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Andrew POE!

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Posts posted by Andrew POE!

  1. I saw pics of Sting's son in his American Sting gear from the '90s and I was amazed at how much his son looked like him during that time. I wouldn't say no to either of his sons continuing the Sting gimmick (El Hijo del Sting and Sting Jr. if you will) after getting trained somewhere or getting a lot more matches under their belt. If they're decent wrestlers, they would be perfect against Charlie Dempsey and Brogan Finlay in NXT or either of them against Dominik Mysterio in WWE for battle of second generation wrestlers.

    4 minutes ago, hammerva said:

    In the medial scrum, apparently Darby Allin is planning on climbing Mt Everest at the end of March.   The climbing part doesn't worry me one bit.  It is how the fuck he is going to get off of it that worries me.

    He'll just do a Coffin Drop off the mountain.

    • Like 3
    • Haha 1
  2. 5 minutes ago, SirSmUgly said:

    I don't believe Nintendo hasn't ever done a mass layoff. They have cash reserves and I think - I'm not a Japanese labor lawyer - are somewhat constrained from doing so at    their Japanese studios by Japanese law.

    I agree about the definition of AA vs. AAA, but for me, I'm focused on games lower in budget and scope. I'll play anything that looks good, but trying to hit on big budget games with lots of scope creep is simply unsustainable financially. Sony lives off of those games and has multiple 10M+ and a few 20M+ sellers and can't even do it. 

    The closest Nintendo has done was reduce working hours and Iwata actually reduced his own salary so employees could keep getting paid during the last economic downturn. Some American CEOs would scoff at having to surrender their pay to help their employees and mumble about communism and refuse to do it.

    • Like 3
  3. 10 hours ago, RazorbladeKiss87 said:

    I rewatched the Rock's promo and I really don't like the over reliance on jokes about crack and meth. Maybe I'm just being sensitive but things like that don't strike me as cool. I know where I'm at in recovery and don't watch things that could trigger me because I'm relatively fresh off stuff. I donno, really not a big deal in the long run but I wasn't a fan. 

    Yeah, it was in poor taste. Problem is, there wasn't really a way for The Rock to be a heel since he would get cheered anyway. So the old standby of making fun of the town/the people in the town was used. What really got people booing was The Rock saying he's on the TKO board and for Seth Rollins to be careful otherwise 'he'll take the title from him and give it to someone else.' The Rock as Vince McMahon (in terms of the evil corporation, not the weird/gross/sexual shit) would get people to hate him.

    The Rock saying he runs the WWE, not HHH, really got him booed. He should lean more into that than below the belt comments about the town they're in this week.

    • Like 1
  4. 11 minutes ago, jaedmc said:

    I guess it depends on how you look at it.

    Roman says Seth's title is Second Place, which one could say is true particularly when they unveiled it a year ago.

    Seth says Roman's title reign is padded by Roman sitting at home for months on end, and when he does show up it's one fight with lots of interference from his cousins. Which is true, but it also similarly undermines the historic nature of Roman's title reign.

    So it's almost a wash as both guys are trying to shit on the other to build up their own legacy.

    HOWEVER.

    One guy has shown up to work every week and defended his belt not just on Premium Live Events, but on TV. A year of Seth's Title Reign does not equal a Year of Roman's.

    And for me that's the difference. Rock and Roman can shit on Seth, but Seth can always say - he's working every week until his body won't let him. And he can say they've built WWE to something special again and Rock is just trying to leech off of younger stars success. And he wouldn't be wrong.

    Rock can say the suits at Netflix don't know who Rollins is. But are fans supposed to get excited about Ted Sarandos' favorite wrestlers instead? Seth Rollins and Cody Rhodes will most likely never ever ever be as famous as Dwayne The Rock Johnson. That's just reality. But I don't think that means folks should give up on them because they can't be transcendental generational ultra super mega stars.

    That being said....

    Rollins has been getting the worst barbs during every exchange. I feel like he's gotta be getting something out of this at some point. But wrestling history is littered with guys who didn't get theirs.

     

    I agree.

    The problem is....building up two of the most over faces in the company this way is almost insurmountable. Even if Cody Rhodes and Seth Rollins win at WM40 and Rhodes wins against Reigns, how am I as a fan supposed to buy into it? Even a casual/lapsed fan won't see Rollins/Rhodes on the same level as The Rock. In a few months, The Rock will be away doing whatever and not on TV and it'll be back to Reigns pulling the football away for the next challenger to try to kick it. (Unless Rhodes finally win the titles at WM40, then it'll be something different)

  5. 10 minutes ago, jaedmc said:

    I don't think Seth has to get the win, when Drew Mac can be the spoiler, and siphon some of this heat for his match on Night 2.

