YaKoMoS

Anthem makes a hell of a first impression. It then smothers its strong start with a burdensome campaign, before showing a final glimmer of potential in its endgame. It’s quite the rollercoaster. There are bright spots, no doubt. The scenery doesn’t vary much, but it doesn’t need to when it looks this damn good. Waterfalls tumble from alabaster cliffs, between emerald treetops, into bioluminescent swamps. The thrill of swooping off a cliff, skimming low over a river to cool your jets and kicking up spray as you go, never wholly erodes – and it’s refreshed each time you unlock another of Anthem’s flying exosuits, or javelins, and feel your way around its unique quirks. The same is true of combat. Some enemies are spongier than I’d like, but that’s so you’re nudged into learning a key mechanic: an evolved version of Mass Effect’s combo system. Certain ability attacks can ‘prime’ an enemy for a combo, while others will ‘detonate’ enemies who have been primed, dealing bonus damage. You won’t see much deliberate coordination of this in the campaign unless you group up, but nor will you need it. It’s only in the endgame that the character builds and teamwork to land combos become essential. Each of the javelins has a distinct role to play. As a Storm, you are a lordly mage, floating above the carnage and dropping elemental bombs from on high, able to both prime and detonate combos with ease according to your loadout. The Interceptor offers the opposite experience: survival requires agility, which means chaining dodges, dashes, and triple-jumps. It’s highly kinetic and ‘micro-heavy’, in strategy parlance, but it looks and feels wonderful – just look at this clip from u/Hakan on Reddit to see what’s possible. Bioware seems to share Bungie’s view that the ‘power fantasy’ is crucial to invest players in these long-term hobby games, and when it comes to your javelins, it has absolutely nailed this. Which is why its repetition of some of Destiny’s prominent mistakes is all the more baffling. As fun as combat can be from beat-to-beat, its rhythms hardly vary. Perhaps 90% of missions – at a conservative estimate – follow an identical template: fly to a place, kill enemies, and repeat twice more. Sometimes you’ll complete an objective before, during, or after these fights, but they’re plucked from a short menu of boring tasks we’ve seen a thousand times, such as ‘bring the things to the thing’, ‘follow radar blips to find the thing’, and ‘defend the thing’. Destiny players don’t need reminding of the scorn heaped upon that game for its over-reliance on the last of these. Strongholds, once described by BioWare with blithe inaccuracy as “a raid-type thing”, simply scale up this formula rather than fundamentally change it. The first unlocks at level seven – pretty early in the campaign – and features ‘bring two times as many things to the thing’, twice, followed by ‘defend the thing, but for longer’. Then there’s a boss. Two more unlock after the campaign, one of which is a repeat of the final story mission, which demonstrates how little Strongholds and missions differ in concept. Strongholds are in fact a dungeon-type thing, far more like a Destiny strike than a raid. The campaign’s story stars some of Anthem’s better characters and throws out the occasional surprise twist, but it never tries to say anything more interesting than ‘friends and bravery are good’. Its villain is a bit of a let-down, too – he’s absent most of the time and ultimately motivated by nothing more than simple megalomania. It all feels very safe and very tired, which is a shame given that the backstory is actually pretty cool. Anthem’s world was made by the Shapers, a race of godlike beings who channelled a force of pure creative energy called the Anthem of Creation. They did this with a set of tools known to humanity as relics, but left the job half-finished and their tools behind. The Anthem throws a tantrum whenever it comes across them, and as a javelin-flying soldier called a freelancer, it’s your job to calm these ‘Cataclysms’ and protect people from their effects. In your charge is Anthem’s main hub, Fort Tarsis, a desperate community fighting to survive the world’s inherent violence. And violent though it is, it’s also a world of vitality and energy, especially compared with the desolate, death-hollowed solar system in Destiny. Some great stories could be told here, but have yet to be. You’re nudged back to Fort Tarsis after each mission, though the Launch Bay area lets you circumvent this, which is the only use I’ve personally found for it. A number of dialogue markers will then pop up on your map, and if you’d prefer not to miss anything, you’ll want to check them all out. But Tarsis isn’t small, and even with the addition of a sprint button you’re not quick. The result is a hair-tearing amount of downtime between missions. It wouldn’t be so bad if these dialogues were more consistent. At its best, there are some genuinely moving sub-plots in Anthem. Yarrow, a freelancer captain, has the ostensibly noble desire to honour his comrades’ sacrifices through a commemorative wall, but one of those comrades argues this only serves to inspire more impressionable youths to sacrifice themselves, like the jingoistic propaganda put about before World War I. Then there’s the old woman who’s been waiting a decade for her son to come back alive from an expedition. She confuses me for him, justifying her delusion by referring to the Anthem: if you love someone enough and pray to it hard enough, it’ll send them back to you in some form. Who am I to say she’s crazy in a world where an unknowable force of pure creation exists? She may even be right, since I’ve little idea of my own backstory. But for every one of those, there’s at least one more where I simply don’t care about the character or their dilemma, and find it faintly ridiculous that I’m playing therapist to desperate strangers who want me to validate their life choices, or talk their loved ones out of theirs. Not only do I have bigger problems, like saving the world from a Marvel villain lookalike or whatever, but – and