Keyrock

2 1st round Packers picks, zero wideouts taken. Will we get passive aggressive Rodgers?

Muh Boys took tackle Tyler Smith. Offensive line is our biggest need and he was arguably the highest rated tackle left on the board at #24, so I have no issue with the pick. I'm kind of disappointed there's no big controversy attached to the pick, it's not like muh Boys.

First QB taken at #20, Kenny Pickett by the Steelers.

No QBs taken in the top 10, you don't see that too often.

Jags picking #1 for the second straight year. The pick is edge rusher Trevon Walker from Georgia. No surprise, they desperately need pass rush. It was going to be him or Aidan Hutchinson (who went #2 to the Lions). I have quite some time to wait till muh Boys pick.

I always figured somebody had to buy it since they keep selling it, now I know who. Then again, I unironically wear Hawaiian shirts as part of my regular wardrobe, so I'm in no position to criticize anyone else's taste.

I could never stomach end-game in MMOs and loot em' ups. Going through the game visiting new areas is fun, I like that. As soon as I beat the normal final boss I am done with the game. I absolutely loathe running through content I've already completed over and over and over again to farm a complete set of purple Super Diamond Plasma Plate of Legendary Awesomeness so that I can do the secret super dungeon that takes 12 hours with a 40 person party.

When I first saw movies and shows in 4K it felt really... off, for lack of a better term. It almost made me feel dizzy. Like when you go to the eye doctor and they shoot the puff of air into your eye and your vision is weird for a couple of hours. It felt sort of like that. I got used to it and now it's great. For whatever reason, I didn't have that issue with games, only shows and movies.

You absolutely should, it's such an easy watch, despite being well over 2 hours long. This is Kurosawa's mainstream crowd-pleaser, like a Michael Bay movie, except it's still good and not absolute garbage if you dedicate more than 2 brain cells to thinking about it. As an aside, my Kurosawa top 5: 1) Yojimbo 2) Rashomon 3) Ran 4) The Seven Samurai 5) Stray Dog

The Hidden Fortress (1958) - Tahei and Matashichi, a pair of bumbling peasants, unwittingly get caught up in a great adventure as a general of a fallen kingdom tries to smuggle the hunted princess of his land through enemy territory. While this doesn't quite reach the incredible heights of Akira Kurosawa's masterpieces, it is nevertheless a thoroughly entertaining and enjoyable adventure movie. This is also an incredibly important movie. The influence this had on George Lucas is crystal clear. Princess Leia was very obviously modeled after the feisty Princess Yuki, General Rokurota Makabe uses a Jedi mind trick to get past an enemy checkpoint, and the two bumbling and bickering peasants surely influenced R2D2 and C3PO. Speaking of the peasants, they steal the show here. It's not often that Toshihiro Mifune gets overshadowed in a movie, but Minoru Chiaki and Kamatari Fujiwara are absolutely fantastic as the greedy and bumbling Tahei and Matashichi. There is also a fantastic spear duel in the movie that's a hundred times more tense and exciting than Jedi twirling laser swords while doing quadruple flips over lava. The blu-ray I got of this classic is a gorgeous 2K transfer, as I would expect from the Criterion Collection. I still have a number of Kurosawa films I haven't seen, which is shameful, I know. In my defense, the man was quite prolific. I have blu-rays of Yojimbo (seen it, love it) and Sanjuro (haven't seen it) that will get a watchin' fairly soon.

50/50 ground beef and pork. You can use different meats and it will be fine, but nothing beats beef/pork IMHO. Use plenty of rice, it help the meat to not clump up into hard balls if there's plenty of rice mixed in. Only partially cook the rice before hand, it will cook more in the oven. Salt, pepper, and paprika to season the meat mixture. I usually use crushed tomatoes from a can and season with salt, pepper, onion powder, and parsley. The key is to use lots of sauce, drown the gołąbki when you cook 'em in the oven. That's the recipe my mom passed down to me, except she usually uses tomato sauce rather than crushed tomatoes. I can't say my gołąbki are better than mom's but I think they're just as good. Nobody can touch my mom's cheesecake, though, not even expensive restaurants. I've purposely not had her teach me because if I could make it myself I would weigh 400 lbs in no time.

If you play Mars: War Logs remember to...

Not sure, but I am a football expert and I'm sure this is a Tight End:

Did you play Mars: War Logs, Technomancer, or Bound By Flame? If you did then you know what you are in for. I would say this is easily Spiders' best game so far. I liked it quite a bit. It's the most polished (still not AAA, mind you) and most open (still too many invisible walls for my taste) of their games. It's got a colonialism theme. You got the native tree huggers and the greedy colonists, though it's not quite that black & white.

