The LBTN Express

In my third season as Charlton I'm currently in the Championship. I got relegated in the second season which I've never had happen to me before. Yet despite being relegated it's probably the most fun game I've had on any FM/CM. I seem to enjoy games more when I'm struggling. We jumped out to around 25 points in 15 or so games in that second season and I thought Europe was possible but we went on one of the worst runs possible picking up just 13 points from the remaining 20 odd games. We needed to win the last game to stay up and Reading to lose. Reading lost and at half time we were 3-0 up but ended up drawing the game 4-4 and going down. Currently 1st in the Championship with 88 points after 32 games (28 wins, 4 draws, 0 losses) and miles clear of Sunderland in 3rd place so promotion is pretty much a given as we've got the strongest team in the division by a long way. I'm aiming to finish with around 120. Despite going down I managed to keep all my players as I've turned Charlton into something of a financial force. We've got £32 million in the bank and I've got a transfer budget of around £20 million to ensure we stay up next season. We're currently the eigth biggest club in England, despite being out of the Premiership. The board expanded the ground over the first two seasons to 42,000 and we've got a lucrative deal set up with Miami for merchandising. I'd like to point out Abou Diomande, he's in the Charlton Under 18's at the start. He came into the team due to injuries and despite not having the best stats all across the board he's got 16 in finishing and 20 pace and acceleration at the moment and I think everything is else is below or around 10 in mine. So far he's netted 14 goals in 11 starts and is keeping Henri Camara out of the side. Billy Sharp (signed from Scunthorpe for £2.2 million) is also knocking them in at about the same rate (24 goals in 31 starts). So yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing how we do when we go back up.

I'm absolutely thrilled about this. It's been stuck in limbo for ever and I'm glad it's not getting made into a movie as it didn't quite fit (Unless it was done by Clint Eastwood, with Clint playing the Saints of Killers as well). I'd always hoped HBO would pick up the rights to make it into a 10 part mini series or a regular series running for 3 or 4 seasons.

1. Joseph Gordon-Levitt 2. Zach Braff 3. Johnny Depp 4. Denzel Washington 5. Terrence Howard 6. Don Cheadle 7. Matt Damon 8. Benicio Del Toro 9. Steve Buscemi 10. Barry Pepper

The only one I know of was that the PS2 could be used to launch and control missiles, or rather parts of it were military grade and taken apart and could be used to build something that could potentially launch missiles. I'll see if I can find a link to the story. EDIT: Link

I'm really looking forward to Bioshock. I think it's got serious potential to top Gears Of War. There was a 10 minute or so video floating around of the developer playing through the game and it looked immense. The whole interaction thing with the 'Big Daddy' and 'Little Sisters' looks great and it seems to have a very advanced AI system in place.

1. Lost 2. 24 3. Prison Break 4. Battlestar Galactica (New) 5. Curb Your Enthusiasm 6. Stargate SG-1 7. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart 8. Scrubs 9. Red Dwarf 10. I'm Alan Partridge

Hmm, same thing seems to have happened to me. What platform did you order it for? Mine's 360.

That was an assumption on my part. They may be longer, and I suppose it all comes down to the editing process which, since the whole thing isn't completely shot yet, has probably yet to begin.

Eko left because he'll be directing movie pretty soon about his life and his upbringing. He never committed to a long term deal and it was supposedly his idea to be written out during the six episode arc and not later in the season. I'm betting on Pickett dying. He's shown tied up in the promo and IIRC Juliette says he's going to kill Sawyer so I'm thinking Juliette kills Pickett or something to gain Kate or Sawyer's trust. Although with recent teasers I don't see how this'll work now. I doubt it's Ben. Michael Emerson is credited as being a regular and is not a secondary character.

From what I've seen it doesn't look overly hard. It'll be one of those games that's relatively easy on the normal diffculty level but be very hard on the higher difficulties. Plus it's more of a find cover and shoot type of game (think GRAW) than a run and gun. So you'll be moving from cover to cover rather than running about all over the place.

I meant Human Torch, my bad. Anyway, I love the Asgard part of the game and the cutscene. Thor is such a great character. He's probably my favourite second comic book character just behind Jesse Custer from Preacher. Hopefully the Thor gets put into production soon.

You get a +5% bonus for the Avengers. My current team, Thor's Guardians currently consists of Thor, Wolverine, Ghost Rider, Colossus & Deadpool. Thinking of adding Pyro, Ice Man or Storm next.

