since it records up to 10 seconds of video with all the cameras being able to capture different angles. Director's View is similar, but with more emphasis on video. You get a preview of all 4 cameras, and you can actively switch between all 4 of them while recording. In the future, if the device could capture different streams of video using this mode, it can better be utilized by content creators.

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Samsung finally (finally!) lets you turn off all face smoothing and beautifying filters, and the results for portraits and selfies are very impressive.

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In my testing, I left the device in Auto for every photo, and the S21 did a decent job balancing color, sharpness, and contrast. Sometimes using the 64MP telephoto meant images would be overblown in harsh lighting conditions, but all three cameras here do produce consistently good photos.

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Video on the S21 is also stunning. The OIS (Optical Image Stabilization) on the main and telephoto lenses as well as the ultrawide's 120-degree field of view make this camera system stellar for stable video. Samsung now includes the ability to record in HDR10+ video as well, but just like 8K video, you're better off sticking to 4K.

Compared to S21 Ultra, you're mainly losing out on a better zoom range and the ability to take macro photography with the ultrawide camera, but comparably the regular S21 produces similar (if not identical) results to its larger brother.

The telephoto has 3x optical and 30x digital zoom, while the S21 Ultra sports two telephoto cameras which are a 3x optical and a 10x optical, going up to 100x digital. Of course, the 30x on the Ultra will give you a much better result than the regular S21, but unless you're really into zooming, the S21's 3x optical range is sufficient.

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You won't find anything groundbreaking with Samsung's camera system here, but what you're getting is a great everyday camera that will produce consistent results without fail.

Should You Buy the Galaxy S21?

Overall, Samsung's entry-level flagship for this year is a great addition to its lineup. The S21, for the most part, has made reasonable compromises that make this device suitable for many people, especially considering the price. If you're someone who is looking to get a device that will give you incredible performance, decent battery life, and a consistent camera experience—all within a sleek, unique design—the S21 really is one of the best price-to-feature phones released thus far.

    Samsung Galaxy S21 Review: Flagship Phone, Mid-Range Price published first on http://droneseco.tumblr.com/

[saffrongamer]

Tadpole Treble Review

Script for my upcoming review video on Tadpole Treble for Wii U and Steam

     I have almost 700 games on steam and it shouldn’t surprise you to know that most of them would be indie games. I’ve slowly obtained these games through steam sales and humble bundles. Therefore, I didn’t really get a lot of them through the desire to play them. While most indie games disappoint me and don’t really offer something for me to be interested, a small team lead by two brothers really interested me in their rhythm game so much that I had to sink my teeth into it.

     Tadpole treble, released by Bit-finity games in 2016 for Steam and Wii U. I only knew about this game through the man, the myth, the legend; Matthew Taranto. He’s well known for creating the popular webcomic BrawlintheFamily. Which I read since I was in high school every update up until its conclusion in 2014. During that time he would experiment with his game and publish demos to his website. After the end of his comic he, his brother, and Dane Caro launched their very own Kickstarter with a fair amount of success. I mean 34k out of 30k is plenty impressive. 

     Tadpole Treble, a game I absolutely had to purchase during launch, is a simple rhythm game where you’re a small tadpole named Baton. Get used to the puns folks, the whole game is full of them. You, as a tadpole, emerge from your egg dodging notes, collecting bubbles, and smacking bamboo sticks to some catchy tunes only to be caught by a hungry pelican. Out of sheer determination and willpower you somehow ram your way out of the pelican’s mouth and to freedom below. Unfortunately you’ve been dropped onto the top of a mountain. Now you need to go through levels dodging colorful trout, hungry turtles, pixelated ducks, pesky mosquitoes, frightening barracudas, rolling boulders, chilling ice water, obese piranhas, sharp-shooting crawfish, and deadly saltwater.

     Throughout your story you’ll meet some extremely loveable characters. Outside your parents there is Etude the bullfrog, the dusty Beatle and his snail Amigos, your Pelican..., and Sonata the Tadpole. I need to talk about Sonata the tadpole. His level, Midnight Bayou, is a level where he sings a love song to you. Not to mention, he’s voiced by none other than Matthew Taranto. I GET TO BE SERENADED TO BY MATTHEW TARANTO IN TADPOLE FORM. How could that be any better?! You should also listen to Thunder Creek. The tune is incredibly catchy and fun to sing along to. 

     When Baton returns home she sees that some kind of oil has begun to pollute her home. We learn that a plane has crashed into the bay causing an oil spill damaging the wildlife. Baton decides to take charge and do what she can to save her family’s home. The final level is a boss-fight that I honestly cannot agree with. The final fight is with a robot named ELE-94. This fight wants you to first strike each chord enough times to break it. I’ll give this phase a pass even though I wasn’t able to realize what you needed to do at first. The next phase wanted you to hit symbols to bounce up and hit a random hanging egg. Why is the egg there? I don’t know. Why does it hurt ELE? I couldn’t tell you. If it was explained in the story somewhere, I must have missed it. The last phase is obnoxious, but really easy when you know what you’re supposed to do. Its called “Another Refrain” for a reason. ELE will try to burn you with a lighter while she sings on loop. If it's not super obvious to you, you need to smack the lighter back at her. However that does nothing. You need to wait until you see her spark the lighter and then you can hurt damage her. Only after doing so you can save your home for your family.

     Lets jump into the gameplay. You’re a baby tadpole swimming along a music scale in the water dodging music notes, enemies, and hazards. While collecting points for your score, food, and bubbles. Bubbles are your main currency in this game. You collect them to bring to Etude the bullfrog for extra goodies and features. Like a music player and a creature catalog. Etude also mentions that he wishes for you to bring him challenge flies. In order to acquire these rare and endangered flies to feed to an obese frog you must beat each level with a level specific challenge. Such as hit all of the golden objects in barracuda caverns, never leave the deadly water in saltwater cape, or smack every single freakin’ bamboo stick in chip-tune lagoon. I absolutely loath Piranha Jungle. You’re required to not take a single piece of damage to get this fly. I wouldn’t even bother with this level if not for the reward for the flies.

     Once you feed the famished over-sized bullfrog you’re treated with some news. Etude tells you of an area where some animals have gone missing. Being the courageous young tadpole, you leap into action to investigate. Upon your arrival you’re treated to a very large Kraken with a trident who seems to be having a very bad day and wants to make sure you also have a very bad day. And believe you me, he’s going to make sure you have a bad day. That endurance in Piranha Jungle was just training you for this level. You see these steam tags? THEY’RE LIES! This game is a bullet hell. Rhythm game, my ass. You need to dodge music notes, with absolutely zero health pick ups. They’ve brought back the lightning from Thunder Creek. Here’s a small hint to help with the cymbal timing. The ring around the cymbal the distance you have left, so use that to help you hit it. Watch out for the big ol’ tentacles. The hitbox can feel somewhat odd. This level didn’t flow nearly as smoothly as the other levels. I think I would have had more fun doing the Sans fight from Undertale again. But I don’t think Matthew intended this to be a scored level so he left that out. Which I believe would be a fair decision. After all, it seems as if this fight was a bonus Kickstarter goal made by one amazing person who pledged $2,000. Thanks man. Thanks a lot for this hell.

     The last thing I need to discuss is the composition mode; the big feature of the game. It is what was advertised the most. I’m sure everyone is familiar with the old Mario paint style music creator. Well this one is much more detailed, has more instruments, and can make music more properly. I honestly wasn’t interested at the time to make my own songs. I was pretty worn out from the kraken fight. So I went online to try and find some music. While I’m currently playing the Wii U version, and using composition mode is better on the Wii U, I have to say that sharing music is pretty crummy on both versions. The Wii U version wants you either load them from a file source or scan a QR code. Now that's all well and good, but I simply cannot find any quality QR codes online. Through some searching, I managed to find a few on the old Bit-finity forums. Which has since been downed in Russian spam-bots and fitness  advertisements. The steam version isn’t any better. They use the same method only with a webcam to function like the Wii U’s camera. This would work way better if they had steam workshop support. A dev post did say that they would be looking into it last September, but at this rate I highly doubt that will come to be. It's a real shame this mode might be wasted. I’ll try to compose some music and post it here in the coming weeks if I have the time. If you want an example of the the composition mode can do, I’ll leave some links to some YouTube videos posted on the Bit-finity YouTube page.

     So that’s Tadpole Treble. An overall enjoyable game that is so incredibly relaxing (bar the bonus stage) that I had to purchase it on both platforms. It’s very disappointing that the composition mode might go underutilized, but hopefully the Taranto brothers port this game to the switch and give it another chance. Hell, I’d buy a physical release. Regardless, thank you for listening to my Tadpole Treble review, I really love writing these. And Matthew, if you ever need a duet partner. I’m your guy.

[footballghana]

Mohamed Aboutrika – African Maestros

Maestros are typically defined as midfielders who are able to control games with their creativity, similarly to how a conductor directs a musical performance. Maestros can flip games on their head with their trickery and technical ability. They are players with an uncanny ability to move the ball, whether it be by slaloming through defences or picking out passes that turned heads.

Maestros are a bit of a dying breed in football today, especially with the phasing out of the traditional number 10 role, but they made many of us fall in love with football. The likes of Ronaldinho and Zidane come to mind when considering world football’s greatest maestros, but what about the Africans?

In this series we will reminisce on Africa’s greatest maestros with words and video – and who better to start with than Al Ahly and Egyptian virtuoso Mohamed Aboutrika?

Watching Aboutrika, over the course of many games or on a highlight tape on YouTube, you realize that he checks off every box in what you want from an attacking midfielder. Dribbling, passing, vision, accuracy, creativity, composure…you name it. And on top of all of that, he had an absurd scoring ability for a midfielder – from free kicks to thunderous long-range strikes.

Whenever Al Ahly or Egypt needed something to happen, they looked to Aboutrika to open the game up. Just like how you knew Arjen Robben would always cut in from the right wing onto his left, viewers of Ahly and Egypt always knew that the ball would have to find Aboutrika in order for magic to happen.

On so many occasions he would drop back to receive the ball 30-40 yards from goal, and within a matter of a few seconds his teammate would be through on goal.

You might guess he was someone who sat back and pinged balls towards goal from deep like Xabi Alonso or David Luiz, but this was not the case. While that type of pass was indeed in his arsenal, Mohamed Aboutrika played incredibly high risk chipped balls into the box from around 15 yards – but he pulled it off with ease.

Any coach would berate a player who, to the untrained eye, simply played a ball in the air into the congested box with an extremely low chance of success, but Aboutrika made it look so simple.

These balls would be perfectly weighted, looping over the defense and falling to the feet of the attacker running into the tiniest amount of space that the pass found.

What stood out to me the most from watching Aboutrika was how he was so effective at changing his direction to beat defenders and create space to make his next move.

Aboutrika wasn’t known as a speed demon, but he was able to make up for it many times over with his balance and dribbling ability.

On so many occasions he is able to execute the perfect flick to eliminate a defender and play a killer pass.

He slowed the game down with his elegance, it’s like he was a hybrid of Sergio Busquets and Lionel Messi.

Whether it be inch-perfect passes or rifled longshots, Aboutrika was able to do it all, and he made it look so, so good.

Aboutrika was so much more than a silky midfielder who played in an aesthetically pleasing way: he was a leader and winner on the greatest stage.

He displayed his class in the biggest moments. And like all great maestros do, he made those around him play better.

His greatness can be seen in his transformation of Ahly. The Red Devils, who had not won the league since 2000, beat out Zamalek to Aboutrika’s signature in 2004 – after he propelled Tersana to the first division.

In his first full season with Ahly, they went undefeated in the league, winning by a margin of 31 points.

The same season, Aboutrika led them to the African Champions League final, where they defeated last year’s finalists Etoile du Sahel 3-0.

A few months after tasting African triumph with Ahly, he was tasked with helping Egypt lift the 2006 African Cup of Nations hosted on home soil. Aboutrika’s miraculous efforts with the national team in the qualification rounds for the 2006 World Cup were not enough to lead them all the way to Germany, but he established a place in the national squad as the #10, the central playmaker, the maestro if you will.

He scored twice as Egypt breezed past their group stage. The Pharaohs didn’t face any real challenge until the semi-finals, when they were tied 1-1 with Senegal at a full capacity Cairo International Stadium.

A curling effort from outside the box was denied by the crossbar a few minutes before Senegal equalized after 52 minutes. The match was a deadlock for the next 28 minutes.

80th minute. Egypt have a throw in from a non-dangerous position in the opposition half. Aboutrika, who was not known for being a speedster, bursts past his marker into space on the left wing where his Ahly teammate Mohamed Abdelwahab threw the ball down the line into Aboutrika’s path.

He let the ball bounce three times to reach the baseline before striking across the ball with his weaker foot – perfectly meeting the jumping head of Amr Zaki. Just like that, Egypt had won and moved onto the finals where they faced Didier Drogba and Ivory Coast.

The match was scoreless through regulation and extra time. Egypt were matched against a Les Elephants side who converted 12 out of 12 spot kicks against Cameroon six days earlier.

In a shootout riddled with misses, Aboutrika was the fifth to shoot for his side – the decisive penalty. Score and you get to lift the trophy.

If you had any doubt that he scored I haven’t done a good enough job yet of explaining Aboutrika’s clutch nature.

After returning to Al Ahly to finish the club season, Aboutrika continued his streak of excellence.

He was the top scorer in the Egyptian League with 18 goals as Ahly won the league undefeated for a second straight season. He also won the Egyptian Cup and Super Cup (where he scored a 92nd minute winner).

After that he continued his goal scoring in the Champions League as he finished as the top scorer with eight goals, leading the Red Devils to a second consecutive African title.

To conclude the year, he led his club side to Japan to play in the FIFA Club World Cup. The Club World Cup has always been a stumbling block for African sides, but Aboutrika’s inspiring performances for Ahly in 2006 on the global stage have and will serve as a source of inspiration for African clubs of the future.

He scored a free kick goal Ahly beat Auckland City 2-0 in the quarter finals. He hit the post as his side devastatingly fell to Copa Libertadores champions Internacional 2-1, but Aboutrika led Ahly to a podium finish with an exceptional performance against Club America, scoring a brace: another freekick and finishing off an excellent team play that he started.

To review his 2006 year. He won the AFCON and CAF Super Cup in February, won the Golden Boot and Championship in the Egyptian Premier League in June, won the Egypt Cup and Super Cup in July, before winning the CAFCL Golden Boot and Trophy in November and finishing third at the Club World Cup in December.

His year was rewarded with a nomination for the African Footballer of the Year by CAF and the BBC. Egyptians became accustomed to these types of performances by Aboutrika for the next few years.

