tbarrie

My recollection was that they scrapped the angle because of the Benoit murders/suicide; they thought it would be in poor taste to go forward with a story about a major character's death in the wake of an actual tragedy in the wrestling world. Wasn't Vince's funeral scheduled for the Raw right after the deaths? Everything's relative. Even Wall Street investors were smart enough to know that Trump was a buffoon who had never successfully run anything, but "smart enough to know wrestling storylines aren't real" is a higher bar that they apparently couldn't make it over.

I would say if it's presented as part of the show, he's talking about the character. If it's at a press conference or something like that, he's talking about the performer. But the fact that wrestling hasn't yet worked out a clear protocol to let the audience know which they're dealing with is one of my peeves with the industry. It's one of the ways the industry is still haunted by the ghost of kayfabe (to its detriment, in my opinion).

Before the rankings went away the first time, the AEW champ and the TNT champ were both listed as champions at the top of the men's singles division rankings. So there was only one set of contenders for both belts. That might look strange now that there are approximately 46 men's singles titles in AEW, though. And with Swerve, Hangman, and Wardlow all gunning for the #1 contendership for the AEW title while Copeland is simultaneously working his way up the rankings for a TNT title shot, it might get confusing unless they go with a separate list of contenders for each title. Which brings up the questions of who gets listed as contenders for which title and who decides that. But those are arguably the sort of questions best quietly ignored.

I recall somebody or other doing a move where they set you up for a tombstone, then drop you flat on your back. Or something like that. Not a very informative post, now that I look at it. But what the hey, I'm hitting "Submit" anyway.

So has anybody commented on the fact that, since her return, Thunder Rosa has been painting her entire face? It used to be just half. Is she, like, fully undead now?

Yeah, but it's a real-life ban, not an in-story ban. When Punk and Cena randomly threw a piledriver into one of their matches (and I don't even remember who drove whose pile), the announcers didn't say anything about how it should be a DQ. Or did they? Though I do sort of like the idea that piledrivers are banned unless you do a flip into them. Sadly I don't think the game has a move-boosting card named "Flipping", but the next time I play I might say that Corkscrew Piledrivers and Flying Piledrivers are fine, just not regular Piledrivers.

Hi all, The mods apparently frown on bumping threads that have been dormant for years, so I thought I'd start a new thread. I got the WWE Legends Royal Rumble card game for Xmas, and it's pretty fun. Not remotely fair or balanced, but neither is the real Rumble, so I'm inclined to let that pass. One note that might be amusing to this board: the Piledriver card is flagged as an illegal move. Do you suppose they outsourced the game design to a Mexican team who weren't fully up on the differences between WWE rules and lucha?

Thanks, but all I remember about "towers" mode is that I joked on here about whether it had anything to do with the Triple Tower of Doom. Pretty sure I never even accidentally clicked on it. That reminds me - I picked up 2K23 on the cheap, but bounced off GM Mode pretty quickly when I discovered the whole roster wasn't available to draft. I may give it another chance, but that just seems like a really weird decision to me. I've been playing Universe heavily, and it's kind of annoying. I mean, it's nice to have a new roster to play with after playing 2K22 to death. And 2K23 adds the ability to choose what "Rival Action" occurs for a rivalry (including none if you want to give it a rest for a week). Given my previous complaints, you'd think that would be great for me, right? Well... The problem is that all the choices of Rival Actions are kind of stupid, as far as I can tell. And to double down on my earlier complaints, some pretty basic wrestling tropes can't be instantiated. Like, suppose Face is feuding with Heel. You want Heel to beat a lower-card face one week, then lay down an unjustified beatdown on them, only for Face to come out and run Heel off. Kind of a Wrestling 101 way to start or build a feud - but as far as I can tell, you can't do that in 2K23. And if you do select one of the actions which involve a wrestler in the rivalry wrestling somebody other than their rival - you can't choose who that "somebody" will be. The computer picks them at random. Since I generally have plans for everybody on the roster, that doesn't work for me. And the ability to choose Rival Actions apparently replaced the last couple of iterations' ability to schedule a pre-match, mid-match, or post-match run-in. Those options were simplistic, but they did at least allow you to roughly simulate a scenario like what I describe above. So Universe mode has actually gotten worse in my estimation.

