SirSmUgly

I definitely agree that the UI and functionality could use work. The UI on Roku is awful. The functionality of the timer bar is only half-working - some shows will add match beginnings and finishes to the timer bar, but some don't. I'm hoping the ad money helps them hire a couple more people to complete that for all uploaded shows. You can pick up where you left off on a show, but only on the same device that you were watching it on. Sometimes, I'll start a Nitro while I'm working, and then I'll go work out and want to pick up where I left off with that same show on my Android while I'm on the treadmill. That doesn't work, and I wish it did. However, if I stop a show and then enter it again on the same device, it will pick up right where I left off. I also think a chance to add shows and create your own user list of specific shows would be nice. I'd love to start a playlist that allows me to organize all Nitros and their relevant PPVs and Clashes in order and then just let it run.

Hey, thanks for complaining about what the board is talking about before offering this email. We all sure wanted to read your bitching yet again. This sort of limited advertising is fine with me. If it helps sustain the WWEN and keeps my sub costs low, go for it. Maybe the revenue from the ads will help hire people to remaster and upload more old stuff more quickly.

The Nasties are fun in sloppy brawls and bomb-throwing contests where a team like the Steiners tries to give them brain damage with all the suplexes. I've never enjoyed Beefcake in any of his forms, though.

Cass made me laugh out loud with that "More like Hey! Arnold" crack. That was great. Honestly, I don't even care if Enzo and Cass are not that great in the ring because their chemistry together is awesome. They actually had a pretty fun match with the Villains, however. I guess this taping was one of the later ones in the session because everyone was pretty much dead until Enzo and Cass's music hit. I want Sasha Banks, Becky Lynch, Charlotte, and Bayley to be the focus of the WWE Women's Championship for the next six or eight years at least. We just need a monster and maybe a really great Joshi wrestler to come over and complete what would end up going down as the best roster of women in U.S. wrestling in a long time. It's too bad Kharma/Kong didn't work out. Everything else on this show was solid, too. Tyler Breeze seems to be getting more comfortable each week with playing a self-absorbed douche. Loved the finish in Zayn/O'Neal. Zayn is awesome at selling getting killed in a bearhug, Titus is awesome at blaming dudes yelling at him in the front row for what he was about to do to Zayn's throat.

I...um...do you ever even watch the wrestlers that you dump on, or do you just throw darts at a chart of random wrestler criticisms to make your posts?

I feel like Ambrose/Nakamura would be great just for the sleazebaggiest and creepiest pairing to come down the pike in a long time in pro wrestling. Nakamura looks like a long-lost McPoyle sibling from Japan and Ambrose probably huffs paint under bridges so...yeah, it'd be like Liam vs. Charlie on "It's Always Sunny," except in wrestling. I'd pay for that.

I'm watching Starrcade '95 and they're doing the WCW vs. NJPW best-of-seven series. Assuming WWE did a PPV today with WWE vs. NJPW matchups, which matchups would y'all most want to see?

Zayn's interviews come off as him being a likeable, regular, maybe-slightly-nerdy dude. In other words, he speaks to what will be a large part of his fanbase quite well.

The scores are all over the place. Seems love it/hate it. If you like survival horror (or if you liked Outlast), you'll probably think it a good game. Review scores (spoilered for length): Re: Good games using the Alien/s license, does that arcade version of Aliens vs. Predators that Capcom did count? That game was awesome and is a game that I am sure to sink quarters into whenever I'm at Ground Kontrol.

Is anyone playing Shadow of Mordor? I bought it because people said it was like Assassin's Creed and Batman: Arkham Asylum had a baby and passed down all of their good genes to the child, and I find that to be true. It's a fairly huge game, too.

Yokozuna is one of my favorite squash match wrestlers ever. I could watch early 1993 Yoko kill jobbers all day. I couldn't find my favorite jobber squash where he uranages a guy practically through the mat, but this one was really fun with the suplexes in particular.

