SirSmUgly

Isn't the Tudyk thing tied to Amy Hennig leaving/being forced out of Naughty Dog? I still don't know what happened there, and I don't believe anyone has really told that story. She's on some new Star Wars game now that sadly isn't KotOR 3 because I'd love to see her write the hell out of that story, but maybe she'll go into detail eventually.

Also true, though USA also has far more invested into WWE programming than they would into other types of programming outside of the major American sports organizations, and when one considers that advertising rates for pro wrestling are still in the shitter, I'd love to see a cost-benefit analysis of whether the rate of return for USA is better than, say, if they tried to snag NASCAR from whomever has the rights and ran a race a week for those three hours, if they just tried to produce three original one-hour dramas for the same time...or for that matter, if they played L&O: SVU reruns for three hours.

Nah, Al Davis had totally lost it on the business side as well as the talent evaluation side at that point. Vince is creatively worse than at any other time in his career (yes, I would hold '94-'95 gimmicks and booking above this current-day garbage), but he's still a savvy businessman as seen by how well he is doing to forge relationships with organizations in the wider corporate world and how he has somehow kept Bonnie Hammer in thrall so that even with these shitty ratings, they're in no danger of cancellation by USA.

stop ruining wrestling Missing a drop kick wouldn't hurt anymore than hitting a drop kick as you still have to fall to the mat from the height you jumped to, successful kick or not. Hitting the dropkick is a controlled movement that would allow you to prepare for the landing. Missing one probably comes as a surprise, throws your gyros off, and causes you to land more wildly - and possibly harder. ENJOY THAT SOMEWHAT CONVOLUTED AND UNCONVINCING EXPLANATION says six-year-old Smelly McUgly.

I'm mostly a nostalgia watcher. I have the Network, but I use it primarily for NXT and the NXT specials, which is the thing that I really love about current-day wrestling. After that, I've been watching 97' RAW and Nitro and plan to watch some mid-'90s ECW and all the World Class on the service. Other than that, I throw on World of Sport because there is a ton of it on YouTube. I've actually seen more WoS in the past six months than I have main roster WWF stuff, which is hard to do when you consider how many hours of television the main roster puts out. Mostly, though, I watch old stuff that I've never seen or re-watch old stuff that I get to see again from a fresh perspective twenty or twenty-five years later. If New Japan or the Paul Boesch library get on Roku or on whatever Smart TV I buy in a couple months, I'll subscribe to that too; I just don't like watching on my notebook, or I'd have them already. Wrestling is still awesome; I just bitch about WWE maybe because that's what I grew up on, so I'm still drawn to caring about the company now, and because they have so much talent that it's insane that the shows aren't orders of magnitude better than they are.

McMahon has really changed in his older age because in the '70s, '80s, and '90s, he'd be ready to dump his headliners as soon as he thought they might be even a little bit old or stale. He dumped Backlund ASAP to get to Hogan; tried to dump Hogan for Warrior, didn't work; dumped Savage so inexplicably that Savage was relegated to color commentary on WM IX, a show so desperate for star power that I cannot imagine how Savage doesn't work it high on the card or at least as a better opponent for Razor to go over than face Bob Backlund in 1993, but that's another rant; dumped Bret as soon as he could for Michaels; essentially tried to dump Austin for Brock. Now in 2015, he's clinging desperately to Cena, not relegating guys like Orton to color commentary on Main Event, calling back old-timers whom he tried to dump to headline WrestleManias, and generally not trying to really push anyone too hard (Reigns, maybe, but that push was botched so badly that I've seen many people swear that it was on purpose). Vince is in "save the company" mode trying to get that corporate cred so that when he dies, Stephanie and HHH won't go out of business soon after, and it has changed his whole perspective on the creative process to a staggering degree, not to mention his willingness to take risks and try to find a new guy to run with when he gets a whiff of his current top guy getting stale.

True, though it irritates me that people called it a carry job and ignored that Corbin is getting pretty decent. Strikes aside because Lawd Jesus, he barely hits guys with his punches and his kicks leave visible air between him and his opponent.

I'm probably going to play Persona on VITA at some point, but I'm not really a JRPG guy. Everyone loves it though, so I should give it a try. I'm going to do a Persona/Hatoful Boyfriend/Danganronpa series of playthroughs and get all the weird Japanese games that I want to try out of the way, maybe after I beat Fallout 4.

Look everyone, it's Tyler...trading wins with fucking Stardust on Superstars every week.