this is no less important – sticking my nose into your personal business is bad manners. The dreariness of trudging around Tarsis to listen to only occasionally interesting people is exacerbated by the loading screens between game states, which have already been merrily mocked on Reddit. The big one – from Tarsis to the open world – has been cut from over two minutes to roughly half that by Anthem’s day one patch. It’s a welcome improvement, but still isn’t exactly snappy, and load screens continue to add a general sense of flab through their sheer ubiquity. The upshot is that Anthem’s campaign is an overall chore that will test your commitment to the whole enterprise. It certainly tested mine. Fortunately, matters brighten when you hit level 30 and unlock the Grandmaster tier I, II, and III difficulties. This is Anthem’s true endgame. You’ll never need to optimise your build during the campaign, even if you play on Hard – it’s where you learn the ropes. Grandmaster, though, cranks up enemy health and damage, forcing you to explore every avenue in response, and revealing the depth of Anthem’s build system. You can choose two weapons, two javelin class abilities, and a support power. You can further modify your build with six component slots that offer universal perks, like more ammo capacity or melee damage, but also niche or class-specific ones, like more shield bash damage for the Colossus. Masterwork gear also starts dropping when you hit the late 20s, which finally brings Anthem’s loot – irrelevant until then – to the fore. Masterwork weapons have unique graphics and a special perk that defines their playstyle. They’re nowhere near as distinctive as Destiny’s Exotics, but at least I’ve become fond of some of mine, which is more than I can say for the rest of Anthem’s loot. Wyvern Blitz is a thunderous sniper rifle that deals +40% headshot damage when floating, which my current Storm build pairs with a Masterwork machine pistol that doubles weapon and melee damage for five seconds after hitting an enemy at point-blank. So I’m hosing enemies down at close range, jumping back and into the air, and going for the head with my sniper. It’s thrillingly overpowered fun on Hard, but near-essential on Grandmaster, and has been a rewarding discovery. Hardcore theorycrafters will be able to find far more inspired synergies across Masterworks and the other elements of Anthem’s build system, but I seriously doubt the endgame’s wider appeal as long as the same rote missions are the only things you can actually do. Anthem is a long-term bet; EA has released a roadmap that advertises new content across at least three acts. Unfortunately it looks like more of the same until the Cataclysm at the end of act one, which we still don’t know much about. And with so many more compelling live games around now – including direct competitors which offer both PvP and raiding – Anthem won’t enjoy the same forgiving environment that the first or even the second Destiny did. Whether it can attract, much less retain, the large audience EA clearly wants without some major changes is a very open question.

First off, let’s establish the lay of the land. To call this a ‘collection’ right now would be like calling a single painting an ‘exhibition’, or a pair of socks an ‘outfit’ (not that we don’t occasionally rock that look). Currently, Halo: The Master Chief Collection consists of one game and one game only: Halo: Reach. You’ll have to wait for 343 Industries’ PC ports of Halo, Halo 2, Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST, and Halo 4 to stagger out over the course of 2020 before your boots are well and truly filled. For now, then, what you get are ten story missions playable alone or in co-op (there’s no matchmaking), multiplayer for up to 16 people, and a wave-based Firefight mode for four. It’s a rather underwhelming way to rekindle Master Chief’s career, especially given that this is the first showing of Bungie’s iconic sci-fi shooter on PC since 2007’s Halo 2, and the first ever on Steam. And, more’s the pity, the titular super soldier isn’t even in Reach‘s campaign. Instead, you’re a silent Spartan in a doomed squad battling alien cult the Covenant across autumnal valleys, ravaged cities, and besieged bases. This is the Rogue One to Halo’s A New Hope, a maudlin prequel set prior to the Chief’s adventures with Cortana. In terms of both mood and the colour palette, Reach can best be described as muted, like someone came along and sprinkled ash everywhere. You feel nothing for this dour planet and its inhabitants. Compared to other gung-ho series entries, it always felt a bit flat, and ten years on, it only feels flatter. But that’s not to say it’s terrible. The sandboxy New Alexandria mission is a rare highlight, giving you free reign to choose your objective through a hurriedly evacuating city. Docking your hornet at a rooftop hospital or nightclub then clearing out pockets of Covenant before flying off to a distant skyscraper is one of the few times Reach feels truly expansive. The Long Night of Solace mission also adds dazzle in the form of a thrilling space dogfight. These moments, sadly, are a minority. At the time, Reach’s satisfying gunplay set the standard. In 2019, if you’ve played any decent shooter in the last decade, it lacks bite. Weapons are strangely devoid of thump and feedback, more like toys than tools, and AI is predictable. Taking down enemies is less about unleashing the power of a futuristic military’s most lethal hardware and more about simply keeping your recoil-less sights trained on targets who merely cycle through a few behaviours. This is much less of an issue in multiplayer, where human competition gives you more to think about. Your mind’s not on the weirdly weightless firearms when you’re bouncing a grenade off the doorframe to catch someone around the corner, or lining up two enemies to get a double kill with the Spartan laser, just as chess players aren’t questioning what the mineral makeup of their pieces are when they go for a checkmate. Probably. Anyway, it’s clean, fair, and just as good as you remember. Reach