Most expensive football players, by country.

I read somewhere that Dimitar Berbatov was the most expensive Bulgarian of all time and it got me thinking– who is the most expensive player from other places in the world? So, with the help of some free time, a couple of messageboard, and an utter lack of a life, I’ve started compiling this list which is SORELY lacking on the internet.  I’ll try and keep this list updated as people move.

AND PLEASE, if you see any errors, let me know at tabqwer [at!] gmail [dot!] com so I can fix them ASAP! Thanks! First Column is country, second column is player, and third column is there in case there’s a contreversy on the various boards I’ve been talking about it.

COUNTRY		PLAYER	OR???
Angola	-	Manucho
Argentina	-	Hernan Crespo
Australia	-	Mark Bresciano
Belarus	-	Aliaksandr Hleb
Belgium	-	Daniel Van Buyten	Vincent Kompany?
Brazil	-	Ronaldo
Bulgaria	-	Dimitar Berbatov
Cameroon	-	Samuel Eto’o
Chile	-	Marcelo Salas
Colombia	-	Juan Pablo Angel	Ivan Cordova?
Croatia	-	Eduardo
Cyprus	-	Michalis Constantinou
Czech Republic	-	Pavel Nedved
Denmark	-	Jesper Grønkjær
Egypt	-	Mido
England	-	Rio Ferdinand	Wayne Rooney?
Finland	-	Mikael Forsell
France	-	Zinedine Zidane
Germany	-	Miroslav Klose	Jorg Heinrich?
Ghana	-	Mickael Essien
Greece	-	Georgios Samaras
Iceland	-	Eidur Gudjohnsen
Ireland	-	Damien Duff
Italy	-	Gianluigi Buffon
Ivory Coast	-	Didier Drogba
Japan	-	Hidetoshi Nakata
Lichtenstein	-	Mario Frick
Mali	-	Mahamadou Diarra
Mexico	-	Nery Castillo
Montenegro	-	Dejan Savicevic	At the time, was Yugoslavia.
Nigeria	-	John Obi Mikel	martins, yakubu, or okocha?
Northern Ireland	-	Keith Gillespie	David Healy, Steven Davis?
Norway	-	Tore Andre Flo
Paraguay	-	Oscar Cardozo
Poland	-	Dawid Janczyk
Portugal	-	Luis Figo
Romania	-	Adrian Mutu
Russia	-	Andrei Kanchelskis
Scotland	-	Craig Gordon/Alan Hutton
Serbia	-	Nemanja Vidic
Slovakia	-	Martin Skrtel
South Korea	-	Ji-Sung Park
Spain	-	Sergio Ramos
Spain (Basque)	-	Gaizka Mendieta
Sweden	-	Zlatan Ibrahimovic
The Netherlands	-	Arjen Robben	Marc Overmars?
Togo	-	Emmanuel Adebayor
Trinidad and Tobago	-	Dwight Yorke
Turkey	-	Fatih Tekke
Ukraine	-	Andriy Shevchenko
Uruguay	-	Diego Forlan	Alvaro Recoba?
USA	-	Tim Howard	Claudio Reyna?
Zimbabwe	-	Benjani

PC, PS2, and DS: Top games, 2007

TOP 5 NINTENDO DS

- Picross

I used to have about three or four hours of mass transit to contend with per day. That dropped to a more merciful 90 minutes once I started getting a one-way carpool to work, but during those dark days of yore, Picross DS saw me through. Just thinking about this game makes me want to play it again. It’s like… some sort of… visual… sudoku. But not stupid. Plus, when you’re done playing, you’ve drawn pixel-perfect Mario drawing and stuff. Play this if you like your brain.

- Front Mission

I’m pretty much th know who’s championing this game, but boy, it’s a fun one. I haven’t played FM2 or FM5, because it’s not in my crazy Canadian language, but out of the other ones, this is my favourite Front Mission. I played a translated ROM years ago, so I figured there wouldn’t be much for me in this game, but it presents an opportunity to play an alternate storyline with a decent 15 hours in it. If you’re not into really wonk-friendly TBS, or you don’t love giant robots beating the crap out of each other, you might not dig this game. It’s also a touch easy after a certain point.

