I was going to give my first impressions on Football Manager Live this week, but I think that can wait seven more days since I need a bit more time with it. So far, I’m addicted, but I get addicted to most MMOs during my first week with them, so that doesn’t mean much. Anyway, I doubt you guys are thinking too much about soccer after that amazing Superbowl; it was epic. It was so epic that I couldn’t drag my weary eyes away from it despite the ungodliness of the hour. The intricacies of American football remain perplexing to me, but an American friend politely informed me that most of his countrymen regard soccer the exact same way. I guess you can keep your football and we can keep ours, although I wouldn’t mind some naughty cheerleaders transferring across to our side. Having said that, I wouldn’t envy them having to wear skimpy skirts during our nippy mid-season; there’s nothing sexy about blue legs, no matter how much of them you can see.

Talking of the cold, it actually snowed here in London over the last two days, an event that’s a magical rarity in this neck of the woods (and a highly disruptive one). Don’t quote me on this, but I think it’s been about four years since it last snowed in England, because I can remember chucking snowballs at my girlfriend, whom I’d only just started dating. What could have been timeless romance became a haunting disaster when a well-timed pitch endowed her forehead with a bruise the size of Spain. Not only did stepping onto the snow yesterday remind me of that nightmare, but it also set me on a short and tenuous train of thought, the likes of which have graced this column in the past, just like this one is going to grace today�s.

It was a warm September, and I was wondering around Leicester Square when I came up to its small, central park. There I saw the unexpected and bizarre sight of two men performing parkour over quad bikes – you’ve not seen anything until you’ve seen a dude somersault of a quad bike, then somersault back over it. These guys weren’t just larking about, but were actually promoting Disney Interactive Studio’s off-road racer Pure. Now, I’ll admit that I didn’t know much about the game, and that I was disenchanted by the Disney association, but since the organisers had lined up a bunch of Xbox 360s to convert skeptics like myself, as well as a bunch of free-running dudes for reasons as tenuous as this train of thought, I decided it was only fair to try their game. Sure enough, a quick playthrough converted me; it reminded me of SSX 3 but with quad bikes instead of snowboards, and that was fine by me because SSX 3 was one seriously kickass game – now I was interested.