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John E. Dynamite

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Everything posted by John E. Dynamite

  1. 99% spot-on hematological Crockett/death worship, 1% dookie lookin' crash pad. A great match overall but a worrying trend after the barbed wire fireworks debacle.
  2. Reuse the same engine + assets, spend less time playtesting and reworking new mechanics, give your team something they already know how to do, give the market something you already know it likes. It's the money. And this is amplified in the AAA sphere, where one fuckup could = minus-a-billion. Every developer prays daily that they land on a formula they can churn out year-to-year with little variation, it's the second best possible business model behind lucking out and making a Fortnite or GTA Online.
  3. When you saw OSJ's avatar next to a well-manicured paragraph, you knew it was time to sit down and ingest some proper, surly, genuine prose. And the one-line quips? Psh, get outta here. He was a man of Taste and Experiences. RIP
  4. How bad does JR have to be to erase his value as a legitimizing voice for lapsed/casual fans? The answer is he isn't even close to crossing that hypothetical Ray Mendoza line. We're stuck with him.
  5. I love SRPGs as long as they have flavor. I bought Disgaea on PS2 15-or-so years ago and almost beat it. Recently I got a PSP and had tons and tons of fun playing ZHP: Unlosing Ranger vs. Darkdeath Evilman (JRPG roguelike w/ the Disgaea engine, play it ~) and that was the motivation I needed to set things right. Beat the Switch version of Disgaea late last year then I immediately plowed through Disgaea 2. 1 is very good, 2 is freaking great. All the things that felt like a waste of time or was too obtuse to use in the normal game in D1 (Dark Assembly, Item World, etc.) all of a sudden felt balanced and worth my grind. Really highlighted the two things people misunderstand about that series 1- If you don't want to grind to Level A Million, the games have well-written 40+ hour stories that are still worth the price 2- The point of the grind isn't to press X until your eyes bleed, it's to figure out the most efficient way to do it via exploiting certain maps and mechanics. Nothing is "cheating", the developers know what they're doing. I'd love to fuck around with the post-game on both but I have such a huge backlog... Disgaea 3, 4, and DD2 are all chilling on my shelf. I will probably beat the Etna and Axel modes though, although who knows when. Loved Valkyria Chronicles despite some clunk. Great storyline, heartbreaking, super clever shooting mechanics, really good DLC too if you wanted more of John DiMaggio voicing the tank-destroying muscle queen (Lord knows I did). Valkyria Chronicles 2 is nonsense because you can't save scum, and it's really obvious that VC1 was designed to be heavily save scummed. Loved Fire Emblem: Three Houses for doing the anime highschooler ensemble as well as I've ever seem a game do it. Contrary to my overwhelmingly Japanese game library, I hardly watch any anime but fuck if every character in that game isn't expertly voices and thoughtfully written. I thought that would be my foot in the door for older FE's I've struggled with so I got Fire Emblem: Sacred Stones because everybody says it's relatively easy. So here I am halfway through the game and I find out it's only considered easy because there's this battle arena you can totally exploit to level way up, and once it's gone it's gone. Thanks for that. I know Awakening will probably work for me and I'm about 10 hours into Shadows of Valentia and like what I've seen so maybe I just prefer the modern stuff. Older fans who hate on the new games and flex how hardcore they are can piss off. If you speak English and have liked the series for that long you probably got into it via emulation and save-stated your way through your first three games. I still play with perma-death, but those old ones are bland. And that's my thing with a lot of other series. I have tried and failed to start the first Final Fantasy Tactics like, three times at least? I own both Tactics Ogre games on GBA and PSP and I can tell they're really well made, but... this isn't a rhetorical question, what do they have to offer other than playing chess with standard fantasy classes + telling very straight-faced sword-and-sorcery stories? Their first hours seem so solemn. I say this as a guy who likes New Vegas but can't fathom Skyrim fwiw. I'd rather have a game like Jeanne D'arc that's a bit of a pushover but positively dripping with personality and charm. Shining Force is another series I've never actually beat a game in, but that's because I keep buying SEGA compilations when they're on sale, playing one for a big, happy session and then forget it exists the next day. Very high on my list of 16-bit things to get around to.
  6. I set a lot of high scores on 3rd Mix and 5th Mix at Towson Mall way back when. I was kinda surprised there wasn't a DDR machine at Round 1 but that place was in rough shape when they opened. Seemed a little better when I bowled there right before quarantine, but I still got smoked at IIDX. I'll play DDR a few times a year and it's almost like riding a bike; I only need to catch a glimpse of the chart and my feet will automatically (try to) hit the next ten steps. Playing IIDX again is like re-learning how to fly a helicopter except now I'm colorblind and missing my thumbs. *sigh* I need to split the difference and find a Pop'n Music.