- Hotel Dusk: Room 215

I almost forgot this came out this year. I’m not a big fan of novelties in video games; my mind wasn’t blown when Psycho Mantis made me switch controller ports, I was mostly annoyed. Now, this game has a few of these kinds of “puzzles;” using the DS in novel, meta ways. I was bothered by that. Te rest of this game, though, is super immersive and interesting. It feels like a really mature title, and not like Gears of War is “mature;” this game actually felt like it was for grownups, not bulbous, overgrown eight-year-olds who like to watch beefy men explode the crap out of each other.

- Glory Days 2

I haven’t really heard much about this gem, but if you haven’t had a crack at it yet, do yourself a favour and pick it up. It’s like a shmup controlled by the stylus, with a Battlefield 1942-style scoring system (capture flags and kill little men for great justice) and a surprisingly weird and sad little storyline (that hardly interrupts gameplay, for those who hate game stories). I can’t believe how little press this game got, and it’s definitely my “underrated game of the year.”

- New York Times Crosswords

I only put this near the last place because it’s barely a DS game as much as it’s a repackaging of newspaper stuff. It is great, though, because I never get a chance to play the New York Times crosswords in real life. This was the only thing to tear my mind away from Picross, and the sheer number of hours of play in this game are probably staggering; there are something like a thousand crosswords in there. And the hard ones can take an hour. That’s at least a few hundred hours. And that’s why people buy games, right?

TOP 3 PS2

- Persona 3

I thought I was done with jRPGs. I loved them as a kid, but as the years have passed, I’ve played less of them, and just had no patience for them. I barely played any jRPGs on the PS2, but this game made me want to check it out anyway, and I was not disappointed. Even after getting my 360, this is why I went back to my PS2. A phenomenal sense of atmosphere is built up through the cut scenes, music, and really clever after-school club alternate life pacing style dealie. It captures a feeling that I’ve never felt in a video game, and I don’t think I can quite explain it. I gave up after about fifteen floors, mostly due to the previously mentioned 360, but I intend to go back once I’ve got a hole in my gaming schedule (which is coming up, given the January/February games drought).

- Odin Sphere

I didn’t get too far with this either, but intend to. It feels virtually nothing like a side-scrolling beat-em-up, but it is. With extra beating up, since you have to go build up your levels by beating up the same guys over and over. But still, this game s so gorgeous and so satisfying that it can’t be ignored.

- GrimGrimoire

Again… didn’t even get that far with it. But I will. What I played, I like, and I appreciate the side-scrolling console RTS concept a bunch. I should really play this more.

TOP 5 ON MY SHITTY PC

- Scrabulous

What can I say? I can’t believe I haven’t been fired yet. Scrabble is good, playing online through Facebook is better.

- Football Manager 2008

This is the only game here that isn’t a web browser game. I’ve played only the last three FMs, but this is my favourite yet. Sure, it’s a really complicated chaos engine mixed with a trillion spreadsheets. Sure, it’s for sports nerds. But if you find me anywhere in video game a more complex number-crunching geekfest, I will give you a kiss. I love this game to bits and will play it consistently until the next iteration is released. Plus, this is the only game where the publisher sent me a free copy (I won it by answering a nerdy question on their podcast).

- Passage

I don’t really want to talk about this game in case people haven’t played it. Thanks to Destructoid for turning me onto it, though. As a game narrative, it really stuck with me for a while and explored things in games that haven’t really been explored before. I should remember to send that guy some money.

- Desktop Tower Defense

Yeah, I played a bunch of this too. This game is fun, and addictive, and awesome, but the thing that really put it over the top for me was being able to compare my high scores to everyone else on my favourite secret message board whose name I definitely won’t tell you even if you ask.

