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Arkansas has left Tennessee doubting itself
Arkansas' competitive effort has Vol fans and analysts panicking
Nicki Minaj says Trump is someone she 'can relate to'
Nicki Minaj won't be silenced when it comes to President Donald Trump.
Andy Kotelnicki Message to His Quarterback
Andy Kotelnicki Message to His Quarterback
Le Fee provides stardust on Sunderland's special night
You have to go back to a second-round exit at the hands of Portuguese side Sporting in the 1973-74 Cup Winners' Cup for the last time Sunderland played in a major European competition. There were no shortage of individual displays to galvanise them from Robin Roefs with his crucial saves, Granit Xhaka pulling the strings from deep to full-back turned winger Trai Hume causing chaos in the opponents' box one moment and throwing in a crunching tackle to end an AZ break the next. The 26-year-old worked tirelessly off the ball, nicking the ball back for his side time and again, but it is in the final third that the Sunderland playmaker really comes to life.
Nicki Minaj joins Trump administration’s small business pitch competition as judge
The rapper will serve on the panel for the SBA’s “Million Dollar Pitch Competition” alongside business executives and other celebrities.
Trump admin revives ‘Apprentice’-era energy with $1M business battle in DC
Nicki Minaj, Grant Cardone, and Joe Gebbia will judge the SBA's Patriot Pitch as five entrepreneur finalists compete for $1 million in cash.
'Just living life again': Beechview resident part of a Pitt trial connecting cancer patients with mental health supports
Rebecca Skolnicki considers herself lucky to have a great support system in her family, friends and neighbors. But after undergoing extensive surgery to...
47 revelatory hours with Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced
To review this month’s supposed remake of 2013’s Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, I must first correct the record. Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced isn’t a game about pirates (and assassins) in the 18th century Caribbean. Sure, sure, that’s what the trailers would have you believe. They’ve go their clips of Edward Kenway swinging his swords and steering his pirate ship into cannon-blasting combat against British frigates. Is Resynced truly a pirate game? Of the 47 hours I spent playing Resynced over the past few weeks, I will admit I spent maybe 44 (?) of them collecting plunder with Blackbeard, drinking rum with Anne Bonny and debating the pros and cons of the lawless pirate-run settlement Nassau with Benjamin Hornigold. I may in fact have spent dozens of hours sailing to remote islands, reading treasure maps, opening messages left in bottles, sinking the odd Man o’ War with a well-timed broadside, collecting sea shanties for my crew, befriending a pet monkey, and hunting whales. I am nevertheless neither so Gullible nor so Narrow-Minded as to call the magnificent Resynced a “pirate remake.” Oh no. Forget any reviews of Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced you may have read. Forget what you yourself may have played, if you’ve spent any time with the game since its launch. What Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced is really about I’m here to give you the scoop (spoilers for Resynced’s Animus menu lore, which many players are probably not going to see): Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced, the new game whose development was led by Ubisoft Singapore, is set in the year 2096. It’s about a societal split, about revolution, about an old Assassin’s Creed adventure repurposed in the series’ distant future as propaganda or samizdat. It’s about the overheated future of 2096, essentially conquered by the series’ well-established nefarious Templar-run company Abstergo. (In this future, Abstergo is, among other things, remaking a 2013 pirate movie called Devils of the Caribbean, but this time in VR. The VR version will be backed by a marketing plan that involves AI influencers, a 10,000-avatar “metaverse premiere event” and that manufacturing of memes aimed at “50 million VR nodes.” See what I mean about Abstergo being evil?) Resynced is about a late 21st-century population mollified by the widespread use of Abstergo’s Animus devices which let people experience the lives of historical figures culled from “genetic memories.” It’s about an insurgent faction of Assassins. And it’s about a plan to wake the population into revolutionary fervor by showing them the memories of 18th century pirate Edward Kenway, who—as depicted in the original Black Flag and again in Resynced—gradually comes to an understanding about the Assassins of his day and their centuries old fight for freedom. Resynced is also about an AI developed within the late 21st-century Animus, called Ego. It has found a way to alter genetic memories, to create and show Animus users false ones. The game is about Ego’s efforts to tell the people experiencing Edward Kenway’s memories that Kenway was wrong, that fighting against order is folly, that we should crave a world where “compliance is rewarded with power.” Who are we in this game? We’re an unnamed Animus user in 2096 who experiences Kenway’s journey virtually. At four moments during Kenway’s exploits in the Caribbean our virtual jaunt can be interrupted for 10-15 minutes, as we explore