Zoraptor

Not directly, certainly. But the pro Iranian PUK were mostly in charge of defending Kirkuk and withdrew without firing a shot after making an agreement with the government brokered, almost certainly, by Iran. Iranian general Qassem Suleimani was in Sulaymaniya, the capital of PUK held Iraqi kurdistan, immediately before they made that agreement.

The west doesn't want independent Kurdistan, they want the threat of independent Kurdistan to keep the regional countries in line as supporting Kurdistan practically means losing Iraq and Turkey. Israel only supports it to troll, their support is actively counterproductive politically. Can't see the US backing PJAK in Iran which is the only major Kurd rebel group as they/re KCK/ PKK affiliates and it would annoy Iraq and Turkey without having the anti ISIS fig leaf; they and their allies would far rather support the arab and baluchi minorities. Russia was neutral on the issue, and kept as quiet as they could away with. Whatever way it was resolved would be good for them- so long as they didn't take sides- since it's primarily a fight between nominal US allies; support of one side results in alienation of the other. The US had to pick a side, they didn't. It's also complicated by Crimea, much as the US could not be seen to be for secession due to Crimea Russia cannot be seen to be against it also due to Crimea.

Because it has long since been debunked, it's the latter. Where is the debunk part in the link? Don't think it has been debunked as it's new information. Hillary denies it, but that's not surprising. I can't imagine too many people thought that she or the democrats weren't involved in the dossier creation at least. Well, they were on losing side of Civil War IIRC Being on the losing side doesn't mean much though, if anything the lingering hostility from Franco is one of the driving forces for secession amongst the catalan populace. The situation at the start of the Civil War was rather different, since the new government was left wing and it was the right wing (including much of the military) that rose up in revolt. That meant that both sides had access to a lot of weapons. My personal opinion is that Puidgemont etc are pretty happy they don't have weapons, and this is still intended to be primarily posturing and a negotiation tool rather than a serious independence declaration. In that sense it has similarities to the Kurdish referendum as well, which wasn't intended to result in actual independence but in proroguing Barzani's rule even further past its expiry by causing a crisis.

Well, wouldn't mind being this Took me a suspiciously long time to realise what the animal painted on the side was, wasn't expecting a Russian heli to reference the NATO designation. I particularly like how it looks like it's drinking from the minigun cupola.

Levine is far more self deprecating than, say, CliffyB. His tendency to embiggen his games is pretty much the same though, but then you don't usually get to be head of a studio with more grounded descriptions- and he had the misfortune to have a bunch of talentless gits in the gaming press hanging off his every word and labeling him an auteur and similar for Bioshock Infinite which is his only real turkey. End of the day he did the story for three* of the more memorable video game stories, and that's 3 out of a list which would barely stretch beyond the fingers on two hands so not a bad effort at all. *Well, Bioshock up until Andrew Ryan meets a golf club. After that it was a question of why they metacommentated on the railroading then continued it despite pointing it out plus some bollocks with a giant Oscar statuette. Still better than most other game stories though, and Thief and System Shock 2 were fab.

You could argue that Levine is pretentious and doesn't deliver what was promised but there's no way he's anything like Ayn Rand. Firstly he clearly dislikes objectivism as Bioshock is an out and out critique of the practicalities of objectivism with dozens of clear and unflattering references to Rand's literature; and he's done similar critiques of other philosophies in his games (Pagans/ anarchists in Thief, Many/ communists in SS2) so he isn't pushing any particular approach. Rand would criticise other philosophies for sure, but not her own. Ken Levine would almost certainly know Harvey Weinstein. Gaming Ken Levine probably not though.

Thing is, when anarchists are smashing up banks and starbucks then the media thinks they're terrible, violent thugs, dangerous. When they're smashing up fascists they're suddenly great though. Same group of people, same philosophy etc. based antipodeans Daily Fail would love WINston. He's the closest to one of their guys we have. He's not really populist though, he just appeals to a specific segment of the population, most of whom would read the Daily Mail and which is a pretty small segment of the population overall. Critically, many of his positions- including closing immigration loop holes- were supported by the very socially liberal Labour Party even before they became the government; and the refugee quota is actually going up. As with many other places we have a genuine problem with an overheated housing market pushed up by unrestrained foreign investment. When the average house price is 25x the average wage it's a bit of a problem and increasing prices are not due to genuine demand. There are also well known and ignored loop holes with immigration where 'skilled' immigrants include occupations that aren't skilled- usually advertised locally with dreadful conditions so as to discourage locals from applying; employment consultants will then charge the skilled immigrant fees to place them, and since they can easily be deported if they lose their job that leads to them often working under illegal conditions as they cannot complain and their 'skilled' jobs sometimes being things like, literally, waiting tables- and there are a plethora of dodgy 'academic' institutions that exist to hand out student visas, then working visas, then permanent residency. With immigration consultants charging fees for that as well. Previous government loved all of that since it made the books look good on the face of it, no matter what the long term problems were. And if you complained about it you were racist. Ex government got pinged under their own copyright law yesterday for 700k odd for using a knock off version of Eminem's 'Lose Yourself' during the last election. The name of the knock off was 'Eminemesque' and they thought it was, direct quote from the guy who is world famous for being hit in the face with a marital aid on live tv, "pretty legal". Sums that bunch of clowns up perfectly and I'm not sure I've stopped laughing about it yet.

I've still only had dialogue issues as outright bugs with Elex, and some periodic quirks with hitboxes. As always there's no point buying it at full price if you're not going to play it immediately, but I'd have no problem saying that it works fine with just the day 1 patch and is more stable than many games are after being extensively patched. As with Labadal that's PC, not console, so mileage may vary by platform. I had one crash when I fired up the game for the first time. Sten's dialogues start halfway through their conversation cue list for some reason and a few other conversations are overly stilted andor seem to be missing lines. Also some of the generic responses to initiating trade and the like are clearly 'common' dialogue and done by different voice actors. Otherwise, hitboxes are fine 99% of the time but 1% of hits register when the animations show a clear miss, and the controls sometimes are a bit spongey/ unresponsive, plus the PDA UI could definitely do with some optimising for PC- and god forbid you only want to sell a few of that multi hundred stack of items as I can't find a way to specify smaller numbers except by clicking manually. I also don't think there's any way to tell exactly how many XP you have, and their choice of UI colours makes it difficult to see the level progress bar. And that's about it, so it's not exactly game break central, more like nitpick alley.

Dang, he's ambitious all right. I guess all it took for Saudi Arabia to be dragged kicking and screaming out of the state that it's in is some fresh royal blood, and I don't mean in the sacrificial sense. I wouldn't hold my breath- MbS is not averse to pandering to audiences while the Wahhabi clerical apparatus is Saudi's greatest foreign affairs weapon. And the mega city is a pipe dream. Might as well have gone the whole hog and call it Amarna while he was about it. It's the standard approach of making the right noises to western media, while saying something completely different in arabic to the domestic one. The Saud's bargain with the Wahhabis in the 80s was Faustian, but made for very good reasons that have only strengthened. MbS has effectively usurped his current position and made succession hereditary, so the list of those wanting him gone is as long as the list of Saudi princes not named Muhammed bin Sultan, ie a couple of thousand of the most powerful in the kingdom. And when it comes right down to it KSA is still the place where the army bought SAMs based on ability to shoot down their own air force's planes and there are more parallel armies than in even Hitler's Germany.

Flake is the new blood since he entered in 2013. The other Arizona senator on the other hand has been there 31 years and would be competing with the Thurmond's in terms of ossification.

Reading far too much into it. UI position, you want to take the unique differences between PC and console expectations, input devices etc into account to get the best for both. Environmental artist? You want console expertise as anything that the consoles can handle a PC certainly can. If it were a programming position specifying console only it would be more significant, or even if we still had the more PC distant Cell or PowerPC based consoles, but this doesn't mean much for whether there's a PC version or not given that both PS and Xbox are using AMD Radeon/ x86 systems that aren't much different from their laptop APUs (though they're considerably better at playing games than APU laptops, of course, and far worse at running Office).

They should though, as the blurb and any fore/after words- any editorial comments really- are often the most useful parts to see what you should be getting out of the book. If you're reading Les Miserables it probably isn't for the 82 page digression on the Paris Sewers, after all, and most forewords will helpfully tell you that you can safely skip it.

You mean Trump and guns? Because this thread usually is all about Trump and guns. Kinda refreshing to read something else in here for a change. Heh, we partially migrated guns to the TV thread. On the previous Trump topic though, I saw the interview with La David Johnson's widow and... I'm pretty convinced that Trump in this case is about as completely in the right as he can be. I doubt there was anything Trump could have said that she would not have taken badly- about the worst that can be said about Trump in this instance is that his tweeting lacked class but that was always lose/ lose since if he said nothing it would be taken as agreement. And for one of the other things she brought up; I'm not exactly the most pro US armed forces guy here but they were absolutely correct not to let her see her husband's body in the circumstances, harsh as that may seem and no matter how much she thought she wanted to see it. It would have been grossly irresponsible to allow her to.

Come on, don't read The Sun. Not even the **** are real They don't even have asterisks at all any more.

I'd guarantee that it isn't just Activision doing that though. Most of this stuff crossed over from 'free' services and there's a constant testing of what is acceptable. It will stop when it starts costing companies money rather than making them it, which given humanity's penchant for compulsive behaviour and special pleading will be never. People literally spend thousands on loot boxes and the like. Let's be honest- it's deliberate targeting of people with either actual compulsive disorders or poor self control in the same way as Nigerian Prince scams or MS Technical Support call scams target the naive/ greedy or technical illiterates; but while it's pretty disgusting morally it is legal unlike those and it can be argued that people know exactly what they're getting (or the chance of getting) when buying the stuff, they're just being 'encouraged' to buy it. (Have to say though, for all the flak other companies get a lot of the worst systems were popularised on PC at least by, well, Valve as much as by Zynga et al)

Very much a 'rule of cool' episode- the metal bolted to the cars wouldn't stop most bullets effectively, apart from Rick et al being able to shoot Negan Dwight could have killed him and almost certainly escaped when they were all outside, the attack on the satellite station had a dozen guys standing around in a beautifully framed for tv group but also a perfect target for pretty much any weapon and the effectiveness of zombie hordes depends completely on plot requirements. Pretty good set up episode though, and I do like that they're listing every guest star for the season during the credits so you're not sure who is going to show up.

Yep, Sunday night US time. They have used proper tactics with short bursts and aimed shots in the show before, but their marksmanship is precisely as good or as bad as the plot demands and the tactics amount to what looks cool (and is needed for the plot) most of the time. I enjoy TWD well enough, but if I ever lost the ability to suspend disbelief I wouldn't last long watching because it isn't either very consistent or very logical if you think about it. Then again, I've seen a fair number of real world videos from actual war zones (eg Libya and Syria) where every single unrealistic and stereotypical 'tv' trope with regards to firing guns can be seen. About half of them feature the classic spray and pray of firing over a berm without even looking let alone firing an AK from the hip like they're Rambo.

Yeah, it's a gothic game. You need a level up plan rather than be a jack of trades and/or not to be worried about persistently running away from enemies. I'm level 5 I think, so I have some basic skills and equipment and I can reliably kill the turkey/ molerat analogues and other basic enemies without much difficulty at all. The snappers, gargoyles and most enemy humans I just as quickly fled from. I tried killing a pack leader snapper with a bow and it cheerfully shrugged off around 50 shots, which was a bit of a giggle. (Combat difficulty is a bit of an S curve it seems. Better weapons and armour, and skills that increase damage seem to have a massive effect on difficulty disproportionate to how much they look like they should have. +10% damage kills things far quicker than +10% would suggest, and even basic armour means that a mutant chicken has to hit you 10 times to kill you rather than twice. There's clearly some sort of damage reduction going on, so if you hit something with 15 damage reduction and do, say, 20 damage then that +10% damage takes the applied damage from 5 to 7, which will actually kill it 40% quicker. That may not be the exact system, but it seems to work similarly)

My main complaint with Elex is that it could do with some ease of use stuff. More than one map note and a minimap that shows terrain and the like. It makes sense not having them for a medievalesque game, but that's exactly the sort of stuff a PDA ought to have. I still haven't had a single genuine bug yet though just one or two dialogue quirks. Only other quirks are the tendency of the human enemies to chase you waving their melee weapons in the air impotently- but if they just pull out their ranged weapon and shoot you it's usually a one shot kill- and some slightly flakey hit box detection. I rather like the fatigue system though, it's not like it takes long to recharge and it stops Witcher style roll spam.