That was an awesome episode, Eko was my favourite character pretty much so I was pleased with the way they handled it and I'm glad he got some real closure to his character unlike others who have died.

I don't know whether a fourth machine could enter the race. I just don't think it's possible these days, what with the huge developmental costs, if it fails the company is most likely going to go bankrupt. Microsoft were able to bankrole their console because they've got pretty much unilimited funds and were able to get some good developers on board. Microsoft will be around in the console wars for quite a while and will survive in the marketplace because they have a lot of first party support. They have their own software companies that are churning out hugely popular games like Halo, Gears of War and Lost Odyssey. They have a lot of licences for exclusives like Mass Effect & Bioshock because they can afford to pay these companies and make it worth their while to release it on their console only. I wouldn't be surprised to see them snapping up a lot more, I wouldn't put it past them to make GTA a Microsoft only game down the line by offering them a huge down payment to release it exclusively. Nintendo is the same, they've got a long history and their devoted fans wiill always go with the new console. Plus they were smart and knew they'd never be able to compete with Microsoft and Sony in the same way and went in a totally different direction. Sony had it with the PS and PS2 with games like MGS, GTA etc but it seems they're losing the support they had. GTA will be released for the 360, Assassins Creed was intended to be a PS3 exclusive but will also now be released on the 360. There have even been rumblings that MGS4 could get a 360 release because Konami are worried about the spiralling costs of the game and don't feel that it would make it's money back being released on the one console and are putting pressure on Kojima. It's a worry, but the only one I see dropping out is Sony because they are losing a lot of exclusives that really sell their system. It'll be interesting to see how well the PS3 truly does because they've pretty much got their whole company riding on it. If it fails, Blu-Ray will most likely fail as well.

Just finished my first season as Charlton and finished 14th, which was a huge struggle. I used a formation with a standard back four, two defensive midfielders, a midfielder pushing forward, two full out wingers and a lone striker. After the last game of the season Darren Bent demanded to be transfer listed. A deal with Milan was struck for £12 million but it fell through at the last minute and he ended up going to Marseille for £10.5 million. It'll be tough without him as he was the main and really only source for goals. My only striker now is Marcus Bent, who had a decent season playing off the bench as both Jimmy Flloyd and Kevin Lisbie have both been released. I'm going to have to go out and buy a couple of new strikers although I don't want to spend much so I'll probably use Marcus as my lone striker. I'm looking at bringing Earnshaw in as the main backup/rotation striker if I can get him for around £2 million. With the sale of Bent I should have a kitty of £14 million this season to bolster the squad which is a hell of a lot better than the £15,000 I had for the whole of last season. The only signings I made last season were Windass for £5k and I brought Danny Murphy back to Charlton after he was released by Spurs 3/4 of the way through the season. The strangest thing that has happened in my game is Arsene Wenger leaving Arsenal to take up the managerial job at Bayern.

Yeah it's going to be a crazy couple of weeks with Call Of Duty 3, Gears Of War, SvR, Tony Hawk's Project 8, Marvel Ultimate Alliance & Rainbow Six Vegas over the next month. I'm more excited about Call Of Duty at the moment mainly because it's been my favourite series over the years and the game I've spent the most time on that didn't involve managing a football team. The only game I won't be picking up on the day it comes out is Smackdown vs. Raw, I've got all the others pre-ordered. I can wait a couple of weeks until I've finished COD, RB6 and GoW. Plus I've still got Double Agent to complete and Pro Evo 6 to play the hell out of. Also I wasn't going to pick up THP8 until I played the demo. It's made a huge leap forward and I was very impressed with it. Anyone else getting the Limited Edition Gears Of War?

Yeah I'm having a problem with the team mate AI, they never seem to make any runs, I stand around waiting for one to make a run so I can slip them a through ball but no-one moves. Also, it's impossible to break away from defenders. You get past someone and even though you're two yards in front they'll always catch you. I could understand if it was someone slow, but I'm playing as Arsenal and everytime I break free with Henry they always catch up no matter who the defender is. Also I've conceded a number of goals due to it swapping the player I'm controlling for apparently no reason on defence, allowing them to break away and score. Don't know whether that's a problem with the 360 version or whether it's across the board.

I got my copy of Pro Evo 6 on Wednesday from Play. I've only played a couple of times on it as Arsenal however but my first impression was that it taken a step backward. It just didn't feel like the last couple of Pro Evo's for some reason. No doubt it'll grow on me.

That was an awesome episode. The thing (it's not a thing) at the end isn't really much of a spoiler, but I'll put it in spoiler tags anyway.