Animus “rifts” where Ego explicitly tries to tell us how wrong Kenway was. None of this is what 2013’s Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag was about, of course. That was a different game, even if you also spent dozens of hours pirating as Kenway in that game, across missions and a map that’s been faithfully reintroduced and rebuilt for Resynced. The 2013 Black Flag was about you playing as an unnamed researcher newly hired in 2013 by Abstergo Entertainment, the video game development wing of the Templars’ evil-corp. In that game, you were assigned to use the Animus to dive into the genetic memories of Desmond Miles, a man who died in Assassin’s Creed III and who was descended from a long line of Assassins (and at least one Templar) whose adventures were featured across the prior AC games. In 2013’s Black Flag, your mission was to plumb the Edward Kenway experience for material that Abstergo could use in productions such as the motion picture Devils of the Caribbean, though the Templars had some ulterior motives for the assignment. Resynced is therefore not a remake of 2013’s Black Flag. It’s a sequel. It is a new game about a new exploration of Edward Kenway’s pirate/assassin journey, set 83 years after the framing sequences of the original game. Resynced provides a new narrative framework that, thanks to the concept of an AI that wants to alter historical memories, arrives with creative justification to tweak a now-classic 13-year old game. That makes Resynced, already a hot seller, a tantalizing hint of where Ubisoft could go with a line of Assassin’s Creed remakes. They could remake the first game, the Ezio games, even the recent ones set in ancient Egypt and Greece. And for each, they could not just modernize the graphics and controls but expand and alter their sequences of events to use them as reference points for a conflict set in the late 21st century, as rival factions try to weaponize historical memories. Game File is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, even when that work consists of ravings about Assassin’s Creed’s modern day plot, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe A story most players will probably miss If you didn’t know any of this, I’m not surprised. If you played the game and still didn’t catch it, I’m not a bit shocked. If Ubisoft has no plans to do more of this, I won’t fall down. Almost all of what I’ve described is optional and missable in Black Flag Resynced. I nearly missed it myself, as I planned for a breezy playthrough of an old Assassin’s Creed favorite. Instead, I found myself in a 40+ hour hunt for the “real” story, buried deeper in Resynced than any gold-filled chest. The story of 2096 is Resynced’s meta-story, told in two remote pockets of the game: 1) four optional playable “rifts” that players may find as they proceed through Resynced’s pirate fantasy , 2) in dozens of text files tucked three menus deep in the game’s barely-interactive Animus hub. Assassin’s Creed games have almost always had a meta-story about people in the 21st century (usually matching the game’s release year) and their connections to the main history portions you play. Those meta-stories have always been squeezed into the margins, though seldom as severely and as, uh, graphiaclly simple, as in recent games. Back in 2013, the modern-day exploits of you as an Abstergo Entertainment employee were prominent. They were portrayed via first-person portions that occasionally interrupted the third-person Kenway experience and could be explored for hours, complete with their own missions, side quests and puzzles. Resynced’s 2096 story—of Assassin “Watchers” vs. Abstergo/Tempar goons, of rogue AIs, of panicking scientists, of a woman wondering why her Animus-addicted husband is muttering about Mary Read (“What does he mean by Assassins?”), of a fight for the population’s hearts and minds via varying interpretations of Edward Kenway’s life choices—is mostly told through unlockable text files. The files are interesting. Offered via diary entries, intercepted chats and news reports, they present varied perspectives of a world in crisis. One set works as a narrative puzzle as it reveals the Rashomonic interpretations of a massacre, or was that a successful Assassin hit? Another favorite reveals the rising bitterness of a person who, through Edward Kenway’s journey, now shakes at the ignored evil around him. One surmises that Ubisoft is averse to putting the Assassin’s Creed’s meta-story in the way of more marketable pirate playgrounds and ninja/samurai epics. Instead, we get a better-than-nothing text-in-menus approach introduced in 2025’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows. In Shadows, players unlocked the meta-story text files largely via time-gated missions that called on the user to kill X number of enemy type Y, clear three enemy castles, re-win a three-phase fighting tournament, and other grinds. Time restrictions on accessing these missions and unlocking the files meant it could take players months to access the full story in-game. But even in the most hardcore Assassin’s Creed hangouts, the fanbase instead seemed to throw up their hands rather than grind to keep up. In Resynced, Ubisoft has shown some mercy, diminishing the amount of new text files that are tied to timed grinds. Now, most of the text-based 2096 lore are associated with “data file” collectibles