    I mean I guess you could go either way on Night 1, but logic would dictate that the bad guys don't get pinned until Night 2. So Drew and the Bloodline fuck Cody and Seth on Night 1. The good guys couldn't get it done on Night 1 together, what hope do they have on Night 2? Tune in to find out.

    On the other hand, I feel like there's got to be some kind of reward for Seth Rollins somewhere. Something more than beating Drew Mac(again). He's done a lot of great work recently on the microphone trying to make all of these stories work, and it feels like he's getting done dirty with this angle.

    That's my point about it killing Seth Rollins being able to be over. Yes, Rollins is a 'fighting champion,' but as Roman Reigns points out, the title is a second place prize to his titles. The Rock completely destroyed his character last night. All of that should lead to a heel (Reigns/Rock) comeuppance and Rollins getting rewarded, but I'm not holding my breath.

    What's to stop Rollins from going completely off script next week on Smackdown and say, "You know what? Fck this. Since you (Rock) said you'll give my title to someone else, here take it. I quit. I'll call Dean Ambrose and go to AEW."

  6. The Rock's promo essentially killed Seth Rollins and Cody Rhodes as far as being over and giving anyone a reason to want to watch WM40 this year. It came close to killing the always mediocre and boring Roman Reigns from being over too. I halfway expected a response to Reigns' "Rock acknowledge me" to be "Roman Reigns, I acknowledge you....as the biggest piece of monkey crap The Rock has ever seen!"Then The Rock telling Reigns that before Cody Rhodes wanted to 'finish his stupid story,' they were going to fight and The Rock wanted to be "the head of the table."

    It's fine they went the way they did, but I have a hard time believing that Cody Rhodes & Seth Rollins will win at Night 1, much less Rhodes winning at Night 2.

  7. 32 minutes ago, Raziel said:

    It's funny that 45 years later, we're gonna get another crash, fueled by mostly the same reasons the first one happened (Inept, aloof, and delusional Executives squeezing every drop of blood from the stone, unrealistic dev cycles causing programmer burnout and poor games, and a market oversaturation and multiple variants of the same theme that hit once and everyone wants to recreate but missed what sold the first one).  Only thing that this one won't have is the overabundance of physical media causing massive losses, but I guess that's being replaced with Dev costs increasing by orders of magnitude while MSRP's only barely shifted.

    Yeah, if you look at the release calendar for the rest of this year, we have too many games coming out at once. It's borderline impossible to play them all. Due to the volume of games, some people (including me) are having to play catchup with releases from years ago (stretching back to PS3/Xbox 360/Wii generation and for some further than that to PS2/Xbox/GameCube generation). As a hobbyist, you end up not buying anything or becoming selective on what's bought. Another crash might be the only thing that can slow down the releases.

  8. It sadly just shows that game development (and video games in general) is not sustainable as an industry. Almost every company is poorly managed, poorly run companies. Except for maybe Nintendo at times. Although Nintendo has the bright idea of taking fan hobbyists to court over emulators and never allowing their back catalog to be playable if they have their way.

    • Like 2
  9. 8 minutes ago, Villanova Grad said:

    Sony layoffs are no surprise if you paid attention to the last earning call.  Sony’s gaming division has 123 million people logging into PlayStation Network and is reporting record revenue, but probability is as low as it’s been in at least a decade.  Sony’s operating profit - basically, the amount of profit earned before taxes & interest - was 6 percent.  Sony Interactive Entertainment/PlayStation Studios usually has an op around 12 percent.  Several analysts thought Sony.’s operating profit would be closer to 20%.  Nope.  It’s getting damn expensive to make AA & AAA games and the longer your game is in development, the longer you have to wait to start making your investment back,

    Additionally, the incoming president/ceo of Sony Interactive Entertainment, Hiroki Totoki, has made several subtle comments about SIE needing to streamline and become more efficient. I read his statement about the last earnings report and thought he was subtly hinting Jim Ryan wasn’t being frugal enough.

    No business grows forever.  Growth and shrinkage are generally cyclical.  Personally, I feel like the industry peaked creatively 10 years ago or more and we’re just now seeing the fallout from that.  Games are getting prettier and more complex, not necessarily better.  It seems fairly obvious that development costs and the time it takes to developed a finished product are getting out of hand.  My professional self is also kinda put off by the idea that want bankrolled for five years or more without minimal oversight, then don’t expect to shoulder the blame if the finished product is a bad game that doesn’t sell.  A lot can happen in the 5+ years you’re working on a game.  The Rocksteady Studios that finished Suicide Squad wasn’t the same studio that made the Arkham Games, or even the same studio that started work on Suicide Squad.  When the going got tough, the studio’s founders left the company.  A lot of the key staff followed them when their contracts expired.  lol, that’s another argument against very long development cycles.

