Zoraptor

An RPG (or whatever Fallout 4 was meant to be) every 2 years* would be barely practical, one suspects, given current dev cycles even if you had two Fallout only teams. And yeah, at that rate it'd inevitably stagnate even more. OTOH, it's been... 10 years since F4 now? That's way too long the other way. And as I said last time it came up; it's hard to justify having nothing tying into the success of TV series and nothing on the horizon either (except a pretty minor tie in in F76). *There is plenty of scope to do stuff which could keep Fallout fresh even at that release rate, at least for a while- settings outside NA, having a party based game, strategy game etc. Probably don't fit well with the new approach at MS though which looks like absolute minimum risk.

Killing off an in house department to use an outside contractor instead is probably the purest double distilled MBA nonsense you can get. It looks great on a balance sheet, at least short term. What does Bethesda need two in house engines for anyway, they can use Creation to make the next Quake*. It's good enough for TES, after all. Fixing numbers on spreadsheets with no knowledge of or care about what they mean long term- or even what their immediate practical implementation means- is absolutely what should be expected of management as their only care is to get one set of numbers to go up, and another to go down. Implementation is a problem for lower level managers, and long term effects don't matter since they aren't a metric for you annual bonus. That the claims that the restructure were targeting '13 layers of management' or whatever were rubbish is utterly unsurprising. *as hilarious and management disconnected as it would be forcing them to use Gamebryo_Iteration++ for a Quake or Doom, it'd almost certainly be UE. Which would be, to quote the great Canadian philosopher Alanis Morisette, ironic.

Ramesses more like Ramessi, am i rite? Writing was literally on the wall for 3000 years. I'd laugh if Infantino finally got brought down by associating with Trump. Not much chance though.

Those defensive errors were awful. Hard to see them making a difference to the overall result since Belgium was comfortably better anyway but they were nails in the coffin. You wouldn't have thought that it was the same US side on attack that put a very easy 4 past a Paraguay defence that had been excellent otherwise either. Not sure that Trump's intervention did them any favours at all.

Funnily enough 'typical knock out football' was one of the euphemisms the commentators used. Along with other classics like 'possession based game' and 'tactical struggle'. I'm not sure they cranked out a 'one for the purists' but they must have come close. Probably wasn't that bad, objectively, and may have had something to do with me not caring at all who won. The only other game I found genuinely boring in the tournament I switched off at half time, which was not a good choice since all hell broke loose in the second half.

The most entertaining thing about Spain Portugal was the commentators trying to come up with ways to avoid using the word 'boring'.

Worse, a suit who spells their name in ALL CAPS. That's two red flags. (The whole thing kind of sums up xbox's history, really. Bad combination of half assedly throwing money at it, fad chasing and never having any sort of unified and consistent vision. Followed by trying to rationalise everything, badly. It's always a classic when one exec spends a lot of money acquiring studios, then the next spends a lot of money deacquiring them. Really, the whole thing can be summed up just about perfectly by what's happened to Gamepass over the past year or so. Decide it's the future and put everything on there; decide it's cannibalising sales of new games and jack up prices, wonder why subscription numbers tumble. You shouldn't need an MBA to foresee either, and you kind of have to pick one approach and accept either somewhat reduced direct sales or somewhat reduced subs to gamepass. As it stands you get the bad publicity of having poor sales performance and the bad publicity of jacking up gamepass' price and the bad publicity of then having to reduce the price again. xbox has just not been a very well run project from its inception)

Not sure I'd have the courage to play "Football's coming Home" in that stadium after that result.

lol. ... ho hum. Really though, where exactly do you think the Crimean Tatars people supposedly care so much about came from originally? Rhetorical question.

Didn't make much of a difference. Ockers challenging the Dutch worst shooting performance in a penalty shoot out this tournament. England, of course, still unchallenged all time greats there. Shame the Cape Verde game didn't go to penalties as well.

I'd suspect Obsidian is pretty safe because because MS want more frequent Fallouts/ TES and have said so publicly. There's only one extant non Bethesda studio which has done a Fallout previous. And, well, it looks a bit... silly, having a very popular Fallout TV show but no game (exc f76) on the table to take advantage of it.

This is what is known as statistic laundering. 1.4 million is the figure of the Ukrainian government (banner near top). It gets repeated by other sources all the time as if it's a new independently derived figure, but it isn't. For the purposes of the headline it's probably irrelevant, since there were probably more casualties in the first six months than in every post ww2 conflict the soviets fought. Much as with the US/ NATO intervention in Afghanistan the violence was primarily inter Afghan in the 80s as well. (There aren't any genuinely accurate figures. The closest are the Mediazona/ BBC ones and UAlosses based on verifiable deaths, which give ~230k (ru) and ~200k (ukr; includes 'missing*'). That ratio at least fits the available evidence which is that Ukraine is doing hard conscription of all but very young adults, while Russia isn't doing conscription at all. Except the six monthly national service intakes, but they aren't used for combat except in very particular circumstances. *=dead as well; but 'missing' means widow/ family benefits don't have to be paid out)

People have been saying that at least since Roger Milla era Cameroon came close v England. Every once in a while a Senegal beats a France but it hasn't happened consistently. Having said that, it's easy to forget that Morocco is African and came 4th in 2022. So there isn't all that much progress left to be made.