Two years later for the 2008 AFCON, Aboutrika stepped up to the occasion again, scoring in the semi-finals and in the only goal of the match in the final to lift the trophy for a second straight time. Arguably more notably that tournament, he scored against Sudan in the group stages. The goal itself wasn’t what made the headlines, it was his celebration – removing his jersey to show a T-shirt reading “Sympathize with Gaza” in protest of Israel.

Aboutrika was the King of African football when he played. He proved it on the domestic and continental stages.

He had more iconic performances in the 2009 FIFA Confederations Cup, as well as coming so close to qualifying for the 2010 World Cup, but the Port Said Disaster and its impact on Egyptian football effectively put a hard stop in Aboutrika’s career.

When the rioting began Aboutrika escaped to his team’s locker room, where he found dying fans. A 14-year-old who was dying in Aboutrika’s arms uttered his final words: “I’m glad I got to meet you.”

The events caused Aboutrika to retire from football, but he returned later after reconsidering. The Port Said disaster saw the stoppage of domestic football in Egypt for two years, which severely hurt the national team.

It was miraculous that Ahly were able to win the Champions League just months after disaster, let alone win it again in 2013.

Before retiring for the final time in 2013 at the age of 35, Aboutrika had a brief stint at Baniyas in the United Arab Emirates, a loan deal he was reported to have agreed to only to help his Al Ahly financially.

For his debut, Egyptians in Dubai and general admirers of El Magico caused the attendance to rise to unprecedented levels. Seeing Aboutrika in action was a spectacle.

Many call Mohamed Aboutrika the greatest African to never play in Europe. The fact that he never left Egypt for the greener pastures of Europe is often held against him when evaluating his legacy, but I think it should be weighed in his credit.

Aboutrika’s loyalty, in addition to undoubtedly improving the quality of his club and national team with his play, should be valued in a world today where big money transfers trump club ties.

It’s widely regarded that Aboutrika was a key member of the Ahly and Egypt dynasties during his career – and these are arguably two of the greatest sides in the history of African football.

I would go as far as saying that it wouldn’t be a huge stretch to call him the greatest African to ever play.

I asked renowned Egyptian journalist Amr Nageeb Fahmy of Bein Sports what made Aboutrika so special, and I think his answer perfectly encapsulates Aboutrika’s magic.

“He was always there when it really mattered, a man who relishes big matches and created the magic when it was really needed.”

This was the first part of our series ‘African Maestros’, the next profile will come out next week.

Source: africanfootballhq.com 

source: https://footballghana.com/

[junker-town]

The 2017 Astros are a beautiful fit for the city of Houston

Any good baseball team would have helped Houston right now. This one helps more than any other.

Hollywood enjoys movies about sad baseball teams. There’s just so much to unearth, so many feelings to mine. There was a movie made about the sadness of the Boston Red Sox and the futility of tethering your self-worth to a sports team that never wins. There was a movie, a funny one, made about the sadness of the Indians. There wasn’t a movie specifically made about the sadness of the Cubs, unless you count Rookie of the Year, but that’s because the sadness existed all around you, and it would have been like making a movie about oxygen.

There is no movie about the sadness of the Houston Astros. There aren’t any books, as far as I can tell. There aren’t any blogs named The Curse of Joe Morgan or The Murder Bodies Buried Under Tal’s Hill. You don’t think about the historical struggles of the Astros because it’s not a part of the team’s identity. You can talk with an Astros fan for hours — hours! — before getting to the part where his or her favorite team hasn’t won a single World Series game in its 56 years of existence. That’s not the story of the Astros. There are no goats, no Broadway plays.

To put it another way, everybody knows about the struggles of the Indians. They won the World Series three years before I Love Lucy premiered, and then they didn’t win it again. That’s brutal. But there’s only 14 years between them winning a championship and the Astros coming into the league. What’s 14 years in baseball time? That’s, what, the time since the Angels won the World Series? That just happened. They’re fine. There’s no drought there. That’s not a long time in baseball years.

The Astros’ drought isn’t baked into the team’s identity, but it’s still the truth. The team’s motto this season was “Earn it.” If Astros fans wanted to adopt, “C’mon, why not us?” as a motto, they would have earned that. I would also accept “COME ON. SERIOUSLY. OUR TURN” because a half century is a long time. Too long. C’mon, why not the Astros?

Instead, the motto is Earn It, simple and plain. Don’t feel like it’s owed to you. Don’t feel like the universe owes you anything. It’s how a team can avoid the deep sighs and self-pity, and it’s how this city in particular can fall in love with that team.

“Earn It” is a fine motto. But if there’s an unofficial motto for Houston, it might be “Fuck it. Try again.”

I’ve spent a half-hour workshopping different, kindlier mottos because I want my mom to send this to her Facebook friends, too. But none of the other words fits. The only ones that work are “Fuck it. Try again.”

The it in that unofficial motto is something huge and unwieldy. Take the Astrodome. It was called the Eighth Wonder of the World because it was an architectural marvel, a testament to unfathomable ambition. It was, in retrospect, something of a monstrosity. The Astrodome isn’t a monument to a great idea; it’s a monument to what someone thought was a great idea. And I can respect the hell out of that.

Photo by Tom Pidgeon/Getty Images

The first year the Astrodome was built, the hitters couldn’t see the baseball because of the glare coming through the windows. So the Astros painted the windows dark. That killed the grass. There were seemingly two choices.

Blind the hitters.

Let the grass die.

Except the Astros did the most Houston of things, which was to create a third choice. That choice was, and I’m paraphrasing, fuck it; let’s invent our own grass. There was more to it than that, but that’s the short version. There was a problem, and the solution was ambitious. The solution was also awful, but fuck it. They could always try again.

When the Astrodome crumbled and fell into disrepair, the Astros said fuck it, try again, and they built a badass stadium with a retractable roof. When it was finished, they slapped a train on top of the left-field wall because, heck, why not? It was perfectly ridiculous and ambitious, and the train currently has the words “TEXAS BEEF” plastered on the side, for good measure. They designed an ankle-munching slope in center field for the same reason, and it didn’t work, but I respected the hell out of that.

This brings up the biggest problem with the Bagwell-Biggio era. The people in charge back then weren’t willing to add the necessary rockets and flames and sparkles and explosives. The Astros were run like an extremely normal baseball team. They had JEFF BAGWELL and CRAIG BIGGIO, both at the same time, and they couldn’t do nearly enough with it. They needed to slap a train on top of that roster and see if it worked. The train never came.

The Astros lost 324 games over a three-season stretch, became the butt of baseball’s jokes, and there was absolutely nothing to do with that roster. Look, the Astros used to be bad, OK? They weren’t the 1962 Mets, but they also didn’t have the excuse of being an expansion team. They were forced into an obvious rebuilding situation, stripping the team down to the studs, sanding the studs, replacing those studs, and eventually burning the foundation, just to make sure. There was probably holy water involved.

Fuck it, then. Try again. That’s why they’re here. It’s how they got Carlos Correa, an obelisk of athleticism who has no right to be that graceful. It’s how they got George Springer. It’s how they got Alex Bregman, who is contributing now but will probably star later. It’s how they got Lance McCullers, who should be here, but is still an example of how deep this current team is. And while it’s fair to focus on the missteps — shudder at the thought of this team with Kris Bryant or Trea Turner or even J.D. Martinez — this team exists because of the decision to try again in the most dramatic possible way.

The Astros don’t have a Curse of Larry Dierker’s Mole because they don’t give a damn about curses. They just wanted to tear down the fossilized ambition and use the shards to build something even more ambitious. It’s what they do.

Photo by Bob Levey/Getty Images

I wasn’t kidding about that unofficial motto:

Not long after a pair of New York real estate speculators founded this city on the banks of a torpid bayou in the 1830s, every home and every business flooded. Though settlers tried draining their humid, swampy, sweltering surroundings, the inundations came again and again, with 16 major floods in the city’s first century.

Try again, try again, try again. There’s no reason this city should exist. It’s hot and sticky. It’s where the kids invented the trend of wearing backpacks with one strap, because wearing them the way they’re intended will make the backpack squish-meld into your skin through your shirt. It’s hot and sticky, and calamity will occasionally shoot from a fire hose out of the Gulf of Mexico. Why is this place here?

Doesn’t matter. It is here. There’s NASA and oil and a port, and the whole thing keeps oozing out to the point where it’s nearly three times the size of Chicago. Houston has more square mileage than Denver, Detroit, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Atlanta combined. The thing that should not be is, and it’s huge. When parts of it don’t work, it’s rejiggered and rebuilt, and sometimes there’s a metaphorical flagpole and hill in the middle of it all.

This is the current story, where Houston is being slammed with 500-year storms every other year and forced to reckon with existential questions. The exponential growth is probably the reason for a lot of the flooding problems, but that’s not going away. The growth is Houston’s identity. It’s where a line chef can afford to split the rent; where someone can work and actually live, which isn’t something that happens in America’s biggest cities. But Damocles is chucking swords at it, one after the other, and Hurricane Harvey devastated it like no hurricane in memory.

The response? Well, you know. The f-word. Try it again. Maybe a little wearier this time. Certainly with a heavier heart. But it’s there.

It’s hard to see where a sportsball team playing in their pajamas fits into all this. Houston has bigger problems than Drew Pomeranz and Mookie Betts, and you would forgive the city if it was indifferent to the Astros’ postseason run, but you know that’s not how it works.

You know that’s not how it works because this is somehow where sports loops back around and becomes even more important. It’s why Minute Maid Park shook after the first Jose Altuve home run on Thursday, shook harder after the second, and absolutely quaked after the third. The baseball is appreciated right now, thank you very much.

Beyond the normal fuss paid to wins and losses, though, there’s something else about this team. The players like each other. I’ve talked to Astros people who’ve been around baseball for a while, and they commented how that isn’t just a feel-good cliché. The 25-man roster has somehow been assembled without an obvious jackass in the middle, and there are some truly vibrant personalities at the top.

The secret might be in the makeup of the roster. In the most popular lineup permutation, the infield goes like this: Georgia, Cuba, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, New Mexico. The outfield often goes Venezuela, Panama-Puerto Rico, and Georgia. And the DH? Man, I have no idea where you’re supposed to say he comes from.

It’s this mix that helps Club Astro go off. After every Astros victory, George Springer is the DJ, and his job is to keep coming with the tunes to keep everyone happy, from the Dominican to the Floridian. If you think that’s easy, check out a sample of walk-up and entrance songs on the team.

The elder Carlos Beltran is all about El Caballero de la Salsa, and one of the youngest players on the team, Bregman, picked “Baba O’Riley,” one of the oldest songs. Luke Gregerson comes in from the bullpen to some Danish rockabilly-metal, and the Cuban first baseman, Yuli Gurriel, comes to the plate to the sounds of a Puerto Rican icon. Evan Gattis walks up to Richie Havens, which is incredibly on-brand.

Photo by Adam Glanzman/Getty Images

Club Astro is greater than the sum of its parts, something just a little more than the teams that would play, I don’t know, “Who Let the Dogs Out?” in the clubhouse after winning a game in 2000. Springer is in charge of it all, and by all accounts, he has a second career lined up if this whole baseball thing doesn’t work out. The whole experience is important enough that Carlos Correa used Club Astro to lead off his rallying cry for Houston on the Players’ Tribune:

It’s fog-machine time!

We’ll hit the button on that thing and turn on these club lights we got, and then all of a sudden you look around and see the pitchers are all dancing, and the position players are going nuts.

It gets loud in there. It’s mostly hip-hop, and Latin music, and reggaeton, but we throw some country in there, too. I’m always requesting Kendrick Lamar, but there’s lots of Migos and Daddy Yankee and Ozuna. It’s a good mix.

It’s possible to build a fine team out of people who hate each other. It happens often enough that I don’t need to list the examples. But that’s not the kind of winner that would do best with Houston right now. This is the model that fits, mostly because it looks a lot like Houston itself. Spencer Hall wrote about it last December:

It’s sprawling in more than one sense of the word. Houston can be super-Texas-country: the requisite pickup trucks, gun shops (oh my god the gun shops), churches, the giant lawns in all the easy marks. There’s also the biggest Hindu temple I’ve seen outside of India because of a booming South Asian population and a slew of Spanish language radio presets in the rental car thanks to a huge Hispanic community. The banh mi game is extremely real thanks to the Vietnamese and other immigrants who settled in Harris County after 1975. The Chinese community is large enough that you can fly EVA Air direct to IAH from Taipei. One in four Houstonians is foreign-born, including the University of Houston’s President, Renu Khator, who hails from India.

This is the current face of fuck it, try it again. It’s why the airport PA pauses and announces the location of an interfaith chapel every few minutes, an exhortation for everyone to come together and believe for a bit, regardless of how you do it.

If you think this is color for the story, it’s not. It is the story. In the Netherlands, there’s a national ethos of aspired cooperation that’s known as the polder model, and it’s assumed that people from different backgrounds and beliefs should stop banging their heads together and collaborate.

Where did it come from? Here’s a popular theory:

A third explanation refers to a unique aspect of the Netherlands, that it consists in large part of polders, land reclaimed from the sea, which requires constant pumping and maintenance of the dykes. So ever since the Middle Ages, when the process of land reclamation began, different societies living in the same polder have been forced to cooperate because without unanimous agreement on shared responsibility for maintenance of the dykes and pumping stations, the polders would have flooded and everyone would have suffered. Crucially, even when different cities in the same polder were at war, they still had to cooperate in this respect. This is thought to have taught the Dutch to set aside differences for a greater purpose.

The specific threat of flooding might be a coincidence in this case, but the idea that self-preservation is a powerful bonding tool shouldn’t be controversial. There’s no time to bicker when you’re muttering obscenities and trying again. It just has to be.

That’s the backdrop of the Astros, who are thriving with their differences, hoping to inspire the city, which wants to thrive with its differences. It’s a dumb sportsball game, but you can understand why the idea of this team succeeding is so enticing, so important right now. And it has nothing to do with it being their turn.

Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports

Something that caught my eye about Correa’s article in the Players’ Tribune:

I was just so very sad. (And for me and Carlos and Juan Centeno, it’s unfortunately a deep sadness that we’d experience again when Hurricane Maria devastated our native Puerto Rico.)

He writes with a heavy heart about what he wants the Astros to give Houston, and the utter desolation of his home has to be squeezed into a parenthetical. That’s not a criticism; it’s entirely understandable. But it’s a reminder that the awfulness keeps coming, and it’s impossible to dodge forever.

Before Game 1, there were tributes to first responders, and the Cajun Navy drove a caravan of gravediggers onto the warning track to wild applause. A gigantic American flag was unfurled, right above a gigantic Texas flag (which made me daydream about the improbability of a huge test-pattern-ass Maryland flag being unfurled before an Orioles game), and the mood was solemn but resolute.