    Also doesn’t help that development costs are 10-30 times (or more) what they were years ago, but the price of a game hasn’t rises in 40 years or whatever.  We should probably be paying $100 for Triple A titles by now.  But, yeah, studios are gouging us when they ask for a $5 price increase.

    Yeah, we're going to have a scenario where we are paying $100+ for a single title AND there won't be physical copies. Based on the staff cuts and low operating profit, I think we're going to see Microsoft buying PlayStation + all their studios in the next few years. PlayStation will still make PlayStations, but it'll be under Microsoft's direction. PSN and Xbox Marketplace will still be there....but going into the same bucket at Microsoft. I've been saying that for awhile but it's hard not to read the tea leaves and seeing it happen.

    The Last of Us Part III will be the last PlayStation Studios published game.

  10. On 2/8/2024 at 1:22 PM, NoFistsJustFlips said:

    It's being reported that the reason is Damore was constantly butting heads with the CEO because he wanted an increase in the budget to go after bigger stars and continue the growth.

    If that's true straight up Fuck TNA. That man literally dragged your corpse out of the grave with his vision. He grew TNA back into being a talked about relevant brand for the first time since Anthem bought it.

    The Man just drew the biggest gate and biggest buy rate in a decade. His vision was working you cheap fucks. Now they put in a stooge 2020s Jim Herd. And they will fall all the way back into that grave.

    At least lolTNA will be a thing again.

    My guess: Anthem is gearing for a tax writeoff of TNA in the next few years. Next year will be 10 years since they purchased the company. They aren't interested in growing TNA as a business or even care about drawing a gate or a buy rate, they just want to maintain a holding pattern until that time comes. Not sure why they are doing this while saying publicly they want to 'bring TNA closer to Anthem.'

    If that's the case, they'll sell the tape library/brand/company to AEW or WWE/TKO and recoup or take a loss in the sale.

    • Like 1
  11. 3 hours ago, The Natural said:

    Keep Tony Khan away from Twitter. WON Reader Awards 2023 spoilers:

      Reveal hidden contents

    WWE wins Promotion of the Year for the first time since 2000 stopping AEW winning four in a row. Triple H win for Booker of the Year and Nick Khan the Promoter of the Year. Tony Khan had won the former three years running and the latter four.

     

    Also keep Tony away from DVDVR and hope he doesn't reactive his account to respond.

    • Like 2
    • Haha 1
  12. 9 hours ago, The Natural said:

    Alvarez on Adam Page:

    He has to have it looked at and (it) could be a broken ankle. But it does appear to be a serious ankle injury. 

    Sometimes we have people getting injured and we don't know anything about it, they don't say anything, but this guy is fighting for the world title in a little over a week so if he's got a broken ankle, I think we're going to hear about it real quick because they're going to have to come up with something. 

    ---

    Come up with something is the obvious, Samoa Joe vs. Swerve Strickland.

    Fightful Select says angle.

    Jerry Lynn is flipping out on Twitter about "that's ruining a cliffhanger" to ask if it's an injury or not. I don't get why they're doing that the last Dynamite before the PPV. But whatever, I just caught Dynamite the one week I could watch it on TBS.

    • Like 1
  13. 27 minutes ago, DreamBroken said:

    Very much look forward to Danielson/Akiyama. 

    It's nuts that this match is being put on a Saturday show a week or so before a PPV. Why Tony Khan didn't decide to pull back on it and save it for the last show before the PPV on Dynamite I don't know.

    This build up for the AEW PPV hasn't been that enticing to watch.

    • Like 1
  14. 45 minutes ago, SovietShooter said:

    That was all on Madison Rayne. Purrazzo was doing a basic leg sweep/flat liner, and Rayne took it like a DDT. Rayne looked awful the entire match before that too, honestly.  Not sure how she is one of the coaches...

    Yeah, Madison Rayne looked really awful and wrestled like she was underwater. Which caused Purrazzo to have to slow down too.

    • Like 1
  15. I missed all but the first 30 minutes.

    Deonna Purrazzo managed to injure Madison Rayne or come close to it with a dangerous move she shouldn't ever do again.

    I don't buy Daniel Garcia against Christian. I don't really see Christian as a champion or a wrestler either but more of a manager. I thought he was too broken down to wrestle anymore but I guess not.

