It's Your Round Posted January 23, 2020 Share Posted January 23, 2020 4 hours ago, Stevo985 said: This years Sao Paulo Junior Cup, a tournament for u20 football teams in Brazil, featured 11 players named Juan Roman Riquelme; all specifically named after the Argentinian footballer In a parallel universe there’s an u20’s tournament featuring 11 Gabby Agbonlahors. They weren’t named that way by fans... they are actually all his children. 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BOF Posted January 31, 2020 Moderator Share Posted January 31, 2020 This is amazing https://twitter.com/OwsWills/status/1222611471437266944?s=20 https://twitter.com/A21950044/status/1222968922573606915?s=20 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tonyh29 Posted January 31, 2020 Share Posted January 31, 2020 Totally appropriate for " useless information" .... I found out today that Rick Astley sang backing vocals on Elton Johns "can you feel the love tonight" (along with Gary Barlow and Kiki Dee) it might win you a point in a quiz one day , you can thank me later 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stevo985 Posted February 2, 2020 VT Supporter Share Posted February 2, 2020 Cristian Ronaldo reportedly makes about £500,000 a week at Juventus. But he actually makes more money through his Instagram account than playing football. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Davkaus Posted February 2, 2020 Share Posted February 2, 2020 10 minutes ago, Stevo985 said: Cristian Ronaldo reportedly makes about £500,000 a week at Juventus. But he actually makes more money through his Instagram account than playing football. I must be the reaching "old man shouts at clouds" stage of life, because the wealth in football genuinely turns me off the game these days. It was bad enough in the 90s. People used to talk about how unreasonable it was for footballers to be paid the average British salary in a week. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhatAboutTheFinish Posted February 2, 2020 Share Posted February 2, 2020 1 hour ago, Davkaus said: I must be the reaching "old man shouts at clouds" stage of life, because the wealth in football genuinely turns me off the game these days. It was bad enough in the 90s. People used to talk about how unreasonable it was for footballers to be paid the average British salary in a week. Here's a piece of trivia I'd love to know...who was the last player to play top flight football (or for the Villa) whilst being on YTS? Pretty sure half the kids today couldn't even imagine playing for 20 odd quid a week and then having to clean the rest of the teams boots afterwards! Any suggestions? (Somewhere in the back of my head I want to say that I remember Steve Froggatt being on YTS when he made his debut, but I couldn't really be sure of that!) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bickster Posted February 2, 2020 Moderator Share Posted February 2, 2020 6 minutes ago, WhatAboutTheFinish said: Here's a piece of trivia I'd love to know...who was the last player to play top flight football (or for the Villa) whilst being on YTS? Pretty sure half the kids today couldn't even imagine playing for 20 odd quid a week and then having to clean the rest of the teams boots afterwards! Any suggestions? (Somewhere in the back of my head I want to say that I remember Steve Froggatt being on YTS when he made his debut, but I couldn't really be sure of that!) YTS finished in 1989, Froggy made his debut in 1991 (aged 18?) so its just about in the realms of possibility, if he was, he'd have been the last Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tonyh29 Posted February 2, 2020 Share Posted February 2, 2020 1 hour ago, WhatAboutTheFinish said: Here's a piece of trivia I'd love to know...who was the last player to play top flight football (or for the Villa) whilst being on YTS? Pretty sure half the kids today couldn't even imagine playing for 20 odd quid a week and then having to clean the rest of the teams boots afterwards! Any suggestions? (Somewhere in the back of my head I want to say that I remember Steve Froggatt being on YTS when he made his debut, but I couldn't really be sure of that!) I’m guessing it’s a revised version of the original one which as @bicks said ended in 1989 , but there is an article where Liam Rosenior talks about being on a YTS for Bristol City as a 17 year old around 2002 , £45 a week and cleaning the changing room after first team matches etc guess there might be a few players who did similar ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bickster Posted February 2, 2020 Moderator Share Posted February 2, 2020 29 minutes ago, tonyh29 said: I’m guessing it’s a revised version of the original one which as @bicks said ended in 1989 , but there is an article where Liam Rosenior talks about being on a YTS for Bristol City as a 17 year old around 2002 , £45 a week and cleaning the changing room after first team matches etc guess there might be a few players who did similar ? It was replaced by Youth Training, there were two types, one where the employer chose you because they wanted to employ you and the other where they essentially did the training on behalf of the government with no promise of a job at the end. If you were on the former it was possible for the company to top your wages up over the government paid allowance. I don't think the top up thing was possible under the YTS. Footballers would clearly have come under the first one so I'm guessing thats where some clubs may have started to pay more (at the top clubs anyway) 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jackbauer24 Posted February 2, 2020 Share Posted February 2, 2020 It's the 33rd day of the year and there are 333 days left. Which is cool because it also falls on the first global palindrome date for 909 years. The next one is a hundred odd years away, the one after that about a thousand. Totally useless information in a nutshell. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ml1dch Posted February 2, 2020 Share Posted February 2, 2020 And to add the numbers... Quote 02/02/2020 — the only one of its kind this century: The previous eight-digit palindrome like this was 11/11/1111, 909 years ago. We’ll only have to wait another 101 years for 12/12/2121 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post Chindie Posted February 2, 2020 VT Supporter Popular Post Share Posted February 2, 2020 A couple of months ago, a bloke in Tokyo's famous Akihabara district bought a Super Famicom (aka SNES) game, for $500. The game was called Cooly Skunk, a fairly crap 2d platformer. So what? Well... Cooly Skunk was never released on the SNES. It came out on the PlayStation, in 1996. Why was a copy of it on a console it was never released for sat in a shop window in Tokyo? Turns out the game had a bit of a history. It was originally planned as a title to compete with Mario and Sonic, as a new 'mascot' platformer for the SNES. That then got canned when the software producer that commissioned the game pulled out. Left with a half finished game, the developer joined up with a new studio and decided to try to make a game that would appeal to a Western audience for the SNES. Apparently what Western audiences want is a cute farting skunk... They finished this game and were getting ready to release it when their partner studio realised the SNES was a dead console in a post PlayStation world, and instructed the developers to switch the title to the Sony console... Meaning starting over. Again. They made the game again, with improved graphics as made possible by the PlayStation's much more powerful machine, and it finally got released, to absolutely no fanfare, and nobody can remember it. So why was it for sale on the SNES? Prototype? Bootleg? Nope. In the mid-90s Nintendo joined with a Japanese satellite company to release what was basically a game download service. A very weird thing, you could 'download' games, which got saved to a special type of game cartridge, play enhanced versions of games that used the satellite capability to have music and the like that the SNES couldn't do itself (but only if you timed things correctly - you had to play to the schedule they had, line literally reading the Radio Times to know when to play). It also allowed you to download demos. Which is where Cooly Skunk comes in. The SNES version of the game briefly had a demo on this service. And some Japanese bloke downloaded it. And then never deleted the download. And then sold it to a retro shop in Akihabara. The file on the cartridge was then uploaded to the net and quickly it was discovered that there was a way to disable the time limit on the demo, meaning that it is now completely possible to play the SNES version of Cooly Skunk, a game that you couldn't buy, from beginning to end, in its entirety. All because some guy 25 years ago downloaded a demo of a completely bang average platform game and never deleted the file, or it have corrupt or fail. And then some other guy was mad enough to pay $500 for it. And then upload it so anyone that fancied it could have a go. 11 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post Chindie Posted February 2, 2020 VT Supporter Popular Post Share Posted February 2, 2020 Another bit of random gaming nonsense. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (OoT) is considered one of, if not the, greatest games of all time. Released in 1998 it's become of those 'defining' titles, a must play. It's also quite a big game, about 40 hours for a 100% completion. As it's so well regarded and so long, it's quickly become a favourite of the 'speed run' community, a subset of gamers that compete to set records finishing various games in various contexts as quickly as possible. The most common contexts are 100% and Any% completion - that is to either achieve 100% completion, or just reaching the end credits. OoT, then, 30, 40 hours for an average player? The record will be, ooh... 25 hours say? Knowing exactly what to do and where to go and knowing the game inside out will save a few hours, surely? Nope. 100% record? Sub 4 hours. Any% record? Sub 10 minutes. How? Well the speed run community makes extensive use of glitches and exploits, and particularly the Any% will often make significant use of them. In OoT, it's recently been discovered that a technique called Arbitrary Code Execution works. This a known thing in the world of IT security but in games is a bit more of cool 'toy' when it's discovered. Basically, it's possible to manipulate the games' code as you play it, and therefore if you can work out the code you can effectively break the game by doing specific things at specific times. Hence the sub 10min time - someone worked out that at the start of the game if you do a set of movements precisely, with your save file named in a particular way, will cause the game to jump directly to the end credits. Most of the time is spent in unskippable cutscenes. But, if you've got too much time on your hands, you too can now 'finish' the best game ever made in 10 minutes with barely any gameplay at all. For the bragging rights, you know? 