- Peggle

Rounding out my “games you can play on a shitty broken computer with half a brain and a mouse” list is Peggle, which I only even started playing in 2008. Like most Popcap games, it makes my eyes burn. I am not sure why I play it, or why I like it at all. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I hate it. Yet, when I sit at my computer and have twenty minutes to kill while checking my e-mail, I inevitably boot it up and throw some stupid little pachinko balls around. WHY WHY WHY do I play it?! Someone, tell me!

My top five retail 360 games of 2007.

- Mass Effect
I can see the opinion of people who can’t look past this game’s many, many flaws. Weird, irritating loading times,  weird conversation choices, repetitive sidequests… blah blah blah. What I liked about this game was the look of it. Going to dozens of little planets and looking at their sky inspired me so much that all I could think about for months was going to space. Yeah, I’m a giant nerd. Yeah, this game should’ve been in the oven a while longer. But the incredibly immersive universe they created, from the Citadel full of aliens to the awesome red dawrf-scorched skyscapes of backwater planets with a marine outpost plopped somewhere near the middle, drew me in and didn’t let me go until the end. And, actually, the story was pretty good. The last fifth of the game has a couple of plot twists that rival KOTOR in sheer awesometude.

- Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
In contrast to Mass Effect, here’s a game that is polished to near-perfection. The single-player game is a stunning piece of videogame storytelling which uses the inevitable lack of control over parts of videogame stories to crushing effect (and I mean that in the good way). It may not be a very long campaign, but it is one that you won’t hate starting over right after you’ve beaten it. It’s that good. The number of really, really memorable moments in the game is massive. And that’s not all, either; the multiplayer, in my opinion, is the most solid multiplayer FPS experience on the console. Forget people’s complaints about the “levelling up” system. You start with everything you need to play well. In fact, I find the more you think like an actual person who actually doesn’t want to die, the better you do. At early levels, I was crushing people because I’d slowly crawl through grass up to snipers and quietly take thme out form behind. The bonuses you get as you level up are more like shiny toys and less like real advantages. This is the only game I play on Xbox Live Arcade anymore.

- The Orange Box
Two first-person shooter titles on my list is kind of crazy, because they’re definitely not my genre, but this is almost definitely their year. Half-Life 2 got a really awesome conclusion. Team Fortress 2 had things that I loved about it (well, mostly just the videos… I find it looks boring in gameplay, and worse, I don’t really enjoy playing it. But, the use of voice in the multiplayer FPS format is just stunning). Then, there’s Portal. I’m not sure if it’s even worth extolling the virtues of this game at this point, because it’s been said much better by pretty much everyone else (I’m looking at you, N’Gai and Totilo) (…he said, as if they were actually reading this). But, if you haven’t played it, it really feels like a monumental step for first-person shooters in spatial innovation, as well as video games in general due to its tone and storytelling. It may be only four hours long at best, but without Portal, I doubt Orange Box would’ve placed in my top five.

- skate.
I’ve only started playing this recently, but I am completely enchanted by it. I realized that I spent upwards of an hour trying to land one specific fliptrick to grind last night. When you do something properly in this game, the sense of satisfaction is awesome. It is excruciatingly difficult at times, but at the same time, always feels kind of hazy and calm, like spending a lazy sunday outside kicking around a real skteboard (I assume… I never had one). The advertisement is a real irritator, and the stick feels a bit random at times, but other than those little niggly issues, this is a game you can sit down with and not stop playing until something forces you away– be it five minutes or five hours later.

- Stranglehold
I won’t pretend this is a game you should own, but I really feel like everyone who loves awesome singleplayer games should give this one a rental. It’s really fun to watch, and even more fun to play. The John Woo attitude just oozes out of the game, and kind of plays out like a really long Woo movie. It also plays out, more importantly, like a perfectly paced action game. It’s never exhausting, and there’s only one point where I found it boring (and that may have been my own fault for not getting where I was supposed to go). It’s difficult at times, but never repetitive. The mini-game mode fits in flawlessly and keeps things fresh. The “tequila bombs” have a suitably dumb videogame name and are each really stupidly fun to use. Play this. Thank me later.