    Orange Cassidy vs Mike Bennett was boring and meander quite a bit as a match. I don't see Orange Cassidy as a champion either, but Tony Khan does, so we get to see it.

    Wardlow's rant I thought would lead to a wrestler coming out and splashing cold water on it (Miro would have been perfect there for that). Instead, he rants about how he doesn't have the World title (without the Undisputed Kingdom coming out and asking him what's going on), he leaves, and I felt like it was pointless.

    The main event was decent but a mess. Audrey Edwards manages to hog the spotlight when the World champion Samoa Joe is standing there victorious. Didn't see why Joe didn't start yelling at her to get out of the ring, but whatever.

    The upper part of the arena was darken and I didn't see that many fans when the camera would cut over to the commentator's side of the arena.

  16. 9 minutes ago, Phantom Lord said:

    GUNTHER vs. Jey was a good match. It is amazing how much of a match Gunther can do just around a chop. I had a sneaking suspicion that Jimmy would cost Jey the match and he did. I wonder who finally takes the title off Gunther. Who ever it will be shall be a huge star.

    The WWE is starting to run into the danger that Gunther will end up like Roman Reigns and never lose the title. That may turn people off from watching WWE (beyond what's going on outside of wrestling). So I guess Gunther can end Reigns' streak, hold three titles, then whoever can beat Gunther will be a REALLY HUGE star.

  17. Watched bits of Raw. The six women segment was sorta bad and Nia Jax looked like she might have injured Becky Lynch (or that was the appearance).

    Chad Gable and Ivar was decent but the crowd was surprisingly dead for it. Chad Gable really should just change it up a bit and lean more into the Kurt Angle-isms (he and Dominik Mysterio would have a perfect Eddie Guerrero vs. Kurt Angle match if that ever happens).

    I'm so over Gunther at this point. Problem is he had a great match with Jay Uso despite Uso's very limited moveset (although Gunther's moveset was a limited too). It's amazing how he's conditioned the audience to basically respond to a chop and build a match around a chop.

  18. On 2/16/2024 at 4:35 PM, tbarrie said:

    My big beef with House Flipper is that every time I see the name I have to remember it's a game about flipping houses, not about the scions of the famous dolphin vying for power with the other noble houses of the sea.

    You can imagine my constant disappointment.

    Apparently, there's a whole genre of video games where you do real life shit in a video game. There's (and I'm not kidding) PC Building Simulator, Crypto Mining Simulator, Bus Driver Simulator, Car Mechanic Simulator, Car For Sale Simulator, Cafe Owner Simulator, and Garden Simulator among others. I just want to do awesome stuff and pretend I'm a ninja through video games, not replace a simulated gasket on a simulated car.

    Oh and all the ones I mentioned have Platinums.

  19. I ended up buying Skull & Bones and Legend of Heroes Trails of Cold Steel III/IV on PS5 yesterday. Along with Suicide Squad earlier this month.

    Skull & Bones and Suicide Squad will end up being priorities due to a server shutdown in the not too distant future although I may start both earlier while people are playing them.

     

  20. 15 hours ago, RIPPA said:

    Hope everyone is sitting down for this shocking news - the internet over reacted to something

    So all the XBOX news

    First Activision Blizzard game to Gamepass is Diablo IV (this is March 28)

    There are "No fundamental change to exclusivity" - so everyone who thought that Starfield was coming to PS5.... nope (to be fair - the possibility that a game will eventually go onto other systems remains)

    Example - 4 games will be coming to Switch/PS5. (I think they are: Hi fi rush, Pentiment, Sea of Thieves and Grounded)

    Games Pass remains XBOX and PC only

     

    Some of the other sources (Tom Warren, Jeff Grubb) had other information that Starfield, Gears, Indiana Jones and a new Doom were going to be multiplatform. I guess Phil Spencer put a stop to that for  now.

    • Like 1
  21. 2 hours ago, Robert S said:

    As long as consoles make good money (and I assume they do) that's not the movement I expect to see. Rather hardware and software architectures will get even more similar so that developing multiple platform games (or at least porting games) becomes cheaper, at least on the Microsoft and Sony front - I don't see Nintendo's business model (underpowered hardware that is sold - compared to the competition and the performance - overprized fueled by exclusive first part games) stop working as long as they are able to put out a new Mario, Zelda, Mario Kart or Smash Bros. once a year.