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stevo985 Posted February 2, 2020 VT Supporter Share Posted February 2, 2020 1 hour ago, Chindie said: Another bit of random gaming nonsense. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (OoT) is considered one of, if not the, greatest games of all time. Released in 1998 it's become of those 'defining' titles, a must play. It's also quite a big game, about 40 hours for a 100% completion. As it's so well regarded and so long, it's quickly become a favourite of the 'speed run' community, a subset of gamers that compete to set records finishing various games in various contexts as quickly as possible. The most common contexts are 100% and Any% completion - that is to either achieve 100% completion, or just reaching the end credits. OoT, then, 30, 40 hours for an average player? The record will be, ooh... 25 hours say? Knowing exactly what to do and where to go and knowing the game inside out will save a few hours, surely? Nope. 100% record? Sub 4 hours. Any% record? Sub 10 minutes. How? Well the speed run community makes extensive use of glitches and exploits, and particularly the Any% will often make significant use of them. In OoT, it's recently been discovered that a technique called Arbitrary Code Execution works. This a known thing in the world of IT security but in games is a bit more of cool 'toy' when it's discovered. Basically, it's possible to manipulate the games' code as you play it, and therefore if you can work out the code you can effectively break the game by doing specific things at specific times. Hence the sub 10min time - someone worked out that at the start of the game if you do a set of movements precisely, with your save file named in a particular way, will cause the game to jump directly to the end credits. Most of the time is spent in unskippable cutscenes. But, if you've got too much time on your hands, you too can now 'finish' the best game ever made in 10 minutes with barely any gameplay at all. For the bragging rights, you know? I'd recommend a YouTube channel called Summoning Salt for people interested in speed running He makes mini documentaries about the history of speedrunning records in various games. Sounds dull but they're really interesting. He himself is a Mike Tyson's Knockout speedrunner so a lot of his early videos are speedruns of that. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tonyh29 Posted February 3, 2020 Share Posted February 3, 2020 Back in the days of the Atari console , there was a Superman game where there were 2 bugs . one where you could stop the bridge from exploding thus capture the gang quickly and another involving the select button where you could end the game in seconds ... no idea how we discovered it as it was pre -internet so probably something that got passed around via word of mouth like the Marc Almond story killed the game of course but i guess it would be a precursor Arbitrary Code Execution ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bickster Posted February 12, 2020 Moderator Share Posted February 12, 2020 What do the following countries have in common? Bahamas Bahrain Comoros Kiribati Kuwait Maldives Malta Marshall Islands Monaco Nauru Oman Qatar Saudi Arabia Tonga Tuvalu UAE Vatican City Yemen Spoiler Don't be silly Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AVFC_Hitz Posted February 12, 2020 Share Posted February 12, 2020 3 minutes ago, bickster said: What is the following a list of? Bahamas Bahrain Comoros Kiribati Kuwait Maldives Malta Marshall Islands Monaco Nauru Oman Qatar Saudi Arabia Tonga Tuvalu UAE Vatican City Yemen Hide contents Don't be silly Countries in which @tonyh29 has asked to be pegged by a courgette, but roundly refused. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stevo985 Posted February 12, 2020 VT Supporter Share Posted February 12, 2020 I feel like it's something to do with vowels Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bickster Posted February 12, 2020 Moderator Share Posted February 12, 2020 Just now, AVFC_Hitz said: Countries in which @tonyh29 has asked to be pegged by a courgette, but roundly refused. Didn't happen with Oman apparently Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bickster Posted February 12, 2020 Moderator Share Posted February 12, 2020 4 minutes ago, Stevo985 said: I feel like it's something to do with vowels Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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