Then there was an announcement asking for a moment of silence for Las Vegas. The timing was a right cross, and it was a reminder of just how much has happened in the past two months. Beltran, Correa, and Centeno have to be absolutely reeling right now, pulled between their home and their adopted home, unable to divide their capacity for grief, which makes increasing the maximum capacity the only possible solution. Derek Fisher went to school in Charlottesville. McCullers and Joe Musgrove are from Florida. Every player from Venezuela is dealing with a more methodical tragedy every day.

Several Astros players are caught between competing miseries, and there’s no crawling back into bed. They go and play, and if they win, they get to dance around like a bunch of idiots. Everyone on the roster is there because of a series of transactional dominoes.

Beltran is there because his talent, age, salary demands, and perceived contributions were exactly in line with what the Astros were looking for. Altuve is there because years ago, someone who isn’t around anymore hired a very wise and convincing scout. Correa is there because those same someones who aren’t around built one of the worst baseball teams in modern history. Everyone on the team found themselves in Houston because of cascading events beyond their control.

That goes for the people who live there, too, whether they’re fourth-generation or if they just moved there for a better life. They’re there because a bunch of shady developers in the 1800s decided that hot, sticky, and flat was the place to be, and the city grew exponentially because it’s apparently where all the prehistoric animals decided to die. The people who live there didn’t have anything to do with it, and they’re all caught up in it now. If they’re smart, they’ll use the silly fun of this baseball team to help them through.

There are limits to what the Astros can do for the city. The damage from Harvey has an easily identifiable toll when it comes to lives and homes, but that’s leaving out some of the larger stresses that accompany a tragedy of this scale. You need a car to get around Houston, and tens of thousands of cars were taken off the road. The people who can’t afford to replace a 1989 Fiero might not be the people who can afford to take a load off and watch the ol’ stickball. It is just sports, after all.

It felt like more to the people screaming before Game 1, though, especially when Springer — Connecticut-born to a Panamanian dad and Puerto Rican mother — grabbed a Texas flag and waved it wildly. Baseball isn’t something that’s necessary after a tragedy like Harvey, but as long as it’s here, at least it’s the best possible kind, both on and off the field.

The city is being forced to take a deep breath, say fuck it, and try again. They get to watch the fuck-it-try-again Astros, a team that was built from the ashes of one of baseball’s greatest debacles. They get to see a bunch of disparate souls from all over the world who were put there because of years-old roster machinations making the most of it.

And there’s a chance that, when this is all over, they’ll have built what they were trying to build in the first place, and everyone will get to dance like a bunch of idiots. They’ll just have to earn it.

If it doesn’t work, you’ll never believe the four words they’ll tell themselves ...

[droneseco]

Samsung Galaxy S21 Review: Flagship Phone, Mid-Range Price

Samsung Galaxy S21 5G

9.20 / 10

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The Galaxy S21 offers a competitive balance of performance, design, and camera capabilities while being $200 cheaper than its predecessor, the Galaxy S20.

Specifications

Brand: Samsung

Storage: 128G/256GB

CPU: Exynos 2100/ Snapdragon 888

Memory: 8GB

Operating System: Android

Battery: 4,000mAh

Ports: USB-C

Camera (Rear, Front): 12MP f/1.8 main, 12MP f/2.2 ultrawide, 64MP f/2.2 3x telephoto, 10MP f/2.2 selfie

Display (Size, Resolution):  6.2-inch, 1080 x 2400

Pros

Great design (especially with the new camera module design on the back)

Flat display

Good cameras

Cons

Lacks an SD card slot for expandable storage

Bloatware is still prevalent

No more MST (Magnetic Secure Transmission)

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Since the launch of Apple's iPhone X back in 2017, smartphone makers have steadily increased the prices of their phones with every launch. Last year Samsung's base S20 started at $999 with its S20 Ultra costing $1399. This year Samsung dropped all of its flagship prices down by $200, with the base S21 costing $799.

The Galaxy S21 is Samsung's answer to the highly competitive premium mid-range market. Out of the entire lineup, the S21 is the most polarizing, because it seems more of a successor to the Galaxy S20 FE than it does to the original S20. Thankfully, that's a good thing.

Design

The design of the Galaxy S21 is one of the areas Samsung intentionally spent most of its time perfecting. Coming from the bland slab that was S20, the new design of the S21 is strikingly beautiful. The new metal camera bump gives off the illusion that the phone was machined from one solid piece of metal, and it does look well polished.

The only minor annoyance would be the volume rocker being above the power button, making it a little hard to reach with one hand. The mirror-like finish of the metal sides makes the phone easy to grip.

On the bottom, you'll find the SIM card slot, which does not support microSD anymore, and the USB-C port for charging and data transfer. Like the S20, there is no headphone jack.

The big elephant in the room is that back cover. The matte-polycarbonate back is one aspect where Samsung cut back on to save on costs, and to be frank, unless you're directly comparing this to another glass phone, you won't notice it. The only way you will know that the back is plastic and not glass is if you knock on it (but who knocks on their phones?).

It's fair to say the plastic back is a downgrade from the S20 from the year before, but it's such a minute thing to sway your buying decision. The plastic back is technically more durable and should allow for better shatter-resistance with the caveat that you will get scratches more easily. Overall, the finish on the back mimics glass so well you really won't notice it, but we recommend a case or a skin to help protect it from scratches.

The Phantom White color I have here looks good when the light hits it. One fun Easter egg with the plastic backs of the S21 is if you turn on your flashlight, the back of the phone will glow along with the Samsung logo; it's a nice touch.

Onto the front, Samsung has done away with the curved screen; this is a great change. You will encounter little to no accidental touches. The bezels have also shrunk a bit giving the device an 87% screen-to-body ratio. The front hole-punch is centered again like the S20, so it should look familiar. Overall, Samsung's approach to the S21's design is a welcome addition, especially considering the blandness of last year's initial launch of the S20 series.

Performance and Battery-Life

The performance of the S21 is superb. The Snapdragon 888 or Exynos 2100 coupled with the 8GB of RAM makes this a true flagship device. The RAM is 4GB less than last year's S20, but the differences between 8GB and 12GB don't affect the day-to-day performance but will affect the longevity of performance down the road.

Since the S21 series this year has done away with MicroSD card expansion, we recommend you pay the extra $50 to upgrade your device to the 256GB variant if you have a ton of files and photos, but you can always use the USB-C port to plug in a flash drive.

Samsung also removed MST (Magnetic Secure Transmission) this year which previously allowed you to use Samsung Pay with credit card terminals that didn't support NFC. This means you won't be able to use Samsung Pay at those terminals anymore.

The unit I tested is the international Exynos variant, and this device has no problems keeping multiple apps running, gaming with little to no frame drops, all without significantly draining the battery life.

You should note that the Exynos 2100, while a major improvement from the Exynos 990, is still behind the Snapdragon equivalent in many ways; the Snapdragon chip overall still performs better, runs cooler and sustains performance longer than the Exynos 2100. The Snapdragon variant of the S21 will only be available in the US and China while every other market will get the Exynos 2100. You can find all the nitty-gritty details of Samsung's Exynos's 2100 compared to Qualcomm's Snapdragon 888 but in day-to-day use, you won't notice a huge difference in performance.

The UI is snappy and well optimized, but the prevailing issue with Samsung's skin on top of Android is those preloaded bloatware apps that take up storage for no reason. This device came preloaded with Facebook, a carrier app, and at least a dozen of Samsung's apps, which have ads. Yes, ads on a flagship device in 2021. This is one of the pitfalls of the Galaxy experience; it takes away from Samsung's incredible overhaul of One UI 3.1.

One UI 3.1 is one of Samsung's cleanest software to date; the entire UI feels streamlined and organized, and the inclusion of Google's Discover Feed makes this the most stock-like Samsung software experience ever, for what it is.

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The display panel on the Galaxy S21 is a huge factor in making One UI feel so fluid; the new adaptive refresh rate can go all the way down to 48hz and back up to 120hz based on your usage. The adaptive refresh rate is a good step up from last year's devices since it helps preserve battery life.

The display is no longer a 1440p panel like previous Samsung Galaxy S devices; Samsung has scaled back to a 1080p display to save costs, but all of Samsung's flagship phones from last year only supported 120hz at 1080p so you shouldn't notice a difference at all.

As mentioned, the Galaxy S21 also flattened the display this year, and this is a great change. It's the same 6.2-inch size as the Galaxy S20 but now with little to no accidental touches when using it one-handed. The bezels have also been streamlined, having a uniform border around the panel with the chin being ever so slightly thicker than the top and side bezels.

The AMOLED display has vivid punchy colors with deep blacks. It's great for watching movies, playing games, and just general day-to-day tasks. The in-display fingerprint scanner is also back, but this time it's slightly larger, and faster than the S20's fingerprint scanner which is great for quickly unlocking the phone with or without a mask. All this to say, you won't be disappointed having this display at this price point.

As for the battery life, the S21 has a sizable 4,000mAh cell that should get you through a full day of use with little to no issues. While the battery life is good, you can certainly exhaust it in a day, especially if you're doing heavy tasks like gaming and taking videos.

In our testing, the device averaged 5-6 hours of screen-on-time with most days having at least 20% left—this is with the screen set to adaptive 120hz, maximum brightness, and all of bells and whistles (Always on Display, Bluetooth devices) enabled.

It's safe to say you're not going to be disappointed with the performance and battery life of the Galaxy S21. This is one of the areas Samsung didn't compromise on, and it goes a long way in keeping this phone good for at least 2-3 years of use.

Camera

The camera system on the Galaxy S21 is nearly identical to the Galaxy S20; the S21 has a 12MP f/1.8 main, a 12MP f/2.2 ultrawide, a 64MP f/2.2 3x telephoto, and a 10MP f/2.2 selfie camera. On a hardware level, this is essentially the Galaxy S20, but where the real changes are is in the software.

Samsung has a bucketload of different camera modes and features baked into its stock camera app, which are surprisingly useful. Sure there are still gimmicks like the AR Doodle and 8K video, but you'd be hard-pressed to say Samsung hasn't done a good job here.

Things like Single Take and Director's View are great for utilizing all 4 cameras on the device. Single Take works well for taking quick photos and videos since it records up to 10 seconds of video with all the cameras being able to capture different angles. Director's View is similar, but with more emphasis on video. You get a preview of all 4 cameras, and you can actively switch between all 4 of them while recording. In the future, if the device could capture different streams of video using this mode, it can better be utilized by content creators.

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Samsung finally (finally!) lets you turn off all face smoothing and beautifying filters, and the results for portraits and selfies are very impressive.

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In my testing, I left the device in Auto for every photo, and the S21 did a decent job balancing color, sharpness, and contrast. Sometimes using the 64MP telephoto meant images would be overblown in harsh lighting conditions, but all three cameras here do produce consistently good photos.

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Video on the S21 is also stunning. The OIS (Optical Image Stabilization) on the main and telephoto lenses as well as the ultrawide's 120-degree field of view make this camera system stellar for stable video. Samsung now includes the ability to record in HDR10+ video as well, but just like 8K video, you're better off sticking to 4K.

Compared to S21 Ultra, you're mainly losing out on a better zoom range and the ability to take macro photography with the ultrawide camera, but comparably the regular S21 produces similar (if not identical) results to its larger brother.

The telephoto has 3x optical and 30x digital zoom, while the S21 Ultra sports two telephoto cameras which are a 3x optical and a 10x optical, going up to 100x digital. Of course, the 30x on the Ultra will give you a much better result than the regular S21, but unless you're really into zooming, the S21's 3x optical range is sufficient.

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You won't find anything groundbreaking with Samsung's camera system here, but what you're getting is a great everyday camera that will produce consistent results without fail.

Should You Buy the Galaxy S21?

Overall, Samsung's entry-level flagship for this year is a great addition to its lineup. The S21, for the most part, has made reasonable compromises that make this device suitable for many people, especially considering the price. If you're someone who is looking to get a device that will give you incredible performance, decent battery life, and a consistent camera experience—all within a sleek, unique design—the S21 really is one of the best price-to-feature phones released thus far.

    Samsung Galaxy S21 Review: Flagship Phone, Mid-Range Price published first on http://droneseco.tumblr.com/

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Switching from Mac day-to-day Pc: Selecting a daily

New Post has been published on https://pressography.org/switching-from-mac-day-to-day-pc-selecting-a-daily/

Switching from Mac day-to-day Pc: Selecting a daily

I’m devoted everyday switching from a Mac daily a day-to-day, and the subsequent step is to start shopping. While you haven’t used whatever however Macs for close to many years, the sheer quantity and kind of Home windows alternatives poses a task. So, whilst I researched which new Windows PC would be awesome in shape for me, I spent a while experimenting with the first Windows every day I ought to get my hands on my Mac.

                                  Switching From Mac 

Desktop PC

Easing in everyday Home windows thru Bootcamp

Most modern-day Apple computer systems come with Boot Camp Assistant—a program designed day-to-day turn your Apple daily right into a gadget which could twin-boot day-to-day Home windows. A copy of Home windows 10 Domestic may be had for $120 (or downloaded and used totally free with constrained options,) so the usage of the OS with Boot Camp is a remarkable way to see what Microsoft has every day offer earlier than you every day every day a daily.

Sadly, my red meat with Apple includes several unresolved hardware issues. As such, I wanted a fresh start with a new daily.

The Surface E-book may be my every day every day and my tablet

My daily desires are stressful. I travel continuously, so I should every day have a lapping day every day. As a journalist, my international revolves around typing, internet research, and enhancing daily or video. A number of my work takes me day-to-day hard environments, so stable build every dairy every day is vital. I also miss gaming on my PS4 console, something I had to surrender for my nomadic lifestyle.

With all of this in thoughts, I decided daily to take the plunge with a Microsoft Floor Ebook. There are exact reasons why it’s taken into consideration the every day of Windows leap day-to-day. It has a high-resolution 13.three-inch show, an every day magnesium case, 512GB of storage (essential for while I’m able to get right of entry to the cloud,) an Intel Middle i7 cell processor, 16GB of RAM, and a discrete portraits card that’s fantastic for gaming. It also has a detachable display that I’m able to use as a pill. The icing on the cake: I’m able to use Microsoft’s Surface Pen (the counterpart everyday Apple’s Pencil for its iPads) for noodling with Adobe Lightroom.

It’s a configuration that costs quite a few cash, however, it does precisely what I need it every day do, and it replaces numerous one-of-a-kind devices—my iPad, my dearly departed gaming console, and my MacBook Pro.