    What I mean: Sony is on the second generation using an x86 architecture, same for Microsoft. Even the bigger game developers nowadays use the same middleware or even full game engines. And the time will come when not even EA fill bother with Frostbite and go Unreal Engine - either that or they will try to sell (license) Frostbite (or whatever they will have by that point).

    Of course I might be completely wrong and in ten years there will only be cloud gaming (not that I really believe in that, I can't imagine how latency will even become low and stable enough for action-based games, at least not on a geographically wide-scaled basis).

    Where I'm coming from with that is the number of developers and publishers closing their doors in the last several years with IPs being lost forever. It won't matter so much that Sony and Microsoft are using similar hardware as it will matter that there aren't enough publishers/developers to create software on that hardware. Microsoft has the money and resources to purchase developers/publishers for decades (whether they publish any of their works remains to be seen). I think eventually they'll gobble up large publishers after they merge. They did buy Bethesda and Activision/Blizzard which no one thought would happen. I think the next big movement will be Ubisoft and EA merging and Sony buying Square Enix with Microsoft buying Sega/Atlus. I actually also think Microsoft will buy PlayStation wholesale from Sony and will get out of the Xbox hardware business altogether in probably about 20 years. PlayStation Plus will still be there, PlayStations will still be made, it's just the overall structure will be under Xbox and will have GamePass.

    I'm probably wrong about all of this though. Also, the US government seems gunshy about Microsoft buying anymore companies after their purchase of Activision/Blizzard.

  22. 3 hours ago, Villanova Grad said:

    The incoming president also hinted that Sony will be more aggressive about getting games on PC.  That went over about as well as you’d expect. Bizarrely, people are interpreting the comments to mean SIE won’t be releasing any games over the next 14 months.

    i’m mostly burnt out by the gaming industry these days,  I find the fanboy arguments infiltrating my Twitter feed exhausting.  Honestly, if you’re so invested in a games company you do not work for that porting games to other platforms or not releasing a Triple A system seller in the next twelve months sends you into a rage, you should probably go to therapy. Lots of therapy.  I say that as someone who doesn’t even believe in the value of therapy, really.  Games are supposed to be fun.  I am really skeptical the console warriorz and influencers are having fun.  One of the Nintendo Life guys said on Twitter that the best console is the one you enjoy.  This.  Oh so f***ing this.  My idea of favorite consoles changes at least a few times a year.  My answer to that question now might be different from my answer an hour ago.  There really aren’t any major consoles from the past 25 years that I do not like a lot, usually for different reasons.

    i stopped in at a mom-and-pop retro game shop last weekend and got to discussing where the market is going.  The owner thinks we are going to see $100 games soon.  Lol, that’s one of the few emerging trends I do not hate. Games have been $60 for decades.  Inflation and budgets have skyrocketed in that time. Silent Hill 2 - on my short list for best games ever - cost less than $10 million to develop. Spider-Man 2 cost $300 mil.  If we want games to continue pushing the envelope, we’re going to have to pay for it sooner or later.

    The rest of the industry leaves me cold right now. Development cycles are way too long & there’s not enough experimentation because no one wants to spend five years and $100 million on a weird arthouse game that might flop when you can pour that money into Call of Duty or a live-service game.  Remember the PS3 generation?  4 Halo games and a remake.  Four Gears of War titles.  An entire Dead Space trilogy.  At least four or five Ratchet & Clank titles from Insomniac.  Etc. Now Sony studios struggle to get one double or triple-A game out the door every seven years.  Ugh.  Halo 3: ODST is great and it was developed in less than a year.  The Peter Jackson Halo game was canceled, leaving half of Bungie without a project. Developers pitched ODST and got it greenlit with the caveat that it had to be done in twelve months so the team could join the rest of Bungie to work on Halo: Reach.

    Also, people who won’t buy games that aren’t 60 fps because “it doesn’t feel good” don’t need to talk to me. Ever.

    Okay, rant over,  I feel better.

    I agree - for whatever reason, I've been hooked to PlayStation and their trophy system for a long time. But even then, I see the changes that are happening and they aren't good. As a result, I go back to PS3 days to get Platinum trophies and I'm amazed at how well some of the games from that generation hold up today.

    There is no experimentation whatsoever with Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft. They're all guilty of the same thing. Something like Heavy Rain would never have gotten greenlit  today. Microsoft wouldn't have released Sunset Overdrive today. Nintendo wouldn't even have done Eternal Darkness or Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes on the Switch today.

    Essentially, the costs of development across all three platform holders have driven games to be an unsustainable market. If publishers sell games for $100 MSRP at launch, just wait awhile, it'll be cheaper.

    Eventually, we'll see one console and one publisher if this keeps up.

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