Firebreaker Chip

If any aspect of this is a work, Tony will at some point snap and confirm it via a twitchy 14 minute promo about how they told a great story using these real life issues as a basis, in response to a semi-related question, or perhaps even in a twitter post

When the price of AEW+ went up earlier in the year, Fite said that as a bonus they were giving people 2 bonus credits a month so they'd be able to get a free PPV out of it if they stayed subscribed; then this month they just cancelled it with no notice before anybody had got a chance to accrue the 20 credits required to fund an AEW PPV, and said it was only ever a temporary thing to ease people into the price increase I am now proudly sitting on 18 worthless space dollars which will gradually waste away every month because they're only valid for a year ??

I don't think the animations in this game are mo-capped? They might use some old retooled previously mo-capped stuff they own but I thought I'd heard that this stuff was traditionally animated The original report on this was so vague and garbled I wouldn't necessarily be confident that FTR were definitely taken out because they're going to be DLC, as the DLC plans may not be as scaled up and extensive as the WWE games are it'd still be weird for wrestlers that aren't on TV much like Yuka Sakazaki and Abadon to be in but for FTR to not be tho

This looks decent, like an actual logical evolution of the vpw2 engine rather than just a straight 1:1 cover, nice to see that they had more flexible special moves options including the corner to centre Boom knee thing and apparently the v trigger to an opponent slumped on the middle rope. I was never actually a fan of the AKI "taunt to get a finisher for a few seconds" system as applied to American wrestling, as it takes all the surprise out of a lot finishers that are better hit as a sudden counter. Maybe there'll be a way to store a slightly less powerful one or something. I'm totally OK with this not trying to be a "you can download every created wrestler and have custom arenas and book a whole promotion" game as a first attempt, just happy that they seem to be able to have a reasonably big, current roster and have a deep pool of signature moves available from different positions so fighting styles seem varied and matches can go in different directions Looks like they could do with slowing down some animations and adding some more pins, ideally including some pin combos and the old slumping one armed exhausted cover Also don't know if there has been much footage of reversals, but I assume anyone worth their salt overseeing a resurrection of the No Mercy glory days would have insisted on a good reversal system as one of the first things on the to do list

There was a really fantastic bit of inane Tazz commentary during the main where he said something to the effect of "Ospreay's a freakin...freak! I don't give uh...uh rat's ass what anybody says, dis guy's a STUD", like yeesh settle down Paulie Walnuts

Yeah, is there a reason he thinks cataloguing all of these every episode is somehow interesting?

I mean shouldn't they be trying to make their product appeal to more than 969,000 hardcore-ish wrestling fans though? "the small, stagnant pool of people who regularly watch our product don't care about the women that much so what can we do ¯\(°_o)/¯" feels like it's missing a trick I know they've been down on star power due to injuries but I don't know if "randomly booked dream matches between AEW guys and New Japan/RoH guys" was the best way to style it out, and also the OTT style they have most people working causes a ton of the injuries!

This was obviously the result of some internal "how many decibels can you get out of Cornette this week" challenge Yuta's delivery on his promo was extremely Grimey imo, was expecting the stream of I CAN BEAT CHRIS JERICHOs to be capped off with BECAUSE IIIIII'M HOMER SIMPSON

Is Cody now suddenly dependent on maintaining the goodwill of the guy whose throne he smashed

Not adding anything that hasn't been said, but I really enjoyed Cash's vulnerable-but-determined energy in that match, and how difficult he made surviving in the ring with Cobb look, just a pure exhausting struggle

I think that while The Chase is obviously a slicker, more professional piece of music, it has a kind of hazy, laid back vibe that doesn't make it that a good fit as a wrestling entrance theme, while the (tag team) Midnight Express version liberally borrows every melodic element of it and turns into something cruder but way more in your face and exciting for the purpose it's being used for The FTR version being a knockoff of the knockoff while adding a chorus back in makes it sort of, you know, fine from my pov

Then...Now...Forever...Together...and always twirling...twirling towards freedom

Max Caster...the floor is yours my man

Damn, you lot weren't kidding about Statlander, she was a fuckin megastar out there Ospreay's prematch promo sounded like someone trying to do an impersonation of David Bowie with a mouth completely stuffed full of teabags