Rather than starting a new topic I'll post my thoughts on the xXxBOxXx here, after owning one for a little while. Going from 1080p (PS4 Pro) to 4K (xXxBOxXx) is honestly not much of an upgrade. I mean, I can see the difference, but it's not very meaningful, at least not on a 55" TV. Maybe the difference is more meaningful if you have a giant 85" TV? 1080p still looks good at 55", I suppose blown up to 85" it could look a bit pixelated, but I don't have a 85" TV, so that's just speculation. I find Ray Tracing thoroughly underwhelming. Ray Tracing has been this mythical holy grail of gaming for decades. Now that I've seen this grail, my reaction is "meh". I'm not just talking on this console, either. I've seen RT running on a high-end PC rocking a RTX 3080, where the performance hit is less pronounced than on an AMD- powered machine and it didn't do much for me. I didn't even get a quarter chub from RT, I can barely tell the difference. Volumetric fog had a bigger effect on me (half chub!) when I first saw it in games. The biggest difference comparing to the PS4 Pro is load times. The xXxBOxXx is very snappy and you rarely have to wait much longer than a handful of seconds for a game to load up. Supposedly, the PS5 is even better in this regard, but I don't have a PS5 so that's hearsay. Going from a 5400 RPM hard drive to a SSD is such a massive difference. Overall, I'm pretty happy with the refrigerator-looking console. While the graphical difference over the last gen of consoles is quite small, I've been getting rock solid 60 FPS at 4K on the small selection of games I've played and that's nothing to sneeze at. In the games that have a quality mode (30 FPS) I'll check that out for a short while just to see the tiny, and I mean really tiny, difference in amount of shiny, before switching to performance mode (60 FPS) to actually play the game. In fairness, the true showcase games for a console generally don't arrive until year 3, so we haven't seen the full extent of what these MSony consoles can do yet. Maybe when Avowed comes out it will look so spectacular that I will instantly soil my briefs? On paper, the xXxBOxXx is a more powerful machine than the PS5, though we haven't seen that in practice yet. I didn't chose Microsoft over Sony for the difference in CUs, though. I made the choice because Microsoft bought up a bunch of studios, most notably Obsidian. I'm pretty sure we won't be seeing Avowed on PS5. Final thoughts: Good console, happy with it, didn't change my life. As an aside, having seen the difference between 1080p and 4K firsthand (not much), I don't see the point of 8K. I suppose that if you are filthy rich and live in a mansion with a 40' by 40' living room and you have a 200" TV (do they make them that big?) then it makes some kind of sense, but for the other 98% of us, that's an absurd premium to pay (both for the TV itself and the machine to power it) for insanely diminishing returns.

As much as I love wuxia, and I do, I am also SUPER GARBAGE at RTSs and any other type of game requiring extensive real-time micromanagement. I can do management in a turn-based game, but this doesn't look turn-based AFAICT. Given my extensive and rigorous information gathering and analysis, consisting of watching the Sseth video @Onerposted and nothing else, there is a 98.37165% chance I would rage quit and uninstall that game within a couple hours of play.

Keeping with forum etiquette the name would be Totally not melkathi.

I'm all for this. The code is already there in the PC version and the current and last gen MSony consoles are essentially PCs. I'm not a game dev, but I doubt it would be a ton of work to adapt the m&kb code from PC to console.

Some Elex 2 screenies from my mountain climb expedition: Gruesome. I've been concentrating on personality skills and stuff like chemistry, animal trophies, and mining to accelerate my AP gain and $ gain (sacrifice the early game for a stronger late game), so I'm still not very strong in combat, even at lev 20. I'm survivable enough that I can explore without too much fear, though. Bonus FH5 screenie:

Happy Easter everyone!

Not exactly the same, buuuuuut...

Survive the Fall looks like it could be a good survival game. As for Vendir, the fact that it's coming out on mobile (as well as consoles and PC) doesn't automatically mean it will suck (contrary to popular belief, good mobile games do exist, they're just buried under a mountain of gacha garbage), but it doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

A grab bag of screenies: These kids at The Fort are the best.

Good old fashioned greasy breakfast with scrambled eggs and sausage. A nice benefit of living in the south is that it's easy to find good breakfast sausage. Back when I lived in Connecticut we did have sausage from local farms and it was better than the Jimmy Dean sausage you can find in any supermarket anywhere in the country, but nowhere near as good as the breakfast sausage I get here. Southerners just know how to make breakfast sausage better. Some green onion stems (or chives) chopped up make all the difference in scrambled eggs. I also like to undercook the eggs a bit and leave them a tiny bit runny, that's something I picked up from mom. Question: Are green onions and scallions just different names for the same thing or are they different vegetables? I've heard it both ways and seen it both ways on the internet, so I'm confused.