occupies that sweet spot in Halo history, developing features established in previous games without overdoing them. Each Spartan gets two weapons, four grenades, and an armour ability, be it sprinting, a jetpack, extra shields, holographic decoys, or invisibility. This results in an unpredictable but – crucially – not unfair experience, with layers of strategy surrounding each option. Use the jetpack, for instance, and you’ll have an aerial advantage at the cost of being visible to anyone who happens to glance upwards. It’s amazing how easy Halo’s multiplayer is to snap back into after a long hiatus. Every map opens a different memory door, providing a fresh shot of nostalgia. Clever design encourages different tactics. There’s the secret vent on Sword Base, but access calls for a mad dash to an exposed boost pad. Reflection has a lift you can use to send up an enemy-baiting hologram. The open skylights on Battle Canyon’s bases are perfect for a drop-in ambush. Power weapons, meanwhile, enable adrenaline-spiking killing sprees, whether it’s grabbing the shotgun and dominating the rabbit runs around Pinnacle, or using the sniper to impose your will on the perilous platforms of Boardwalk. Quite simply, this is some of the most diverse competitive multiplayer gaming ever devised. There’s zombie game type Infection, which plays like tag with energy swords; there’s the rugby-style Grifball, where players score goals rather than kills; and there’s Dino Blasters, which gives players concussion rifles and unlimited jetpacks. Reach doesn’t force you into a playstyle. It shapes itself around you. The only part of Reach’s online portion that feels more redundant than refreshing is its eight-on-eight big team battles, which have since been vastly bettered in scope and spectacle by numerous other shooters. Joining both campaign and competitive multiplayer is the wave-based Firefight mode. It’s a decent challenge and comes with some imaginative rule sets (all grunts all the time; infinite rockets) but human opponents are infinitely more interesting than Halo’s AI. Useful unlocks could have saved it, but all you’ll ever earn here, and this goes for the multiplayer too, are tokens to spend on avatar cards, nameplates, and armour pieces. They’re linearly arranged, which means you don’t get a choice. If you want your body to produce confetti upon death (one of the few good rewards), you need to buy about a dozen knee pads first. But Reach doesn’t keep you coming back by dangling the next rank in front of you. It keeps you coming back by being bloody good fun. While time hasn’t been kind to its campaign, and its co-op mode underwhelms, the multiplayer is a godsend. We may be waiting a while for the other Halo games to arrive, but the ability to play endless rounds of Team Slayer against a resurrected community substantially softens the blow.

President Rodrigo Duterte has decided to end more than two years of martial law in the southern Philippines after government forces considerably weakened Islamic militant groups there with the capture and killing of their leaders, his spokesman said on Tuesday. Mr Duterte placed the Mindanao region under martial law after hundreds of local militants aligned with the Islamic State group and backed by foreign fighters occupied buildings, a commercial district and communities in Marawi City starting 23 May, 2017, in the worst security crisis Mr Duterte has faced. Troops quelled the disastrous siege after five months of intense airstrikes and ground offensives with the help of American and Australian surveillance aircraft, but congress approved an extension of martial law in Mindanao three times after Mr Duterte warned that militants continued to recruit fighters and plot attacks. Mr Duterte decided not to further extend martial law, which expires at the end of the year, after his defence and security advisers provided an assessment that “the terrorist and extremist rebellion” has been weakened with the losses of the militants' leaders and a drop in crime in the region, presidential spokesman Salvador Panelo said. “The palace is confident on the capability of our security forces in maintaining the peace and security of Mindanao without extending martial law,” Mr Panelo said in a statement. “The people of Mindanao are assured that any incipient major threat in the region would be nipped in the bud.” Defence secretary Delfin Lorenzana has told Mr Duterte that Muslim militants can no longer carry out an attack like the siege on Marawi, which left more than 1,000 mostly militants dead, along with troops and civilians, and turned the mosque-studded city's commercial and residential areas into a wasteland of burned and pock-marked buildings and houses. Troops have also made significant progress in efforts to defeat the decades-old communist insurgency in the region, Mr Lorenzana said. The attack reinforced fears that the Islamic State group was gaining a foothold in in southeast Asia despite its battle defeats in Iraq and Syria. Opposition politicians argued Mr Duterte's martial law was unconstitutional because it is an “extreme measure” that can only be imposed when an actual rebellion against the government exists. They also feared the move could be a prelude for Mr Duterte to declare martial law throughout the Philippines. Foreign governments have also expressed concern, but Mr Lorenzana said the martial law imposed in Mindanao was “mild” compared to the state of martial rule declared by authoritarian leader Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines in the 1970s. The Marcos-era martial law was characterised by widespread human rights violations and alleged plunder of state coffers. Mr Lorenzana said businessmen were reluctant to invest in the south because of martial law. Suicide bombings by Islamic State group-linked militants have rocked the southern province of Sulu this year, including the first one staged by a Filipino militant, but Mr Lorenzana expressed confidence that government forces “can maintain the peace and order there and improve it further, make it more peaceful, without martial law.”