  7. Aw jeez. My Japanese wishlist is pretty scant these days... unless I get my hands on a nice CRT and commit to all the rhythm games I wanted from the BEMANI glory days. Then I'm just gonna start selling my organs. I poked my head into the Super Potato in Nagoya and hoo boy, it is a very good museum and a very expensive shop. It was comforting to witness a level of retro collecting far, far beyond mine.
  8. Let's get reductive. Being a Shawn Michaels fan is the pro wrestling equivalent of being a Tit Man.
  9. I get that the NHL deal counts for something, but the last Stanley Cup games averaged 2.3 million viewers and this season's openers are getting great press for averaging only 1.3 million on NBC, and I don't know what that looks like demographic-wise.. I understand that Wednesday night is a good night for the NHL but are they really gonna expect their double-headers to be worth cutting Dynamite over? Wouldn't the worst case scenario be moving Dynamite to Thursdays, or are the Thursday NBA games as bulletproof as TNT's Tuesday basketball lineup? Isn't the more sensible option to air the NHL games ESPN doesn't want on TBS instead? I'm getting used to your opinions being of the very pessimistic variety but NHL + Turner = Death of Good US Pro Wrestling TV is a big, sad stretch.
  10. What in Tar-Nation of Domination are you going on about?
  11. People are cheering, this is weird. Also, one of the best + most historically significant rounds you'll ever see, for better or worse.
  12. Alex Alex Abrahantes was an Egyptian politician and diplomat who was the sixth Secretary-General of the United Nations from January 1992 to December 1996.
  13. I like the Trentagon El ?M match. It's Trent's first singles match since November, it's on TV, it's against a bigger name. At this point I don't expect anything resembling logic around Death Triangle's booking. It might even lead to an entirely confusing DT/BFs feud that will somehow have a perfect blowoff match. Allin/JB, Starks/Page & Christian/Hobbs are three singles matches I would pay to see. I don't know if AEW has even run a card without a tag match before, maybe that's why they wanted to get everyone on TV during the opening minutes of Darby vs. Hardy the other week. I think that AEW thinks that the Pinnacle's likely win at Blood & Guts will fix their inauspicious start. I'm gonna totally guess the long game here... the Pinnacle have set the highest bar possible for a faction, they're supposed to be the Horsemen. And if The Pinnacle are supposed to be the Horsemen, MJF is supposed to be Ric Flair, but the Horsemen didn't form until Ric Flair had spent the better part of 5 years with the NWA World Heavyweight Championship. I don't know how that stable lives up to the hype if MJF isn't AEW Champion by the end of the year. I would have still put money on Kenny -> Hangman -> MJF being the way the belt ends up moving, and I get the feeling a lot of companies are gonna run babyface title wins the second they get crowds back (AEW thinks July per Jim Ross). I just hope AEW haven't painted themselves into a corner and that Adam Page doesn't get one of those short, first-time babyface title runs that not everybody gets their heat back from.
  14. This is the topic I needed. Most of the wrestling I've been watching since the demise of New Japan has been full eps of territories and Puerto Rican + Japanese commercial tapes. Here's the March 22nd, 1986 episode of CWA Memphis. Really, really good sit-down interview w/ Dutch Mantell caps off the first quarter-hour (dude can play guitar better than me!) but the real drama is in Bill Dundee & Buddy Landell's beatdown of 19-year old, still innocent referee Jeff Jarrett, with involvement from Jerry and grandpa Eddie Marlin. Bill Dundee cuts an all-time promo afterwards even if he gets bleeped for half of it. The wrestlers, Lance Russell, the crowd, everybody sells it like the most heinous act in history and it's some riveting stuff. The high school cheerleading squad from Bartlett, TN sitting in the front row helps.
  15. Oh, don't sweat it. I'll tell you why my point was wrong to begin with - I just didn't think my initial take was "hot" enough to warrant what the thread was asking for. Those ex punks actually played shows and sold some cassettes, those Broadway hopefuls did dinner theater and maybe even cashed some checks under Actors Equity, the Mellencampian ex-QBs accomplished valid things as student athletes. Those metaphors have nothing to do with my understanding of being a wrestling fan. There are many people on this board who have had experiences in the industry that could speak a lot more to those points. Hell, at least four or five of us are either CM Punk, Tony Khan, or both (myself included).