Stay tuned for top five 360 Arcade games, DS games, and top three PS2 and low-end-PC.

My favourite games from before my birth

I was born on August 15, 1984. It’s a pretty special date, because it meant I was born into the recovering videogame (Boy, I hate that spelling… thanks, VG Styleguide. I only do it because at least someone’s standing up for standardization in videogame editorials) industry. I didn’t experience first hand the epic failure of E.T., or the resulting drought that nearly choked video games out of existence. By the time I was old enough to crawl, the NES was strong and a new era of gaming had begun.

However, I spent a lot of quality time with games older than me while growing up. Our house was an anomaly: we had a games console and a computer, which many others didn’t have, but we always had very dated, second-hand equipment. During the reign of the NES, I could only play jealously at other houses, wishing my father would upgrade us from the Atari 2600. When the Pentium 100 came out, and I watched my friend play Warcraft II, I wished my father would replace our old Atari ST desktop. He did– with his friend’s old 486 (not even a 486DX! The horror!). The Christmas when the N64 came out, my mom gave me her boss’s kid’s SNES (in my opinion, they got completely shortchanged here. The 64 was good, but I got an SNES!).

Some of these games suck now, but they have a certain magic to me. That magic is impossible to capture due to the Internet, nowadays; before you even look at the cover of a game, you can now know if it is good or if it sucks. Back in the day, you couldn’t even rent these games. You had to get them at garage sales, which were usually run by the parents of people who owned the games, so they couldn’t even tell you if they were good. That’s something that’s probably lost on kids nowadays. Back then, I didn’t even have someone to compare games with. If I ever have kids, I will give them all Game Boys, and not let them on the Internet until they start needing it for school. Then I wil buy them horribly shitty Game Boy games that they will love, despite the crap, because they don’t know better. Every nerd should experience loving a dud game.

[b]Breakout[/b]

This game pretty much solidified my opinion of how games should be played. Why play Pong with a friend? If my friend is over, I want to run around and play guns or draw pictures or pretend to be spacemen. If I am home alone, however, I want a game to play! Breakout was the first “Pong vs. A Brick Wall” game and I still have never stopped playing games like this (Alleyway on Game Boy, Arkanoid on Commodore Amiga, Nervous Brickdown recently on DS). I still don’t “get” multiplayer gaming. I always think there’s something better I could be doing with my friends. I’m barely talknig about Breakout… or am I?

[b]Space Invaders[/b]

This one I only got to play in arcades, and not very often, but I loved it. It was probably the earliest example of videogame masochism I can remember. My parents would give me one or two quarters and leave me at the local mall arcade for an hour while they took care of their business. I would usually play the newer, shinier games like TMNT: The Arcade Game, but for a while, it was Space Invaders. I’m not sure I ever beat the first wave of baddies (I sucked at games then, just like I do now). The game I played was in black and white, too, with coloured cellophane over the screen to make it look like the aliens had color. Awesome.

[b]Asteroids[/b]

This is probably the game I played most on my Atari ST personal computer, with the possible exception of Bubble Ghost (which came out in 1987, and doesn’t make the cut for this list). Boy, this game was amazing. I think the version I was playing was actually “Asteroids Deluxe,” but it doesn’t matter. This game had one of my favourite mechanics to ever not be really ripped off by every game ever; the “warp” mechanic, which was essentially the “oh shit, I’m probably about to die, if I hit this I might live… or I might TOTALLY die right away” button. When I got bored of the game played normally, I’d challenge myself to only move using warp, and forego the up/down/left/right controls entirely.

