SirSmUgly

I see that everyone also thinks that rebound headbutt was terrible. And unveiled right after a match where like 75% of it went to Bull freakin' Dempsey. Tyler Breeze showing promise at comedy wrestling was lovely. Charlotte's shit-talking was pretty good too. "You gonna fight me tonight or what?" Sasha as a shit-talking chickenshit heel is sublime, though. I thought the best spot of the night was them struggling over the arm after the crossface and pin attempt trades. Kevin Owens maybe should win March Madness for making me and the Full Sail mutants root for Alex Riley for a minute there. I sure hope they feud Corbin with a solid veteran worker for a few months. If Kidd weren't up in the big show, he'd be perfect for Corbin. Where is Chad Gable? I want to see more of that guy.

Not shocked that DreamBroken feels that way because he and I feel pretty much the exact opposite about almost everything when it comes to wrestling.

CounterSpy is a sweet game, though. Can't wait to finally play Valiant Hearts. I love Ubi doing these smaller-budget digital titles. Child of Light was one of my favorite games from last year. Speaking of Ubi, where's my next Rayman 2D game, damn it?

I think his selling is a definite point against him. I don't know that he's consistently convincing. He doesn't have the best facial expressions or sell exhaustion as well as he could.

OK, question. What don't I get about lucha? Like, trios matches, I don't get those. Even something like Ultimo Guerrero vs. Atlantis seems weirdly-paced to me. I can never get into them. I know it's a cultural block that I need to get past, and I think that it's worth it to do so because ignoring a whole country rich in talent because of their style seems kinda lame to me. Help me understand what I should be looking for in lucha. What sort of tropes are there that I can latch on to?

...so I think Neville is actually really good fighting from underneath against a bigger guy. He looks like he's really having to survive out there before he can use his athleticism to hit big moves and turn things around. I think him against Owens was a great example of this, but Rusev killing him earlier this year was also awesome, and even that Baron Corbin match was surprisingly decent when it would have otherwise been a train wreck with almost anyone else because of Neville.

I did that and am somehow still able to post? I don't remember this at all, which almost certainly means that I was black-out drunk when I did it.

I disagree on that one. I think Neville got VERY good over the past six months. Why do you dislike Neville, may I ask? EDIT: Oooooooooor I could just go read the Neville/Pentagon Jr. thread.

As someone who appreciates Hechicero as much as I can while not being really into Lucha outside of violent one-on-one brawls, and as someone who really prefers work contextualized by a narrative that makes me care more about the character in the ring, I don't think I'm much different from what a number of DVDVR regulars are like. I read Pro Wrestling Only occasionally, and those guys are very mechanic-based in their criticisms as a broad stroke. I love reading their match reviews and such because they illuminate the mechanics of wrestling in a way that I often don't think about. However, here at DVDVR, I feel like many (most?) posters have a less cerebral approach in many ways. A lot of the Daniel Bryan love here is in no small part because of the journey of the character (and by extension, the person) to try and claw to the top of the company. There was a story AND a meta-story, both of which were incredibly compelling, and those stories gave Bryan's in-ring work an incredible urgency that just isn't there for me if I'm watching individual matches in individual promotions from a guy, or if I can't understand or follow the narrative due to a language barrier or being unable to find the shows in order to watch them. Same with Zayn. His whole character arc has been "not good enough, but too pure to want to take shortcuts, just wants to get better and better and someday achieve his dream." He's like the Leslie Knope of wrestling. I think that many posters here are drawn to that. They WANT that character to succeed, and that drives their opinion of his work as much as his actual work does. This is really reductive, of course, and not meant to indicate that PWO posters don't care about narrative. However, I do notice that there is that difference. I wouldn't be shocked if Hechicero were winning this poll were it over on PWO, where narrative is less of a driver for ranking guys. My apologies if I've offended some of the PWO regulars posting here.

Zayn is one of two guys that I think would feel right winning the whole thing, IMO.