If you’re heading to the mountains this winter, make sure you choose the right pair of ski pants or salopettes for what you need – this way you’ll really be able to enjoy your time on the slopes. Waterproofness is undoubtedly one of the qualities to look out for. It's worth knowing that waterproof garments are often tested against a universal performance scale and rated from 0-50,000mm+. For ski and snowboard trousers, the lowest you’d really want is 10,000mm, with high end performance gear being up at 20-30,000mm (being highly waterproof yet still flexible and breathable). Then there’s insulation – shells are more versatile as you can use in both milder and cold conditions (simply layer with thermals), however built insulation is more convenient if you’re going skiing in mid-winter at a resort. You also need to consider style and cut – some are baggier and allowing high manoeuvrability, aimed more at freestyle or backcountry riders. Others will be more traditional and offer a close fitting snug warm fit, intended at the average piste skier. The more premium options might feature a concealed RECCO reflector. This is a neat band-aid sized passive reflector meaning you can be detected by an avalanche transceiver in that worst case scenario. We have selected a range of trousers suitable for all conditions and types of skiing, and tested them in terms of their fit, comfort, build, waterproofness, materials quality, and most importantly their performance in adverse weather. You can trust our independent reviews. We may earn commission from some of the retailers, but we never allow this to influence selections, which are formed from real-world testing and expert advice. This revenue helps to fund journalism across The Independent.

It can’t get here soon enough. There’s something pleasant about watching a high-horsepower Audi rocket down the German Autobahn as cars quickly move to the left lane as the wide, angular front fascia of the 2021 RS6 Avant fills their rearview mirrors. It’s something that rarely, if ever, happens on American highways, and seeing such vehicular respect on the road makes us a bit jealous. But it does allow for the Audi RS6 Avant to stretch its legs in a way no American can legally. In the video above, we see the super wagon cruising at well over 170 miles per hour (273 kilometers per hour) in the wet. Though speed is where the RS6 Avant excels. Under the hood is a twin-turbocharged, hybridized, 4.0-liter V8 producing 591 horsepower (441 kilowatts) and 590 pound-feet (800 Newton-meters) of torque. Power routes to all four wheels through Audi’s full-time Quattro all-wheel-drive system, rocketing the wagon to 62 miles per hour (100 kilometers per hour) in 3.6 seconds. The top speed is limited to 155 mph (250 kph). However, opt for the Dynamic Package, and top speed jumps to 174 mph (280 kph). Get the Dynamic Package Plus and top speed increases again to 190 mph (305 kph). The Audi RS6 Avant in the video above likely has the Dynamic Package Plus as it has no trouble reaching 176 mph (284 kph), just a bit above the Dynamic Package's top speed. Then the driver steps off the accelerator as a car moves into the right lane before quickly moving back to the left lane, realizing its miskate. It’s an impressive display of performance for a wagon capable of hauling five people and cargo – 20.0 cubic feet (565 liters) of space in the trunk and up to 60.0 cubic feet (1,680 liters) in total interior volume. Gallery: 2020 Audi RS6 Avant: The video gives us a driver-eye view out over the car’s hood. We can see the new interior with Audi’s latest version of its virtual cockpit. Audi hasn’t released pricing for the Audi RS6 Avant just yet, but if you live in the U.S., it’s best to budget in some track time because this kind of driving on American roads will earn you a ticket. Or worse.

The stunning Mazda supercar that never was. Name: Mazda Furai Debut: 2008 Detroit Auto Show Engine: Three-Rotor Wankel Specs: 450 Horsepower / 278 Pound-Feet In the mid to late 2000s, Mazda proved it wasn’t giving up on the rotary engine yet. The company still found success in the RX-8 sports car, a sort of not-so-direct successor to the beloved RX-7. And in 2008, Mazda debuted a jaw-dropping, Wankel-powered concept at the Detroit Auto Show known as the Furai, meaning "Sound of the Wind." Race Ready: Mazda never intended to build a production version of the Furia. The company created it as a race car from the start, destined to compete in the American Le Mans series. The Furia wore outrageous red and silver aero work and the number "55" as a nod to the Le Mans-winning 787B. But a few issues kept the project from ever reaching the track. The Furia used a complicated tri-rotary Wankel engine. The engine, essentially a modified version of the 20B found on previous road-going Mazdas, ran on E100 ethanol fuel. The Furai was fully functional, sure – the company tested it on various tracks, including Laguna Seca and Buttonwillow. But the car ended up acting as a rolling testbed for things like future design and aerodynamic testing, rather than racing. And then the accident happened… Death By Furai: In 2008, soon after the debut of the Furai in Detroit, the company handed over the keys of its beloved prototype to test drivers at Top Gear. During a photo session at Bentwaters Park Air Force base in the U.K., driver Mark Ticehurst noticed smoke from the engine bay. Ticehurst escaped unscathed, thankfully, but the entirety of the Furai went up in flames in a matter of minutes before crews could extinguish it. After learning of the incident, Mazda brought the charred remains of the concept back to its Advanced Design Studio in Irvine, California where the company created it, but never went back to the project again. In a 2013 interview with Road & Track, then senior designer, Carlos Salaff, had this to say about the accident: "It was sad for me. I poured my heart and soul into that car. When you pour your heart and soul into something, it becomes your baby. And then I saw it destroyed like that and it really hurt. It hurt." Gallery: 2008 Mazda Furai Concept:

The launch of a McVeggie burger at McDonald’s in New Zealand has sparked confusion among customers, as the burger is not technically classed as vegetarian. This week, McDonald’s New Zealand announced it had added the McVeggie burger to its menu following a successful trial earlier this year. The burger is described as being a “delicious crispy patty” made from potatoes, peas, corn and onion, with the slogan: “Veggies never tasted so good.” However, the description includes the caveat that the burger is “not vegetarian” due to the way in which it is prepared. “With the equipment we have available, we have to cook the patty in the same oil used for other products like McChicken patties,” David Howse, the general manager for McDonald’s New Zealand, told The Guardian. “This product is intended for flexitarians, rather than being vegan or vegetarian, but for some vegetarians our preparation method will be OK.” While McDonald’s New Zealand has made it clear in the burger’s description that it may not be deemed suitable for vegetarians, McDonald’s spokesperson Simon Kenny said the firm is aware that “there will be vegetarians that are disappointed this isn’t a vegetarian product”. The New Zealand Vegetarian Society shared a post on Facebook about the McVeggie burger, asking its followers how they feel about it. While some said they feel the launch of the burger is a “tiny step in the right direction”, others described it as “disappointing”. “They have made completely the wrong call, the world is moving towards plant-based eating and this is so off the mark, it’s almost funny,” one person commented. “I would be way happier if it was prepared vegetarian. But it’s progress. The more veg food the better,” another remarked. Earlier this year, the McVeggie burger was launched at McDonald’s Australia with the same sti[CENSORED]tion that it is not an entirely vegetarian product. McDonald’s also launched its first ever “vegan-friendly” Happy Meal, which could not be described as vegan as the tortilla wraps in the range pass through the same toaster used for burger buns, which contain milk. In November, it was reported that a vegan customer was suing Burger King after he was served an Impossible Whopper burger that was not completely free of animal by-products. The class-action lawsuit alleged that the burger was contaminated by meat residue because it was cooked on the same grill as meat burgers. According to the complainant, the fast food restaurant had no disclosures on its menu stating that the burger would be cooked on the same grill as meaty menu items.

