SirSmUgly

I have almost caught up in my Lucha Underground watching, but I'm having a hard time getting into Puma. I prefer AJ's work in New Japan, which is mostly what I've seen from him. Good year for AJ.

I have to be honest; I don't think I've seen a KENTA/Itami match this year that I thought was that great, really. I actually watched that Mason Ryan match, and it was probably better than most of the stuff I've seen from his opponent. I need to think about this.

The Vita works for me as basically a full home console experience except on a handheld. It's a pretty staggering piece of hardware in quite a few ways. The touchpads on the back don't really work effectively when trying to use them as the equivalent of L2 and R2, but it's so graphically powerful and doesn't utterly cramp my hands like even the XL versions of the DS do. It's the first handheld console where the size of the console and the layout and amount of buttons make the fighting game experience feel worthwhile. Also, I like Playstation All Stars Battle Royale for what it is, having finally played it. Mortal Kombat plays nicely on it as well. I have UvMC3 , SFxTekken, and Injustice on the way from Amazon now. I'll be looking into Jump All-Stars too when it comes out later this year.

Me neither. This company, man. I got it, actually! Check your trash. That's where mine was. On another note, the Arrowhead Pond crowd sounded like they took a batch of NyQuil before WM XII except for whenever Jake the Snake would tease (or hit) the DDT. Is that one of the five most over moves in WWF/E history?

I'm pretty excited for BioShock: Infinite as well. I never did play it because of how soured I was on the series after BioShock 2. I loved the first one, and I didn't think it needed a sequel at all. I don't really have much space on my 60GB HDD, so Sleeping Dogs will have to be erased at the very least to make room for both TR 2013 and BioShock: Infinite. I considered switching out that hard drive for a 1TB one, but I think my 360 might be on its last legs anyway.

I got a Vita this weekend after getting back into playing DS (mostly before bed). Except for the exorbitant price for memory that would be solved by letting me get third-party memory, it's a really wonderful console with an awesome library. I know that Sony isn't doing lots of big first-party stuff and all the big name Western third-parties have abandoned it, but there are three years of awesome back-catalog for me to collect already in that regard. Does anyone else have one of these?

I had a milder Reigns-over-Bryan sort of irritation when TNA missed the chance to put the NWA Championship on Monty Brown just to keep it on Jeff Jarrett.

Nakamura/Zayn is going to happen in the final four. Too bad it's not the final because I would be most pleased either way in that case. I look forward to being on the losing side of advocating for Tyson Kidd and Tyler Breeze in round one.

Not just in that BEN! post, but in a number of places, I see people saying that a large part of support for the in-ring work of the women is that we have lower standards for them then the men. I hate that idea because I actually genuinely enjoy the women. I'm not doing some "grading on a curve" thing. If I enjoy, say, Sasha Banks or Bayley or Nikki Bella's roaring forearms, it's just because I enjoy them. I'm not being disingenuous in any way.

I wish NJPW World was an app on Roku or even PS4. I would be glad to trick my PS4 into thinking that it lived in Japan. Another, different thought that doesn't deserve a thread: Isn't it good when wrestling makes us into marks? Like, shouldn't I care about who the champion is? Furthermore, shouldn't I care about my favorite guy being presented as the king of the faux-fisties? The point of wrestling is to get me to willingly suspend disbelief and buy in to the mystique of the wrestlers, championships, etc. When did "mark" become an insult rather than a goal for people who can see behind the curtain, but still want to believe anyway?

LOL at Kevin Steen proving how much of an antihero face that he is by punking Alex Riley. Becky Lynch and Bayley have very good chemistry and should wrestle each other for the next couple of months. Just have Bayley have to figure out how to beat Becky and stop getting caught by submissions, then work her way back up through Charlotte and finally Sasha after that. I feel like Lynch didn't start getting comfy in the ring until she started wrestling Bayley more often. By the way, Lynch pointing and yelling IN YOUR FACE, IN YOUR FACE, IN YOUR FACE at fans in the crowd after she won made me laugh. I hope a feud with Tyler Breeze can likewise help Itami settle and find his comfort spot. I think they should run Corbin/Rhyno or Corbin/Kendrick at some point to help Corbin settle in. He's a big man, so I always know they take until about their late 30s to gestate and get really good, so I have patience with him.

Bryan had HHH's best match ever and Reigns's best match ever... ...but Brock is a force of nature. Plus he was in the best WWE triple threat ever. I can live with either guy winning.

I wish that I could get into trios matches done lucha-style. When I see wrestling from Mexico, my favorite stuff is always when two guys have a bloody singles-match brawl. I have a very hard time enjoying other stuff that isn't in that vein, and it sucks. I know I'm missing out.

If not for Bryan/Lesnar, I would have guessed that Cena/Tanahashi would have been the rigged one. Having to vote in Bryan/Lesnar might make Jraq's head explode like that dude in Scanners.

At the risk of making a false cause fallacy, I note that WWE wrestlers are getting more publicly disgruntled the closer that DVDVR gets to March Madness...

Nah, he'd bring Bayley or some other woman not named Charlotte up from NXT and re-package her into a character named Ms. Treatment whose schtick was raising awareness about nagging people regarding the economic and social inequality of women in society until some face male told her to shut up and that this is America where you can't blame anyone else for your own failures except yourself. Then after six months, the character would be flanderized into something like Ivory's RTC character, coming out to yell at women for showing skin to the evil males in the crowd.