MJF will probably have other grievances than the contract situation, it just depends on whether he ever publicly elaborates on them. There have already been conflicting reports on whether or not he expected to be able to add money without adding years, nobody seems to have that strong a grasp of the finer details of the main beef

Archer got up like a champ for those Wardlow powerbombs, damn

I stand to be corrected but I think Ishii is pronounced "Ishi-e" but the ii is more like one elongated syllable, doesn't really make sense to segment it to the point of saying two separate sounds eesh-YEAHHH

God I'd forgotten about that already. There'll be a Dark Side of the Ring about Cody's last year in AEW one day. Ominous electronic music playing over a vignette of a bleached blonde guy gesturing towards his neck while a weeping tattoo artist pleads with him

Is it bad that he was allowed to say he built the forbidden door? (beyond the fact that it became very annoying as a thing to constantly reference very quickly) I'm not unsympathetic to the idea that Tony Khan needs to impose a bit more message discipline and consistency on his product, but is Rhodes referring to a nebulous concept that got invoked on TV nearly every week, in a rambling promo about nothing much where he came across as a bit of an idiot, that big a deal? If anything it seems that Cody being allowed to have his own little sandbox was just the cost of doing business to keep a guy who was to some degree a draw and liked by the network etc, but as we've seen that all became too much of a pain in the ass for everyone involved and it's been resolved in a way that's probably best for everyone. The alternative would have been either not working with Cody in the first place, or changing everyone's name, insisting on giving them music you own, and having bullshit 90 day no competes, which would just be pushing AEW into being a company nobody particularly wants them to be

That entire shoot is on youtube on the channel "best of the KC archive" or similar (it's their own channel not a reup), but as with a lot of of their stuff there is a ton of grim misogyny as well https://www.wrestlinginc.com/news/2022/03/news-on-scott-halls-health-before-his-passing-sean-waltman-on-hall-suffering-during-the-pandemic/ Unfortunately it sounds like Hall's final years were not good, Waltman seems to imply he basically fell off the wagon and became isolated because of the pandemic, and when he fell and broke his hip he was lying around for days before DDP checked in on him because nobody had heard from him, pretty miserable stuff

Jericho should rush out some Parker/Menard merch, then have them work occasional indie shows where they have to go back to being called Matt Lee and Jeff Parker 2.0 because Jericho owns their AEW gimmick

Is there still a way to do manual rope breaks? I have auto rope breaks turned off and saw a website guide that said manual rope breaks are now available to all wrestlers, but have never seen the prompt or had an opponent do one when right next to the ropes Also how do you do the takedown defensive ability? I know the flash pin is right stick and down on d pad but not sure how to do the one that just trips them up

People are posting some pretty cool reversal sequences leading to match finishes and stuff on the wwe games reddit, much like fire Pro I guess the closing stages of the matches are handled better then the early stages The PSN store says the Undertaker Immortal pack is included with the standard edition as of now (it was meant to be part of the pre-order bonus I think), but it isn't actually turning up for anyone from what I hear. Currently trying to get them to send it to me but suspect the answer is "looks like Sony fucked up, have a nice day" I wouldn't care but I'm currently unable to download a reasonably good Luchasaurus caw because it uses moves from it ?

By default, you press x rapidly to fill a circle. That's it. You can change it back to the stop-the-moving-bar-in-the-green-line version in the options but I won't be doing that. The submissions minigame requires tapping the correct button according to the prompt, but can be changed to just holding it instead. All of the semi-realistic chain grappling/working holds and reversal limits have been removed, so the matches are kind of annoyingly go-go-go from the start. There's no stamina bar but there are still slider settings related to stamina effects and recovery; haven't heard anybody saying they've seen any groggy finishers or crawling pins, which has to be one of the best features they ever put in and then immediately dumbly scaled back and removed for no reason. On the other hand, the controls are smoother and more responsive, and there seem to be a lot of contextual animations linking things together. The overall feel of playing a match is definitely improved on e.g 2k16-19 where it was possible to have frequent good matches but too dogged by this kind of jankiness to ever really say it was fun doing it I don't know what all the sliders do to tweak yet but it doesn't seem very good for simming so far, feels like one AI wrestler (Cody lol) tends to get the advantage and steam almost uninterrupted to a finish.

Fascinated by how bad this sounds, though I guess this sort of jank was what GM mode was always like and everyone asking for it back is a total monkey's paw situation anyway