President Donald Trump says North Korea's leader "has too much to lose" to act in a hostile way, after the secretive state's latest military test. Kim Jong Un is believed to have ordered the "very important" test at its Sohae satellite launch site, a rocket testing ground that US officials once said the country had promised to close. North Korean state media called it a "successful test of great significance" but did not specify what was tested. South Korea's joint chiefs of staff, which usually issues alerts if a missile is seen launching from North Korea, declined to comment. Speaking hours after the apparent test, Mr Trump said Mr Kim was "too smart and has far too much to lose, everything actually, if he acts in a hostile way". "He signed a strong denuclearisation agreement with me in Singapore," the US leader also said on Twitter, referring to his first summit with Mr Kim in Singapore in 2018. And he added Mr Kim does not want to "void his special relationship with the president of the United States or interfere" with the upcoming US election in November next year. Missile experts said it appeared likely the North Koreans had conducted a static test of a rocket engine, rather than a missile launch. "If it is indeed a static engine test for a new solid or liquid fuel missile, it is yet another loud signal that the door for diplomacy is quickly slamming, if it isn't already," said Vipin Narang, a nuclear affairs expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "This could be a very credible signal of what might await the world after the New Year." Tensions have risen ahead of a year-end deadline set by North Korea, which has called on the US to change its policy of insisting on Pyongyang's unilateral denuclearisation and demanded relief from punishing sanctions. On Saturday, North Korea's ambassador to the United Nations said denuclearisation was now off the negotiating table with the US and lengthy talks with Washington are not needed. "The results of the recent important test will have an important effect on changing the strategic position of the DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) once again in the near future," North Korean state media reported.

Lawrence Stroll is reportedly keen on buying into the carmaker. Aston Martin could be about to change hands, with Canadian billionaire Lawrence Stroll the reported suitor according to Autocar and RaceFans. Stroll, a fashion magnate, led a consortium that purchased the embattled Force India Formula 1 team last year and is reportedly set to lead a consortium that could buy into the British carmaker too. Aston Martin is currently owned by a number of different parties – The Kuwait-based Adeem/Primewagon shareholding group owns a 36 percent stake, Morgan shareholder InvestIndustrial owns 31 percent, while Mercedes owner Daimler owns a four percent share. The remaining 29 percent is publicly owned and it is currently unknown which share Stoll's consortium will buy, but it is understood to be a 'major' share. The manufacturer is keen to double its sales by 2022 to 14,000 units annually, but is struggling financially at the moment. Aston Martin posted losses of £80 million in the first half of 2019, while the company's share price has dropped from £19 when it was first listed to just under £6. However, per Automotive News Europe, news of Stroll's apparent interest in the company led to share prices leaping by 17 percent. Back in September Aston Martin raised $150 million from a bond issue, with the option of raising another $100 million. The bonds will be repaid at with 12 percent interest by 2022, while the proposed additional $100 million will be repaid at an interest rate of 15 percent. The bond issue came after it was forced to lower sales forecasts and offered a profit warning amid slumping demand in China and Brexit uncertainty. Should Stroll buy into Aston Martin, his Racing Point F1 team could be rebranded as Aston Martin. The team is based at Silverstone, where the carmaker also has a technical base. If that happens, it could complicate things for Red Bull, which is not only sponsored by Aston Martin in F1, but both sides have co-developed the Valkyrie hypercar which is set to compete in the World Endurance Championship when the new Le Mans Hypercar regulations come into force in 2021. Stroll, an avid petrolhead, owns a collection of classic Ferraris, widely regarded as the most valuable collection of its kind in the world. He also backed his son's entry into F1. Lace Stroll spent a portion of his junior career as a Ferrari junior before being aligned with Williams whom he made his debut with 2017. Following his father's purchase of Racing Point, the 21-year-old moved to Racing Point at the beginning of 2019.

Greetings to all members&staff Today is a lovely day for @Bandolero , because he born a Girl, finally !! Congratulations !!??