Wealthy people can never be upset about anything, I guess. Yes, I don't think that AJ's higher profile and money-making ability erase the fact that she and other women get less opportunity than they should. I lean that it's just AJ going off on her own if only because I'm not sure how a "WWE discriminates against women" angle is a good idea. It could work, but would need the sort of subtlety and self-awareness that the writers on the main shows can't drum up. Also, it would take WWE actually giving their women a chance to reach a dedicated audience beyond having arguments and moments of lipstick lesbianism on Total Divas.

I get where you're coming from, Fowler. I like spectacle in my WM matches too. I personally think that Savage/Warrior retirement is the best WM match ever and it also runs on story-driven spectacle in a number of ways.

I haven't actually ever seen Ms. Vayntrub, but I heard her on Doug Loves Movies and got super-irritated because she and the other two guests kept stepping over John Hodgman's understatedly-funny lines. I'll do a GIS, but I doubt that her hotness can overcome being irritating on Doug Loves Movies. She was reaching Kumail Nainjani levels of annoying at one point. Your opinions are bad and you should feel bad! Dude works as the annoying guy on Portlandia because he doesn't have to stretch much to fill that role, but he and Marc Meron sniping at each other in an extremely unfunny, podcast-derailing manner is the worst thing about comedy ever. My opinion on this is awesome and nigh unassailable, and I judge you harshly as a person for disagreeing.

I like Cactus/Hunter, but HHH/'Taker at WM 27 and 28 were both dreadful and overlong. I guess if you like that WWE Epic style, though, I can dig why you'd like it. Personally, the more I think about it, the more I think that the two Shield 6-mans and versus Bryan at WM are probably HHH's three best matches ever. Actually, thinking about it, HHH, Bray Wyatt (though just out of the voting period), and Roman Reigns have all recently had their best matches of their career with Bryan. Bryan to the Elite Eight!

I haven't actually ever seen Ms. Vayntrub, but I heard her on Doug Loves Movies and got super-irritated because she and the other two guests kept stepping over John Hodgman's understatedly-funny lines. I'll do a GIS, but I doubt that her hotness can overcome being irritating on Doug Loves Movies. She was reaching Kumail Nainjani levels of annoying at one point.

Is it a holding pattern or reintroducing the story? You have to do something to refresh in the audience's mind what the issue is at hand. And now you have the whole "Randy playing mind games with Seth" part at hand. It's the inverse of what Seth did to Rollins when he was worming his way into HHH/Steph's favor. In the past, the commentator would simply re-introduce the story by reminding the audience "this is for when they put him out X months ago in that dastardly attack!" Simple, effective, and the crowd gets catharsis from seeing the guy just come in and start beating dudes up. Re: Cristobal's view. I get that. I personally love NXT too much to not watch it weekly + the specials. The NXT Championship and NXT Women's Championship are genuinely important to me. Honestly, they're the most important titles to me in North American wrestling by a fair amount. Sure, those guys will get booked into the ground on the big show, but right now, they're all competing for the richest prizes in wrestling, and I want to keep up with that. I actually still do have the Network, which is good for Vince's bottom line, but probably hurts me because I watch 1996 Nitro or a random mid-'80s Mid-South or 1997 RAW and realize just how much shittier the current Thanksgiving sides are than 80% of the stuff on Vince's own network. I didn't watch Fast Lane and had no desire to, though I did go back and check out Cena/Rusev on account of this board. I'm skipping on WM, which I think will probably be WM XI-level bad. Oddly, what seemed like the best deal about the Network (super-cheap current PPVs) is the least-useful thing about it to me now.

I think Orton is the perfect example of this: On NXT, he would have come back RKOing everything in sight. Some people might argue, "Well, they have to fill three hours on RAW, so Orton couldn't just do that. They had to draw the story out," but this is a show that gave a women's tag match about sixty seconds, so I don't think that argument works. "Holding pattern" booking never works. If a plane tries to stay in a holding pattern indefinitely, it eventually runs out of gas, stalls out, and plummets to the ground. Same applies to wrestlers.

Tiresome lecture, Gregg. Vince McMahon, with all his years in the business, SHOULD be able to connect with traditional booking on a higher degree of difficulty than Ryan Ward. Your argument about NXT being easier for Ward to successfully book is a red herring. Vince McMahon found a way to book two hour shows that kept multiple acts hot in the past. That third hour makes things tougher, but Vince McMahon of all people should be able to meet that challenge. If he can't, it's time for a new approach. Well, there's your issue: From a pure fan standpoint, I don't like or care about Roman Reigns even if he beat Bryan. So I guess what I'm thinking is, "Who cares about Roman Reigns? I don't think I'll bother watching WrestleMania," which is pretty much what most fans do when the company makes poor creative decisions over and over again. Apathy sets in. Oh man, Gregg, I love you, but you aren't some sage that has crucial life wisdom for us. You're just a dude that rationalizes poor booking decisions on a bad wrestling show. I appreciate that you enjoy this show, but it's pretty clear that you are in a minority, and I think reducing why to "People just like to hate things" isn't very logical at all.