I loved SRIV (except for the fact that High Voltage might be a group of one-armed chimpanzees who have never coded in their lives because the damn thing locked up my PS4 randomly at least twelve times during my twenty hour playthrough). Beat it and immediately started to play Gat Out Of Hell. Stopped about ninety minutes in and just looked up the endings on YouTube. I had my fill of that gameplay. We need a reboot, preferably one that resets things and goes back to the end of SR2 so we can get back to a focus on Ultor and Troy, that sonuvabitch. Right now, I'm playing through Sonic Colors and enjoying it well enough, but I see why SEGA added the werewolf stages to Unleashed and the 2D Sonic stages to Generations from a gameplay standpoint; the boost gameplay is REALLY fun, but only in short bursts. It gets old quickly. Of course, it's also easier to make non-2.5D boost stages, so from both a fun factor perspective and a labor-intensive perspective, interspersing something else with those stages is a good idea. I also have been playing lots of VITA while I'm burning up the Stairmaster or elliptical. Quickly: Injustice: Gods Among Us is pretty fun single-player. I play a decent Batgirl. I think. It's hard to tell against the computer. I have bought this game twice now, actually, but it was worth it. I'm looking forward to the next game in the series now that MKX has been completed. Jeanne d'Arc is so goofy that I love it, and it's a pretty good tactics-like as well. It does get game-breakingly easy about halfway through, but I'll get through it anyway. Tearaway is adorable, but it doesn't really hold my interest. My first Tearaway card died after maybe a week, but Target was offloading VITA games for about six bucks apiece, so I got a new copy pretty easily. It's one that I'll enjoy playing with my kids someday, though. Super Meat Boy has been on my PC forever. I don't necessarily love playing pixel-perfect platformers, and frankly, I don't really love this game either. I'm all for difficulty, mind you, and I think that I physically threatened my VITA at a couple of points during the end stages of Rayman Origins, but this feels more like IWTBtG! than just a really challenging and rewarding platformer Backing Broken Age: I made a hyooooooge mistake. I loved Costume Quest and Trenched and of course Psychonauts, but Brutal Legend is a bad game made worse that I personally hate metal and the gameplay didn't even get close to making up for the soundtrack (though Peter McConnell's work in that game is suitably awesome), CQ2 was not good because the original creator of the idea left the company, and honestly, they haven't put out a good game since Stacking. Of course, I also backed Massive Chalice and still have not played it, so I could just need to play that to rediscover my love for Double Fine.

RAW is so stale. I wish they would change everything up. Visuals, commentary, everything. Go back to doing a Nitro-style set. Move the Titantron somewhere different in the arena or make it multiple screens all banded together instead of one big complete screen, like the board for the New Press Your Luck from a few years ago. Dump Cole, dump JBL. Stop micromanaging EVERY damn thing the commentators say. Dump the scripted promos. Stop making everyone wrestle to the hard camera. Stop shaking the camera to simulate impact. Maybe use some things like that sky camera/over the corner camera that WCW used on the first Souled Out. Change the color of the ring ropes. Use the video boards around the ring in an interesting way. Modify WWE style to allow for different regional styles to shine through. Allow secondary finishers to finish matches in order to increase the unpredictability of match finishes. Try more finishes besides "clean/DQ/countout," maybe the occasional draw, KO, or ref stoppage. Start shows with competitive matches that don't advance storylines. Start shows in media res occasionally, as Nitro once did. Use rankings to organize possible contenders; don't be a slave to them, but the WWE Top 25 rankings on WWE.com should be shown from week to week. Do more "from the control center" type summations for upcoming shows like NXT has started to do again. Do more random tournaments like KotR or hell, do a G1-style tournament. Again, NXT did the Dusty Rhodes Memorial Tag Team Classic, and it was an awesome switch-up. Actually have things happen on Superstars or Main Event that are referenced on RAW, but that you must get the Network to see in full, and vice versa. Don't make every entrance song either a shitty nu-metal or questionable CFO$ song and actually get some variety because people listen to rap and even country too, damn. Or they could go nuts and do some crazy shit like that WCW: Lockdown idea that I read about so many years ago, which honestly, I am intrigued by even though I know that it's not a good idea. That might actually solve all their problems! (No, it wouldn't.)

I watched the Canadian elections tonight, and they were entertaining, but I don't know if it was worth not seeing Owens/Henry. I mean, if they hyped that match, I would have actually watched RAW live for the first time in a long time.

If they don't put it on Kofi and have those guys Freebird the title, there's nothing else they can do that won't be disappointing outside of creating time travel and going back to get 1997 Bret Hart or 1979 Jim Breaks or 1988 Barry Windham or someone like that to win it in a long match.