[b]Gorf[/b]

My friend scored a VIC-20 from a garage sale with this game. It was the first game I ever saw that you had to load from a cassette.  The wait was excruciating. It made me really glad that I had the Atari 2600, whose load times were virtually non-existent. But, once Gorf was running, it was a masterpiece. The game was punishing, like Space Invaders, but once you passd that first level, it was practically a brand new game. This was the first time I’d ever really experienced the feeling that a game could present another scenario instead of “the same as before but harder.” Now, that’s taken for granted, but back then, it was like finding $5 in an old pair of pants. A completely unexpected surprise (remember, there was no Internet to tell us!), and a reason to go to that friend’s house way, way more (aside from his other awesome stuff, like later, an NES, and before that, his dad’s hidden adult mags).

[b]Combat[/b]

I know I said I didn’t like multiplayer games above, but this was one of the first examples of me changing my mind. You could play as tanks, planes, or… uhh, faster planes in this one-versus-one shooter. The tanks were the best. Trying to explain the game just doesn’t get the message across, I’ve learned. It’s a game that I think everyone should experience with a good friend at some point. It may have been the most perfect 1v1 shooter ever made, and it’s held up fabulously. Seriously, go play this game. Like, now. After hours, when you’re sick of tank mode, try the planes mode.

[b]Donkey Kong[/b]

This is one of the three 2600 games I actually owned, and probably my least favourite of the three, but that’s not saying much. The first (or third, or fifth, or…) level is the one you’d recognize if you’ve never played the game; a questionably wobbly looking tower with a monkey on top, throwing barrels at you. THIS WAS NOT THE BEST LEVEL. The best level was the second level, with four perfectly level floors, with two poorly built rivets each, and a really nasty, high-speed fireball on each. See, the fireball had free range on the level until you jumped over and killed a rivet. Then, it could only go back and forth between the wall and the rivet (or, if you trapped it in the middle, the rivet and the other rivet). I’m not sure I am doing this justice. But, the feeling of being over on the ugly side of a rivet, and timing your jump so that you went over a rivet AND the fireball at the same time, AND trapping the fireball on the useless side of the building, was so epically awesome that you felt like an absolute master of video games. I never managed to do that more thna twice in one level (you get four chances), so you felt like you’d done something really special. I don’t know if this game is actually hard anymore, but back then, it was the perfect level of punishing. Not hopeless, but NOT easy.

[b]Ms. Pac-Man[/b]

I never had Pac-Man, but I had Ms. Pac-Man. I think I cried when my dad bought it, not because I knew Pac-Man was a better game, but because it looked like it was for girls. But, I played it. And I played it a lot. In fact, this is one of the games I got to the “end” of (not really, as I’m not sure there even was an end; however, every Atari game I had would eventually glitch up a few levels in, forcing me to start over. Thanks, dust, for complicating my young gaming life.). I should play this game again; since, I’ve only played a bit of Pac-Man and a bunch of Pac-Man C.E. (which will make an appearance on my top games of 2007 list, so stay tuned). Ms. Pac-Man was also very unique in that it had a main female character who wasn’t included to make dudes want to bang her. Nice one, Namco.

[b]Mario Bros.[/b]

This isn’t Super Mario Brothers. This is the game before it, for the Atari. You’ve probably played it while playing your friend at SMB3 on the Nintendo, when you enter the level he’s standing on. But, that version pales in comparison to the original. You had to commit to jumps, back in the day. You had to save that POW block for when you really needed it, not just when you felt like messing with your buddy. I think my game had a glitch, too, because there weren’t any coins when you killed a badguy; there was a weird spinning multi-colored wafer. I remember always thinking they looked like candy, and wanting to eat them a lot.

That’s it for this segment of “Will Missing The Good Ol’ Days.” I hope to do segments on later generations of games, and later consoles in the future. Keep an eye out for a Game Boy retrospective. I’ll try not to talk about games you’ve heard too much abotu already, like Pokemon, and stick to ones you have definitely not heard enough about, like Final Fantasy Legend (the first), Solar Striker, Baseball, Super Mario Land (the first), and maybe a few others.