This might be greater day-to-day than you need, or maybe you need some thing with even greater processing electricity. I’m able to shop for you, however, as a current Apple escapee, I’m able to give you some fundamental advice on what daily consider earlier than dropping any coins on new hardware.

Define your needs and wants

Locating a daily which, at least, can cut the same mustard as your cutting-edge Mac is an absolute day-to-day. Permits begin with the fundamentals: What do you currently use your Apple daily for? What would like your new Home windows every day everyday day-to-day do? Adding the gadgets from your wish-listing that you may find the money for makes the transition from one platform daily the opposite extra attractive.

If you’re an artist or cope with an every day of PDFs, perhaps a hint show or one that’ll work with a Wacom pen, is the way to move. Do you need your new day-to-day everyday feature as a tablet for analyzing in bed? There’s no scarcity of contact-enabled Windows lap daily ps that fold in 1/2 or come aside so that you can use them as a pill. Or skip this feature and stick with your iPad—but it daily is stated, having contact and pen abilities on a full modern daily is something substantially lacking from Mac OS which you might welcome in Home windows.

You’ll want a day-to-day bear in mind the disadvantage of any of the capabilities that you need, every day. Lapeverydayps with touch-sensitive displays generally demands extra battery electricity than conventional models, as an example.

The CPU is the coronary heart of the matter

As Mac customers, we had little desire approximately which CPU our day-to-day used. For years, it’s been not anything but Intel. Intel CPUs dominate In Home windows lap every day, day-to-day, however, the options could make your head spin. (We’re no longer even concerning desktop CPUs, which may be determined in excessive-end gaming leap day-to-day in addition to traditional every day were, with new AMD Ryzen CPUs Including in addition complexity.)

Mac Virus

If you want daily to perform a little gaming, paintings with CAD software or video editing, seize a day-to-day with a Core i7 processor. My Floor E-book makes use of the sixth era (Skylake) Middle i7-6600U, a dual-Center mobile processor, however, more modern lapidary-to-days are rocking seventh-technology Kaby Lake CPUs that provide a bit extra performance and efficiency.

In case your needs include lighter gaming, enhancing every day, phrase processing, and internet surfing, go with a less costly Middle i5, or if the rate is a trouble, a Middle i3 (although you’ll take successfully in processing electricity by means of doing so).

You’ll locate gradual performance, however, better battery life with Intel Everyday chips. Intel Celeron? Quicker than an Everyday CPU, however, they get lousy battery existence. Then there’s Intel Core M (additionally observed within the MacBook 2016), low-powered chips that offer decent overall performance, but can’t touch the oomph you’ll get from a Core i5 or i7 chip.

Ugh. Mastering approximately these things is like falling down a rabbit hole, and a great case, it reminds you that Windows Pcs are day-to-day far extra often than Macs are. If you can, ask a daily-savvy pal for help (I did). In any other case, PCWorld’s pleasant Lapeverydayps feature can come up with an informative assessment plus our day-to-day pointers.

On the subject of RAM and pressure space, I’ll come up with the equal advice I give all my friends: Buy as a good deal as you may manage to pay for.

The greater RAM you have got, the Faster your machine will run while acting responsibilities, in particular In case you run more than one packages or want to stack up a number of browser tabs. storage? greater programs, more movies, more track—extra the whole thing. We live in an age where a whole lot of our media is streamed now, but having the space day-to-day keep crucial files prepared at a second’s observe without a wi-fi connection is nothing however win.

photos and display technology

Windows lap everyday ups come in eleven-, 12-, thirteen-, and 15-inch show sizes, daily Apple does. but you’ll additionally discover 10-inch models accessible. A 17-inch show is not unusual, day-to-day. Heck, Acer’s Prada every day 21 X offers a curved 21-inch display. In case you’re the usage of your daily for picture enhancing, gaming, layout, or In case you do a whole lot of multitasking, you’ll possibly need a larger show.

There’s also show decision every day consider. Luckily, even el-cheapo box-shop specials generally come with 1080p presentations, what we’d day-to-day the baseline. If you have the coins, you’ll discover lap daily ps with 4K/UHD presentations baked in daily them, day-to-day. My advice is to ignore the hype and believe your eyes. If you edit 4K video for a dwelling, going with an extremely-excessive-decision display is. but In case you’re just searching daily iTunes movies, surf the net or video chat, chances are you’ll be happier with a less pricey alternative.

every day the bigger the show, the more battery life it’s going to call for. a larger display manner a larger chassis, everydayo—which means extra weight to carry Whilst you tour and much less room for your bag. discover the balance that works for you.

As for the pics processor, all lap daily ps grapple with controlling warmth in ever-thinner instances. Most Windows lap daily ups come with incorporated pix chips that provide good enough or higher overall performance, with varying thermal hundreds.

Mac customers who’re deep in day-to-day first-character shooters or call for photos have historically had daily everyday gaming consoles or high-top Macs with Retina shows. A Home windows PC with a committed photos card might feed the equal need, but this selection may have a dramatic impact on your every day every day’s weight, battery lifestyles, and fee. In case you’re a casual gamer who unearths joy in playing older video games like Civilization V or simply need daily watch movies, a daily with incorporated pictures will fee you less money and day-to-day nevertheless prove pleasant.

The inner specifications of any PC you Buy won’t count number every day you In case you hate the use of it. before you Purchase whatever, visit a shop and spend a while typing on it. Use the trackpad substantially. Listen daily the audio system. Ensure it has the ports you need and they’re placed in a way that makes them easy day-to-day use. daily the blessings of brick-and-mortar shops every day: you may stroll away with the daily you need without shipping expenses, and likely simpler return policies If you change your mind. If you make a decision every day buy online, test the go back policy closely. At any store, be careful with res everyday king costs.

Days spoilers

a brand new day-to-day is a massive purchase. You deserve to be glad about it. Subsequent time we’ll speak about Finding replacements for Some of your favored MacOS software.

[fan-of-mulligan]

FOM BLOG: GILLINGHAM 1 - 1 SHREWSBURY TOWN

I left My House at 12.45PM in the afternoon and I made sure I had the following things on me,,,,,,,, (Money, Keys, My Gillingham Season Ticket, My Samsung Galaxy S2, Spare Battery, My Fleece-Jacket, Spare Lids, My Gillingham Scarf, My Gillingham Bag, A Packet Of Polo’s, Pad and Pens and a 500ML Bottle Of Coca Cola) - and I made sure I had everything on me before making the fifteen / twenty minute walk from my house to Rainham Train Station, and once I arrived at Rainham Train Station, I brought My Return Ticket To Gillingham for £3.80, and I just managed to get on to The 13.12PM Train in time before the doors closed on the train, why is there only one person on at the ticket booth I have no idea, and before leaving my house, I was seriously considering getting A Taxi from My House to Priestfield Stadium as there were engineering works on the main line, Simon did tweet me that the trains were running between Rainham and Gillingham, but there was a reduced service, and I thanked Simon for sending me that information as that was very useful.

I saw Stephen on the train, who had told me that he had just managed to get on the train a few minutes earlier as the bus replacement service took over forty minutes to get from Faversham to Rainham, A Journey which is double the length of time compared to traveling from Faversham to Rainham via train, good thing that Arsenal were away to Southampton and West Ham United weren’t playing at home either, because Me and Stephen were on the train for The Charlton Athletic Home Game, and Gillingham, Arsenal and West Ham United were all playing at home at the same-time, and the train was packed that day, I had sent the following tweet before leaving my house “””On My way to Priestfield Stadium as Gillingham take on Shrewsbury Town, hopefully Gills can pick up three points today - COME ON THE GILLS!!””” A Tweet that had already got a few likes, and also, it was essential that Gillingham picked up all three points in a crucial home match against Shrewsbury Town.

As The Train arrived in Gillingham at 13.18PM, Me and Stephen both got off the train and started to make our way towards Priestfield Stadium, only stopping off at The NewsAgents so that Stephen could buy A Drink for 35P, I added that you could probably buy those Energy Drinks in bulk for £3 - £5 from Tesco’s or Asda, Stephen wanted to know my take on Gillingham’s Performance against Sheffield United and what the atmosphere was like inside Bramall Lane, I added that the atmosphere from Gillingham Supporters was very good, but there was a spell just after Kieron Freeman’s equaliser for 2-2 that the atmosphere inside Bramall Lane from Sheffield United Supporters was truly remarkable. and that atmosphere had your hairs standing on the back of your neck, it was a vital that Gillingham kept Sheffield United quiet for ten to fifteen minutes after that, otherwise we could of been on the end of a hiding to nothing.

Performance Wise, I thought that the way Gillingham tried to contain Sheffield United and opt for defensive stability and a resilience performance was the right way to go, Stuart Nelson kept Gillingham in the game in The First Half, Josh Wright scoring twice completely turned the game around, and after both of Josh Wright’s goals, Sheffield United scored two goals that were ruled out for offside, even for Sheffield United’s Equaliser, Stuart Nelson saved a deflected effort before Kieron Freeman scored the re-bound, we could have lost late on, but Bradley Dack and Mark Byrne could have scored late on as well, but all in all, a point away from home against The League One League Leaders is an incredible result, a result we would have all gladly taken before kick off.

And we were all hoping that Gillingham can build on that result with a win and three crucial points against Shrewsbury Town, three points which would move Gillingham potentially eight points clear of The League One Relegation Zone with that game in hand against AFC Wimbledon, and I am sure that Adrian Pennock would want to win his first home game as Gillingham Head Coach, and four points from his first three matches would be a very solid start, and then we can start turning our attention to Transfer Deadline Day, and looking to bring in the players we need to sign to strengthen the squad for the rest of The 2016 / 2017 season.

We arrived out-side Priestfield Stadium at 13.25PM, and I went inside The Club Shop to buy My Match-Day Programme for £3, and Diane mentioned that she sent me a message forgetting that I told her that I was going to buy her Match-Day Programme, but once I got change from A Ten Pound Note for buying My Match-Day Programme, I gave Diane The Six Pound I owed her from the previous week, Diane added that she couldn’t use Her Free Ticket Voucher for The Shrewsbury Town Game as Ralph and Ethan were going to The Shrewsbury Town Game, I agreed with Diane that this was bad, because you used to be able to use that voucher for any home game throughout the season, and normally I would use that voucher for A Home Game Over Christmas, but as Stephen wanted to go to The Port Vale Home Game, I was going to let Stephen use the voucher.

I was seriously considering getting another Home Shirt, as there was A Deal in January and if you buy A Home Shirt then you get A Away Shirt for free, I was going to wait and buy A Shirt Later on In The Year, as there might be another shirt sell at the end of the season which might see Gillingham Shirt’s Sold at A Cheaper Price, I queued up at The Ticket Office and checked the fixtures list to see what were the next two up and coming away games, and I brought My Bradford City and Coventry City Tickets for £42, and I got Stephen his Two Free Tickets for The Port Vale Home Game, My Main Worry is that should Gillingham get into The Championship - which would be fantastic - it will cost £42 just for One Adult Ticket.

Which brings me on to the next point, which was that brilliant Interview with A Young Liverpool Supporter on RedMan TV about where English Football could be heading in five to ten year’s time - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmNsWzHgxC8 - WARNING, THIS LINK DOES HAVE SOME SWEARING!!!!! - Stephen made a brilliant point that all the while Liverpool are participating in tours in Asia and America, then they are contributing in turning Liverpool into a tourist club and moving away from there roots, but I thought that The Video Clip brought up some very thought provoking arguments and suggests where English Football could potentially be heading in the long term.

Me and Stephen waited outside for Gary to turn up and Neither Me, Diane, Stephen or Matt were confidant with Trevor Kettle as Referee, we would have had Darren Deadman for The AFC Wimbledon Home Match which was called off, so someone at The Referee Association doesn’t like Gillingham very much, hopefully a controversial refereeing decision doesn’t become the focus of our talking points after the game against Shrewsbury Town, I still think that Video Technology with A Tennis HawkEye System is needed in Football, Two Challenges A Game, One In Each Half, Video Technology would give a real time decision, because the current format can see players who are sent off and that sending off can be rescinded after a appeal, but if that sending off decided the outcome of a match and you lost narrowly, then the loss of one point, or potentially all three points, could be the difference between surviving relegation or being relegated, such are the fine margins in football.

Peter, Sharon, Charlie and Carole caught up with us, and Peter had his trusty Chips with Curry Sauce before kick off, and Peter and Charlie asked me for my thoughts on The Sheffield United Game, I mentioned that The First Half was damage limitation and Gillingham tried to contain Sheffield United for as long as possible, but A Player of Billy Sharp’s Quality is always capable of sticking the ball into the back of the net, Second Half, a much better performance and Josh Wright scoring twice in quick succession turned the match on it’s head and Gillingham had the lead away at Bramall Lane, Kieron Freeman equalised for the hosts, and after that, the atmosphere inside Bramall Lane was sensational, and Sheffield United found Stuart Nelson to be in inspired form, so Gillingham could have quite easily have lost the match, but Bradley Dack and Mark Byrne came close to scoring late on and win the game for Gillingham as well, so all in all, a point isn’t a bad result, and Peter added that a point away at The League One League Leaders is always going to be an impressive result.

Diane said that because Ethan was bored, she was going to head round to her seat in The Gordon Road Stand and we would meet up again after the game, hopefully celebrating Gillingham picking up all three points in a match that Gillingham have got to win, it has been ages since we were last at Priestfield Stadium and a lot has happened since that Oxford United Game, Sharon showed us a picture of A Former Gillingham Player Playuing at Shrewsbury Town and Stephen said it’s Adam El-Abd, and it didn’t look anything like him, I am surprised that Adam El-Abd has changed that much, but boy we can do with El-Abd in Gillingham’s Defence right about now, as his leadership and experience would be a valuable asset, Peter, Sharon, Charlie and Carole decided to head off inside Priestfield Stadium towards there seats, while Me and Stephen waited for Gary to turn up.

And as Gary Arrived, the first thing Me and Stephen Said to Gary is that it has been ages since our last home game, Second of January to be precise, and a lot has happened since then, but Gary added that this was a match that basically everyone in NoirCat had put down as A Gillingham Home Win, even though Gillingham do not have the best of home records against Shrewsbury Town, hopefully, Gillingham do not go two goals down and win 3-2, which was precisely what happened at Greenhous Meadow earlier in the season, obviously that would be fantastic if Gillingham can earn the win, but I think we would much prefer a solid defensive display and a hard fought 1-0 win, to be honest, any win will do, a bad performance with A Own Goal being the difference between the two sides, as long as Gillingham win that is the most important thing.

One of the more interesting topics was the signing of Tomas Holy from Sparta Prague on A Two And A Half Year Deal and where on earth did that signing come from was Gary’s response, at least we cannot miss him as Tomas Holy is 6’ 9’, so basically he just needs to stretch his arms to gather the ball with ease, Gary added it is interesting because we have signed Paulo Gazzaniga, who is either with Rayo Vallecano or Real Sociedad in Spain, what is especially annoying is that Southampton only loaned Paulo Gazzaniga to Rayo Vallecano, Had Southampton sold Paulo Gazzaniga, then Gillingham would have got a percentage of that money, as there was a sell on clause in Paulo Gazzaniga’s deal when he left Gillingham.

But you do wonder how or where did that Tomas Holy Deal Come From and is this where Gillingham are looking to get the bulk of there transfer business done ??? - young foreign players who we can bring into The Football Club, this is something Andy Hessenthaler did with Paulo Gazzaniga, Stanley Aborah and Bruce Inkango, and given how close Gillingham is to Europe, I am surprised that Gillingham haven’t looked at players in France, Spain or Portugal, more often, looking for young players who will use Gillingham as A Stepping Stone to A Championship or Premier League Club.

I mentioned to Gary and Stephen that Paul Scally looked very thin last week away at Sheffield United, and I did wonder that with Adrian Pennock only getting a contract until the end of the season, is Paul Scally considering selling the club so that A New Owner could bring in there Own Manager for The 2017 / 2018 season ??? - because Paul Scally has been Chairman for Twenty Two Year’s Now, and this job is bound to be take it’s toll financially and on his health as well.

Gary couldn’t see Paul Scally Selling The Club, as One Of The Directors is Now solely focused on trying to get Gillingham to move to A New Stadium, and if Paul Scally was looking to lighten the workload, then he would bring more people in, rather then see Chief Executive, Steve Waggott, Leave Gillingham Football Club, but Gary also brought up an very interesting point that you can make a case that Paul Scally has saved Gillingham Football Club Twice, because selling Priestfield Stadium to Priestfields Holding Limited, and then buying Priestfield Stadium back for One Tenth of the price we sold Priestfield Stadium for is genius, as you essentially get The Bank to write off the rest of the debt, and Gary pointed out that Gillingham’s Finances under most of our previous Chairman were in bad decline and Priestfield Stadium had poor facilities at the time as well, although the finances for most Third Division and Fourth Division Clubs at the time were not great in those days, and that needed to be pointed out, looking at the ground now, and the facilities are superb, and we have probably expanded as far as we possibly can at Priestfield Stadium, and moving to a larger capacity stadium is the only way for Gillingham to continue developing.

Stephen spoke about Gillingham’s continued progress over the past five season’s, 2012 / 2013 League Two Champions, 2013 / 2014, 17th in League One, 2014 / 2015 12th in League One, 2015 / 2016 Ninth In League One, and currently this season Gillingham are Seventeenth in League One, compare our record to clubs like Tranmere Rovers, who suffered back to back relegations into The Conference National, OK, they look like there on there way back up, but some clubs like Stockport County, Macclesfield Town and Torquay United, they don’t make there way back up, and in Darlington, Chester City and Hereford United’s cases, these clubs have had to re-form and work there way back up through the league’s again, I am sure those clubs will look at the continued growth at Gillingham Football Club, and would love to see that year on year improvement for there own clubs themselves.

Eventually, We Saw Gillingham’s Team News On Twitter, and Gillingham Lined Up As Follows,,,,,,, Stuart Nelson, Ryan Jackson, Max Ehmer, Adedeji Oshilaja, Paul Konchesky, Josh Wright, Jake Hessenthaler, Scott Wagstaff, Bradley Dack, Elliott List, Cody McDonald SUBS: Tomas Holy (GK), Bradley Garmston, Mark Byrne, Emmanuel Osadebe, Billy Knott, Rory Donnelly and Jay Emmanuel-Thomas - Gary and Stephen haven’t seen Elliott List play so they will both be keen to see what Elliott List can do against Shrewsbury Town, and it was great to see Bradley Garmston back among the substitutes bench, as Bradley Garmston has been out injured for the vast majority of this season and it is great to see him back, Chris Herd is out injured, so Paul Konchesky starts at Left Back, with Adedeji Oshilaja starting alongside Max Ehmer in the heart of Gillingham’s Defence.

Shrewsbury Town do come into this match against Gillingham in respectable form, winning there last two league games 1-0 against Oldham Athletic and Bradford City, however, there away form is far inferior to there home form, and if Gillingham want to not just consolidate League One Football, but push further up the table then these are the type of matches that Gillingham need to win, and we want to build on that encouraging performance against Sheffield United by winning against Shrewsbury Town, Gary mentioned that everyone had this down as A Gillingham Home Win for The NoirCat Prediction League, so let’s hope that is precisely what Gillingham manage to achieve.

As Gary headed round to his seat, Me and Stephen spoke for a bit more pre-match, I mentioned that My Brother Stewart is going to be freezing as he will be standing / sitting in The Brian Moore Stand, he was last at Priestfield Stadium for that 1-0 win against MK Dons, where Stuart Nelson seriously damaged his ankle saving Dean Bowditch’s Penalty Kick, since then Stuart Nelson has damaged his other ankle, got a cut underneath his chin away at Oldham Athletic, and Referee Dean Whitestone wanted Stuart Nelson to leave the field of play to receive treatment and Gillingham put an out-field player in goal, and that was obviously never going to happen, Stuart Nelson is desperate to re-claim Barry Fuller’s Title as The Terminator, as Stuart Nelson has a cut underneath his chin, both ankles are strapped up and he is putting in the performances to earn Gillingham valuable points, Stephen added, if only every other Gillingham Player put in the same level of desire that Stuart Nelson has for The Gillingham Shirt.

Stephen Added that he hoped to see Cody McDonald and Rory Donnelly get themselves on the score-sheet, Cody McDonald usually goes on a decent goal-scoring run between now and the end of the season, and hopefully we will see Rory Donnelly score a goal as a substitute, like he did against Swindon Town earlier in the season, that goal showed what Rory Donnelly can when he gets into scoring positions, and we need to start seeing that on a more regular basis from Rory Donnelly, Stephen went towards Block C of The Medway Stand, and we will meet up after the game.

I headed towards The Family Enclosure Entrance, and After My Gillingham Bag was searched, I went through the turnstiles, brought one fifty / fifty match day lottery ticket and I headed straight for my seat, I mentioned to Andrew and Charlotte my thoughts and opinions on Gillingham’s 2-2 draw against Sheffield United, Andrew added that he thought that Josh Wright will start putting in better performances now that he has only his game to concentrate on, as Andrew thought that The Captaincy took something away from Josh Wright’s Game, and I agreed, well the two goals last week showed that Josh Wright can concentrate on his own game now.

Colin turned up and he had seen the team sheet, and Colin had read The Programme Notes, Link Is Here to Those Notes,,, http://www.gillinghamfootballclub.com/news/article/2016-17/chairmans-notes-shrewsbury-3539753.aspx - And Paul Scally wasn’t impressed with the training regime under Justin Edinburgh, David Kerslake and Wayne Hatswell, Maybe Paul Scally advised Justin Edinburgh to improve Gillingham’s Training And Match Preparations and that advice wasn’t taken on board, or Paul Scally went down to The Training Ground and he clearly didn’t like what he had seen and advised Justin Edinburgh to improve our training and coaching, this makes for interesting reading, and perhaps this, along with Justin Edinburgh’s constant talk about over-achieving when this is Gillingham’s Highest Wage Budget in our entire history are just two of the reason’s why Paul Scally has decided to make an managerial change, the task in-front of Adrian Pennock, Steve Lovell and Jamie Day is a difficult one, and hopefully, a win against Shrewsbury Town can start to pull Gillingham a lot closer to those mid-table positions in League One.

The Players applauded The Gillingham Supporters, who likewise applauded the players, before going down the tunnel for one final Pre-Match Team Talk before this important League One Clash against Shrewsbury Town, who you have got to say, have brought an excellent traveling support with them for what is A Cold January Afternoon, as Shrewsbury Town’s Supporters had The End Block Of The Gordon Road Stand, and half of The Brian Moore Stand if required.

Looking around Priestfield Stadium for what is going to be Adrian Pennock’s First Home Game in-charge and Gillingham’s First Home League Game in A Month, I thought that Priestfield Stadium looked empty in The End Block’s Of The Rainham End, and The Gordon Road Stand looked empty in some blocks as well, With A Bus Replacement Service and the cold weather conditions, perhaps some people were put off from coming to the game, and also, Shrewsbury Town At Home isn’t a match that will get floating / casual supporters turning up to Priestfield Stadium, and I suppose the reverse can be true in that Shrewsbury Town V Gillingham isn’t a match that will get floating / casual supporters to turn up at Greenhous Meadow.

Both teams came out of the tunnel and lined up in-front of The Medway Stand and the atmosphere raised in volume inside Priestfield Stadium and at least Referee Trevor Kettle didn’t switch ends, meaning that Gillingham were kicking towards The Brian Moore Stand in The First Half, and Shrewsbury Town were kicking towards The Rainham End, meaning that both teams were kicking towards the ends where there respective supporters were situated in The Second Half, hopefully Gillingham can get the three points we need to move up The League One Table - COME ON THE GILLS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

FIRST HALF:

This Important League One Clash started with a strong combative challenge from Adedeji Oshilaja on Abu Ogogo in The First Minute Of The Match, and in The Third Minute Of The Match, Tyler Roberts looks to use his pace to take on Paul Konchesky down Gillingham’s Left Side Of The Pitch. but Paul Konchesky does really well to stick with Tyler Roberts and prevent The Shrewsbury Town Winger from whipping in an dangerous cross, although the chance is still there for Shrewsbury Town to open the scoring, as the visitor’s have won The First Corner Kick Of The Match, And From The Resulting Corner Kick, Joe Riley has whipped in an dangerous in-swinging cross towards the far side of Gillingham’s Penalty Area, and Junior Brown headers the ball back across the face of goal and Alex Rodman skies an volleyed effort over Gillingham’s Crossbar - but the first goal-scoring opportunity of the match goes to Shrewsbury Town.

Five Minutes into the match and A One Minute’s Applause goes around Priestfield Stadium for Former Gillingham Defender Dave Shipperley, who scored Eleven Goals in One Hundred And Forty Four Appearances for The Gills between 1974 and 1977 before moving on to play for Charlton Athletic, Neil Shipperley was at The Gillingham V Shrewsbury Town and I am sure he appreciated the touching tribute for his father, I am not old enough to remember Dave Shipperley in his playing day’s, but those who were old enough to remember spoke very highly about Dave Shipperley, and how he was such a threat in the air from corner kicks, I thought The Tribute was respectfully observed by everyone inside Priestfield Stadium.

Seven Minutes into the match and Gillingham win a free kick in a very dangerous position on the pitch, Josh Wright loses possession of the ball in Gillingham’s Half Of The Pitch as Shaun Whalley intercepts the ball and the interception runs through to Joe Riley, who runs down the right flank - Gillingham’s Left - in possession of the ball, and Joe Riley is being closed down by Paul Konchesky, Josh Wright and Scott Wagstaff, and Joe Riley manages to dig out a cross towards the edge of Gillingham’s Penalty Area, and Elliott List brings the ball down, and Elliott List plays the ball forward to Bradley Dack, who turns past Gary Deegan and runs forward in possession of the ball as Gillingham look to turn defence into attack, and Bradley Dack runs down the left side of the pitch and holds the ball up and waiting for support, and Bradley Dack threads the ball through to Scott Wagstaff on the over-lap, and Scott Wagstaff is pushed to the floor by Aristote Nsiala, and you have got to say that The Shrewsbury Town Defender is very lucky not to have conceded an penalty as that foul was very close to The Eighteen Yard Line, still the chance is there for Gillingham to open the scoring from the resulting free kick, and that is almost precisely what Gillingham managed to do as Bradley Dack came extremely close to opening the scoring, as Bradley Dack has whipped in an sensational curling effort which almost picks out the top right corner of the net as Shrewsbury Town Goalkeeper Jayson Leutwiler threw himself to his left and Adedeji Oshilaja was almost close to getting his head on to the end of that free kick as well - that free kick from Bradley Dack was very similar to the one Wayne Rooney scored a few weeks a go, such a shame that Bradley Dack didn’t open the scoring with that free kick.

Eleven Minutes into the match, and Josh Wright is penalised for his challenge on Freddie Ladapo and Shrewsbury Town have an opportunity here to open the scoring from the resulting free kick, and Shrewsbury Town looked to threaten from the resulting set play, as Joe Riley’s dangerous in-swinging cross was aimed from right to left towards the far post, and Max Ehmer does really well to prevent Abu Ogogo from heading the ball back across the face of goal and the ball runs out of play for A Gillingham Goal-Kick.

But in The Fourteenth Minute and Junior Brown can consider himself a very lucky man, as Bradley Dack threaded the ball through to Cody McDonald as Cody McDonald was baring down on goal down the right side of the pitch, and Junior Brown has clearly taken Cody McDonald out twenty yards away from goal and Referee Trevor Kettle has shown a level of leniency towards Junior Brown by only showing The Shrewsbury Town Left Back A Yellow Card, Now Cody McDonald was in a wide position and I suppose you can make the case that it wasn’t a clear cut goal-scoring opportunity, but had Cody McDonald evaded that challenge from Junior Brown then Cody was through on goal, this was a big talking point and something Me, Stephen, Diane and Gary spoke about in greater detail after the game as well.

And from the resulting free kick, Gillingham came very close to opening the scoring as Bradley Dack’s dangerous in-swinging cross is aimed towards the far post and Max Ehmer’s header at the far post is headed back across the face of goal and somehow Shrewsbury Town manage to clear the ball off the goal-line, and after a goal-mouth scramble, Gary Deegan kicks the ball clear and away from danger and survive a real scare at the back, that is the closest either team has come to opening the scoring, and it could well be that a set play will make all the difference in this crucial League One Encounter.

Seventeen Minutes into the match and Gillingham get a fortuitous free kick decision going in our favour as I wasn’t sure that Freddie Ladapo had fouled Ryan Jackson there and Gillingham got a very lucky free kick decision going in our favour, And A Minute Later Bradley Dack is penalised for his challenge on Joe Riley, and in the same minute, Shaun Whalley kicks the ball long down-field, leaving a foot-race between Paul Konchesky and Callum Roberts and Paul Konchesky does extremely well to header the ball back to Stuart Nelson, as Paul Konchesky was looking up at the ball and that back header could have gone horribly wrong.

