Miguel Sanchez

Given the boxer represents Germany I'd say it's a bit out there

On to Algeria and their post-independence football team is an interesting one. They were the team which missed out on qualifying from their world cup group when West Germany and Austria kicked it about for 80 minutes, and lots of the players from the 80s team ultimately won the 1990 African Cup of Nations which Algeria was hosting for the first time. Rabah Madjer - Wikipedia played for Porto in the 80s and won lots of league titles and the 1987 European Cup. Lakhdar Belloumi - Wikipedia is their most capped player and was voted the 4th best African player of the century, although he spent his whole playing career in Algeria. Riyad Mahrez - Wikipedia is the other obvious candidate and I don't know how you compare these three guys together given when and where they've played. Consider this a dress rehearsal - is Messi better than Maradona? Is Mahrez better than these other people from the past? Outside of football your best bet seems to be middle distance runner Taoufik Makhloufi - Wikipedia who won a gold at London 2012 and two silvers at Rio 2016. Any thoughts?

Think I'm going to stick with the long jumper here since he's won something, but I don't think either he or the boxer compare to Cana. The world pool champion is also Austrian, we'll see if he can unseat Alaba in a few countries' time.

Re: Swinson above - her idea of highest average score per minute or whatever it was instead of penalties was blatantly obvious and everyone who went "THEY'RE TIED THE SCORES WOULD BE THE SAME" is an idiot. Knockout football generally happens after teams have played other teams in matches already, and they'll have scored goals in those matches. The idea was idiotic but I don't think I saw one person acknowledge the obviousness of the maths there.

I've thought of a way to make bitcoin mining more efficient. I shall carry some out and then produce the results after hitting return. 1 Bitcoin. There you go. Took almost no time or energy at all! I trust I am now rich.

Up next, Albania. Their most capped player is Lorik Cana - Wikipedia who played for Marseilles, Galatasaray and Lazio, playing in the Champions League and retiring from international football after captaining his country at Euro 2016. In other sports they have no Olympic medals. The best I can do seems to be long jump or weightlifting. A gold in the long jump in the European Indoor Championships in 2017 for Izmir Smajlaj - Wikipedia A gold in the 2014 European Weightlifting Championships for Erkand Qerimaj - Wikipedia Smajlaj is getting my vote her I think, but they're all well behind Cana so it's a win for football. Any objections?

Oh I'd forgotten I'd quoted this. Whoops. Some Olympic medals seems better than some cricket numbers so that sways me. The list in the OP comes from the wikipedia page "List of Sovereign States," for whatever that's worth.

The reason I specified sportsman in the title is because I imagined including women would make the non-footballers even harder to quantify - where would Serena Williams fit in for instance, given the quality of her competition has been so comparatively low? Anyway, Afghanistan seems like Zohib Islam Amiri as their most capped player with 61. Elsewhere it's cricket, and while I'm fucked if I'm understanding any of these numbers it seems to be Rashid Khan - Wikipedia who takes the honours. Comparing the two I'd say Khan wins since he's been at a higher level than Amiri.

Why doesn't she just wear a mask? She'd be perfectly safe then.

I'll put in the names once we reach a consensus or someone looks up an obscure Pacific island's history on wikipedia. The Travel Forum claims P&B has a well-travelled membership - how much do you know about the world?