What exactly is MyFaction, anyway? All I know about it is that it's way too hard to exit if you accidentally click into it. (I accidentally did just that a few days ago and was befuddled not to find a way to return to the main menu. So I figured fine, I'll make whatever initial selections I need then exit. After several minutes of making contextless choices I didn't understand, I said "fuck it" and restarted the game.)

At least the name made sense then, because the match featured one team associated with tables, one with ladders, and one with chairs. Then for a few years "TLC match" meant a multi-team ladder match, which sort of worked. Then the Edge/Cena TLC match happened in 2006, and for the last decade and change WWE has been pretending a "TLC match" and a "ladder match" are two different match types. (Yes, the linguistic absurdity bugs me more than the overuse of ladder matches. But that bugs me too.)

I have to ask, though - is Minoru Suzuki a big ratings draw? Because I'd think such a crazy choice would work better as a surprise, to make future Cope challengers more intriguing.

Then we can all go back to enjoying people pretending to beat the crap out of each other.:)

I really should rewatch that. I remember being annoyed by it, but it gets such universal praise I'm wondering if I was just overreacting to a nitpick. I did that more in my youth.

Because Technico is expressing their views politely and respectfully, even if they differ from yours and mine? I'm not sure why you seem angry about it.

To me, the difference with late 90s WCW is that the old guys are nowhere close to monopolizing the top spots in AEW. I mean, yeah, Samoa Joe is on the old side, but before him MJF had their longest world title reign yet and I believe he's in his 20s. Hangman wasn't old; Kenny Omega wasn't old; Moxley is a veteran but I wouldn't call him old. Punk and Jericho were long in the tooth when they held the big belt, yes, but there's a big difference in my view between having veterans/old guys on your show and having them dominate the top like they did in 90s WCW. So to segue into why they're there - I see a couple of reasons. First, having them on the roster can only help the young guys get better. Second, they offer a change of pace. You may not like slow, psychology-based matches, but a lot of people do. They're another ring in AEW's proverbial circus. If you like action-packed PWGesque matches, great, AEW still has a shit-ton of those. Nothing wrong with showcasing another style as well, though. Variety makes for a better show.

Whole-heartedly agree, particularly with the second paragraph. I honestly think pissing away the Hangman-Dark Order friendship is AEW's biggest booking misstep to date.

Anybody know if they've fixed the bug where progressing the main questline wipes out the contents of your condo in New Atlantis? I know there's a list of fixes linked to in that tweet, but they're listed by quest name and I can't remember the name of the specific quest that causes the issue.

I Googled that name and all I found was an RCMP officer who was shot dead in September while executing a search warrant. Probably not whom you meant?

They definitely billed Volkoff as from Lithuania; it was done to foreshadow his face turn. No idea if that was before or after Koloff.

The thing that gets me, is that even if you're ignorant of all the stuff you mentioned - it doesn't take a genius to figure out that anybody who did in fact "cure cancer" would be set for life. So the idea that scientists are financially motivated to not cure cancer is impressively stupid as well as being grounded in ignorance.

I'm not big on boxing, but I would watch the heck out of a Lucha Undergroundesque boxing show, if complete with spacemen, dragons, and mysterious Aztec medallions.

Now I want to sneak in a plug for Old World, which was designed by the lead designer for Civ IV. It's not like Civ in the sense that it's trying to simulate all of human history; it focusses specifically on the ancient/classical Mediterranean and Near East. I really like it. It has a system of characters and random events similar to Crusader Kings (although not as deep or ambitious as CK III's), as well as a number of small but interesting tweaks to the Civ formula. I believe there's an option to turn the character system off if it doesn't appeal to you; I can't vouch for it, as for me that system adds a lot of fun, but I expect it would play just fine as a 4X game without it.

That's his mascot, Utie the Uterus.

So does every second in AEW have access to Jake Hagar's hat?

Keith Lee seems too naturally likeable to be a Hogan monster to me. They could try to roll in elements of Lanny Poffo's "Genius" gimmick, I suppose, but I'm not sure he could be smarmy enough. WALTER would be my #1 from current day. I also second the suggestion of Giant Gonzalez, although the matches would absolutely stink from a technical perspective.