Keyrock

The hit song from the cinematic masterpiece Miami Connection: Later it was used in some Ubisoft game, or whatever.

It's a great trailer. That said, the vast majority of 40K games focus on the wrong faction, the Orks are the true stars of this franchise. WAAAGH! Can a guy get a game focused on my boys the Evil Sunz? We all know the red ones go fasta.

I'm barely off the transport in The Dome for 10 minutes, just doing the new employee initiation and getting my standard issue equipment, and this sleazebag starts hitting on me. I mean, I know I'm attractive, but some professionalism, please. Oh well, I'm a silver so heaven knows I understand how to file a sexual harassment report and how to get it through proper channels to the top. First impressions with Encased are quite positive. This game feels like a lot of Fallout 1 & 2 with a pinch of Shadowrun and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. There's a ton of dialogue and narration, so if you are the type of gamer that skips dialogue to get to the action then this is not the game for you. I'm impressed that almost everything has been voice acted so far, I didn't expect that from a budget title. I also appreciate that people have very distinct personalities, even if that personality is sleazebag. I imagine that that guy wouldn't hit on me if I was a male character, but I wonder if my charisma is at play too. The test character I made has a fairly high charisma stat; were I to make a female with lower charisma, would he not hit on me? Is this game that smart? I may just put that theory to test. Anyway, I'm going to **** around some more before making my real character, but I'm considering making a character that's dumb as a box of rocks yet has powerful psionic abilities. That sounds dangerous and hilarious!

I played Hard West a few years ago. It's a decent enough game if you can get past the technical issues and quality of life, or lack there of, issues. I think this was the developers' first game. They followed this up with Phantom Doctrine, which was a much smoother experience.

This is my test character just to screw around with and get familiar with the mechanics and such. I'll probably make a new character once I'm familiar enough with the game that I know what I want to focus on. I went silver wing for this trial character. Wings are essentially professions: Silver Wing = Office/Business White Wing = Scientist/Doctor Blue Wing = Engineer/Mechanic Black Wing = Security/Military Orange Wing = Convict/Laborer I'm surprised that everything seems to be voice acted so far. Maybe that's just the intro? The game feels very Fallout 1 & 2 but with the modern quality of life improvements that you would expect.

Have you watched this team? I can't do anything to them they haven't already done to themselves.

Monica Bellucci /bites knuckle

Good marketing. I'm lukewarm on the movie, I'm setting my expectations fairly low.

There's nothing more badass than a masked luchador in a suit. Even Texano (the guy without the mask) looks pretty great, but Drago (center), holy ****, that's like some final boss in Tekken type ****.

I was in Connecticut at the time, so obviously we got WWF, but whenever I could find a way to get some southern territories stuff that was such a treat. Mid-South (later UWF during Bill Watts' ill-fated attempt to go National) was my jam. That wrestling is sadly mostly gone, the business always changes and never goes back, it's the way of things. Once is a blue moon you'll get Cody Rhodes in AEW doing an old school emotional, often bloody, Championship Wrestling from Florida style match, ala his late father. That's about the last bastion of those glory days we have today. On the bright side, I love me some lucha libre and I get to see plenty of that. The thing about lucha is that when it's bad it's really really bad, you have people standing around just waiting to catch somebody and it looks so ****ing phony. However, when it's good lucha is spectacular. The good news is that AEW has a couple of the absolute best luchadors on Planet Earth in the Lucha Bros (Fenix and Penta). Those guys are so ludicrously good. Penta has so much charisma it's unfair, and I don't even speak Spanish. Fenix, I'm convinced, isn't human; my man defies the laws of physics on a regular basis, I can't even begin to describe some of the things he does, it doesn't make any sense.

I'm glad they are doing weapon rebalancing. The bow was indeed OP as **** and the battle axe garbage because it. Was. So. Sloooooooooooooow and didn't do nearly enough damage or stagger to make up for how excruciatingly slow it was and the fact that you obviously can't use a shield with it.

I'm a Ferengi stan, where does that put me?

I'm sure there's an entire subreddit dedicated to the "Starfleet are actually the villains" theory.

AEW sort of resembles WCW in a way. WWE has a homogenized product. Occasionally they will bring someone in who wrestled somewhere else for a long time and they bring a bit of their old style to the WWE, but over time they get molded into the WWE style, and anyone who started their career with WWE always uses that style. There's nothing wrong with WWE's style, but everyone just kinda wrestles the same. WCW, particularly in 96 and 97, was like a variety show. You'd have an old school emotional southern style tag match, a hard hitting brawl between two hosses, a highly technical catch as catch can classic, a lucha libre match, some Japanese strong style, you never knew what you might see. AEW is like that where they have people from all over the world working wildly different styles and instead of molding the people into their show, ala WWE, they mold their show around the people. I can't tell you which approach is better, they both have their pros and cons, but I can tell you which approach I enjoy watching more and it's the variety show. One area where I think AEW is VASTLY superior to WWE is in promos. For the longest time, WWE has scripted all their promos. A few people here an there had Vince's trust enough to where they could alter their promos and even occasionally shoot from the hip, but 95% of the time people just memorize the lines they are given and repeat them verbatim; they are all even taught to speak with the same cadence and emphasize certain words. It makes all their promos seem very artificial, like someone reading lines off a prompter, which in essence is what is happening. I hate scripted promos with the fiery passion of a thousand suns. AEW doesn't have writers for promos, the wrestlers themselves come up with the promos, sink or swim, like in the good ol' territories days. People in AEW sound a lot more genuine because they are speaking their own words. Some come up with the promos in advance and memorize them, some can just shoot from the hip, but in either case it's their own words and not a script written for them. @KP the meanie zucchiniTOS was working a a pretty lean budget, so they would just sort of reuse whatever props and costumes they had lying around the studio from whatever show or movie was recently shot. That's how you wound up with hilariously weird stuff like a planet full of Nazis.