that players can find in the world. That includes a batch of written entries that explain a historical link between the feudal Japan era in Shadows and the piracy adventures in Black Flag. Players who explore a lot will find dozens of data files, though the game does not appear to offer any in-game tracker for finding each one. You just need to keep looking for them. As of this writing, I have most of them, but not all. I can’t find any full guide for them online. And even Ubisoft’s optional $5 microtransaction that reveals lots of items in-game does not appear to reveal the locations of the text files (at least the official description omits them from its collectibles list). That’s not a huge bother, because tracking the data files down compelled me to re-explore the waves and islands of Black Flag. That was a thoroughly pleasant task to do for the first time in a dozen years. I expect many players, though, will be content to wait for the files to be reproduced in an online AC wiki somewhere, the easier to read on a web page. It may not seem enticing to play a video game in order to gradually unlock pages of text to read. Why not, you may ask, just read a book, where they put the pages in order? For one, they’ve not tucked this latest installment of Assassin’s Creed’s meta saga in a book. I also enjoy the unordered delivery, the dawning comprehension of a story about 2096’s desperate people and questionable tech, which I glimpsed first at its middle, then the end, then the front, then other moments in between1. I am also enamored with the idea of the Assassin’s Creed games I’ve previously played, including Black Flag, being repurposed for an information war. The ideas in Resynced’s meta-story, which builds off characters and ideas in Shadows’ chunks of text, are strong. The potential of where they could go with it is exciting. As for the pirate stuff? Looks great, controls pretty well, is fun to play and oh so speedy in terms of how much of a good time you can have with each sit-down. It never gets old to chase a new shanty page across a rooftop, bombard a fort with upgraded mortars or use a diving bell to explore sunken wrecks (hats off to the team at Ubisoft Barcelona that worked on the underwater portions in Resynced; that team is now facing layoffs, such is the misery of modern gaming and oft-troubled Ubisoft). New pirate missions in Resynced involving new ally characters are brief, dramatic and add more to Edward’s story, even if the gameplay perks they provide barely enhance the gameplay. A new denouement for high-class pirate Stede Bonnet is affecting; a new hunt for Blackbeard’s treasure is a welcome extra moment. A new epilogue to hunt down a pirate killer, on the other hand, over-complicates Kenway’s character. The ending credits remain my favorite of any game I’ve ever played. Black Flag provides great source material. The revisit is well-made and a great sign of what could be. It is offered in a different wrapper that hints at an opportunity for more interesting remakes to come, should Ubisoft choose to pursue such treasures—and as we brace to resist or comply with an Abstergo future. 1 The messages that Edward Kenway finds in bottles tell another out-of-order story, one about a man reckoning with the strange memories and voices he’s heard in his head since he was a boy. That tale was also in the 2013 game and develops into one of Black Flag’s most compelling character arcs. In Resynced, it has lost its climax, because the bottle story previously paid off in the halls of the first-person Abstergo Entertainment, which is exclusive to the older game. An altered resolution, written by the 2013 game’s lead writer is fine, doesn’t invalidate the 2013 version, but makes for an inferior final note.
WATCH: Trump talks about White House renovation projects, Nicki Minaj at Rose Garden luncheon
Platner holdout floats emergency lifeline for panicking Dems if scandal-plagued candidate wins
Rep. Josh Gottheimer calls for Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner to exit the race, saying he should get off the ballot and let a Democrat step in.
Drury chemistry professor lands $450,000 research grant from the National Science Foundation
SPRINGFIELD, Mo., June 9, 2026 – Drury University Assistant Professor of Chemistry Dr. John Kiernicki has received a $449,297 research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for the study […]
Infinity Ward Vows Modern Warfare 4 Stays Grounded, Slams Door on Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj and Omni-Man Skins
Infinity Ward dumped a lot of information on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 all at once on Thursday, May 28. Among the reveals, the studio also shared that cosmetics and collaborations won't betray the game's grounded atmosphere, unlike in other recent installments. On the studio's X account, they tweeted: Every aspect of Modern Warfare 4 is anchored in the game's narrative. Every feature, every decision needs to feel authentic to what Modern Warfare is, and that includes cosmetics and collabs. We're committed to keeping it grounded and transparent, and we want to hear from you on what you'd like […]
The Viruses Causing New Outbreaks Are Much Less Familiar to Science
The types of Ebola and hantavirus panicking officials are very different from the species identified decades ago, raising new questions about how to respond.
