Firebreaker Chip

Samoa Joe doing insincere 2003 Rock style satellite promos but as PSAs is a thing I didn't know I needed

That first solid knee plus was the most brutal the move had looked since Bryan debuted it against Cena in 13, and Lesnar sold it like he'd been fired out of a cannon, stellar near-fall work from all involved imo Lesnar was always going to win but Bryan getting a dastardly Yano-y countout win off Lesnar's knee going out or something would've gone over well Bryan bumping so high up on the first German was scary but the way you know he's really crazy was the force he was laying those grounded kicks into every exposed surface of Lesnar's body, imagine cheerfully doing that knowing Brock's going back on offence later ¯\(°_o)/¯ It's a shame Orton currently has dibs on torturing Rey

Ah yes, Wrestling History 101: when Greg Valentine broke [squints at notes] Yahoo's leg

The in-ring of this has improved a fair bit but having a showcase objective where you have to put Orton through a table is cruel and unusual punishment, the controls for it are so shit

You reckon they'll ever run a repeat of the Dream/Black "say my name" feud where Lars Sullivan sits down next to a defeated Velveteen Dream and grudgingly puts some pants on

Graves namechecking the "mysterious red liquid"

Disappointed that people would impugn the integrity of the Rock, whose dealings with Saudi Arabia were all before it unexpectedly became bad in October 2018

On the post show they showed her doing a WTF face at him as he stormed past I forgot how much I missed Hero's "oh hey little buddy! you gonna "suplex" me huh? Haha that's adorable" act

I really wish they'd just allow an Auto option for pins and submissions instead of having distracting minigames. In my experience the simmed matches usually have a better sense of damage progression for subs and near falls than played matches, where you can often repeatedly fail to submit someone who's clearly dead but also repeatedly kick out of big moves at 1 late in a match. I'd rather be pleasantly surprised that my guy kicks out of a late match finisher rather than being like "ah whatever, guess I'm burning my Resiliency on that one" Its also impossible to balance the minigames so that a large % of the player base don't find them either trivially easy or match-ruiningly inconsistent

"don't burn all your bridges and end up like me, a guy who spends his time acting on TV, raising a child with my partner who was also a wrestler and doing a fun podcast with my best friend who was one of the guys I feuded with a bunch before" who could have delivered this promo believably? JBL would be one. Imagine an uncomfortably intense tearful Scott Hall intervention Worth it for the neck zinger and Edge's utterly defeated body language thereafter though I'm still a sucker for things happening that cause Triple H to glower like a provincial retail manager desperately trying to remain professional in the face of a provocation he is not a well-rounded enough person to endure

The walk up looked like it must have been reasonably good, though my back was literally against the back wall of the upper tier Naito was absolutely monster over vs pretty much everyone else with tanahashi closest I went for a beer during EVIL's entrance

Real 4d chess from AJ here. Needed Andrade to shout "WELL SHIT" just before the styles clash hit

I thought McIntyre came out looking like a million bucks by the end of that tag match, the disturbingly effortless kip up, the genius finish, carrying dead ziggler and both belts to the back without looking tired. Nobody's career is truly unsalvageable, as long as there remains an indie scene to refresh careers and the faint but real hope that Vince will perhaps one day die I liked Joe/AJ, wondered if the finish would work better if Joe's argument is just that AJ was out. Like why would you bother tapping to a blood choke if you were pinning a guy at 2? I guess you can just say that AJ was being sneaky and he really hates Joe though

I thought they were going to go in that direction with Bryan at the start of his 2013 push, with that awesome cradle vs Cesaro in the Raw gauntlet etc, but then they just pivoted abruptly to letting him straight up pulverise people clean as a sheet with the busaiku knee and it was like oh ok that works too