  16. That's Part Two of the theory. I drove around a lot today and I kept Busted Open on the ol' outer-space radio. Lifetime mark Dave LaGreca always opens the show by doing this weird caricature of a ring announcer, often during interviews he breaks into what could be described as a "bathroom mirror promo". Legitimate Hall Of Famer-cum-Dignified Has-Been Bubba Ray Dudley spends most of every show fantasy booking. Mark Henry does the same thing & might be the best example on that show of a guy who can't stop the fantasy. Why would he? He's training for a comeback, he'll get one, and it will make him happy. This board, just one example of many, is likely populated by boyhood dreamers who grew up but didn't move on. Now we imagine we're bookers, color commentators, managers and Meltzers. It's not like this is the only case of "armchair quarterbacking" in the world, but yeah, it really hits different in the pro-wrestling fandom - and I say this as someone who knows just as many high-school sports stars as he does old punk rockers and failed Broadway/Hollywood chasers. Those types can (and sometimes do) live their entire lives yearning for the unattainable glory of their extracurriculars, but it usually requires a more active level of delusion and regret OR they find a legit outlet. Some find jobs or side gigs in education, promotion or volunteering, or become stage hands or folks who work at certain venues. Some people have kids to live vicariously through, for better or worse. But pro wrestling is too weird and niche to have all those outlets. Old smarks chit-chatting on the internet? Thinking that you're a better booker than Watts, a better businessman than Vince, a better critic than Meltz and a haver of hotter takes than Corny isn't just par for the course, it's the foundation of most discourse. It's the final, terminal state of the essential delusion.
  17. I guess if I had to boil all that psudeo-prose into an argument, it would be - most wrestling die-hard fandom begins in adolescence. It happens when being entertained by wrestling turns into fantasizing about participating in it. Because of the nature of how the artform is performed and presented, the element of fantasizing plays a bigger role in wrestling fandom than others. Even more than in sport, acting, or music. And following that, most wrestling fans subconciously reach a point where they stop fantasizing and it changes the way the interact with the artform/product. And I'm got a mess of "hot takes" that follow from that assumption and go out on a longer limb. Here's one... almost all post-kayfabe babyfaces have easy-to-perform finishing moves because Vince wants kids doing them to each other on the playground. The common assumption is that "out of nowhere" finishers get big, unexpected pops for said babyfaces. That makes sense. But moves like the Stunner, The People's Elbow, Superkick, Spear, AA, the Swanton Bomb, any babyface sumbission finisher... these are things that kids do to each other. Powerbombs are hard. Your friends won't always let you piledrive them. The number of younger siblings who have had sock-covered hands shoved in their mouths? Tens of millions. And I think it's by design.
  18. Here's a big one. Ahem. Your relationship to wrestling is (probably) defined by your own adolescent delusions, when you thought you could grow up to be a professional wrestler. I would wager to guess that 90% of this board, if so much as a squirt gun was pressed to their temple, would instantly be able to rattle off their preferred A) gimmick name B) entrance music C) finishing move. I can't think of a single vocation that is more in-tune with adolescent male wish fulfillment, except for maybe being a rapper. Sport is obviously the big one of the last century-plus - the ex-high school football star knocking back boilermakers to calm his lumbar while pining for the glory days is a pretty accurate portrait of a pretty common human destination. But the delusion of athletic greatness breaks a lot quicker - a big injury, no scholarships, or just pairing up with a person who's so superior to you at a meet that you have to go "oh, fuck, I really can't pay the bills with this." But wrestling success isn't determined by such objective criteria as a win/loss record or your numbers at the combine. You can delude yourself for a long time by thinking you could be the most charismatic, the most creative, the hardest working, the guy who knows the most holds, the most willing to jump off of a very high ladder. And it's not like you can just join the pro-wrestling club in school and find out that you suck at it. Instead you try out new moves on your siblings, backyard with your friends, get really into Fire Pro CAWs, book an e-fed, something. Mostly, you daydream. You cut promos against actual wrestlers while you're taking a shower. You hit the "back" button on whatever device is playing your music so you can hear that one track from the beginning and figure out the EXACT beat where you should burst through the imaginary curtain. You cycle through the move list in a video game, picking out sweet-looking techniques that you could conceivably do to somebody else, skipping over Presses both Gorilla and Shooting Star if you're inadequate in strength or agility. You interact with pro-wrestling in no small part by living this childhood of quiet desperation. Pro wrestling fandom was built on the delusion of kayfabe. The artform has always been such an obvious work, it would have never gotten off the ground if old-timey marks weren't willing to delude themselves - but a change in culture and communication necessitated