Continuing my hobby of writing about games, I decided to write a series of match reports following the exploits of the fictitious Landgraff United in Pro Evolution Soccer 4’s Konami Cup.

Landgraff United – LGU for short – is a team my friend Sean put together in an online football management game called HatTrick. He used to write team news on a forum, and it inspired me to do the same. I edited one of the game’s fictitious teams to match the kit, stadium and lineup of Landgraff United, then entered them into the Konami Cup. How did they fare? Read on!

Konami Cup 1st round.

Landgraff United vs. Real Betis.

Landgraff United‘s Konami Cup campaign got off to a disappointing start today with a heart-wrenching 2-1 loss to visiting Real Betis.

After falling a goal down in the 27th minute to a spectacular Oliveira diving header, LGU threatened the opposition penalty area numerous times, coming closest with a Lewbrant thunderbolt just before the half-time whistle sent the visitors in a goal ahead.

Coach Miguel Trincado Settier must have rallied the players at half time, as within five minutes the hosts were awarded a penalty right in front of their loyal supporters. Marco Hoogstrate decided to take over from regular set-piece expert Steen Rud Risum, and would have been disappointed to see his spot kick saved by Contreras in the Betis goal. However, LGU kept the pressure on and, after a quick cross from the right William Pierce popped up in the six yard box to head the ball straight across goal and inside the far post. The Landgraff Arena exploded; LGU’s celebrations in front of their own fans were ecstatic.

After the restart the game was a very scrappy affair with neither side holding onto possession too well. LGU applied some pressure to win a series of corners but failed to make use of them, and when Betis broke to the other end the defence gave away a needless foul. A quickly-taken free kick saw Betis ace Fernando sneak in around the back to tuck the ball away and make the game 2-1 in the 87th minute. Landgraff United’s loyal fans, so buoyant after their team’s equaliser, were now solemnly silent as the small group of Spanish fans celebrated.

Still optimistic

Despite a late chance for LGU the final whistle blew on the game at 2-1 to Betis. A disappointed Miguel Trincado Settier told me he was proud of his players despite the result.

“I thought we showed tremendous heart to get back into the game at 1-1 when we could have given up. We were unlucky with some of our chances, and I think we gave away a sloppy second goal, but sometimes things just don’t go your way. It’s just part of the game. We’ll be better-prepared for our second game next week.”

LGU now face an uphill struggle to qualify from Group 1, but hopefully coach Settier’s enthusiasm will rub off on his players in time for their next match against tournament dark horses Somesterrine.

Next match: Landgraff United vs. Somesterrine

Not, as you might be thinking, an excuse to play games non-stop until your eyes bleed but rather a social networking website mainly for people who play games. Think of it as a MySpace with even worse social skills, if you like.

Anyway, I actually think it’s a pretty good site. There are pages for games, developers, publishers and of course players, and anyone can contribute to game pages, creating them and adding content as they wish. Of course, if you’re just there to make friends there’s lots of provision for that too, with groups and friends list, just like any decent site.

I created a group for game bloggers called – in a very Jamesian twist of ingenuity – Game Bloggers. I thought it would be a good opportunity for other game bloggers to exchange links and build traffic, so if you’re a GGE member you can find the link here. If you aren’t a member but it sounds interesting, leave a comment (or email me) and I’ll be happy to send you an invite!

I’ll also be working harder on building links here and increasing my traffic, which seems to have dropped off a little this year. If you have a website you’d like me to publicise, let me know and we’ll exchange links.

Incidentally, today I started and finished my second soundtrack in two months for a documentary called “The Future of Farming.” Mixing rustic, lightly lilting acoustic guitar rhythms with gentle spacial synths it’s another string to my bow – scoring a documentary is hard, but I think I’ve done a good job. Expect samples in the coming days!

Okay, so the first post of the year isn’t exactly a classic, but it’ll just clear a few things up and then we can dive into the content proper as soon as I write it!

• Lots of people come here searching for a poem called “The Game“, by somebody who shares my name (that’s James Newton, by the way). Obviously this isn’t the right site, but it certainly matches all the key words. Anyway, if you’re here looking for the poem “The Game” by James Newton, and it’s about football, you actually want the tenth poem down on this page (link)
• I’ll do my best to come up with some Wii Play tips, and there’ll be a short Wii Sports video soon!
• I am the number one games expert in Malaysia according to MSN Live Search!
• Thanks to my soundtrack work on Tanner, I’m now up on IMDB. Check it out!
• This month’s issue of GamesTM has an excellent four-page feature on NiGHTS into Dreams, including an interview with the usually-reclusive Yuji Naka. He doesn’t say anything about Wii NiGHTS (the article does mention Air/Aero NiGHTS though), but there is an interesting revelation about the original Saturn analogue pad: the first person to hold the prototype was none other than Steven Spielberg.

That’s about all I can come up with at the moment. I can’t tell you my posting schedule over the next few weeks – I won’t be at work, but I’m going to my parents’ house for a week, so it could be quiet.

Oh yes, last thing – it’s my 23rd birthday next Wednesday, the 10th of January, hence the cool banner.

After a very successful year’s blogging here, it’s time to wish you all a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year. I’ll try to remember to post a quick retrospective before the year’s out, but until then here’s a few highlights off the top of my head:

• Getting a job I adore;
• All the time I spent with my family, particularly my beautiful nephew and niece;
• The success of the site, of course;
• Writing my first complete soundtrack for Tanner;
• Nintendo Wii – great fun!

There’s more but they’re the best ones that spring to mind right now. I hope you enjoy yourself until you pop by again.

Cheers!

The site is going from strength to strength!

Internet overlords Alexa keep a track of traffic and readership of websites, ranking domains against each other in some form of popularity contest. Big dogs Yahoo!, MySpace, Google and YouTube tend to come out on top, whereas normal websites tend to leave a puddle in the corner, lolling around the high millions.

I used to be one of those weedy guys, happy with never getting attention and not getting my nose broken. Nowadays, though, I like to get in there and mix it up a little. I’ve put my personality on the line – I’m not afraid any more. The big corporate bullies might snarl at me, but I stand proud, for I have improved my Alexa rank by half a million places.

Yes, we’re not talking an incremental increase here; I have gone from weak to sleek in a week. Granted I’m still at around 750,000, but I’ve broken into the top million websites in the entire world. PhilNewton.net and Sodaware.net are both in the top 500,000, with Sodaware pushing the top 250,000. This is awesome stuff!

My readership seems a little inconsistent, but it serves as a rough outline of who likes this place enough to subscribe. I’m grateful for every read, click and subscription – thank you!

If this is your first time, check out some of my Best Bits in the menu on the left, or scan the Archives for something eye-catching. New or old, Internet stranger or real-life chum, thanks for coming!

Oh yes, and make sure to stop by again before Friday for something I hope will be very exciting indeed…

About six months ago this postcard sailed through our letterbox.

I didn’t have any friends on holiday, any that were interested in basking sharks or would send me a postcard “just because”. I even smudged the writing on “Marley” to see if it was printed spam, but it’s actually someone’s real handwriting. A real person wrote and sent this.

I was quite confused, but things got even stranger when I read what was on the back. You can click the image for a larger version.
From what I can tell, it was sent from Scotland – I think the postmark says Glasgow – and it’s addressed to a Master Helme. Obviously that isn’t me, and neither is it my girlfriend or our housemate at the time. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, none of the previous tenants went by the name Master Helme either. I presume whoever wrote this postcard knew him from a long time ago.

The handwriting is obviously a child’s, but here, as accurately as I can make it, is what it says:

To Marley

I no you don’t layk theis but we haf bigin been to balamory and we hard to go on to a balamory trip and to Marley from Alfie and Franco

The first section

“I know you don’t like this” is absolutely fascinating. Why didn’t Marley like it that they were in Balamory? Why did they have to go on that trip?

The more I read it, the more questions come to my mind. The address is written much more clearly – is it a parent or much older sibling? Why is it only addressed to Master, not Mr Helme?

However, nothing prepared me for the last bit.

