Firebreaker Chip

Mystery Collision GM booking the show via text message Adam Page booked to cut constant promos saying "I am soft"

They should sign Mysterio's kid for the switch role on account of him being a Dom who's a sub I'm sorry

He really did have a hell of an in-ring run there, and with stuff like the short Kingston feud/match and the post-return promos there was some real heat and a sense of unpredictability and danger that you weren't really getting elsewhere in the company But idk doing this old school throwback thing, if the manly fights you're starting backstage are over things that seem insanely petty in 2023 like Luke Perry's son making a pass-agg remark or whatever, it just seems kind of lame and deluded. I guess he was just on whatever level trying to get fired. I wonder if he was banking on negotiating a sweeter exit than this though

I wouldn't be surprised if nobody senior at WWE wants to work with him or give him the satisfaction of negotiating a comeback, but they could probably do a more Goldberg-y schedule where he comes in to work with someone he can get on with, every single aspect of the feud is carefully agreed on and signed off in advance, and he gets delivered directly to Gorilla position in a Hannibal Lecter cage gurney thing and then shoved out to ringside

I guess he probably can't say anything about the All Out 22 stuff but if they just straight up fired him this time he can go off on the recent stuff as far as his confidence in his lawyers will go?

Do they have to have a tournament to decide who the real world champion is now? Maybe Adam Cole could win it

When Roderick Strong's back wrestling he needs to just come out to a recording of him screaming ADAAAAAAM in a maddening loop imo It's been corny as hell the whole time and if he leans into it just that little bit longer it's going to cross over into awesome

Would there be a chance he'd get the Mysterio Rumble 2014 treatment from Chicago when it turned out to be not Punk though? Who wouldn't, I guess

I didn't see anything wrong with it! Having watched the match back in the broadcast I enjoyed it as much as the live viewing I also thought received wisdom was that the opener has to be a hot match and it's the stuff in the middle that had the responsibility to not kill the crowd before the main! Not that it matters in AEW, the promotion where guys just do insane shit and shout "follow that motherfuckers!" wherever they are on the card! Except the main event, wouldn't make sense to shout it then.

The LGBT wrestler Charlie Morgan also alleged during the Speaking Out period that Saraya Knight and others in the family practised violent homophobic hazing and other sleazy, abusive stuff against her and other trainees, kind of grim having this gaggle of wretched cunts paraded at stuff like this as like a funny embarrassing UK soap opera family tbh! https://www.diva-dirt.com/saraya-knight-and-family-accused-of-abuse/

I fled for the tube as soon as the bell rang for the (real) main finish and am glad I didn't miss a major plot twist, though apparently I missed a beef Between Cm punk and luke Perry's son? It was a fun, watchable show in the arena for how long it was, with a friendly atmosphere. Almost jumped out of my seating block marking out at the FTR Bucks finish. Thought the amount of meta comedy in the main event of an 80k stadium show was genuinely weird at times idk

This is good parenting in action

Having got to some fairly uh high-drama stuff in the last couple of play sessions, I assume I'm fairly near the end and it doesn't open up. You basically get the long set piece quests with a big fight at the end, then a period of being at back at base with the journey to the next mission as your main objective, and then a few side quests related to the base camp available. I'm pretty sick of the side quests because they're just "backtrack to this place you've been before to harvest/kill a thing" or "do a stupid minor errand within the base that some of the less important people who just stand around all day should really be doing"; I've just been clicking through the dialogue etc to get the XP at this point. The quality of the story and the voice acting really carry what a shamelessly shallow experience it is for a FF game. It also frequently looks properly amazing a on a good 4k screen. I'm not as down on as it probably sounds, it's not reaaaaally Final Fantasy, but it's hard to argue with the kind of lizard-brain excitement you get from the climactic Kaiju battle bits where Ifrit obliterates someone by uppercutting a continent into them or whatever

Can't believe the crowd was chanting "use the table" during Andrade-Buddy. Like goddamn have you people ever seen a wrestling match before, they're gonna get to it Wonder if someone could get a heel act over where they set up insanely elaborate MITB-style table and ladder deathtraps in hardcore matches then just win with a small package without using them "We want tables" chants in general should result in an automatic five minute chinlock imo

These were the quotes from Bret from April: "Sadly, it's getting too phony. I really question the direction that the people that are in charge are taking wrestling. AEW has gone in a bad direction with all the violence and gore. I watched an episode, Dr. Martha Hart doing her big press conference, I'm watching AEW and [Jon Moxley] is sticking a fork in somebody's head for five minutes with a close-up. This isn't wrestling. I would recommend turning all that off and not watching because it's not very good. Wrestling is going in bad directions because people don't know what wrestling is or was." (h/t Fightful)"

As much as there are lots of people in AEW who should (but probably wouldn't) take advice from Bret, he has no filter at this point and would 100% fall out with lots of people and shit on the company while working for them. He's been quoted recently as saying the company's gone in a bad direction in-ring and he doesn't watch anymore anyway. This was pre-Collision so unsure if he's been tempted back by seeing a weekly tribute to his work (wonder what he thinks of the Martha-approved Owen stuff?)

