Well, Japan are out of the World Cup, they needed to beat Brazil by 2 goals to go through, clearly an impossible task. Hopes were raised after Japan unexpectedly went 1-0 ahead in the first half, but Brazil soon came back, and ended up winning 4-1.
I guess i should make a comment about England eh, seeing as i am English afterall. Well, all i can say is “uninspiring”. We’ve got through the group stages, but we haven’t played convincingly well. Beckham’s crossing has been poor. Our forwards have been poor. Half of our defence has been poor. And our tactics have been poor. IMO Beckham should come off, Lennon should replace him. I think Crouch should also come off and Walcott replace him (we might aswell try him out). Our last game was a slight improvement over previous ones (even though we only drew), and i think the fact that Joe Cole *finally* started passing it to Ashley Cole helped matters a lot. Uhh, anyway… i think we may possilby beat Ecuador, and possibly then go on to get to the semi-finals, where we’ll probably lose to Spain, but i’m not particularly hopefull, we certainly need to improve, this is not the way a World Cup winning team should play.
Staying with the spirit of the World Cup, here’s a semi-review (i say semi-review, because we all know how sucky my “reviews” are) of a Korean manhwa i started reading called Angel Cup:
Where better to start i guess than the front cover. Nice colour scheme, stands out fairly well, and you can tell straight away it’s about girls football. Only critique would be the girl seems a bit too umm “glossy” as if she’s wearing plastic clothes and covered with oil.
The story itself is a pretty basic sports story… team of misfits gets together, gradually improves, finally reaches their goal (at least i’m guessing they do).
The only comments i have about the way the story was introduced in the first half of the book was that it didn’t flow very well, it was jumping all over the place. While i appreciate that there are several parts of the story being introduced at once, there is surely no need to keep jumping between each one every couple of pages. Luckily once the backstory was introduced this jumping seemed settle down and we got into the flow of the story.
I have a couple of criticisims about the artwork too, the girl characters are cute, but there were a couple of discrepancies in the way the main character was drawn to being with, which were slightly offputting, but as with the story, this seemed to sort itself out by the end of the volume. Also, on the topic of character designs, the girls are cute! ^_^ But, the male characters look too umm… “American” in design for my tastes.
The only other thing with this is i’m finding it slightly hard to learn/remember all the Korean character names, lol. But i guess that’s my fault, lol. -_-
Other than all of the above, i think the main reasons for my continued reading are the cute girls, and the fact that they all have distinct and interesting personalities, with seeming a fairly large backstory behind each person (which i’m hoping will be expanded upon in future volumes). I’m not usually one to read manga with a lot of action, but i shall be looking forward to carrying on with this series.
There really are quite a lot of good manhwa out there, it’s good that Tokyopop are bringing more of this over here. This (along with iD_eNTITY) put Jonathan Clements comments in neo magazine to shame, where he called all manhwa “crappy Korean knock-offs”, i for one think that is an utterly un-acceptable comment for a professional magazine to be publishing in print.
Other minor news… i’m finally playing Doushin – Same Heart!! What a long wait that was! It better live up to expectations, lol. Windows Live Messenger is finally out of beta, it looks shiny, but i’m waiting for Messenger Plus Live to be released this Saturday before i try it out fully. And also, i think i’m addicted to HP Lovecraft’s stories, they’re just so atmospheric. ^_^
Oh, and i can’t leave without a picutre update:
