dwarf

Well it's funny you should mention because the twat in chief said as much recently. No hint of irony whatsoever. Also love how implicit in that she highlights the shortcomings of FPtP but whenever the argument for PR comes up her colleagues just stick their fingers in their ears and shout 'naaah mate. Unstable governmnent.' Germany's unstable is it? Cameron played this card before too, but in relation to UKIP. Rotten campaigners both of them.

My Dad, who voted for Brexit, has been a long-time Labour voter but will probably abstain this year because he doesn't trust Corbyn. I told him we'd end up with the Tories if he did that. He said something to the effect of 'that's too bad', adding, 'Corbyn would only fuck everything up anyway.' He also said that he thought Brexit would be good for my future. I started raging internally at how patronising that was considering he knew my views on the issue. Then he followed that up with, '...but it won't be good for the next 10 years or so.' AS IN, IN THE PRIME OF MY LIFE, DAD?! I rage quit in real life (again, silently). But I don't tend to get vocal with him about politics any more. We don't need our relationship to get frostier than it is already.

I feel like they probably spent a long time in development on Infinite trying to prove concepts early on, which meant they had some really cool stuff running in the opening but had to rush the rest. So the start they've got the festival and pageants and interactive stuff (you know - world-building), and then the rest is just a string of maps to clear out because they don't know what to do with you once they give you a gun.

I borrowed the original early on in the PS3 cycle but didn't persevere with it, which was probably a mistake. Infinite's opening was terrific, but the overall game felt unfinished, or at least unrealised. The world completely died whenever you cleared out an area - it felt like you were running through an abandoned theme park at points, but not in a cool fairy tale kind of way, more of an empty, redundant map kind of way. Compare to the original, whose claustrophobia fostered urgency.

Didn't Cameron do that last time before buckling under media pressure? Maybe the same will happen to May. The Tories don't stand to gain anything by leveling themselves with the other parties, so while it is cowardly I'm not surprised by her decision.

He's damned if he does, damned is he doesn't. But now he should be maximising exposure on mainstream media AND on social media, where he can deliver his message without spin (albeit mostly to the converted). But yeah, Corbyn completely garbles all of his messaging. There isn't a single, repeatable tagline or vision that people can can take away after his speeches or announcements, because he just mumbles about fairness and not being the Tories with zero conviction and with the emphasis in all the wrong places.

While that might not be entirely ignoble on Farron's part, he's as much of an opportunistic slimeball as May. He'd be dumb not to power-grab now.

So we're getting a Tory government either way, but for me the choice is between: Labour - a socialist party closest aligned to my poltics, but which is backing Brexit (out of necessity almost) - the worst imaginable course of action for our country. The Lib Dems, who are a watered down Conservative Party, who currently only have a handful of MPs and probably would struggle to run a government, but who are backing a remain ticket. It's just a shit state of affairs if you're a socialist at the moment. Maybe the best chance of Labour gaining power would be to reverse their position on Brexit (which I can't see happening now), and aim to run a pro-EU coalition government with the Lib Dems and other fringe parties, in the hope that the electorate has changed their minds on leaving, having seen some of the Leave campaign lies exposed, and the negotiation shambles unfolding day by day. The Tories want this election now, in what would normally be an inopportune time during the middle of the most important negotiation period in our history, before everyone realises that Brexit will be a complete horror show for the country.

I'm not saying verisimilitude isn't a worthwhile pursuit at all, but rather there's something particularly mundane about Gran Turismo and its press releases. And while you're right about simulators serving a purpose (ample space for them in the market too), you're having me on if you're going to a GT game to experience the thrill of racing a sports car (granted, you did say the series was a little shitty).

Not purposefully targeting you Choze, purely intended as an observation of the game: is there anything more boring in the whole world than Gran Turismo screens? Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed playing A-Spec as a kid, but there is something so crushingly lifeless about a game whose sole ambition is verisimilitude. To car nuts I'm sure the details are joyous, whereas I'm unmoved. Put these graphics side by side with GT6 and I'm sure you could spot the difference if you looked close enough. Rely on memory alone, though, and this looks bang average. [/hyperbole]

[quote=Choze;1853581http://www.anandtech.com/show/11250/microsofts-project-scorpio-more-hardware-details-revealed Has the same criticism we have pointed out(no new chips here over PS4 Pro). Did we?

Western foreign policy in the middle-east is so opaque and confusing. Intervention troubles me, the U.S treating itself like an international police force troubles me, and yet it's hard for me to condemn aggressive acts of war over there because I have such little understanding of the geopolitical situation. To what extent does bombing ISIS targets reduce their influence and territory? What makes a successful bombing raid different to an unsuccessful bombing raid (aside from obvious considerations like civilian casualties)? Is the bombing negated by the radicalisation/recruitment that results from it? I can't remember reading any illuminating journalism about this, so either I've not been looking properly (likely) or it's nearly impossible to make sense of (also likely). I see the odd thing like this Twitter thread, which takes an anti-war slant, and I'm happy to read anti-war analyses, but it might as well be conspiratorial and way off the mark for all I know:

I think that's optimistic, frankly. People will be saying that a few iterations down the road, and eventually come to wonder if there is anything inevitable about the rise of VR. "I was being realistic, and don't call me Frankly."

And I was so looking forward to Choze's glowing assessment!

We're living in post-truth now. Get with the regime.

I remember we all mentioned this in the PlayStation Meet thread all that time ago. The Scorpio feels like an aggressive carpet bombing raid on an empty field.

The FLUDD was brilliant in some scenarios, it just needed some minor tweaks to improve the feel of Mario's movement. Equally to blame was the bad level design which didn't complement the mechanic very well. The red coin collecting on the pirate ship sticks out in my mind as one of the more frustrating examples of how the FLUDD shouldn't have been implemented, what with the impossibility of triangulating the coins in 3D space when jumping from positions above and below them, while intervening platforms and obstacles obscured important visual information from view. Then there was the hassle of having to refill the FLUDD in the water below the ship if you failed to economise it on the previous attempt. I suppose the greater jump distances granted by FLUDD necessitated bigger levels, which meant that too much of the game was spent running from A to B rather than platforming. Over the shoulder FLUDD was definitely a mistake, as were the levels where you had to fastidiously clean every last splodge of graffiti, and I think those moments compounded the niggles people had with it. Nintendo sometimes stretches their mechanics beyond breaking point because they feel like they have to justify their inventions to everyone. They even built a whole console around it in The Wii U.

Can't believe I fell for it!

WipEout HD was the boy. One of those games that makes you strive for perfection, and kills you in the process. Preferred it to F-Zero because the vehicles didn't feel like you were maneuvering Scalextric cars.

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Had an amazing experience recently while I was trying to find footage of a level from Driver (PS1). Followed a trail of breadcrumbs on YouTube and happened across the soundtrack to Need for Speed 2, which I hadn't heard for over 15 years. I remembered playing racing games with a steering wheel controller when I was 5 or 6 years old, including Colin MaCrae Rally, but I didn't realise it was a Need for Speed game I'd played all that time ago. Man, the nostalgia rush upon listening to these tracks was unreal. So, so good.

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With the amount of games you own that's not far from the truth :P

Whether this turns out to be anything more than a cool tech demo remains to be seen, but it's a solid trailer nevertheless.

Is this a cut line from the film? Vegans would argue there isn't an ethical way to kill an animal, although you'd be right in saying there are different degrees of deprivation and brutality that go into farming practices. You could also argue animals have differing levels of intelligence, and differing capacities to experience pain, but my contention would be that to make a long, bespoke list of animals that are more acceptable to kill would be a strange way of justifying a meat-based diet.