I see the potential in Corbin that others see. My one nitpick is that he has such a baby face that doesn't match his look. He needs to do like Husky Harris and grow a scruffy beard or something. I feel like the NXT crowd turned the Vaudevillains face, so their new theme doesn't work. I'm hoping that once Vince steps down, HHH and Stephanie actually let the women do serious wrestling work on RAW or at least start a one-hour Divas women's show (Gregg is absolutely right; I hate that fucking term for the women, too) with maybe the two higher-level feuds on the show getting development on RAW so that people see what's going on and decide to tune in to the women's show to follow up.

Is that still a negative thing on the internet? I thought at this point, everyone with any damn sense loved Goldberg.

Man, the Enzo, Cass, Carmela trio has some serious chemistry. Bayley/Charlotte was solid. This is a dumb question, but what is Baron Corbin's gimmick? The little vignette last week made him seem like a vampire or werewolf or member of some sort of legion of underworlders. They changed the Vaudevillains music. LAAAAAAAME. It needs to be more jaunty like the last one. Also, I think wearing that Vaudevillains shirt sort of takes away from Simon Gotch's whole aura. The Villains have the most fun tag spots. I like these guys a whole lot. I enjoyed Kidd/Neville. I like Kidd grounding Neville and forcing Neville to work up from underneath and get in bursts of high-flying offense. I find Neville to be pretty uninteresting, but with the right guy, he's good for a solid match, and he and Kidd have pretty good chemistry together. I'll be interested to see if they do turn Neville heel at some point because I've never seen him work heel, but I don't see that at this point, he has the offense to really have interesting control stretches or anything like that.

I actually haven't seen RAW in months. The only way I know what's going on is a. you guys and the RAW thread, which honestly is shorter and much more entertaining, and b. on video packages during the PPVs, since I watch the PPVs just on the principle that when I was a kid, me and my siblings would spend every PPV listening to the scrambled out channel the PPV was on and follow them by audio, so to have the chance to see all of them for less than two dollars per PPV is something that 12-year-old-me would be pissed off that 32-year-old-me wasn't taking advantage of. I actually find my favorite shows to be NXT (easily the best weekly show on TV in the U.S., and it isn't close unless the AAA show on El Rey is really good), Main Event, and Superstars, and those latter two just have fairly good ten to fifteen minute matches with wrestlers that get more proficient at WWE style each week and thus almost always put on a good show. That doesn't mean that I can't lament the missed opportunities that the company has gone through with the Wyatts, Cesaro, etc., right? Or else what is a message board for?

That Wyatts/Cena feud wasn't over anyone's head. This is pro wrestling, not quantum mechanics. Bray wanted to corrupt Cena by forcing him to do things outside of his typical "Hustle, Loyalty, Respect" creed. By getting Cena to break his creed, Bray would win even if he lost the actual matches. So of course, Cena overcomes him again and again, and oh, Bray tried to turn the children against Cena so Cena would lose faith that his "HLR" credo was still relevant in comparison to Bray's less noble philosophy, but that didn't work either in the end. Don't confuse "didn't understand it" with "understood it and recognized how much the execution sucked."

I think, and this is not an insult, you just watch in a way where you aren't uncritical, but that you are liberal in how you analyze what sense can be made of the storylines, promos, and booking decisions. I don't think that's wrong, but I do think that it is one of many valid ways of taking in the show and wrestling fans are never as bad (and alternately somehow even worse) than we make them out to be.

I have to politely disagree to some extent. I can accept the criticism that Bray Wyatt wasn't as interesting in this feud as he could have been, but I think that even if he was clearly stepping up his game, we get the same result. It is hard to overcome 1) Chris Jericho, who is reaching Randy Orton levels of "who gives a shit about whatever this dude is involved with" at this point even when he just comes back for a short while, 2) Vince McMahon, who apparently dominates the writing committees and is so uneven about what he wants that everything Wyatt has done post-Shield feud has felt stop-start and inconsistent. We're not blaming Cesaro for losing heat after being jobbed to Sheamus and Jack Swagger, having his music changed, and being immediately dropped as a Heyman Guy, right? I mean, Cesaro is still putting in work, but no matter how good you are, some things are nearly impossible to overcome.