the truth being laid too bare to disbelieve. And so, a ton has been written (in this thread and elsewhere) about pro wrestling existing in pre-and-post kayfabe eras, along with the transitional years between, let's say, Black Saturday and Montreal. We can collectively agree that we miss the days when we wanted the Good Guy to beat the Bad Guy, but that we Can Never Go Home Again. The Genie's Out of the Bottle. God is Dead. Et cetera. So I ask you, if you can consider the evolution of the audience's understanding of pro wrestling, also consider your own. Why did you dream of main-eventing a Wrestlemania when your were a kid? When did you start realizing that this was all just a hobby? Would you love and hate the same things then, when you still had the boyhood dream? When I was ten I wanted to be Chris Jericho because he was a normal-sized person who succeeded on evil schemes and shit-talking. It was something I could aspire to. When I was in high school we would drive to Philly and watch tapes so we could steal spots for our backyard fed. I learned all of Chris Hero's cravate set-ups because I was good at remembering them, and I actually had an outlet where I could apply that knowledge. When I went to college there wasn't that outlet anymore, so I didn't have as much of a reason to watch. Now I'm in my mid-thirties and I've been living with a woman who has become an AEW diehard and I've been watching more wrestling than any point in my life since I was 17. Is it because of her? Is it because I have this board to post on? Was there just nothing better to do during quarantine? Did it take the death of my boyhood dream to finally appreciate all the 1986 Memphis TV I've been working through? Maybe I'll know in ten years. But when I state my opinions and argue my tastes in regards to pro wrestling, I consider how I got here. I knew wrestling was fake from the beginning, but grew up watching it with stars in my eyes and a dream in my heart. That was my kayfabe.
  19. Oh. You're at that part. Yeah I wouldn't, uh... How do I not get spoiler-y here... You've actually got until May 14th to worry about that Mass Effect remake. So that's good.
  20. There's a lot of hyperbolic phrases in game reviews that I'm tired of hearing. But Dragon Quest XI earns every damn phoneme in a pair of words like "Fully Realized". The first Dragon Quest jettisoned the trillion-dollar generating JRPG industry (this is not bullshit, Pokemon is the highest-grossing media franchise in human history) from its outstretched hips in 198-fuckin'-6 and every idea that every person in that genre-cum-industry has ever realized started from that bedrock. Too many reasons to count as to why the series was ignored by Western JRPG players in the post-FFVII boom years but DQXI really brought things full circle. It's crazy that a franchise that should be so old and tired got its mojo back so hard. But that's just proof positive of Dragon Quest XI's all time pound-for-pound genius. The fact that it manages to achieve what it does in such a conservative framework is even crazier. The fact that it manages to unify 35 years of good idea into such a singularly cohesive, natural, complete package is astounding. I don't know if it's the best Dragon Quest ever but it's certainly one of the best 10 JRPGs I've ever played and I'm a man who keeps those sort of lists. Which is to say I'm tickled that people on this board dig the game. Check out Dragon Quest III on the Gameboy Color if you grew up on Pokemon G/S and actually want to play the outright best JRPG on that console. Check out DQ IV and especially V if you really dug the throwback 16-bit mode in DQXI. My favorite Dragon Quest might be IX on DS because of the added difficulty and almost MMORPG-level sidequest and postgame systems. And this might invalidate my entire rant but I'm halfway done with DQVIII on 3DS and it's a joy through-and-through, I look forward to completing it and understanding why it's the consensus best game in the series.
  21. Well shit. That's one of the games on the de-patched list. Good reviews, generation exclusive, I don't own it. Does the patch just affect the DLC? Because I heard the DLC was some kind of terrible.
  22. I thought my PS3 collector's panic was waning but now there's news that some games' patches have been deleted. I switched out my Slim to a Super Slim about 2 years ago so now I've gotta go through the entire collection and download every update. I didn't think this was going to be an issue since the patches aren't downloaded through the PSN, but apparently my 1 dollar copy of The Beatles: Rock Band is on the patchless list so shit's real now. This is A) bullshit B) a fun little project. I've been collecting so heavily over the last five years waiting for things like this to happen so there's a lot I own that I haven't played, but popping every game into the PS3 has given me an excuse to watch everything's intro cinematic. Drakengard 3 looks like a hoot! The s/o saw the opening to Atelier Ayesha and I guess that's gonna be a thing now. Going through this makes me realize how futile physical collecting is for PS4 or any other system who's games have gigantic Day One patches. We always knew it would be like this, but man, it still sucks. Are there any PS3 games that really need their patches to be playable? I might prioritize tracking down the good ones that are significantly less playable without an update - I popped in the Silent Hill HD Collection (shut up, fanboys) and definitely had the sense that the game would be worthless if not for the patch.
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