But in The Twentieth Minute, Shrewsbury Town had a guilt edge goal-scoring opportunity to open the scoring and Shrewsbury Town should be winning 1-0 now, Jake Hessenthaler looks to play the ball over the top of Shrewsbury Town’s Defence to send Ryan Jackson in and behind Shrewsbury Town’s Back Line, but Alex Rodman is well positioned to hook the ball over his shoulder and clear Shrewsbury Town’s Lines and Adedeji Oshilaja wins the aerial battle on the halfway line against Tyler Roberts to header the ball forward and Aristote Nsiala clatters into the back of Bradley Dack and Gillingham should have been awarded a free kick, but Referee Trevor Kettle surprises everyone inside the ground by not awarding Gillingham a free kick as Shaun Whalley runs forward in possession of the ball down Gillingham’s Left, and Shaun Whalley continues his run forward in possession of the ball and The Shrewsbury Town Number Seven just keeps going, twisting and turning and carrying on with his driving run, and Shaun Whalley has an end product to his play, as Shaun Whalley whips in an dangerous in-swinging cross and one of Freddie Ladapo or Tyler Roberts should have scored for Shrewsbury Town, that should be 1-0 to the visitor’s, and everyone inside Priestfield Stadium knows it as well.

And having survived a real scare at one end of the pitch, Gillingham could and perhaps should have opened the scoring at the other end in The Twenty Fourth Minute, Paul Konchesky manages to keep the ball away from Freddie Ladapo before kicking the ball long down-field and Matt Sadler wins the aerial battle up against Bradley Dack on the halfway line, and Max Ehmer wins the aerial battle up against Tyler Roberts and Josh Wright’s clearance is more up and under and Elliott List brings the ball down before playing the ball back to Ryan Jackson, and Ryan Jackson clears the ball down-field which turns out to be a good pass towards Bradley Dack, and Bradley Dack manages to thread the ball through to Cody McDonald to run on to as Cody McDonald is now baring down on goal and one on one with The Shrewsbury Town Goalkeeper and Cody McDonald see’s his first time effort towards goal saved by Shrewsbury Town Goalkeeper Jayson Leutwiler, who threw himself low down to his left to make the save and Junior Brown manages to clear the ball away from danger - but that was the chance, that was the chance for Gillingham to open the scoring.

Twenty Five Minutes into the match and Gillingham are looking to threaten in and behind Shrewsbury Town’s Defence again as Bradley Dack pings the ball down the right side of the pitch and Scott Wagstaff comes across to attempt to get on to the end of that pass, but Junior Brown only just about does enough to clear the ball out of play, but Gillingham can pile on the pressure from the resulting throw on, and from the resulting throw on, Ryan Jackson has hurled in an dangerous long throw into the heart of Shrewsbury Town’s Penalty Area and Gary Deegan is well positioned to win the initial header, and Aristote Nsiala boots the ball clear and away from danger, and Ryan Jackson allows the ball to run out of play so that he can try again with another long throw, and from the resulting long throw, Ryan Jackson has hurled the ball long down the line and even though Max Ehmer has won the initial flick on, Shrewsbury Town do manage to clear there lines, and Gillingham do look the more likely side to make the all important breakthrough at this present moment in time.

And I thought that Gillingham had in-fact made that all important breakthrough in The Twenty Eighth Minute, Paul Konchesky passes the ball centrally to Josh Wright, who plays the ball forward to Bradley Dack, and Bradley Dack pokes through a first time through-ball into Scott Wagstaff’s path down The Left Side Of The Pitch, and Scott Wagstaff is twisting and turning and manages to evade Joe Riley’s attempted challenge before threading the ball through to Bradley Dack on the edge of Shrewsbury Town’s Penalty Area, and Bradley Dack manages to evade Aristote Nsiala’s attempted challenge, a challenge that knocked Bradley Dack off balance and Bradley Dack couldn’t sort his feat out, and Bradley Dack can only lift the ball over the right side of Jayson Leutwiler’s crossbar as Bradley Dack tried to pick out the top right corner with an accurate strike - Bradley Dack is having a very good game for Gillingham and Dack is very unlucky not to get himself on the score-sheet.

On The Half An Hour Mark, and Gillingham manage to win A Corner Kick as pressure from Bradley Dack forces Aristote Nsiala to concede The Corner, and the chance is there for Gillingham to take the lead from the resulting corner kick, Bradley Dack whips in an dangerous in-swinging cross towards the far post and Abu Ogogo manages to header the ball clear and away from danger, and it is going to take a very precise corner kick from Bradley Dack to pick anyone out in A Gillingham Shirt, as Shrewsbury Town have more taller players in there side who are more likely to win the aerial battle.

Thirty Three Minutes into the match and we all thought that Gillingham were going to make the breakthrough by scoring that all important first goal, Matt Sadler plays the ball forward to Freddie Ladapo and continued his run forward looking for the return pass, and I thought that Referee Trevor Kettle was going to penalise Max Ehmer for his challenge on Freddie Ladapo, but Referee Trevor Kettle pointed to the ball while Josh Wright passed the ball out-wide to Elliott List who was One On One with Junior Brown - TAKE HIM ON LIST!!!!! - Was My Response as Junior Brown has already been booked for his challenge on Cody McDonald, and that is precisely what Elliott List did as Elliott List forced Junior Brown to back-peddle as Brown cannot dive into a challenge and a quick turn of pace saw Elliott List get to the byline and pull back an dangerous low cross inside Shrewsbury Town’s Penalty Area, and Elliott List’s dangerous low cross manages to pick out Jake Hessenthaler, who evades Gary Deegen’s Sliding Challenge before playing a one touch layoff back to Josh Wright, who see’s his first time shot towards goal saved by Jayson Leutwiler, but Jayson Leutwiler could only parry the ball back towards Paul Konchesky on the edge of Shrewsbury Town’s Penalty Area and Paul Konchesky brings the ball under control with his first touch and Paul Konchesky passes the ball out-wide to Scott Wagstaff, who cuts inside with his preferred right foot, and Scott Wagstaff manages to whip in an dangerous in-swinging cross which picks Bradley Dack out inside Shrewsbury Town’s Penalty Area and the ball did drop to Bradley Dack, but Aristote Nsiala was in the right places at the right time to clear the ball away from danger.

Still, that clearance from Aristote Nsiala was only a temporary reprieve for Shrewsbury Town as Josh Wright brings the ball down and manages to shield the ball away from Abu Ogogo by running towards the right wing, and after a few touches in possession of the ball, Josh Wright drops the ball back to Ryan Jackson, who takes a touch to control the ball, and Ryan Jackson whips in an dangerous in-swinging cross which deflects off Alex Rodman and there was a terrible mix up between Matt Sadler and Jayson Leutwiler, and The Shrewsbury Town Goalkeeper made enough contact on the ball to turn the ball behind for A Corner Kick, but Gillingham came very close to opening the scoring in fortuitous circumstances there, And From The Resulting Corner Kick, Bradley Dack’s dangerous in-swinging cross aimed towards the far post is headed clear and away from danger by Abu Ogogo, and although A Goal-Scoring Opportunity wasn’t created from this corner kick, Gillingham are knocking on the door and they are the team more likely to make the breakthrough.

Thirty Five Minutes into the match and Bradley Dack almost managed to thread the ball through to Cody McDonald again, but Matt Sadler was well positioned to slide in and make a crucial interception, Bradley Dack is playing really well for Gillingham and he is threading through through-ball’s for Cody McDonald to run on to, Dack is unlucky not to get himself on the score-sheet and he has been involved in most of Gillingham’s Attacking Play, if Bradley Dack keeps playing like this, then he will eventually either score or assist a goal against Shrewsbury Town, and hopefully Bradley Dack can do both, score and assist a goal in this all important League One Clash.

Thirty Six Minutes into the match and Ryan Jackson has hurled in an dangerous long throw which somehow managed to bounce in Shrewsbury Town’s Penalty Area and Joe Riley has cleared the ball away from danger for the visitor’s, Shrewsbury Town are like a boxer on the ropes at the moment and Gillingham need to land that knock-put blow by scoring the crucial first goal of the game, Ryan Jackson is another player who is putting in a much better performance for The Gills, the kind of performances we were seeing from Ryan Jackson on a more regular basis throughout The 2015 / 2016 season.

Thirty Seven Minutes into the match, and despite all the pressure from Gillingham, it is Shrewsbury Town who have been awarded a free kick in a dangerous position on the pitch, Shrewsbury Town have A Throw on in Gillingham’s Half Of The Pitch Down The Right Side, and Junior Brown throws a long throw down the line and Freddie Ladapo wins the aerial challenge up against Max Ehmer and Elliott List is penalised for standing his ground when Alex Rodman jumped over The Young Gillingham Winger, A Debatable Free Kick, but the chance is here for Shrewsbury Town to open the scoring from the resulting free kick, and that is almost precisely what Shrewsbury Town did as well, as Joe Riley has curled an dangerous in-swinging effort from the right side of Gillingham’s Penalty Area towards goal and Stuart Nelson had to be alert to turn the ball behind at the expense of A Corner Kick, and that is the first meaningful save that Stuart Nelson has had to make, and Joe Riley was clearly going for goal with that curling effort, the chance is still there for Shrewsbury Town to open the scoring from the resulting corner kick, and Joe Riley goes across to take the resulting corner kick for Shrewsbury Town, thankfully, Joe Riley’s dangerous in-swinging cross is headed clear by Cody McDonald, and in The Thirty Ninth Minute, I thought that Gillingham were very lucky to be awarded a free kick in our half of the pitch, as Alex Rodman was penalised for his challenge on Ryan Jackson when play on could have been waved on, so I do think that Gillingham were fortunate to be awarded a free kick on this particular occasion.

Forty Three Minutes into the match and Gillingham have A Throw Just Inside Shrewsbury Town’s Half Of The Pitch on The Halfway Line and Ryan Jackson throws the ball long down the line and Junior Brown headers the ball clear and Shaun Whalley plays an fantastic through-ball for Freddie Ladapo to run on to, but Paul Konchesky manages to get back and play the ball back to Stuart Nelson, but only just as Paul Konchesky’s back-pass was slightly under-hit, and Stuart Nelson has kicked the ball long down-field and that clearance from Stuart Nelson turned out to be an decent pass as Aristote Nsiala was caught underneath the ball and Adedeji Oshilaja of all people is through on goal, and Adedeji Oshilaja manages to shrug off the challenge from Aristote Nsiala and confidently strike the ball into the bottom right corner of the net to give Gillingham the lead just before half time - nothing Jayson Leutwiler could do about that and what a time for Gillingham to score as well.

And after two minutes of stoppage time at the end of The First Half, Gillingham go in at the break with the slender advantage, just when we thought that neither team were going to break the deadlock, Charlotte sitting next to me had actually missed Adedeji Oshilaja’s Goal, but what a time for Gillingham to open the scoring.

HALF TIME: GILLINGHAM 1 - 0 SHREWSBURY TOWN

There was a spell of sustained pressure from Gillingham prior to Adedeji Oshilaja opening the scoring, Josh Wright saw his effort on goal saved from Jake Hessenthaler’s one touch layoff, and in the same move, Ryan Jackson’s cross caused a huge mix up between Matt Sadler and Jayson Leutwiler, a mix up which could have seen Gillingham open the scoring in fortuitous circumstances, but Adedeji Oshilaja opening the scoring just before half time is precisely what Gillingham needed, because Shrewsbury Town will get there chances to score and they will get a spell in the game where they will dominate, so it was crucial that Gillingham scored when were on top.

One of Freddie Ladapo or Tyler Roberts should have scored for Shrewsbury Town from Shaun Whalley’s dangerous in-swinging cross, but Cody McDonald needed to score that one on one effort up against Jayson Leutwiler, and Cody McDonald will know that he won’t get a better goal-scoring opportunity then that throughout the entire game, interesting that Adedeji Oshilaja went the same side and he scored, perhaps with Adedeji Oshilaja being A Centre Back, Jayson Leutwiler wasn’t sure what Oshilaja was going to do.

One of the big talking points was Junior Brown only being booked for his challenge on Cody McDonald when Another Referee might have shown Junior Brown a straight red, this is a crucial decision because some supporters in Block’s A, B and C of The Medway Stand were clearly not happy with that decision, from my vantage point, I couldn’t tell if Junior Brown should have been sent off or if a booking was the correct punishment, but I do think it would have been very interesting to see what would have happened, if you could use Video Technology to make a decision in that possible scenario.

I spoke to David at Half Time and he - like everyone inside Priestfield Stadium - was surprised that A. Adedeji Oshilaja was still up there for Stuart Nelson’s Long Kick Down-Field and B. Adedeji Oshilaja took that goal like A League One Striker because it was a really good finish, but what a time to score, just before half time, and this is a match that Gillingham need to win just to pull away from The League One Relegation Zone, but Cody McDonald had to score that one on one chance though, because had that gone in along with Adedeji Oshilaja scoring, then Gillingham would be in a really commanding position to pick up all three points.

David asked me how I traveled to Sheffield United the week before, I mentioned that Diane drove and we shared fuel costs, David asked why not travel via The Supporters Coach, and I added that we went via car last week, but The Supporters Coach hasn’t been running very often for away games this season, the numbers have dropped off and if Gillingham start to win more games then more people will go to away games, and also, away matches are very very expensive, and they do take up the entire Saturday, Now I don’t mind that, but I can understand why that is so off-putting for many people, especially when your traveling to places like Oldham Athletic in January for example.

Both Teams were out ready for The Second Half and David went back to his seat and I sent the following tweets on Twitter before the re-start “””Jake Hessenthaler has been solid in the 1st half, won a few second balls in the middle of midfield and been neat & tidy for Gillingham Today””” Rob sent me A Tweet and I responded and I sent this tweet “””The cross which Ladapo should have scored came from that side, maybe Garmston will come on in The Second Half”””

Tactically, I wouldn’t look to make any substitutions at Half Time as Gillingham are playing really well, but I can see Bradley Garmston coming on for either Elliott List or Paul Konchesky in The Second Half as Bradley Garmston might get a ten minute runout, we also have Jay Emmanuel-Thomas and Rory Donnelly on the bench if Gillingham need to freshen things up in attack, big forty five minutes plus stoppage time coming up for The Gills, hopefully, Gillingham can pick up all three points against Shrewsbury Town - COME ON THE GILLS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

SECOND HALF:

Neither Adrian Pennock or Paul Hurst made any tactical changes at half time, with both manager’s sticking with The Same Eleven Players they named in There Respective Starting Line Up’s at The Start Of The Match, and having scored just before the break, Gillingham could of doubled there lead right at The Start Of The Second Half, and Gillingham came close to doubling there lead straight from the kick off as Bradley Dack plays the ball back to Josh Wright, who takes a touch to control the ball and Josh Wright kicks the ball long down the left side of the pitch, and Cody McDonald manages to beat Junior Brown to the loose ball and run through on goal down the right side of the pitch, and Cody McDonald skips past Matt Sadler’s attempted challenge, and Cody McDonald’s effort on goal towards the near post was saved by Jayson Leutwiler and Shrewsbury Town eventually are able to clear there lines - that would of been the perfect start to The Second Half For The Gills.