This idea popped into my head while watching the Euros and when seeing an argument in the Andy Murray/tennis thread. Here is a list of the world's countries: Best footballer Best non-footballer Football better? Afghanistan Zohib Islam Amiri Rohullah Nikpai (taekwondo) No Albania Lorik Cana Izmir Smajlaj (long jump) Yes Algeria Rabah Madder Noureddine Morceli (running) No American Samoa Nicky Salapu Sean Manaea (baseball) No Andorra Ildefons Lima Hocine Haciane (swimming) Yes Angola Manucho Carlos Morais (basketball) Yes Anguilla Ryan Liddie Omari Banks (cricket) No Antigua and Barbuda Peter Byers Viv Richards (cricket) No Argentina Lionel Messi Juan Manuel Fangio (motor racing) Yes Armenia Henrikh Mkhitaryan Artur Aleksanyan (wrestling) Yes Aruba Theric Ruiz Xander Bogaerts (baseball) No Australia Harry Kewell Don Bradman (cricket) No Austria David Alaba Toni Sailer (skiing) No Azerbaijan Rashad Sadygov Shakhriyar Mamedyarov (chess) No The Bahamas Lesly St. Fleur Chris Brown (sprinting) No Bahrain Ismail Abdullatif Yusuf Saad Kamel (running) No Bangladesh Jamal Bhuyan Mashrafe Mortaza (cricket) No Barbados Llewellyn Riley Garfield Sobers (cricket) No Belarus Alexander Hleb Max Mirnyi (tennis) No Belgium Eden Hazard Eddy Merckx (cycling) No Belize Deon McCaulay Verno Phillips (boxing) No Benin Stephane Sessegnon Yemi Apithy (fencing) Yes Bermuda Shaun Goater Clarence Hill (boxing) Yes Bhutan Chencho Gyeltshen Sigyel Phub (boxing) Yes Bolivia Marcelo Moreno Paulo Victor Aguilera (bmx) Yes Bosnia and Herzegovina Edin Dzeko Mirza Teletovic (basketball) Yes Botswana Joel Mogorosi Nijel Amos (running) No Brazil Pele Ayrton Senna (motor racing) Yes British Virgin Islands Avondale Williams Dion Crabbe (sprinting) No Brunei Shah Razen Said Fakhri Ismail (sprinting) Yes Bulgaria Hristo Stoichkov Boyan Aleksandrov (wrestling) No Burkina Faso Charles Kabore Hugues Fabrice Zango (triple jump) Yes Burundi Saido Berahino Venuste Niyongabo (running) No Cambodia Keo Sokpheng Hem Bunting (running) No Cameroon Samuel Eto'o Joel Embiid (basketball) Yes Canada Dwayne De Rosario Wayne Gretzky (hockey) No Cape Verde Ryan Mendes Jordin Andrade (hurdling) Yes Cayman Islands Mark Ebanks Shaune Fraser (swimming) No Central African Republic Geoffrey Kongdogbia Beranger-Aymard Bosse (sprinting) Yes Chad Ezechiel N'Douassel Yes Chile Alexis Sanchez Marcelo Rios (tennis) Yes China Sun Jihai Yao Ming (basketball) No Chinese Taipei Chen Po-liang Chien-Ming Wang (baseball) No Colombia Carlos Valderrama Edgar Renteria (baseball) No Comoros El Fardou Ben Nabouhane Maoulida Daroueche (sprinting) Yes Democratic Republic of the Congo Dieumerci Mbokani Dikembe Mutombo (basketball) No Republic of the Congo Francois M'Pele Yes Cook Islands Tony Jamieson Stan Wright (rugby) No Costa Rica Alejandro Morera Soto Nery Brenes (sprinting) Yes Croatia Luka Modric Ivano Balic (handball) Yes Cuba Onel Hernandez Teofilo Stevenson (boxing) No Curacao Leandro Bacuna Jurickson Profar (baseball) No Cyprus Sotiris Kaiafas Marcos Baghdatis (tennis) Yes Czech Republic Pavel Nedved Dominik Hasek (hockey) No Denmark Michael Laudrup Mikkel Hansen (handball) Tie Djibouti Hussein Ahmed Salah (running) No Dominica Glenson Prince Jerome Romain (triple jump) No Dominican Republic Tano Bonnin Albert Pujols (baseball) No East Timor Nataniel Reis Augusto Ramos Soares (running) Yes Ecuador Antonio Valencia Andres Gomez (tennis) Yes Egypt Mo Salah Amr Shabana (squash) Yes El Salvador Magico Gonzalez Carlos Hernandez (boxing) Yes Equatorial Guinea Emilio Nsue Eric Moussambani (swimming) Yes Eritrea Yidnekachew Shimangus Zersenay Tadese (running) No Estonia Ragnar Klavan Andrus Veerpalu (skiing) No Eswatini Tony Tsabedze Yes Ethiopia Getaneh Kebede Haile Gebrselassie (running) No Faroe Islands Fiji Finland France Gabon The Gambia Georgia Germany Ghana Gibraltar Greece Grenada Guam Guatemala Guinea Guinea-Bissau Guyana Haiti Honduras Hong Kong Hungary Iceland India Indonesia Iran Iraq Ireland Israel Italy Ivory Coast Jamaica Japan Jordan Kazakhstan Kenya Kiribati Kosovo North Korea South Korea Kuwait Kyrgyzstan Laos Latvia Lebanon Lesotho Liberia Libya Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Macau Madagascar Malawi Malaysia Maldives Mali Malta Marshall Islands Mauritania Mauritius Mexico Micronesia Moldova Monaco Mongolia Montenegro Montserrat Morocco Mozambique Myanmar Namibia Nauru Nepal Netherlands New Caledonia New Zealand Nicaragua Niger Nigeria North Macedonia Norway Oman Pakistan Palau Palestine Panama Papua New Guinea Paraguay Peru Philippines Poland Portugal Puerto Rico Qatar Romania Russia Rwanda Saint Kitts and Nevis Saint Lucia Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Samoa San Marino Sao Tome and Principe Saudi Arabia Senegal Serbia Seychelles Sierra Leone Singapore Slovakia Slovenia Solomon Islands Somalia South Africa South Sudan Spain Sri Lanka Sudan Suriname Sweden Switzerland Syria Tahiti Tajikistan Tanzania Thailand Timor-Leste Togo Tonga Trinidad and Tobago Tunisia Turkey Turkmenistan Turks and Caicos Islands Tuvalu Uganda Ukraine United Arab Emirates United Kingdom Scotland England Northern Ireland Wales United States US Virgin Islands Uruguay Uzbekistan Vanuatu Venezuela Vietnam Yemen Zambia Zimbabwe Totals:

Perhaps the ultimate Collector's Edition is this one for WipEout Omega Collection. I remember seeing this and not believing it was real. Part of me still doesn't. But imagine having this:

I've been meaning to do this since NotThePars' FF7 statue. Blame him. I'm sorry. These pictures are all large so... sorry. Here's all my video game related shite This is my Collector's Edition of Gran Turismo Sport. I got this from Amazon during their 2018 Black Friday sale. On the Thursday night it was £50 and I asked myself do I really want to spend £50 to get a game I already have, a big book, a model car, a copy of the game I already have in a steelbook case and some in-game credits? Do I really? On Friday at work I convinced myself yes, I did. Then I went online and it was £30. I've never clicked buy as quickly on anything in my life. To celebrate 2021 (probably) being the last official seasons of GT Sport's FIA-certified Championships I started looking for a model of the Nissan GT-R I'd driven in the Manufacturer Series ever since I started doing the races regularly. I couldn't find the model that's in-game but I did find that one, which is very close to the livery I run on the car in terms of colours and design, so that's cool. The 787B and the R390 are the result of my just getting lots of suggestions for model cars on my Amazon home page and not having the will-power to say no. I'm not crazy about the Mazda though, the orange is too bright and there's a chip on the rear wing. You get what you pay for I guess, the GT-R was £40 from ebay and the other two were £16-17 each. This is the GT Sport steelbook and my Batman Arkham games steelbook. I probably wouldn't have bought this one if I'd realised Arkham Knight wasn't on-disc. This is my steelbook of the Bayonetta/Vanquish collection, which was very reasonably priced when I got it. This is a close-up of it. Modern Warfare 2 and Tower of Guns steelbooks. I forgot to get the MW2 art book that came with it. Tower of Guns is a game I've played on PS4 and PS3 already. I got this version (which has a different trophy list) purely out of bemusement, I had no idea such a niche game would have a steelbook release. This is my fancy version of Heavy Rain. When this game came out I made a bunch of those origami birds and dotted them around my school. A girl, who was that year awarded Rear of the Year in our yearbook and who the resident lecherous P.E. teacher tried to get fired into at the end of year party, recognised what they were. Perhaps I should have known her better. On a related note, I recently discovered there's a 15th anniversary edition of David Cage's previous game, Faherenheit/Indigo Prophecy, on sale on Amazon for ~£25. Someone tell me I shouldn't buy it. Please. Here's my copy of the Annapurna Collection, a collection of eight games published by Annapurna Interactive. Each game is on disc, and has its own foreward from the studio responsible for them, like this: This is the special edition of BioShock 2, the poster advertisements not shown. I remember how annoyed I was they weren't actual posters that were in the first game: Here's my Mirror's Edge Catalyst collector's edition which I bought without looking at the size of it and expecting the statue to just sit on my PS4. Yeah. That's the box it came in and the steelbook for the game. I'm thinking about Catalyst right now and thinking of it much more fondly than I did when I finished it. I love the first Mirror's Edge. The second game ruined Faith as a character. Fun fact: I got this for £15. According to the internet this apparently cost £150. The box it was shipped in says it's number 386 of 1000. Were they expecting £150,000 worth of sales? This is my assortment of strategy guides and art book. If I had anywhere proper to put them I'd have loads more art books. This is my PS4 and a pair of WipEout models, a Feisar and AG Systems ship. The Feisar is the wrong colour, the blue should be darker and the brown bit should be closer to grey. You can see now how hilariously over-sized the Mirror's Edge statue would have been.

