Salads

I was recently investigating the Jak and Daxter series because Naughty Dog are building a great rep but I have a personal intolerance for the kind of moviegames their seventh gen works falls into. After some research the first game was going to be my choice but turns out ND have been going down their current route for a while as they purposely excluded the option for subtitles on the grounds that they would stop the 2001 PS2 platformer being 'cinematic' enough. Ended up settling for 3.

Gordi posting in the catch-all makes me think we failed in our mission to make him check out the Osaka show. Seconded. My stance on Naito has always been that he's the Mutoh successor young Tanahashi used to be promoted as. Rob mentioned the 'stare into space' selling on his blog but also being generally unhinged, intermittent selling/downtime with spasms of often reckless offense and the more direct finisher/ring attire comparisons. I can already picture him with a bald spot. This year's G1 maybe doesn't show this very well but I'm assuming the injured knee angle is an attempt to compensate.

I can't remember whether I posted it on this forum or not but my wish for the G1 winner was 'anyone but Shibata or Naito' so I'm a bit bummed. Hope Naito's form recovered enough for a fitting final. Tanahashi deserves a lot of credit for having the biggest shift nearly every night and successfully being Tanahashi throughout all of them.

Goto sporting a new costume, announcing the imminent debut of a new finisher and topping his group = I think plans may have gone tits up. Though it seems a lot more likely now I never bought the inevitability of Shibata walking in and topping a group with the cream of NJ's biggest stars, and Goto beating him tomorrow to win their never-ending feud would've completed the trilogy of New Japan G1 push tropes along with 'group of death won by unfancied homegrown' and 'group winner pins champion'. Goto's win over Okada makes a lot more sense for a future title clash than Makabe/Tanahashi/Kojima's would, though seeing as Okada's 100% in singles tournaments so far and generally hyper dominant maybe they'll go down the champion-as-finalist route which hasn't been done since 2007... when Nakamura mucked plans up by separating his shoulder. Depending on what precisely you meant by outside the G1, I'd recommend the 2011 tournament final between Naito and Nakamura. Not his best match, but I consider it a coming of age moment not only for Naito but also for the 'new' Nakamura you commented on earlier.

Last year's eighteen-man tournament ended up with twelve on eight points and three each on six and ten. Anderson may have been an unlikely finalist but he was still on his third G1 and had won tournaments/belts including the longest IWGP tag reign in history, though perhaps most importantly unlike Ishii he wasn't thirty seven years old. Perhaps worth noting at this point that Yano had a similar Korakuen main event win over Tanahashi in the 2011 tournament.

Yeah there was a bit of a struggle to differentiate among the upper card even before Okada started blitzing through everyone, Devitt turned megastar and Shibata joined the party. The last twenty man G1 they held had a lot more fodder. On a brighter note for someone like me who hasn't bought the shows the coverage from everyone has been fantastic, especially rzombie's unprecedented next-day giffage. Getting feedback from matches as they happen is helping cement the individual happenings in a way the usual post-tournament highlight listmania never could.

It has since been released on PC. I know this thanks to reports of Fish's people skills at launch.

Reminds me to get up to speed on BULLET CLUB. In particular their grenade-throwing Tongan Diesel.

New Japan's been so youth-focused in the last few years someone like Nakanishi may as well be Hiro Saito at this point. I imagine Tenzan gets a bit of preferential treatment due to having won three times as many G1s as anyone else on the roster.