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It has changed significantly since then, so much so that we decided to review it again. Our original review can still be found here. For more about why we've chosen to re-review certain games, head here. Given that it started life as a faithful recreation of the original Defence of the Ancients mod, you’d be forgiven for thinking of Dota 2 as the archetypical MOBA. Yet this isn’t the case: in practice, Dota 2’s purism sets it apart from the vast majority of games in this genre. What we think of as the MOBA really began with Heroes of Newerth and League of Legends—games that took that roughshod family of WarCraft custom maps and professionalised them, commercialised them, found them a form that would enshrine the MOBA at the top of the gaming world for the better part of a decade. Dota 2 is different. Adopted by Valve, that original mod became a tool for boosting Steam’s po[CENSORED]rity in places where the service hadn’t reached the ubiquity that it enjoyed in Europe and North America—such as Russia, Southeast Asia and China, traditional strongholds of the DotA scene. And the best way to do this proved to be to remain steadfastly idiosyncratic. What this resulted in was a free to play MOBA where all of the heroes are free, where there are no account levels to grind, where design compromises imposed by the limitations of a noughties map editor have been embraced as design law. Dota’s leap from mod-scene darling to million-dollar phenomenon was whiplash-inducingly quick, its uncommercial credibility ripped away like a bandaid—so fast that you might not notice it was gone. What does this mean for you as a prospective player? Principally, it means that this is a dizzyingly deep competitive team strategy game whose core design benefits from fifteen years of unbroken refinement. It was in this strategic sandbox that the basic assumptions of the MOBA were established: two teams, three lanes, five heroes per team, towers, creeps, jungles, bases, and Ancients. On paper, your job is to lay siege to the enemy base and blow up the enemy ancient. In practice, your job is to mani[CENSORED]te the strategic, economic and psychological tempo of the match, a challenge whose variables change every time you play. You’ve also got to pick the right wizard, cast the right spells, and make sure they buy the right shoes. Obviously. This is Dota we're talking about. Dota 2’s learning curve is mountainous, but everybody has to start somewhere. You’ll start by picking a character you like and learning how to use their abilities effectively—lining up stuns, dishing out damage, turning foes into frogs, being the best helicopter or bear or fishman that you can be. Then you’ll learn something about how to play that hero as part of a team, which stat-boosting items to buy, and at what stage in the game you’re at your most powerful. You’ll learn some hard lessons about getting too close to enemy towers, about carrying a town portal scroll to get from place to place on time, about vision-granting wards and why everybody’s always yelling for someone else to buy them. Then you’ll improve, maybe learn a few more heroes, learn to look at your minimap, and then you’ll realise that you’re going to have to unlearn about 75% of the things you think you know in order to surmount the next step of Dota 2’s endless staircase. If you enjoy this process of learning, failing, and learning again, then thousands of hours will pass: and before you know it, you’ll be a below-average Dota 2 player like everybody else. Although the community has always maintained certain customs about the best way to play, Dota itself has never enforced a particular methodology. This is the key thing that separates it from its peers: while other MOBAs have tended to fold the community metagame into the design of the games themselves—codifying player roles like tanks, supports and damage-dealers as fixed archetypes within their rosters—this doesn’t work quite the same way in Dota 2. This is a game with a simulationist heart, where a character isn’t a good tank because they were always intended to be so, but because of the specific way they interact with Dota 2’s underlying matrix of items, statistics, and map features. This is a game where the addition or subtraction of a tree in a single part of the map might change the viability of a hero—a game of endless interrelated butterfly effects. What this means is that Dota 2 is a game you will never finish learning, one that cannot be perfected either by its developers or its players. It goes without saying that it’s hard to learn: I’ve been playing consistently for the last six years and I’m pretty bad at it. But that journey has been one of the most rewarding and remarkable experiences I’ve ever had with a videogame. The process of learning, sharing knowledge and adapting to continual change brings people together: I have made lifelong friends playing Dota 2, people with whom I now share an extensive vocabulary rooted in this expansive, strange, beautiful game. That inherent flexibility is also the reason Dota 2 makes for such a compelling esport. Its complex sandbox allows for huge divergence in playstyles across teams, players, and regions. While restrictive metagames have emerged from time to time, they have never lasted: and in seven years of high-profile competition, the field has remained open to challengers from all parts of the world, with all sorts of different approaches to that core strategic challenge. Indeed, the creativity that Dota 2’s core simulation supports is something that the best players are ideally positioned to exploit, and watching the metagame get turned on its head by a brilliant bit of lateral thinking—something that happens at least once per International—is a pure thrill. If you’ve never felt a basketball stadium full of people explode with excitement because a teen millionaire has selected an unusual dragon, then, well, you’re missing out. It’d be impractical to recount every way that Dota 2 has changed since I first reviewed the game for PC Gamer back in 2013. It has a better in-game UI and a much improved main menu, including faster load times and a more sophisticated interface for pregame strategising. Most recently, Valve introduced new quality-of-life features like context-sensitive indicators to let you know when a hero or item has been altered in a patch. Given that balance passes now take place fortnightly, allowing