And within a Minute, Gillingham could have gone from almost going 2-0 up to being pegged back to 1-1, Bradley Dack is penalised for his challenge on Gary Deegan, and Shrewsbury Town’s quickly taken free kick caught Gillingham unawares at the back as Freddie Ladapo plays the ball through to Alex Rodman, and The Shrewsbury Town Midfielder see’s his first time effort on goal saved and parried away from danger by Stuart Nelson and Gillingham survived a real scare there.

But in The Forty Eighth Minute, Shrewsbury Town should of scored again, Shrewsbury Town have A Throw On Down The Left Side Of The Pitch right on the halfway line and Junior Brown throws the ball down the line and Tyler Roberts flicks the ball on to Freddie Ladapo, who brings the ball down and side-steps Adedeji Oshilaja’s attempted challenge, and Freddie Ladapo’s powerful strike towards goal is blocked by Stuart Nelson and the first re-bounded effort from Abu Ogogo is blocked by Adedeji Oshilaja, who denied The Shrewsbury Town Midfielder from equalising and Max Ehmer can only get the ball partially clear and away from danger and Gary Deegan’s driven effort towards goal is blocked by Josh Wright and the ball spins up into the air, and Junior Brown tries to pass the ball through to Alex Rodman, and Max Ehmer on the deck can only slice the ball partially clear and away from danger, and Shaun Whalley’s first touch is poor, and this allows Paul Konchesky to clear the ball away from danger, but only up to Aristote Nsiala on the halfway line, but Cody McDonald manages to close The Shrewsbury Town Defender Down and finally we can breath a sigh of relief.

But Gillingham were just all over the place at the back as Freddie Ladapo, Abu Ogogo and Gary Deegan all had chances to score within the same move and Gillingham are slicing clearances, we look really nervous across the back four and the midfield just aren’t doing enough to protect the defence, Jake Hessenthaler and Josh Wright both need to sit in-front of the back four and look to defend for the next five to ten minutes to make sure that Gillingham can grow into this second half, because Cody McDonald has had the chance to double Gillingham’s Lead, but Shrewsbury Town have created enough chances to be level in The Second Half.

The start of The Second Half has seen goal-scoring opportunities left, right and centre, and this continued as both Gillingham and Shrewsbury Town create attacking moves in quick succession, It’s Gillingham who are on the attack first with Max Ehmer playing the ball forward to Cody McDonald, who holds the ball up and quickly turns and evades Aristote Nsiala’s attempted challenge and Cody McDonald squares the ball to Josh Wright, who plays the ball out-wide to Ryan Jackson, who has the pace to take on Junior Brown and get to the byline and pull the ball back to Cody McDonald inside Shrewsbury Town’s Penalty Area, and with his back to goal, Cody McDonald tee’s up Bradley Dack, who scuffs his effort on goal wide of Jayson Leutwiler’s Left Hand Post.

But after that chance from Bradley Dack, Shrewsbury Town had chances to score in The Forty Ninth and Fifty First Minute’s Of The Match, In The Forty Ninth Minute, Joe Riley’s challenge on Scott Wagstaff goes unpunished and despite the appeals from Gillingham Supporters, Referee Trevor Kettle doesn’t award Gillingham A Free Kick, but all credit to Scott Wagstaff for showing the perseverance and persistence to win possession of the ball back, as Scott Wagstaff runs forward in possession of the ball and Scott Wagstaff continue’s his run forward into Shrewsbury Town’s Final Third, checks back on himself and lays the ball off to Elliott List, who takes one touch to control the ball and another to square the ball to Scott Wagstaff, who is challenged by Gary Deegan and Abu Ogogo runs forward in possession of the ball and plays the ball square to Alex Rodman on the left side on the halfway line, and Alex Rodman just keeps on running forward in possession of the ball as Gillingham just track back and track back, and Alex Rodman gets into Gillingham’s Final Third and plays the ball forward to Tyler Roberts, and Tyler Roberts takes one touch to control the ball and another to hit a lofted shot towards goal which was straight at Stuart Nelson, but a save that Stuart Nelson needed to make nonetheless, because the defending from Gillingham for that passage of play was very disappointing.

And in The Fifty First Minute, Shrewsbury Town should of have equalised, Jayson Leutwiler’s Long Kick Down-Field is won by Adedeji Oshilaja as there was a tussle between Adedeji Oshilaja and Freddie Ladapo and Scott Wagstaff wins the aerial battle between The Two Number Seven’s up against Shaun Whalley, and Paul Konchesky volley’s the ball down-field and Aristote Nsiala boots the ball high up into the air and Shaun Whalley flicks the ball on to Tyler Roberts, who passes the ball down the line to Freddie Ladapo to run on to, and I thought that Freddie Ladapo had fouled Ryan Jackson as Ryan Jackson was clattered into but no foul was given and Tyler Robert’s first time low cross picks out Alex Rodman, who’s first time effort towards goal clatters against the base of the post and re-bounds off Stuart Nelson, and Elliott List manages to intercept the ball from Freddie Ladapo and clear the ball down the line, but only as far to Junior Brown, who brings the ball down, evades Josh Wright’s challenge and manages to retain possession of the ball and Junior Brown turns back on himself and plays the ball back to Gary Deegan, and Gary Deegan takes a touch to control the ball before threading the ball through to Tyler Roberts, who manages to play a first time flick over Gillingham’s Defence and Ryan Jackson doesn’t deal with the ball properly and Stuart Nelson is out quickly to deny Freddie Ladapo, but The Shrewsbury Town Striker was flagged for offside.

But Shrewsbury Town should have equalised and since that Cody McDonald Chance right after the re-start, Gillingham are a mess at the back and Shrewsbury Town have improved and look the more likely side to score, and failing to score is our main benefit because the score-line remains in Gillingham’s Favour, and if The Gills can go 2-0 up then Gillingham would be in a commanding position to go on and win this match, but at the moment, Shrewsbury Town look more likely to equalise then Gillingham doubling there lead, so Adrian Pennock must be looking at his substitutes bench and thinking how do I stop Shrewsbury Town from creating so many decent goal-scoring opportunities ???

Fifty Four Minutes into the match and I thought that Bradley Dack was very neat and tidy in retaining possession of the ball before playing the ball through to Cody McDonald, who was fouled by Matt Sadler, and Aristote Nsiala’s foul on Ryan Jackson two minutes later relieves the pressure building on to Gillingham’s Goal, while in The Fifty Eighth Minute, Paul Konchesky plays an fantastic whipped pass down the left flank and Scott Wagstaff is fouled by Joe Riley, and Gillingham have A Free Kick in A Promising Position On The Pitch Down The Left Side, Not Necessary A Shooting Position, but Shrewsbury Town had every player back to give you a idea of how threatening this set play was, and from the resulting free kick, Bradley Dack has whipped in an sensational in-swinging cross into the heart of Shrewsbury Town’s Penalty Area and Gary Deegan was well positioned to header the ball clear and away from danger, Dack’s Free Kick has plenty of pace and curl on the ball which was very difficult to defend against, we need to see more moments of quality like that from Bradley Dack if Gillingham are to pick up all three points.

Fouls on Scott Wagstaff and Jake Hessenthaler from Matt Sadler and Abu Ogogo are starting to break up the pace and tempo of this match, but Shrewsbury Town did manage to score an equaliser on Sixty Three Minutes, and you have got to say that on balance of play in The Second Half that the equaliser was well deserved, It’s Gillingham who are looking to make the breakthrough as Elliott List is one on one with Alex Rodman, and Elliott List manages to get to the byline and whip in an dangerous low cross, but Abu Ogogo is well positioned to make the block and Bradley Dack plays the ball down the line towards Elliott List, but Alex Rodman intercepts the ball and runs forward in possession of the ball, and Alex Rodman plays the ball square to Abu Ogogo on the halfway line, who manages to pass the ball out-wide to Shaun Whalley on the right side of the pitch - Gillingham’s Left.

Shaun Whalley takes a touch to control the ball before running forward in possession of the ball and Shaun Whalley plays the ball out-wide to Joe Riley on the over-lap, and Joe Riley takes a touch to control the ball before whipping in an dangerous cross, which loops up into the air off Scott Wagstaff and the ball takes a whacked deflection and bounces over Adedeji Oshilaja’s head, and Stuart Nelson manages to prevent Tyler Roberts from scoring, but there was Alex Rodman to head in the re-bound, no offside flag and the goal does stand, and you have got to say that goal has been coming for some-time now.

And Just A Minute after Shrewsbury Town Equalised, The Visitor’s could have taken the lead, Shrewsbury Town have A Throw On In There Half Of The Pitch, and Junior Brown throws the ball down the line and Ryan Jackson boots the ball down-field, and Cody McDonald tries to retain possession of the ball, but he losses out to both Matt Sadler and Junior Brown, and Junior Brown kicks the ball forward towards Freddie Ladapo, who holds the ball up before playing a one touch layoff square to Tyler Roberts, who runs forward in possession of the ball and Tyler Roberts has the confidence to run forward, drop his shoulder and take a shot on with his left foot, and Stuart Nelson is well positioned to prevent Tyler Roberts from scoring and Max Ehmer chests the ball back to Stuart Nelson - Tyler Roberts, and Shrewsbury Town in general are playing with more confidence and freedom and they look like there going to be the team who are going to go on and pick up all three points against Gillingham, so Adrian Pennock needs to find a solution to this problem, because if the game continue’s to go like this, then Shrewsbury Town are going to win.

And having almost gone 2-1 down to that effort on goal from Tyler Roberts, in The Sixty Sixth Minute, Gillingham win a free kick in a promising position on the pitch, Elliott List has the pace to go on a driving run forwards in possession of the ball, skips past Alex Rodman’s challenge and Elliott List passes the ball square to Bradley Dack Twenty Five Yards Out From Goal and Shaun Whalley clatters into the back of Bradley Dack and Referee Trevor Kettle awards Gillingham A Free Kick, and Shaun Whalley goes into The Referee’s Notebook and is shown A Yellow Card, Paul Konchesky and Bradley Dack both stand over the resulting free kick and Paul Konchesky steps over the ball and leaves it for Bradley Dack to strike goal-wards, and Bradley Dack has whipped an sensational curling effort over Shrewsbury Town’s Wall and Bradley Dack’s effort has only just cleared the crossbar with Shrewsbury Town Goalkeeper Jayson Leutwiler throwing himself to his right to cover the left side of Shrewsbury Town’s Goal, that is the best effort on goal from Gillingham for some-time now, and something for Gillingham to build on.

Sixty Eight Minutes into the match and Cody McDonald was flagged for offside, and A Minute Later Scott Wagstaff is penalised for his challenge on Shaun Whalley, and in the same Sixty Ninth Minute, Shrewsbury Town make the first substitution of the game as Freddie Ladapo is substituted and Stephen Humphrys comes on in his place, Freddie Ladapo has been causing Gillingham’s Defence Problems all afternoon so it is a bit of a relief to see Freddie Ladapo substituted, Ladapo is precisely the sort of striker that Gillingham are lacking and I did say the same-thing about Lee Erwin at Oldham Athletic as well, A Target-Man who can hold the ball up, flick the ball on and be a pivot up top for Gillingham, also, Cody McDonald plays a lot better when he has someone alongside him who is A Target-Man, Adebayo Akinfenwa and John Marquis come to mind straight away.

Gillingham also make there first substitution in The Seventy First Minute as Bradley Garmston comes on for Elliott List, Elliott List played longer then he did against Sheffield United and Oldham Athletic, and it looks like that Bradley Garmston is going to play as A Left Winger in-front of Paul Konchesky and Scott Wagstaff is going to move across to The Right Wing.

Seventy Two Minutes into the match and Stuart Nelson is quick off his line to catch Joe Riley’s dangerous in-swinging cross into Gillingham’s Penalty Area, while The Attendance at Priestfield Stadium is announced as 5,316, with 223 Shrewsbury Town Supporters, great turnout from Shrewsbury Town for what is A Long Away Trip In January, Gillingham are one of few clubs to actually announce The Away Attendance during the middle of the game, but as for The Home Attendance, you have got to say that considering that this was Adrian Pennock’s First Home Game as Head Coach and Gillingham haven’t played A Home Game for almost A Month, then this is a really disappointing turnout, granted, Gillingham V Shrewsbury Town doesn’t excite fans who might support Gillingham as just there local team, but I thought there would have been at least 5,500 for Pennock’s First Home League Game In-Charge.

Seventy Three Minutes into the match and Cody McDonald can consider himself very unlucky to be flagged for offside, while a minute later and in The Seventy Fourth Minute, Paul Konchesky has a soft free kick given against him for a foul on Tyler Roberts, and from the resulting free kick, Joe Riley has aimed a cross-field cross from right to left in an attempt to pick out someone at the far post, and Max Ehmer is well positioned to header the ball out of play at the expense of A Corner Kick, but nonetheless, Max Ehmer has prevented someone in A Shrewsbury Town Shirt from heading the ball on target, thankfully, A Goal-Scoring Opportunity Of Note Wasn’t Created From The Resulting Corner Kick, but Shrewsbury Town are pushing forwards and they look the more likely side to make the breakthrough.

Seventy Seven Minutes into the match and everyone inside Priestfield Stadium had thought that Gillingham had re-taken the lead, Bradley Garmston has the pace to take on Joe Riley, and Bradley Garmston has whipped in an fantastic in-swinging cross which was allowed to bounce inside Shrewsbury Town’s Penalty Area and somehow Scott Wagstaff cannot direct his header on target and Shrewsbury Town Goalkeeper Jayson Leutwiler wasn’t required to make a save.

However, In The Seventy Eighth Minute, Gillingham should have taken the lead, Ryan Jackson’s Long Throw into The Heart Of Shrewsbury Town’s Penalty Area is won in the air by Joe Riley and Tyler Roberts slices the ball clear, but Jake Hessenthaler chests the ball down and runs towards the right wing, and Abu Ogogo is tracking back with Jake Hessenthaler all the way, and Jake Hessenthaler checks the ball back to Scott Wagstaff, who takes a touch to control the ball before whipping in an dangerous in-swinging cross and Aristote Nsiala headers the ball clear, but Bradley Garmston plays the ball back into the heart of Shrewsbury Town’s Penalty Area, and on the slide, Cody McDonald see’s his first time effort brilliantly saved by Jayson Leutwiler and Max Ehmer see’s his effort on goal crash against the base of the post and Shaun Whalley manages to get the ball clear and away from danger, unlucky from Cody McDonald as there wasn’t much he could have done better then what he did to get a shot off on goal, and maybe the angle was just too acute for Max Ehmer to score the goal to put Gillingham back in-front.