How Nicki Minaj Became Trump’s ‘No. 1 Fan’
The rap superstar is throwing her weight behind the White House agenda after being courted by Trump’s 29-year-old celebrity whisperer.
Trump’s health cuts complicate federal messaging on hantavirus
The federal hantavirus response has laid bare the impact of the Trump administration’s cuts to U.S. and global health, renewing concerns among public health experts that the U.S. is not prepa…
Broncos Fans Worried About Bo Nix's Status For 2026 Season
We're still several months away from the start of the 2026 season, but Denver Broncos fans are already panicking about Bo Nix's status for Week 1. Nix finished his second season in Denver with 3,931 passing yards, 25 touchdowns and 11 interceptions. Although he was inconsistent at times, he saved ...
Troopers cordon off Armstrong County business while investigating shooting
The incident took place by Nicki’s Quick Six, but a 911 official was unable to tell Channel 11 how many people were hurt or killed.
Alex Jones Calls for Trump’s Removal After Panicking About Failing Health
The former stooge has reached the end with Donald Trump.
Panicking scientists, canceled experiments: Federal funding cuts turn research dean to crisis management specialist
Fielding frantic faculty emails and panicked texts was not how I had hoped my 2025 would begin. Little did I imagine that my role as a research dean at a medical school would be taken over by navigating ...
Panicking scientists, canceled experiments – federal funding cuts turned my work as a research dean into crisis management
When the Trump administration took aim at higher education and the scientific research enterprise, a university dean had to figure out on the fly how to support scientists and their work at his school.
My husband and I were laid off at the same time. Instead of panicking, we started our own business that now has 600 employees.
Sony seems to be testing dynamic pricing for digital games, but you shouldn't start panicking yet
It appears that Sony has been quietly testing a new dynamic pricing model for games sold on the PlayStation Store.
Nicki Minaj fans say they’re leaving Democrat Party as rapper’s politics spark backlash and praise
Nicki Minaj fans are reportedly switching to the Republican party after her Trump support, with viral social media posts showing "Barbz" leaving the left.
Nicki Minaj says 'bullying' of Trump propelled her into politics
Nicki Minaj made an appearance on "The Katie Miller Podcast," which airs on Tuesday, Feb. 3.
Nicki Minaj says Trump bullying pushed her into politics as MAGA supporter
Since aligning herself with the Trump administration, Minaj has garnered blow back from prominent voices in the entertainment industry.
Nicki Minaj stands up for Trump against ‘bullying,’ says she ‘couldn’t handle’ how he was being treated
Nicki Minaj revealed Trump "bullying" inspired her political awakening. The rapper says witnessing attacks on the president reminded her of her own experiences.
Trevor Noah draws Trump's ire after Grammys jokes about the president, Nicki Minaj
Noah saved his most pointed jokes for absentees, and elicited an angry post from the president.
Fertitta Entertainment names longtime executive as COO
Houston-based Fertitta Entertainment on Friday announced the appointment of Nicki Keenan as chief operating officer, where she will oversee the full scope of Landry’s nationwide operations, including its expansive portfolio
Fertitta Entertainment names Nicki Keenan COO, overseeing Landry's
Longtime Landry's executive Nicki Keenan will oversee the nationwide operations of Tilman Fertitta's entertainment empire, Fertitta Entertainment said Friday.
Video: Opinion | ICE Is Losing the Political Battle
“When I look at the ICE operation in Minnesota,” says the Opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie, “I see a White House that is panicking and that is losing.”
Nicki Minaj’s Embrace of Trump-Era Politics Has Fans Asking Questions
The Trinidad and Tobago-born hip-hop artist's motives are under scrutiny.
Was Nicki Minaj always a Trump supporter? She spoke at Turning Point USA
Rapper Nicki Minaj expressed support of President Donald Trump at the Turning Point USA AmericaFest. She previously mentioned him in "Black Barbies."
Entertainment headlines with TMZ
TMZ takes a look at the entertainment stories making headlines, including the aftermath of the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife, the death of actor James Ransone and rapper Nicki Minaj at a TPUSA event.
WATCH: Nicki Minaj discusses faith and politics with Erika Kirk at Turning Point USA summit
Rapper Nicki Minaj on Sunday made a surprise appearance at a gathering of conservatives in Arizona that was memorializing late activist Charlie Kirk, and used her time on stage to praise President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance, calling them “role models” for young men.
Nicki Minaj surprises conservatives with praise for Trump, Vance at Arizona event
Female rapper Nicki Minaj has made a surprise appearance at a gathering of conservatives in Arizona.