I'm enjoying how 16 is such a straightforward experience, I'm further in and it doesn't really change much from the formula of running along a corridor-shaped area/exploring a small field, doing some fights then getting dripfed some more melodramatic/intriguing story beats. It's very superficial for a Final Fantasy game but it works well in terms of what it is. The voice acting is extremely polished as well. You do travel through some really nice/cool looking areas as the first act progresses I'm actually stuck away from my PS5 for a while so doing a third and final lifetime attempt to get all the way through VI (pixel remaster on steam deck). Getting through the floating continent was like being at work on a bad day. Every remaster of a 90s JRPG needs an optional, no judgement "halved encounter rate, doubled XP" mode

Collision reminds me of peak NXT a little, kind of a hybrid of the weekly TV and the specials. Five matches with emphasis on storytelling and a clear sense of which matches are "featured", brisk pace with a focus on the in-ring, old school flourishes and tournaments in honour of departed legends, lots of wrestlers who were actually in NXT when it was good, commentator who doesn't know how to pronounce "coup de grace", etc etc Also maybe something about a smallish roster of heavily featured talent who work together in slightly varying configurations but get good results from it Anyway, interesting to see the Regina crowd was purely pro-Punk, they were eating up everything in a way that added to the show and deserved the good matches they got, despite the raised eyebrows about burning Joe-Punk "IV" there imo!

I'm finding the core gameplay of Fight Forever really fun too, now that Elite difficulty is kind of the appropriate level of challenge. It's a really good game to just do 5 or 6 matches on a Steam Deck during a spare half hour. It's bare bones but honestly, on the 2k games I've often just played neverending exhibition matches once the showcase mode is done, because it's common for the career mode to be bad and universe is basically always bad and a waste of time (up to this year's which I've actually found functional enough to put some time into). One on one normal rules singles matches are basically pro wrestling to me, multiperson no dq ladder clusterfucks and all that are always going to be a joyless shambles in a video game that doesn't have agents to lay out the big spots and agree who should be lying on the floor selling for 10 minutes at any given time. It's a shame FF whiffed on the tag team mechanics so much; when will a wrestling game developer figure out that you have to have limits on pin breakups?

I just had a PAC vs OC match go 10:32, possibly because I'm still bad at the game and I insisted on trying to win with a Black Arrow that he kept reversing. I'd lost the first two though so it felt good, and there were a few good near falls on either side. I kicked out of the orange punch and his mousetrap flash pin

Baffled that Kenny Omega of all people has been heavily involved in making a game where the matches are short and nobody kicks out of big moves

Yeah, I'll probably buy this to support what they're trying to do and have a play round with for a week, but with short matches, seemingly easy AI and limited single player content I expect to be parking it after a while and seeing what they update There have been screenshots of per-character overall damage and per-finisher damage settings, which would allow roster-wide tweaks for balancing/match length purposes, but there's been no evidence they can actually be changed for non-Caw wrestlers as of the launch build It seems a no-brainer to allow that, because with chain wrestling, 1-5 finishers with variable damage output per character, weight detection and at least some injury selling all in the game, it seems like a waste to have the matches be these condensed "2-3 minutes with the first finisher winning" sprints

Yeah, it felt like it buried the ref when the he makes eye contact with Callis after he's come back out and just...does nothing Kingston saving Mox from what he thought was a deadly ring explosion was understandable, Kingston diving in to save Mox from his own partners doing a move they do 10 times in every single match...not for me. What, did he think he spied another landmine strapped to Nick's foot? Perhaps Eddie will save Mox from increasingly non-threatening situations going forward as we build towards him diving from off-camera, screaming NOOOOO in slow motion to prevent Mox locking up with Chuck Taylor at the start of a match With Bryan injured, is there any chance they run Claudio vs Ishii on Dynamite? Thought commentary was generally good here and Kelly meshed with Excalibur pretty well and filled in the New Japan stuff he was more familiar with effectively, other than when he kept forgetting the Japanese announcer was about to speak

Re: the "counterfeit Bucks" line not being cleared, obviously nobody in this situation is exactly behaving like a functioning adult, but are we meant to think the Bucks cleared doing Punk's moves and mimicking his botches in Chicago while he was injured? Like yes, you have deliberately entrenched yourself in a situation where you and this other guy are going to be continually extremely petty to each other until you're all dead, it kind of is what it is

PAC's a Ben IRL, maybe bring him back and have it play through all of his matches New Jack style. Might sync up nicely with some of those sarcastic slow motion kick exchanges with Cassidy