It comes after the names, so I suppose it was added as an afterthought:

I fell off my bike and killed my self

I have read and re-read that line so many times, but I’m still not sure what it says. It looks like it says “killed”, and I can’t think of anything else it could say, but of course that doesn’t make any sense at all.

It’s such a bizarre postcard to get by accident that I can’t help but wonder what Marley would have made of it. What do you think of it?

As you’ll have noticed from the cool new banner – although subscribers, you’re missing out – today is the 14th birthday of Miles “Tails” Prower.

I can hardly believe it’s fourteen years since all that fuss over Sonic Twosday, when everyone was excited about the sequel to what was then (still is, maybe) the best game ever. It did quite well, I seem to recall.

Sega, in their great wisdom, have chosen today to launch the new Sonic game on Xbox 360. I think my gesture is much nicer.

Happy birthday, Tails. Even though you’re not as cool as Sonic – who got an entire site redesign – you’re still cool enough to get an article mentioning your happy day.

Links:

The best Sonic 2 page ever

I must be the only gaming-related blog in the entire world NOT running a story about PS3. This is because, in all honesty, it means nothing to me. I like some games on my PS2, but that’s as far as it goes.

The main purpose of this post is to alert you to a bit of a tidy-up I’ve had around here. “Harvest Moon Diaries” at the top has been changed to general “Diaries” now, which includes HM:AWL and now my old Animal Crossing has a home here too. It’s out of date now, but it’s still an enchanting story of talking animals, happiness and friendship. More games should be like this.

The other reason I thought “what a wonderful world”, apart from the fact the song was used in Strictly Come Dancing tonight, was that a friend of mine in New York just had a tattoo, and was able not only to send me a photo of the outline but also talk to me via MSN whilst she was getting the tattoo. Unfortunately it’s not Sega-related, but nobody’s perfect. Still, isn’t technology wonderful?

Expect another update tomorrow!

I’m listening to The Storm, from Some Cities by Doves

I used to write a diary about my life many years ago, but let’s be honest – I don’t have the most exciting life, and so it wasn’t the most exciting diary. I kept one for a few years, and last time I was home I looked back to see what had changed, and naturally it was quite a lot. I won’t go into that here, though.

The idea of keeping a diary for a game first occured to me when I was waiting for Sega’s genius RPG Shining Force III on the Sega Saturn. It seemed so enormous that I’d need to create some kind of guide book or journal to help me through it, so I planned different chapters: characters, weapons, magic and a diary of the game. Somewhere I have a list of all the magic resistances, special moves and items, but I never actually wrote down a diary of what I saw and when.

Anyway, the idea stuck with me: I liked the notion of creating something to accompany a game, but few games I played seemed suited to the diary format. That is, of course, until I discovered Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life.

I haven’t kept diaries for them throughout my whole playing experience, but I wrote for two consecutive (virtual) years of Harvest Moon, and dipped in and out of Animal Crossing when I got into it.

The one thing I always tried to do with my diaries was keep them authentic; although the characters obviously don’t exist, I still enjoyed writing from the perspective of the main character, and tried to keep it all consistent as though it were a real diary I had discovered. It was a lot of fun to write, and hopefully it’ll be good fun to read too!

Diaries:

Animal Crossing (Gamecube)

Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life (Gamecube).

Pro Evolution Soccer 4: Landgraff United’s Konami Cup campaign

I haven’t found another site that has a Harvest Moon diary – if you know of one, please let me know in a comment. If you have a diary for another game – any game at all – please share it with me too!

Today for the first time since I started this blog – which was way back in January now, I recall – I topped twenty subscribers. Although that doesn’t seem a lot, it’s quite a milestone, and my average readership has risen by 50% in the past three months. Couple that with the good news that I’ve had over 100,000 hits since August and I’m a happy man this afternoon!

 A huge “thank you” goes to all my subscribers and visitors. If you know someone who’d be interested in reading the site, tell them about it! Don’t forget you can also subscribe with the RSS feed, or via email, and with the content coming thick and fast in future you won’t want to miss any of it!

Thanks again, and keep reading, subscribing, sharing and commenting!