players ready access to this information is very welcome. The Arcade was a flagship new feature when it launched, a freeform custom game lobby that recreates the conditions of the WarCraft III custom map scene from which the original DotA emerged. As in those days, a few game modes—chiefly tower defence mods and a couple of combat-heavy Dota variants—dominate. In part, the flagging po[CENSORED]rity of the Arcade is due to the introduction of Turbo mode last year. Turbo fulfills the same purpose that many of those po[CENSORED]r Arcade mods do: it allows you to play Dota—or something like Dota—more quickly and in a more forgiving environment, and its inclusion shows the benefits of relaxing Dota 2’s purist tendencies. This mode features much faster leveling—and therefore much shorter games—and downplays some of Dota 2’s more complex systems, like the item courier. The result is a version of Dota 2 that is both more accessible for new players and offers experienced players the chance to blow off a little steam. It’s easier and sillier, and ultimately less rewarding than a full game, but it’s perfect when you want to check out a new hero or when you don’t have the time or energy to commit to a match that could last more than an hour. Valve has spent years fiddling with ways to make money from Dota without compromising its core. This began with the Compendium—a sort of digital stickerbook released alongside each year’s International esports championship—and grew into Battle Passes, months-long event seasons where players race to complete challenges for points and prizes. This year’s Dota Plus subscription system is as close as Valve has come to putting game features behind a paywall. Your fee grants you access to enhanced tutorial features, including in-game skill and item suggestions based on crowdsourced data. There are also challenges to complete and stat-tracking gems to collect—a further variation on the ‘collect all the hats’ theme that powers Battle Passes. Dota Plus caused controversy when it was announced—this is a community highly sensitive to anything with a whiff of pay-to-win about it. But that hasn’t been my experience with the system. In fact, Dota Plus’ data-driven guides are frequently less useful than the player-made alternatives available in-game for free, and often make skill and item suggestions that aren’t helpful. A bit of extra guidance for new players is always welcome, but there’s nothing here to challenge or replace the value of having a friend show you the ropes. Between Plus and Battle Passes, then, the bulk of Dota 2’s microtransactions take the form of premium systems that let you complete challenges and win hats. There are greater and lesser expressions of this idea—from co-op dungeon minigames to Crystal Maiden’s gambling wheel—but it basically comes down to paying a fee to get better rewards from the matches you’d be playing anyway. This is a mixed blessing. On one hand, taken on their own merits, Dota 2’s premium options aren’t very compelling. There’s not much that you feel you’ll have to own unless not participating in the latest Battle Pass makes you feel like you're missing out. On the other hand: there’s not much that you feel you’ll have to own. Dota 2’s extraordinary generosity in terms of raw game-stuff, which sets it aside from every other game in this genre, means that Valve don’t have much left that they could meaningfully lock behind a paywall. In that scenario, it’s tempting to forgive them the odd underwhelming hat collection minigame. Every now and then, however, a feature creeps into one of these premium packages that feels like it belongs in the core game. That's happening right now—at the time of writing, owners of the 2018 International Battle Pass gain the ability to queue to play specific roles in their next ranked game. This is a learning from League of Legends—a further relaxation of that signature purism, acknowledging that while Dota 2 allows players to occasionally transcend or redefine team roles, the majority of players naturally sort themselves into positions anyway. And you know what: it's a really good idea to borrow, allowing you to bypass one of the most socially fraught moments in any ranked game—the bit where half your team argues about who has to play support. It's a shame that this feature is, at present, restricted to the International's latest money-spinner. Particularly because player conduct remains an issue for Dota 2. Valve have introduced, extended and tinkered with player reporting systems, matchmaking, and so on. They have taken steps to reduce the anxiety that surrounds ranked play by replacing granular numerical skill ratings with much broader, seasonal rank badges. They've implemented pop-up reports that tell you whether you're doing well or badly in the eyes of your fellow players, and added messages to the start of games telling you to be nice. The success or failure of these methods is, inevitably, invisible: you never know how many internet assholes the game is successfully keeping out of your games. Even so, Dota 2 remains a place where strangers scream at one another for making mistakes, where hostility has been entrenched by parts of the community as the norm and even desirable. It is certainly not the only game that has this problem, but it can feel unusually intense: perhaps because Dota 2 forces strangers together for so long, or makes them depend on one another so much. The same pressures that make this such a remarkable experience with friends can make it hellish, too, and after six years I couldn't assure you that this is going change. Dota 2 is one of my favourite games of all time, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend playing it solo until you know what you're getting yourself into. And yet for me, and for millions of other people, this strange, unlikely, unrepeatable game has become part of the daily fabric of playing games on the PC. It's a shortcut to a particular kind of competitive experience that I click on almost every day, and that has retained its ability to excite, fascinate and frustrate many years and many thousands of hours after other games have run their course. Its present custodian, Valve, has succeeded in improving it—in making it more accessible and adding new ways to play. But most importantly Valve has succeeded in preserving Dota—in protecting the spirit of a phenomenal game that predates this specific iteration and will hopefully outlive it, too.