I think the Rams will be much improved now that they have a halfway decent QB in Matt Stafford. Jared Goff was an albatross around their necks. I think they are the second best team in the NFC. I fear we are getting a repeat in the Superbowl Big Game, but I'm hoping we get Browns vs Rams. I mean, of course I'm hoping muh Boys can get to the Big Game, but I'm trying to be somewhat realistic here.

Division Winners: AFC East: Bills AFC South: Titans AFC North: Browns AFC West: Chiefs NFC East: Cowboys NFC South: Bucs NFC North: Packers NFC West: Rams

Yeah, Vince has been operating on the "I know what the fans want better than the fans know what they want" philosophy for a long time and he could get away with it because the WWE has been essentially the only game in town for two decades. They don't even bother with the biennial charade where the McMahons come out to the ring and tell the fans they are listening and changes are coming, because they have pulled that stunt so many times and there were never any changes that they can't even pretend to care any more. They have such lucrative TV deals and got such an obscene amount of blood money from MBS to do Saudi shows that it's going to take a long time for the stagnation of WWE's product to start hurting them in the pocketbook. Then of course, there is the rumor of a sale. Who knows if it is true and if it would be a positive or negative. Luckily, there is now a legit alternative for the first time in over 20 years.

AEW has their bad moments, nobody bats 1.000, but their good moments far outnumber their bad moments. More importantly, it's a company that's genuinely trying to make their fans happy, and you can't fake that. Speaking of embarrassingly bad, WWE is really rough right now. Smackdown at least has Roman Reigns, who is killing it since hooking up with Paul Heyman, Raw is just a dumpster fire, borderline unwatchable. I mean, WWE has been declining in terms of the quality of the product for well over a decade now, but they really fell off a few years ago, rivaling the really rough years of 1995 and 1996, when WWE (WWF at the time) was just garbage. The optimist in me is hoping that AEW's rise will be the wake up call WWE needs and they get their **** together and put on great, exciting shows again, much like WCW kicking their ass for 83 straight weeks forced WWF to adapt and brought about the Attitude Era, which had a ton of garbage that people forget about via rose tinted glasses, but also had so much greatness. The difference is that in 96 WWF was legitimately in danger of going out of business, these days they are making ludicrous amounts of money no matter how trash the product is, plus Vince McMahon is like 75 or 76; even brilliant promoters eventually fall out of touch. Ring of Honor still exists, not as great as they were in the mid 2000s, but still a solid product. TNA still exists, somehow, rebranded as Impact Wrestling. It's a a fairly good product, but it's hard to get rid of the TNA stink. New Japan Pro Wrestling was super hot for several years, but the pandemic really hurt them. The pandemic hit at the absolute worst time for AEW, it could have absolutely killed the company just as they were getting off the ground, yet they arguably got through it the best of all the companies. I mean the pandemic isn't over, but we do have live crowds again. AEW is the only American company even remotely on WWE's level in terms of production value and ability to fill 6000, 7000, 10000 seat arenas.

Speaking of games that matter, Encased reviews are starting to pop up: https://techraptor.net/gaming/reviews/encased-review https://pledgetimes.com/encased-review/ https://thekoalition.com/2021/encased-review-under-the-dome-and-in-my-heart I'm probably picking it up tomorrow. I'll post some thoughts if I do.

I'm so sorry to hear that, GD. Condolences.

I have failed you, Melky. Instead of making cynical posts about another soulless looter shooter I should have been posting about games that matter. /self-flagellates

I don't usually write anything about rasslin', since I'm likely the only one here that watches it regularly, but last night was AEW All Out 2021 and it was special. That was the best show I have seen... ... ... /scratches head ... Ever? I haven't felt this excited and happy as a rasslin' fan in at least 20 years. This is almost certainly going to be this young company's highest selling PPV ever and they were already doing the best non-WWE numbers since probably 1998, when WCW wasn't yet fully into their downward spiral, really the last time WWE had any real competition. With this many eyeballs on them it was imperative that they deliver a great show, and boy did they ever. This was like watching a baseball team hit 10 straight home runs, it was insanity. Also, hats off to the crowd, a hot crowd makes a big difference, and this was 10000 people in Chicago collectively losing their minds (and voices) for 4 straight hours. This was a landmark show that I will remember forever. I am so ****ing happy right now!

I have a fairly high-end "55 TV and plan to purchase a Dolby Atmos surround system once I purchase a house. I have no purpose for a movie theater ever again.

Having intermissions would help, but I'd much rather watch something that's 5 or 6 hours long in the comfort of my home, where it's completely up to me when the intermissions are.