Ayatollah Hermione

Never gonna dance again

With you on Thurston Moore, Chez. Just listened to it today and it's excellent. I really love House of Balloons too; my past week has basically been spent listening to it. The transition from House of Balloons to Glass Table Girls is immense. I don't think I can pick a Top 10 yet but my definites would be: St. Vincent - Strange Mercy Fleet Foxes - Helplessness Blues The Weeknd - House of Balloons PJ Harvey - Let England Shake Girls - Father, Son, Holy Ghost The Dear Hunter - The Colour Spectrum Night Beats - S/T Thee Oh Sees - Carrion Crawler/The Dream Not heard Kate Bush, Feist or Tom Waits yet and there's stuff released earlier in the year that I'll have to re-listen to like Beastie Boys, Radiohead, Psychic Paramount, Danger Mouse and Destroyer to see how I feel about them. It's been a pretty good year though IMO. Special credit to Gotye for releasing, maybe, the best single with "Somebody That I Used to Know", closely followed by SBTRKT's "Wildfire" EDIT: Lykke Li, Laura Marling and Anna Calvi all had good albums too. Sisters doing it for themselves

St. Vincent for me, I reckon.

Been a canny year (though I've not played Uncharted 3 and Assassins Creed: Revelations yet) but for the most part, the best games have been the ones not hyped up too much. Little Big Planet 2 was fantastic IMO. Great, inventive level design and the community tools they gave people were insane. Some really crazy user-made levels coming out of that with my only gripe being they couldn't code the possibility for user-levels to use PS Move so I could play hundreds of light-gun levels. Dead Space 2 had some impressive set-pieces but was an action game masquerading as a survival horror game; struggled to get the ammo consumption right and improves a lot more when you play it on a lower difficulty, treat it as a big budget Aliens rip off and enjoy the set-pieces. Killzone 3 and Homefront were terrible. MORTAL KOMBAT was incredible. I'm no fighting game wizard (and never will) so Mortal Kombat appeals to me nicely and the nostalgia kick was great. It had more than that though with a fun story mode, a crazy challenge tower mode and FREDDY KRUEGER as DLC. Portal 2 was very good and incredibly well written though lacked the insular charms of the original. Though, their work in expanding that universe in an innovative way was excellent and the puzzles were brilliant. Fun CO-OP mode too. LA Noire was basically a point and click adventure game with a great setting but silly story. Its core mechanics were functional but rode a lot of goodwill with the Mocap stuff. I did really enjoy it though, thought the scraping around for clues etc brought back nice little memories of Broken Sword and Sam and Max. Not played Infamous 2 or Dragon Age 2 Deus Ex was so average that I struggled to get through half of it. Still got it to complete. DRIVER SAN FRANCISCO. What a great game. Drugged out cop plays out 70s buddy cop fantasy in his head complete with driving under trucks, smashing head first into oncoming traffic and driving school buses off ramps. A game in which all the core mechanics blended excellently; far better than it had any right to be. Dead Island made me more tired of zombies than I am already which was impressive. Gears 3 had a good campaign, if an infuriating one from a storytelling perspective. Horde mode really is a phenomenon though and I wish my internet was working to take advantage of it. Arkham City was excellent, though again, lacked the surprise factor of its prequel. Catwoman's dialogue and all-round gameplay were shitty though and the game would have worked a lot better if it was solely Batman. Improved on its boss fights which makes the whole package great though. Ratchet and Clank 4 manages to take everything fun about the series and replace it with the clusterfuck bullshit of New Super Mario Bros. Wii except the latter is still good with 1 player. Not played a lot from November (though it was a ridiculously stacked month) but it's crazy that at this point in time (without having played Uncharted, Ass:Creed, Sonic Generations, Rayman and anything Wii-exclusive), my GOTY is probably Driver: San Francisco. From a sheer personal POV, I mean, Best Game with regards to technical achievement, mechanics, etc is probably Skyrim but D:SF is well worth a playthrough from anyone. So, yeah, what have I missed? Not played many downloadable games but as far as I'm concerned, XBLA will never top Shadow Complex as long as it exists.

Yep, done with this for a while. Shame, guess this kind of thing just isn't doing it for me anymore.

Not played this for a week, went back to it tonight and couldn't get back into it. This is clearly a better game than Oblivion but it's not grabbing me half as much. I'd say I may be leaning toward more linear experiences but I'm having boat loads of fun just messing around in Saint's Row. Very peculiar.

It's a no from me, Simon Happy

Robbie Elliott didn't knock 4 past the Mackems That's why it was special. His chicken dance was rarer than hen's teeth. But was it rarer than Steve Watson's throw-in?

Shame because I actually reading his posts about the on-field side of things. I remember some really interesting old chat about our 70s players between him and, I think, Stevie where LM was telling him the craic about a few of them and it was good to read.

Robbie Elliott didn't knock 4 past the Mackems

His Twitter patter is shocking. No wonder the club tried to get him off it because he just invites needless scrutiny on himself, something he was getting away from under Hughton. Just because he likes The Smiths instead of JLS, it doesn't make him unique amongst footballers like he seems to think.

I hoped it was a biblical storm to wash away all the shite bars on the Quayside.

Nolan's funky chicken will never be replaced, in my heart.

Harps wishes he could help.

I know we have the stickied thread for older NUFC photos but I thought we could start one for more contemporary memories etc.

Ben Arfa is cool as fuck. Anyone got that photo of him celebrating the Everton goal by just standing with a stone faced look on his face?

Which was almost as long as Ronny Johnsen's

Lamine Diatta. 9 minute long NUFC career.

Was spelled 'Garry' I believe. Top knowledge. Amdy Faye needs to be hovering around the worst XI somewhere.

Everyone so soon to forget Wayne Quinn

Thanks for trying, Nigel

The idea that Wes Brown will be 36 and on £40k a week is mint though

No idea how he got a year extension like, especially considering they had Welbeck coming back from the mackems. And the fact he's shit.

I was watching the game where they resorted to long hoofballs up the pitch for Hernandez to chase on the counter for the majority of the first half. Your title's going to your neighbours, you sour-faced old cunt. Deal with it.