Tyler Breeze has awesome matches against Zayn, at least one good match against Tyson Kidd, Hideo Itami's best matches so far for what that's worth, a good fatal-fourway match, a selfie stick, oh and let me remind you, the best music video and theme song combination ever: I love Goldie, but he'd be better off stepping to Ron than trying to step to all that.

Did not like Wyatt's year this year once he stopped getting to tag with Luke Harper in six-mans or wrestle Bryan. Had what might have been the worst PPV match that went over 15-minutes of the year with Cena except that then he had a worse one with Ambrose (and Ambrose had an even worse one than that with Rollins, but that's neither here nor there). On the other hand, I've never enjoyed Galloway, and he didn't change my mind this year. Abstain.

Nakamura is so great! It's him or Wyatt. In particular, that April 2014 match Nakamura had with Tanahashi = aces, IMO. I like Thatcher a lot, though. He works a style that I really have to be in the mood for, but I'm into joint work and lots of struggle for holds and all that in general, and to see it as the focal point of a match is a great chance of pace.

This makes me want to watch 2003-2005 Cena because I remember him having awesome matches with Eddie Guerrero and the Undertaker. He wasn't at his 2007 level by the time he got the gold in 2005, and I know that having a good match with Eddie Guerrero is equivalent to having a good match with Daniel Bryan in terms of how much you can evaluate the strength of the other guy's work, but he had a significant amount of good-to-very good singles matches under his belt by the time WM 21 came around. I get that it's sort of unfair because he also had way more singles matches than Reigns, but Reigns has been pretty much a ghost when it comes to having good singles matches. He's much more like Diesel in late 1994, who had not one really good singles match before the Bret Hart 1995 Royal Rumble match. The closest thing he had before that was a couple of solid-not-great singles matches with Razor. That reads a lot more like Reigns than Cena in 2005 does.

You know, I hate those spots too, but I just sort of ignore them for evaluation purposes, like finisher kickout spamming or rolling into position awkwardly to face the hard camera in WWE matches. It's a stupid part of the house style that looks stupid even when done kinda well if you think about it too long.

Voted Ibushi, but I really enjoyed that Masters/Thatcher match. Will be voting for Thatcher (and Busick for that matter) as long as I can.

It boggles my mind that a publicly-traded company still has guys like DeMott and Michael Hayes in positions of authority.

Reigns shouldn't have beaten any of those dudes. I voted for Cena against him, and in any other cases where I voted for him, I was blinded by the fact that he was hidden in 6-mans, which guys like NintendoLogic tried to point out ad nauseam. I didn't completely listen. Shame on me.

Nah, he's being shit on because he's not that good.

Nakamura finding a way to make that video hilariously awesome rather than creepy. I want to see a Dean Ambrose/Shinsuke Nakamura feud. Or wait, maybe I want to see them tag together.

It's somewhat hard to find some of the Brits online, but Rampage is all over Daily Motion. I watched a couple shorter matches including the one below. He's good on the mat, works to make holds look like they're having an effect instead of just laying there, and is fun to watch. Yeah, I have no problem voting for him here.

I gotta be real, I spite-voted Okabayashi just because of these Ambrose posts. March Madness is about hatred, and with no FSW, I needed something else to feed off of this year. Plus, that Rollins/Ambrose lumberjack match was so beyond awful that maybe I'll just vote against Ambrose every round to retaliate in some small way for having had to sit through it. Those are twenty minutes that I'll never get back.

Crap, I like Dean Ambrose, but I don't think he had anything above "pretty good" as a singles this year. Need to watch a couple of Okabayashi matches between classes this afternoon.

Gulak is one of those guys I should actively try to track down more often. I've seen him in like five or six matches (including that AR Fox match linked above), and I enjoy him each time. ADR/Patron had that fun Sin Cara match on Main Event, but honestly, I can't remember anything else he's done this year.

Yeah, Reigns has those six-man tags with Evolution, BUT now that we know he was protected by five other guys who are actually good at the pro wrestling, those mean less to me in his case. Plus, I'm beginning to think that it's hard to actually screw up a six-man tag and make it less than good. Matt D made enough of a case for Ultimo Guerrero around here that I know he's better on my limited watching of him.