Terribly unfair, getting exclusively old submarines approaching eol rather than the new ones they were promised is a good thing! Everyone knows old boats are easier to maintain! Just watch, the procession to join AUKUS will start any minute now*! Certainly not Scotty from Marketing's finest hour; isn't anything Albanese can do about it except hope that Darth Trump doesn't alter the deal any further. I mean, not like he can go off and buy French boats instead. *to be fair, if our right wing politicians could find a way they'd have signed up for tier 2, but it's massively unpopular here due to our (very popular) anti nuclear stance. So, in an all too typical worst of both worlds approach we'll just buy helicopters at an inexplicable 500mn a pop and- even more inexplicably- 1bn worth of sea drones. 2 (two) drones for that amount. Both of which would get taken out in a proper fight by a 1k drone from temu.

Founded by Good Kiwi Bloke Peter Thiel. What could possibly go wrong? Pity there aren't any Tolkien Trademarks on the name really. For someone who wasn't exactly keen on the consequences of industrialisation having companies named Palantir and Anduril epitomising those negatives would have been galling.

The German result was hilarious. Though there was a lot of pre tournament talk was about how brittle they looked you didn't really expect them to lose to a team ranked in the 40s. I guess Morocco kind of justified what looked like a ridiculously high official ranking.

AMC Pacer, so ugly it makes the list twice three times? As someone who has driven and owned a Nissan Cube equivalent (Toyota Sienta) that style may not be the single most fashionable format designed by man, but they're so practical it doesn't matter.

It's a bit like the previous graphics card shock or covid chip shocks- if they could produce more they would. They're selling everything they make anyway. If demand is 150% of supply getting to 110% may not make a significant difference to pricing, once the prices are high. Indeed, even getting more supply than demand may not for a while, since any price drops encourage people to buy now who have put off buying before. (I don't think the RAM manufacturers are anywhere near as gung ho about 'AI' being sustainable as many other hardware manufacturers and are worried about getting caught with large inventories and scaled up production for a burst bubble. That has certainly happened in the past leading to RAM gluts)

You'd have got very long odds on South Africa qualifying after that first match. Gone from absolute shambles to pretty decent.

Some interesting refereeing on show in the England v Ghana game. Can't help but think that if the shirt colours had been reversed Ghana would have been down to 10 and England would have had a penalty. Especially the Pickford one, even England supporters seemed to think he was fairly lucky to still be on the field let alone not giving away a free kick. If it had been Kane vs [Ghanaian keeper]...

They key take away about Starmer is, and always has been, that in his 'landslide' election victory he got half a million less votes than the 'unelectable' Corbyn. It was always about a Tory collapse and how First Past the Post works rather than Starmer/ Labour themselves being popular. Turning out to be Tory lite- which was not exactly a surprise, his slogan could have been 'status quo, but better!'- evaporated even that tepid support. Labour in the UK have the same issue left parties have in most places- spent so long pandering to the mythic floating vote in the centre and shifted so far right in pursuit of it that they've given their core voter no reason to vote for them. For 30 years in the UK, and 40 years here. Then get terrified of doing anything even slightly left economically, and start up with... weird social policies to compensate. For Starmer in particular in seems the only thing he actually capital B Believed in was unqualified support for Israel. Which was a particularly odd look, for someone who was a human rights lawyer. (As a contrast, all the right wing parties are hugely pro immigration here. Most immigrants vote right so adding a million new people give them ~700k new voters; and the 'anti immigrant' party needs something to complain about but not do anything about, of course, since they own houses as much as any other MP. It also inflates the housing bubble further which makes the economy look good on paper while our English Lit grad Finance Minister who has only ever worked in PR and politics runs the real economy into the ground. While spending more money per unit than Trump did on Air Force One buying helicopters and claiming those in social housing have 'won the lottery' (direct quote)- unlike her fellow ministers on struggle street practically donating their time on a paltry 320k salary and claiming 52k/ year accommodation supplement for living in their own houses. One of six in their portfolios. Mystery why NZ has no stamp duty or Capital Gains Tax, eh)

Group G now has the opportunity to do the funniest thing. Especially with Belgium having a player sent off. Just need another 3 draws and the NZ/ Iran qualification quinella is all on.

Don't see how even Iranian hardliners would be opposed, since that's basically who's in charge and who Trump was negotiating with even more so than before. The only 'concession' made was to disavow nukes, which they'd done repeatedly anyway; and had supposedly been months to weeks away from developing since 1999, ie 27 years ago now. All the big provisions Trump wanted beforehand and criticised Obama for not getting- eg no aid to proxies, giving up ballistic missiles- aren't in his 'agreement' either. And they can still shut the straits down whenever needed. There's essentially no downside for Iran.

..and their football team isn't great either. badum_tish.gif

So, how do you spin that to be better than what Obama achieved with no war? Even managing to get an explicit no toll on the straits provision isn't exactly victory, just not an abject defeat. No wonder Trump seems genuinely peeved with Netanyahu.