After those chances from Cody McDonald and Max Ehmer, Shrewsbury Town made there second substitution of the game as Louis Dodds has been brought on for Tyler Roberts, now Louis Dodds scored both of Shrewsbury Town’s Goals against Gillingham at Greenhous Meadow earlier in the season, and he has always impressed me whenever Dodds played for Port Vale, and speaking of substitutions, I am surprised that Adrian Pennock has made just the one sub in A Match I am sure that he would want to win, Jay Emmanuel-Thomas, Rory Donnelly and Billy Knott are all available if we’re looking for a fresh pair of legs to make all the difference.

Gillingham built on that chance created in The Seventy Eighth Minute by creating another goal-scoring opportunity in The Seventy Ninth Minute, as Max Ehmer kicks the ball long down-field and Bradley Dack manages to bring the ball down, retain possession of the ball despite Joe Riley’s challenge, and Bradley Dack squares the ball to Josh Wright roughly twenty five yards from Shrewsbury Town’s Goal, and everyone in The Rainham End urged Josh Wright to try his luck from distance, but Josh Wright plays the ball out-wide to Scott Wagstaff, who looks to take on Junior Brown and Scott Wagstaff forces Junior Brown to concede The Corner Kick, and the noise cranks up un volume inside Priestfield Stadium, and Gillingham almost opened the scoring in sensational fashion from the resulting corner kick, as Bradley Dack whips in an superb in-swinging corner kick and Josh Wright attempts the spectacular over-head kick and Josh Wright’s effort only just went wide of Jayson Leutwiler’s Left Hand Post, and that was the chance we were looking for, and with ten minutes to go plus stoppage time, Can Gillingham find the all important goal to pick up three priceless points in this vital League One Clash ???

But it is Shrewsbury Town who look like they are trying to find the winner, because The Visitor’s have the chance to score in The Eighty First Minute, and Gary Deegan of all people drives forward in possession of the ball and with few passing options available, Gary Deegan has tried his luck from distance, but The Shrewsbury Town Defender / Midfielder has dragged his shot well wide of Stuart Nelson’s Right Hand Post.

And in The Eighty Second Minute, Gillingham came close to scoring in very unusual circumstances as Bradley Garmston has the pace to take the ball down the left side of the pitch, and Bradley Garmston plays the ball back to Paul Konchesky, who takes a touch to control the ball, and Paul Konchesky whips in an dangerous in-swinging cross which has taken a huge deflection off Joe Riley, and that deflection had Shrewsbury Town Goalkeeper Jayson Leutwiler back-peddling, and at full stretch, Jayson Leutwiler was able to gather the ball.

This End To End Battle see’s no sign’s of stopping and this time it is Shrewsbury Town on The Front-Foot and Bradley Dack is penalised for his challenge on Gary Deegan, and Shrewsbury Town have A Free Kick within shooting territory here, and from the resulting free kick, Shaun Whalley has put his laces through the ball and hit that effort low, on target with plenty of power and Stuart Nelson dived to his right to parry the ball away to safety, and we can breath a sigh of relief that Shrewsbury Town haven’t turned this match on it’s head, because whoever scores now will win the game.

But in The Eighty Fifth Minute, Shrewsbury Town should have scored and everyone inside Priestfield Stadium knows it as well, Stephen Humphrys has managed to intercept the ball from Paul Konchesky after chasing a lost cause, and Stephen Humphrys has whipped in an dangerous in-swinging cross and even though Adedeji Oshilaja has won the aerial battle, the second ball has dropped perfectly for Louis Dodds to score what surely is going to be the goal that will win the game for Shrewsbury Town, but Louis Dodds must of been leaning backwards because Louis Dodds somehow manages to sky his effort clear of Stuart Nelson’s CrossBar, I had My Head In My Hands After That, because that was in, the ball fell to the one player who is perfectly capable of sticking the ball into the back of the net and I have no idea how Louis Dodds hasn’t at least hit the target with that effort, because Dodds should have scored.

That miss will hopefully give Gillingham renewed hope that The Gills could go on to win all three points, the points mean more then the performance, and if Gillingham can win this match with the few minutes we have got left, plus stoppage time, then we won’t mind how Gillingham get the three points just as long as we get them.

After that glaring miss from Louis Dodds, Shrewsbury Town Make There Third And Final Substitution as Bryn Morris comes on for Abu Ogogo, A Change From Paul Hurst that may well be a change to ensure that Shrewsbury Town will get a point from the game, And In The Eighty Eighth Minute Bradley Dack was incorrectly flagged for offside from The Linesman Down The Rainham End / Gordon Road Stand which was very annoying, because although Cody McDonald was standing in A Offside Position, the ball was played through to Bradley Dack who was clearly in A Onside Position.

In The Ninetieth Minute, Adrian Pennock makes A Double Substitution as Jay Emmanuel-Thomas and Rory Donnelly come on for Bradley Dack and Cody McDonald, Why didn’t Adrian Pennock look to bring Jay Emmanuel-Thomas and Rory Donnelly on at least ten minutes a go ??? -  because Adrian Pennock has been very good with his substitutions in our previous two matches against Oldham Athletic and Sheffield United, so it was a bit disappointing that Rory Donnelly and Jay Emmanuel-Thomas didn’t come on with at least ten minutes to go.

Gary Deegan is penalised in stoppage time for his challenge on Scott Wagstaff and there is three minutes of stoppage time for Gillingham to find A Winner, although with six substitutes and A Goal From Shrewsbury Town, I thought there would be at least four minutes of additional time, but it is Shrewsbury Town who look like they are going to score late on, as Stephen Humphrys tries his luck from the edge of the area and Stuart Nelson is forced to parry the ball away from danger, excellent save from Stuart Nelson to ensure that Gillingham get at least a point from this match.

This Match was going to end with a Grand-Stand Finish with Two Ryan Jackson Long Throw’s, this time, Ryan Jackson comes across to the left side of the pitch to take these throw on’s, the first of these two long throws from Ryan Jackson was headed clear and away from danger by Gary Deegan, and Ryan Jackson allowed the ball to run out of play so that he can try again, The Second Long Throw From Ryan Jackson was more of a threat, as Adedeji Oshilaja flicked the ball on to try and pick out Scott Wagstaff, but Jayson Leutwiler was quick off his goal-line to punch the ball clear and Bradley Garmston on the stretch stops Louis Dodds from getting to the loose ball and Paul Konchesky plays the ball down the line towards Jay Emmanuel-Thomas, and once Jay Emmanuel-Thomas lost possession of the ball, Referee Trevor Kettle blew his whistle for full time as both teams share the spoils in this battle to avoid relegation.

So The Full Time Score at Priestfield Stadium is Gillingham 1 - 1 Shrewsbury Town, I was surprised that there were a few boo’s, but all in all, the players were applauded for there effort and application, it wasn’t a roaring reception which you would normally hear after your team has won, but it was a polite applause that Gillingham have at the very least avoided defeat, but that was A Match that Gillingham had to win in My Opinion, but you have got to say that Shrewsbury Town looked the more likely side to win when you look at The Second Half Performance as a whole.

FULL TIME: GILLINGHAM 1 - 1 SHREWSBURY TOWN

Colin came over at The Full Time Whistle and Colin thought that this was A Match that Gillingham needed to win, at home to the team below us in The League One Table because Bradford City Away is going to be a very very difficult match, it is clear that Gillingham are looking to retain there League One Status and we have to hope that there are going to be many additions to the squad in The January Transfer Window, because the squad is short in several area’s, but at the same-time, the budget has mostly been spent this season so we’re relying on Loan Signings where The Parent Club is prepared to pay 100% of the wage contributions, Young Players who need to play competitive first team football, or free agents who are willing to accept cheap short term contracts, hopefully Adrian Pennock can bring in the reinforcements between now and Tuesday, but it is going to be a difficult task, but it would have been ideal to go into Transfer Deadline Day off the back of a win against Shrewsbury Town.

I made sure I had everything on me before heading for the exit and I spoke to One Gillingham Supporter Out-Side who said that Jay Emmanuel-Thomas and Rory Donnelly should have come on ten to fifteen minute earlier and I agreed with his assessment, because why were the changes so late ??? - I do wonder if Adrian Pennock has seen both players in training and the fact that Elliott List starts ahead of both players really is a telling statement, Adrian Pennock must be looking to sign at least one, probably two strikers before Transfer Deadline Day.

I was surprised to see Stewart, I knew he was going to Gillingham V Shrewsbury Town but I thought he would of headed in the opposite direction, Stewart was cold from sitting / standing in The Brian Moore Stand, it was freezing throughout the entire match, and Stewie said that Cody McDonald should have scored that one v one effort, but because Stewart had to make a move, he didn’t stop for long, I said that there is a pizza with his name on it, but he will probably get something to eat and drink either from A TakeOut or Restaurant Later On.

I meet up with Stephen and Gary after the game and Gary was in the middle of his conversation with Stephen about Junior Brown and Gary thought that Junior Brown should have been sent off for his challenge on Cody McDonald, Gary mentioned that The Gillingham Commentary mentioned that there were two players covering and that is why Junior Brown was shown A Yellow Card, but Gary interpretated that challenge very differently, Gary added that at best both players were level with Cody McDonald, but even if that was the case, Cody McDonald was baring down on goal with his preferred right foot and there was no way either player would have come across in time to make a block - that’s one of those scenario’s where you would love to see what Video Technology would have made of that decision, I thought A Yellow Card was suitable punishment, but Gary had a much better view then I did, and Gary thought that Junior Brown was lucky to stay on the pitch.

NoirCat Predictions weren’t great for Me, Stephen, Diane or Gary, as everyone had this down as A Gillingham Win, and it was such a shame that Gillingham didn’t get the win that we so desperately needed, because we could have done with all three points from this match, and of all the potential goal-scorers you could of selected for Gillingham, Adedeji Oshilaja is on the score-sheet for Gillingham, and it was such a strange goal as Stuart Nelson boots the ball long down-field and Adedeji Oshilaja is on the end of it, and credit to Oshilaja because it was a well taken goal for A Centre Back, and yet, Cody McDonald went the same side and Goalkeeper Jayson Leutwiler was able to get down low to make the save.

But The Second Half was end to end, Cody McDonald Could have Scored, Freddie Ladapo, Alex Rodman and Abu Ogogo all had chances to score and The First Five Minutes Of The Second Half, the score-line could of been anything, and there can be no complaints about Shrewsbury Town equalising because they deserved to be level at that stage, but Cody McDonald or Max Ehmer had the chances to nick it for Gillingham, and thankfully Louis Dodds skied that effort over the crossbar late on, so while we’re disappointed not to win, we’re also pleased not to lose as well.

I also said to Gary that maybe we could bring Tomas Holy on As A Striker and could we bring on A Goalkeeper to play as a Striker ??? - Gary added that Tomas Holy will need an out-field kit, although Tomas Holy could be A Rush Goalkeeper and Stuart Nelson can stay in goal, speaking of striker substitutions, Rory Donnelly and Jay Emmanuel-Thomas coming on so late is very disappointing, as Adrian Pennock has been very quick and decisive with his substitutions in the last two matches, both Jay Emmanuel-Thomas and Rory Donnelly needed to come on with fifteen minutes to go.

Diane mentioned that she would arrange a time for us to possibly drive to Bradford City Via Car, as Diane was unsure whether to go to this game via car or not, but with the cold weather, decreasing temperatures and Ethan very bored, Diane decided to head off home, with Liverpool losing to Wolves and Gillingham drawing against Shrewsbury Town, it hasn’t been a good day of results for Diane, Tottenham managed to win 4-3 against Wycombe Wanderers and only just - if only Gillingham went to White Heart Lane and did that.

Gary headed off and said he would see us for the next home game, which isn’t A Month Away This Time, Stephen will be going to Port Vale so we both said C Ya To Gary while we waited as Stephen wanted to get Player Autographs from Elliott List, Scott Wagstaff and Cody McDonald, we waited for Jay Emmanuel-Thomas and we either missed him and he has headed off early, or he was still getting changed, while we were waiting, Dad Rang Me and said that Mum wanted A Small Portion Of Chips And A FishCake, I mentioned that I did see Stewart and he was freezing in The Brian Moore Stand, I added that I was surprised to see him as he would normally head off very quickly.

After The Phone Call, Colin spoke to me and he asked me for my thoughts on the result, after thinking about it, Yeah A Draw Is A Fair Result with Colin saying that it is a work in progress and Gillingham are two matches unbeaten now and this something to build on, such a shame it wasn’t the win we so badly wanted, but we’re getting there and hopefully we can pull off the most unexpected win by winning against Bradford City Next Week.

I Said C Ya To Colin and Julian, and Me and Stephen waited for five more minutes before heading off, I stopped off at Sainsbury’s to buy a 500ML Bottle Of Coca Cola for £1.25 and I mentioned to Stephen that he could post The Man Of The Match Thread On Gills Debate, as we wanted to start getting those threads back on the forum again, in the end, I ended up posting The Man Of The Match Thread, but Stephen can post The Thread Next Time.

Stephen headed off to The Cricketers Pub while I made my way towards Gillingham Train Station, and I made it just in time for The 18.07PM Train, and I rang home to say that I was on the train to Rainham, where the train will terminate and I was back in Rainham at 18.15PM, and while I was on The Train, I had sent the following Tweet, Two Games unbeaten for Gillingham so it is something to build on, but a win today for The Gills would pull Gillingham away from the bottom 4, we really could have done with a win, we don’t have the greatest of home forms against Shrewsbury Town, but that was a match Gillingham needed to win, had we done so, Gillingham would of been Sixteenth In League One, so we only move up a place, but Gillingham would have moved Seven Points Clear of The Relegation Zone - Eight if you include Goal Difference - and Gillingham would have had a game in hand as well.

I arrived back in Rainham at 18.15PM and made My Way to George’s Plaice to Buy A Small Portion Of Chips with One FishCake, and A Small Portion Of Chips and Two Jumbo Plain Sausages for £8, and once I got My Change Back, I got A lift From Dad Back Home, Dad had done well in Super Six despite a few shock results in The FA Cup over the weekend, Stewart was probably sitting next to A Radiator after suffering from the freezing conditions high up in The Brian Moore Stand, and it is such a shame that Gillingham couldn’t get the three points we so desperately needed, but it is two matches unbeaten for The Gills, hopefully, we can make it three games unbeaten for when we travel to Bradford City The Following Saturday - COME ON THE GILLS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!