Mafia re-released on GOG. No licensed music, but there's already a mod for putting it back it if one is so inclined.

One of the odd and counter intuitive things about the neoliberal economic model is that governments giving money to businesses seems to increase the government's responsibility to those businesses rather than the reverse. Best example is agricultural subsidies, but it's common in many sectors. It's doubly ironic because in theory neoliberals don't believe in subsidies, except when they do as the result of lobbying or threats for pet sectors.

I don't think much at all changed at EA- the situation was not actually as bad as was made out by EASpouse which is somewhat different. Plus they now have a bunch of outsourcing studios in places like China where the situation is undoubtably worse. It does seem to be cyclical though, companies work out that there are diminishing returns from overworking people as quality declines and productivity gains reduce; then they forget that after a few years when the competent managers and producers have moved on or there is new top level management looking to make things 'cost effective'. The decline in quality in particular can be very important as bugs may be very hard to track down so it's better to have as few as possible from the start. That's why most of the outsourced studios are for things like textures and models though, easy to overwork since it doesn't matter so much if they make mistakes or die at their desks in their 20s.

We get these periodic overwork scandals and nothing changes- EASpouse, anyone? About as much practical effect as #StopKony2012. As others have said, game development is a vocational job, there are always other people willing to come in at the bottom of the pile because they theoretically love games development to replace those burning out from the practicalities. It's a similar situation with other vocational jobs like teaching, nursing or (low level) doctoring- because people want to do the jobs they get under valued and over exploited until their goodwill runs out and they realise anything else is better, then in comes the next bright eyed bushy tailed innocent willing to work 100 hour weeks semi permanently. This is also a world where games companies get subsidies for working in cities or countries and are seen as being great value added to be competed for with inducements; in those circumstances one may find a 'coincidental' lack of labour rules enforcements lest all the 'bureaucratic red tape' drives them off to some other city or country.

PB did dlc for Risen 2 and 3, at the behest of the publisher. There was an extra island for R3 and two (?) temples for Risen 2. But yeah, very little chance of a GOTY as Nordic aren't making them do paid dlc for Elex. Well, I haven't played either Gothic or Risen so that tells me very little. With all the praise from peeps here I'll be sure to check it out... when the obligatory GOTY edition drops. Gothic type games are pretty difficult to explain if you haven't played them. Maybe Dark Souls crossed with Fallout New Vegas crossed with Morrowwind? They're difficult without generally being unfair, you'll get slaughtered if you blunder into the wrong place, the story is goodish (not as much as FONV, but that's a high bar) and a lot of pleasure is got from the exploration of an interesting mostly open world. There's also a fair amount of lovable jankiness about them, they're flawed but it's made up for by their virtues.

I had the game pre ordered but I saw reviews anyways. One thing that concerns me and that maybe you can clear; is it true that the initial "hump" in difficulty that its common in Piranha games, stretches longer in this game due to its open world nature? Don't know if anyone could have played long enough to answer that definitively. It's so similar* to Risen 1/ Gothic 1/2 that i'd suspect the difficulty curve must be similar as well. Then again they were all open world games as well, so it was ridiculously easy to go from fighting hungry wolves to blundering into a shadowbeast in any of them at which point you would get butchered. Apart from getting killed by the first turkey the only other time I've died was missing a platform and falling after discharging my jetpack. That's my only minor complaint so far, the jetpack flight has a tendency to get stuck on the geometry on occasion, though I'll probably get used to it. *Seriously, right down to meeting 'Diego' and him running you off to the 'old camp' helpfully slaughtering all the pesky wildlife (from the previous games) on the way. I haven't met any snappers yet, but if I don't soon I promise to literally eat my keyboard.