Ambrose is a great answer. They pretty much had a great never-say-die type of babyface and they cooled him off twice when the crowd was ready for him. They should have just strapped a rocket to him to see what would happen.

Just book strong babyfaces. I know people roll their eyes at NXT, but that crowd generally loves heels like Sasha Banks, Kevin Owens, or Tyler Breeze right up until they face off with a well-developed, strong babyface like Bayley, Sami Zayn, or Finn Bálor. What strong, universal babyface has this company had in the past few years? Cena isn't that guy. Bryan is the only one who I can think of. Maybe Punk, too. Otherwise, they have a bunch of faces that people are bitterly split on at best and lukewarm for at worst. The company just sucks at booking and building up babyfaces, and that's compounded by a significant enough portion of the crowd who will push back against the booking of faces who they did not organically get behind. Maybe if the company just pushed the guys that were organically chosen by the crowd as their champion in a way that didn't overdo it, they'd have strong faces that would get the right reaction for the heels.

You noticed Bunger, but failed to even mention Biggerstaff. You're slipping, dude.

Rockstar equated "strong narrative" with "downer story" there for awhile with Max Payne 3, RDR, and GTA IV, and of those stories, I think RDR is the only one that regularly connected with people. My awesome parents bought me my NES in 1986 when I was only four. It took me a good year to beat SMB, if I recall correctly, but once my uncle told me about the Koopa shell ricochet trick, I was running up good enough scores to send them into Nintendo Power.

I just love that here in 2015, Vince fucking McMahon is having circles written and booked around him in large part by a dude who wrote for the Rachael Ray Show. Absurd. It's odd that RAW doesn't really leverage the fact that it's live programming and thus people should still be making sure to tune in to see it unfold. Hell, if you missed the first two hours, they'll recap everything important at the top of the third hour. They should really tinker with the format so that the announcers only allude to what people missed in the first hour or two rather than just giving it away. It might be wiser for them to edit the video clips of RAW and Smackdown (assuming Smackdown moves to USA and becomes a live show) that they put online so that they don't give as much away also.

Already seen Breeze wrestle Finn and it was mediocre. Unless Tyler's finally taking the gold, there's no reason to run that program right now. I kinda don't care as much about Joe. It's not fair to him because it was twelve years and numerous injuries ago, but he just doesn't have that physical explosiveness in the ring that made me really get into him. He never was the same after that one Sting match where he did the really foolhardy dive down a bunch of steps and onto his tailbone. This is not to say that you're wrong, Ramsey, as much as it is to simply remark on those two guys. At this point, though, I'm all for Breeze getting a run with the gold, so I hope they find a way to do that while transitioning to Finn/Joe at the same time. Crews is a filler challenger for now, I think.

Don't get me wrong, Rollins actually makes me pine for the days of WWF Champion Diesel, who was at least decent on the stick, but the fact that Cena's the only relevant wrestler on McMahon's roster says a fuck of a lot more about McMahon's total failure as a booker over the past eight years than it does anything about Rollins or anyone else on the roster.

Man, people make fun of wrestling attire all the time. Comparably speaking, if PN News came out on our screens right the fuck now, people here would be making fun of his goofy attire. I don't buy that claim of misogyny, at least here. Maybe in a pit like Wreddit or something.

I wouldn't call it lazy. It's more like hopeful. The women need a giant of some sort who can act as a base for their higher-end moves and who can toss them around. She can be more rotund or cut like Chyna for all I care, but I'd like to see a bigger woman in that sort of role.

It could just be me, but I'm pretty sure she got the same mega reaction in front of 13k in Brooklyn as she gets in front of the Full Sail crowd. She won't get over on the main roster, but it won't be because she has limited appeal. It's because Vince McMahon hates money.

This might seem a weird question, but is anyone excited for the Royal Rumble specifically to see if they'll once again book it in a way that the crowd vocally hates? I'm hoping that they figured out that all the super-smark types show up to RR in droves as it's the first PPV on the Road to WrestleMania, and instead of trying to please them, they just go full on troll. Bryan returns as #1 in the Rumble, tossed out by #2 The Miz in thirty seconds. Cena tosses all of New Day, Dolph Ziggler, Kevin Owens, Cesaro, and Sami Zayn in his RR debut. Reigns throws out Lesnar to win it.

Izzy putting her hands up to her head after Sasha snatched her bow off was great. She had a total "What the actual fuck?!" look on her face there that you can catch just before the camera goes away from her.