I like that the Wyatts are breaking up on good terms and could come back together at any time, and I am all for Luke Harper, WWE World Heavyweight Champion at some point here in the near future, but I don't know if breaking up the Wyatts after they have been decimated by Cena and the Usos is the best option. In fact, at this point I think they would be better expanding the family, especially if that means re-packaging the Ascension into something that isn't shitty. Have these guys go back to dominating the people they run up against and get their aura back before you spin Luke Harper off into a singles star. Plus, I do think that Erick Rowan needs the cover of the stable to be really useful at this point.

I think the real problem is having a PPV called Hell in a Cell that requires the titular match in a dead zone month. Hell in a Cell should only happen at the organic end of a feud, not necessarily because October. I agree with you 110% on that. HIAC should be a feud-ending extra boost to a regular PPV, not a "themed" PPV in and of itself. But given the way Brock/Cena has gone down so far, the logical ending taking place at HIAC seemed to be a happy accident. Well, they booked themselves into a corner with this rematch. They clearly want to keep the title on Brock and keep him strong, but they also don't want Cena to eat another pinfall to Brock. Assuming they aren't stupid enough to put the belt right back on Cena, but they're also too worried about Cena losing again and looking weak in the eyes of his fanbase, the mistake was running Cena/Brock III for the gold at NoC instead of maybe waiting to do it after Brock finally loses and letting Cena beat him in the rematch there. NoC should have really been a placeholder one-month feud for Brock. Toss him in there against Ambrose or Ziggler, let him win a fairly dominant fifteen minute main where the opponent is never really competitive, but takes a load of punishment and gets the crowd behind him just for taking so much of a beating, and move on to your next feud for Lesnar for HiaC. Instead, they run a match in the main event of NoC that logically should lead to a final cell match that they can't do because they can't do another fuck finish the very next month in a one-on-one match, but they also have no desire to have either guy go over the other right now. I guess there is one more option - do a triple threat at HiaC where the third guy eats the pinfall for Brock so Cena loses without really losing, but then you're shoe-horning another guy into what was really a one-on-one feud where Cena needs to come back and beat the dominant monster, which is less-than-optimal narrative structure.

That year-long Diesel reign was brutal. The thing about 1995 WWF is they have lots of top faces (Diesel, Bret, Undertaker, HBK by April, Razor, Bulldog, Luger) and no good top heels (Sid, Jarrett, an overweight Yokozuna, and Owen were the best they had). Someone needed to turn, and that someone should have been Razor. In fact, having Razor beat Diesel for the title in the early summer and drop it to Bret Hart at Survivor Series '95 instead would have been better. That way, you can run Razor/Diesel in a rematch, Razor/Bulldog or Razor/Luger (before Bulldog turns and Luger leaves for WCW), Razor/HBK, Razor/Undertaker (did they ever even cross paths at any point?), even a little Razor/1-2-3 Kid feud for a month. Then, you still have time to put the title on Bret in the fall. It might not have made any more money than Diesel did on top, but it would have been much more fun to watch.

They did it this morning/afternoon. If you go look now, everything is correctly numbered.

I hate the Steelers too, Ava Bailey. I hate the Steelers too.

That wouldn't have worked; they pulled them down to change them to the right episode numbers. They are up again, properly numbered.

These 1995 RAWs are such a chore to sit through, but in Episode 102, Ernie Ladd does a really awesome interview/promo where he responds to Vince's question about Lawrence Taylor's chances against Bam Bam based on Ladd's experiences as both a football player and a wrestler. I liked it so much that I would say that it's actually worth seeking out if you're futzing around the Network and looking for something to watch.