Anyone else not realise this was a thing on the Friday too?

Just buckle down, do your time like Leslie Grantham.

Part of me wants to see the source of these images and another part of me really really doesn't.

About fucking time, mate.

I realise goons like this are probably reacting excessively on purpose since they're filming themselves, but do people actually react to things like this when they're watching it at home? It's embarrassing watching this.

Also modelled by every pizza/chippy hybrid takeaway place in the world.

Just me that thinks that Norwich top looks like something from the Isthmian leagues?

Horizon Zero Dawn (PS4, 2017) Before I went into Horizon Zero Dawn I didn't really know anything about it. I knew it had a redhaired girl as the main character. I knew it had a world filled with machines. That was pretty much it. I've since learned the girl is called Aloy, the machines are all eerily similar to animals from Earth's present and past, and as she sets out into her third person action adventure she finds out who she is and why the machines are there. Aloy is born a member of the Nora, one of the tribes that inhabits the game world. The Nora are extremely snobby however and Aloy is an outcast, doomed to be raised by another outcast until she reaches 18 and can run in The Proving, a sequence of tasks people that age partake in in order to become a Nora Brave, and properly join the tribe. Sadly right at her moment of triumph some bad guys turn up to kill her and Aloy's world is turned upside down. The Nora instead make her a Seeker and send her out into the world to discover what's going on. Like all open world games nowadays, Horizon offers the player complete freedom on how they approach the game's various quests and activities. There's a levelling system which allows you to unlock skills, with quests tied to that in an advisory manner rather than required. The problem I always have with open world games, especially large ones like this, is that I'm overwhelmed. I barely know who Aloy is, who the Nora are or why every location in their area is called Mother's Something or other, now I'm out into the world meeting the Carja and the Oseram and the Banuk and various individuals within those tribes and I'm doing quests for all of them and I'm doing hunting trials and I've got different weapons and outfits and upgrades with different categories to improve and there are loads of locations with funny names to find them all in. If reading this feels fast and poorly explained, now you know how I feel. This isn't really something that improves as the game goes on. In one session you could spend two or three hours just doing side quests, visiting various places on the map and getting the life stories of various different people in the process. Then the next time you play you go back to the main story and you've no idea who anyone is, something not helped by there being two separate main quest threads in the early game. Is this a problem I have? Is it because I don't play games like this very often, and is this why I've always preferred a more linear experience? I think something which limits any real sense of connection I had with the characters is how you interact with them. There's an air of the Betheseda open world RPG about things, where you talk to people and have a list of conversation topics to work your way through in lieu of exposition. The voice acting isn't that great (Aloy's in particular can be downright weird, and the amount of talking she does when you're controlling her in the world is irritating) and during these conversations the people have that classic Fallout dead eyed thousand mile stare the entire time. Near enough everyone you speak to has the same look, same mannerisms and same vocal delivery, and they all look ridiculous while they're doing it. As a result, I don't pay that much attention. Now that I've finished the game I'm in two minds about the world. I spent 70 hours in it across my first playthrough, the Frozen Wilds DLC and New Game+ and I like it. I like the premise of the story and I'll expand on why later, and the gameplay loop of fighting machines and scavenging in the open sections remained satisfying through all those hours. Gameplay is your standard modern-day open world action adventure fare. There's a crafting system based on scavenging from the environment as well as defeated enemies, allowing you to make as much ammo and health potions as you like. There are a range of weapons to provide different strategies for approaching both human and mechanical enemies. This is also slightly overwhelming in the early game because there are lots of different types of weapons which all do different things and, for me at least, there was a sense I should be using all of them. I realise this isn't the case, I realise most games have problems like this where the default weapon is the best option despite whatever else they can make you try to use, but my experience with the weapons was similar to the characters and locations. There are a lot, and it's a lot to try and process when you're new to the game. Once you do though, it's worth it. Finding some machines you need to take out and planning your assault beforehand, laying down traps and tripwires then baiting them to run into them while you finish them off with arrows, this is very satisfying when it comes off and it remains satisfying for the whole game. The combat controls are solid, and different ammo types easy to switch between. Aloy also has a melee weapon which is about the most useless weapon I've ever seen in a