When a hot new vehicle hits the market, automakers often have to deal with bad press in the form of ridiculous dealer markups. Sometimes, manufacturers will even take steps to try and prevent that from happening. Ford’s decision to label its new electric crossover a Mustang is already controversial, but now the automaker is apparently making another strange move by telling its dealers to not advertise the Mach-E below MSRP. As you might expect, however, it’s a bit more complicated than that. The news comes from CarsDirect, which cites a bulletin Ford sent to dealers about the Mach-E pricing structure. The idea behind this isn’t to allow dealers to push markups on the Mach-E – something which is entirely dependent on demand and, frankly, may not happen anyway. Rather, the report explains Ford wants to “be competitive in the battery-electric space by transacting in the way customers want to transact.” Gallery: 2020 Ford Mustang Mach-E: What does that mean exactly? It’s common practice for dealerships of all brands to advertise new vehicles with incentives and discounts that, while technically correct, may not be available to everyone. As such, there can often be some bait-and-switch taking place where buyers visit a dealership based on a low price, only to find the vehicle is actually more expensive. By requiring dealerships to not advertise prices below MSRP, it seems Ford wants the opposite to happen with the Mach-E. Buyers will head to dealerships and instead of getting hit with higher numbers, they’ll be greeted with lower figures. In theory, anyway.What does that mean exactly? It’s common practice for dealerships of all brands to advertise new vehicles with incentives and discounts that, while technically correct, may not be available to everyone. As such, there can often be some bait-and-switch taking place where buyers visit a dealership based on a low price, only to find the vehicle is actually more expensive. By requiring dealerships to not advertise prices below MSRP, it seems Ford wants the opposite to happen with the Mach-E. Buyers will head to dealerships and instead of getting hit with higher numbers, they’ll be greeted with lower figures. In theory, anyway. It seems Ford is extremely eager to keep buyers happy when it comes to the Mach-E. The company is already facing considerable backlash from Mustang enthusiasts over the four-door SUV getting the storied moniker that has been the exclusive domain of two-door pony cars for 55 years. 13,657 people have signed a petition to change the Mach-E’s name, and the president of the Mustang Club of America was met with considerable backlash over his approval of the Mach-E being a Mustang. To Ford’s credit, the company says all First Edition models are already sold out, but Ford won’t say exactly how many that is. There’s also still lots of time before even the first Mach-E models will arrive in dealerships. First Edition cars with a $61,000 price won’t be available until late 2020.

New EU rules could mean a shortage of halloumi in supermarkets across Britain as suppliers struggle to keep up with growing demand. Cyprus is the home of halloumi and exports around 40 per cent of the squeaky white cheese it produces to Britain – the biggest importer of halloumi worldwide. Now the Cypriot government want the halloumi industry to receive an EU badge of authenticity, known as the Protected Designation of Origin (PDO), but according to farmers it could see Brits go without. PDO is a set of legislation which tightens up rules on production and means products can only be given a certain name if they are made in a certain way or in a specific geographical area. Products such as French champagne, Italian gorgonzola cheese, Melton Mowbray pork pies and Greek Kalamata olives have already been awarded the badge meaning they can only be sold with these titles if they are sourced from that specific territory. Currently the Cypriot government is worried about imitation halloumi, labelled as ‘white grill cheese’ or ‘grillhoumi’, and wants to act to prevent these lookalikes by making halloumi a PDO. But farmers say that the new rules and strict regulations this would bring would be the death of the industry and could see a 60 per cent reduction in output. “The decision to register the PDO would be a suicidal decision for the halloumi industry,” Nikos Papkyriakou, of the Pan Cyprian Organisation of Cattle Breeders, told the Cyprus Mail. Farmers complain that the regulations, such as the requirement for sheep and goats to eat five specific types of plant during grazing, are so exacting they cannot be met. It would mean all halloumi would be required to have 50 per cent goat and sheep milk rather than the 20 per cent currently sti[CENSORED]ted. In addition farmers could no longer vary the shape of halloumi – many make ‘burger halloumi’ in a non-traditional round disc shape – as this detail will also be protected. “If the new designation is adopted, it will be a disaster for halloumi makers,” Giorgos Petrou, the president of the Cyprus Dairy Producers Association, told The Telegraph. The halloumi cheese sector in Cyprus is worth nearly €200 million a year to the island’s economy and employs around 12,000 people.

The German government ordered the expulsion of two Russian diplomats on Wednesday in response to what they described as “real indications” Russian authorities stood behind the broad daylight assassination of a Chechen exile in Berlin. A statement released on the site of the German Foreign Ministry suggested the move followed the “insufficient participation” of Moscow in the murder investigation. The case will now be examined by intelligence prosecutors, it said. Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a former Chechen insurgent, was shot dead in central Berlin park in August. According to witnesses, his assassin approached on a bicycle from behind, before firing from a Glock-26 pistol at point blank range. The man was arrested following a failed getaway. German prosecutors say the suspect entered the country using a Russian passport under the name of Vadim Sergeyevich Sokolov. This appears to be a fake identity. According to a joint investigation carried out by Bellingcat, Der Spiegel and The Insider, the passport serial number corresponds to those issued to known Russian intelligence officers. The Russian Foreign Ministry, which described the German move as “unfounded and unfriendly”, has said it will respond asymmetrically. “Mixing politics with a police investigation is unacceptable,” a spokesman told the Kommersant newspaper shortly after the news broke. “A complex of retaliatory measures will be required in response.” Mr Khangoshvili, 41, was an ethnic Chechen hailing from the Pankisi gorge region in northern Georgia. He fought in the second Chechen war (1998-2002), and continued to support separatist fighters after returning to Georgia. He remained an obvious target for Russian and Chechen intelligence. The victim had already survived two assassination attempts before his murder. It was following a 2015 attack that he left Georgia to seek asylum in Germany. At the time of his death, Mr Khangoshvili was awaiting an appeal against deportation.