game - it starts off an uninterruptable movement animation that takes about four seconds to finish and does no damage. Terrible, especially if you accidentally trigger it while you're trying to aim your bow. Outside of the full attack option on machines and humans alike, there's little viable variety in the gameplay. You can kill human and machine enemies with stealth - either with well-placed arrow shots or contextual melee strikes or over-riding the machines to make them fight for you, but even on lower difficulties it's hard to take out more than a couple of enemies before you've alerted a whole area full of them. This often leads to you being swamped from all sides, and it can be easy at times to be physically overwhelmed by machines, being pushed around. It doesn't help in this regard that most of the machines you can't take down in one hit are all absolutely huge, but these ones can move just as fast and as suddenly as the smaller ones. The final note I'll make on the combat is that there's an elemental system in the weapons and outfits. You can use ice, fire and other kinds of ammo and certain machines are vulnerable to them and it's almost completely pointless because fire works pretty much perfectly against all of them. Spam a few fire arrows until the flame or thermometer symbol above the machine fills up, then spam its weak spots with regular arrows. Job done. Now that I've said "machines" about a thousand times, what of them? What of the story that put them there? I'm a big fan of dystopian fiction and as Aloy explores the world we start to find the ruins of what is clearly, or was, Earth. We discover that throughout the 21st century mankind became more reliant on increasingly sophisticated robot technology. Then the biggest robot manufacturing company in the world made a line of "peacekeeping" (read: military) robots that had a glitch in their software. They're fuelled by biomass and they can self-replicate at will. And now they can't be shut down. Whoopsie. The biggest thing I can say about the story for this game is that even though, perhaps because, it took me a long time to uncover it as I was going about the map that it felt properly momentous. I realise that mankind dooming the planet to lifelessness then enacting a successful plan to counter it is about as large-scale as it gets, but the pace you uncover the details and then the remnants of it feels well-paced in a way that's surprising for an open world game. By the time you discover what Zero Dawn is (we know what Zero Dawn is, still not sure about the Horizon bit) Aloy isn't just a clueless Nora wandering about the world anymore, so there's a reasonable amount of character development tied in with the story details. That said, the manner in which the story is presented is... well, let's call it convenient. Aloy has a Focus, a device from the pre-apocalypse days she found when she was young. This lets her scan the area around her and interact with old technology, and forms a useful part of the gameplay as you scan areas to find out where enemies are and what their weaknesses are. Rather than Aloy exploring the world on her own and finding out the truth about herself - an admittedly daunting task - the Focus starts talking to her. It starts talking to her in the voice of Cedric Daniels from The Wire, who conveniently has spent several years scouting locations and gathering information and perhaps more things he's not being honest about, and he guides her through everything she has to do. I realise it might have seemed implausible for Aloy to find out so much on her own, but it's probably worse to just put a voice in her ear which gives her all the answers. The Frozen Wilds DLC offers a new location, new story and some monsters even more irritating than before, purely by virtue of their size. It's alright. It raises some questions about the game's geography, since it seems to have a volcano in it which was once Yellowstone National Park. But the rest of the game is set in and around Colorado and Utah. I might be completely off with this, I'm sure if you've read this far you care about the game enough to know if this is nonsense and will tell me as much. You get some new weapons here too and elemental combat comes into play a bit more, but for the most part it's just more of the same. And that's fine, since I like what I had already. Despite everything that I've said here, I know what the best compliment you can give an open world game is. It's how much you want to be and spend time in that world, how much you want to be the character you're playing as or spend time with them. After playing this for a bit I had a day where I was really immersed in it, I sunk a good few hours into it. The next day I was out and while I was walking down the road I realised I was looking at cars and automatically scanning them as if they were machines. I was looking at the lights and body panels as areas to target, as weak spots, and I didn't even realise I was doing it. That makes up for all the dead eyed conversations, convenient plot delivery and surprisingly underwhelming final boss fight. I'd love to say my positive experience with one of the most celebrated PS4 exclusives will make me more eager to seek them out in the future, but my backlog's big and there's always something else to work through first. It's a hard life, this.

Is Levelling Up different from Building Back Better?

I'm very concerned that the James Melville twitter account - which I do not believe to be used by a real person - is and has for a while regularly been saying things I agree with.