Cliff Hanger

A thought I just had: not that WWE Speed means anything, but that belt's lineage just got wacky with Gable on the shelf and Kaiser walking around in the gear. Do they have him drop the belt to the next tournament winner, or have him hold onto it?

Apparently, New Jack is gonna have a whole separate entrance for No DQ matches where he brings the garbage can full o'weapons and dumps them into the ring, and his theme song (presumably a knockoff) will play thru the whole match just like old times.

Wrong member of the Paul family. I don't think I'd trust Jake to throw a worked punch. That said, Stacks DID challenge their dad to a match, so hell, let's find Jake a match too and make it a family affair.

Even with KSI out of the bag via the Swirch 2 shop we still have one unannounced character left for the WM pack. (I don't really give a shit about Punk and Charlotte or whoever else with their WM41 gear and, to the extent possible, entrances.) Should start getting videos any day now for Bull and friends.

I really should've figured that whether it was tonight or later, Naomi's cash-in would be a jump to Raw. It gets some distance between her and Jade (the last thing we'd need is Jade v Naomi again in three weeks) and sets up Naomi vs Stephanie as a top program.

Had you told me Friday that one match on this show would have several minutes of crowd crawling, i doubt I would have picked correctly. Wild-assed main event. Not a lot of big surprises outside it. Everything was at least fun. Loved Kelani Kingston, Lash carrying Nia (not a surprise since we've seen her do that with Otis but still) and the ultimate finish of the BR. Trish can still go, dammit. Tag match was a lot of fun. Glad TJD retained; i figure they will have to hold the belts until Liv is healthy barring unforeseeables.

Hey, note to everyone, but especially @SirSmugly and @RazorbladeKiss87 who responded to the first post, that I was partially wrong about THPS3+4 not having a Solo Tour mode. You unlock it when you 100% the Crew Tours. Eta: one day I will figure out how to tag users

Retrosoft announced the mystery wrestler for their fall update, and it's Randy Savage? I wouldn't think that was possible unless his Legends deal is expiring and not being renewed.

Honestly, that part made me think of Age of Ultron (the comic event, not the movie) but it's obviously not as well-remembered (in either sense of the phrase) as SoS.

It felt very much like they used the fighting-game model for DLC rather than the sports-game model. I think that works better if you do one pass per year rather than finishing what was announced at launch and turning around and saying "for another $25 we'll give you another pass with fewer wrestlers but it'll have a neat arcade ladder!" before the game is even 6 months old. As for both the terrible tag AI and the lazy-man's-No-Mercy story mode, I never did unlock Brodie Lee and I blame tag matches. Two weeks til Bull Nakano in 2k!

So why throw Drake in there and not Bryce Donovan? If one VP member stays off the Gauntlet, shouldn't that mean you keep your champ (even from a lower tier show) jobbing to a guy who already beat two other guys without a rest break? I smell a betrayal from Monroe on Sat. The Culling are about survival of the fittest, but Spears loses because he saved Niko from getting a honk-honk. Does he really mean it? Somehow, this is simultaneously the least-bad use of Paxley since she was run out of the Diamond Mine. God i feel sorry for these folks. Inamura vs Femi is probably my personally most-anticipated WWE match this weekend, and they can't sell 750 tickets because of when and where they're doing the show.

THPS3+4 not only omits the free-roaming aspects of 4 on PS2 (which I knew about and still bought it), but doesn't have the 1+2 remakes' ability to do the campaigns separately with each character to re-do goals and rewards. In 1+2 yoy got a 'crew tour" where goals were communal but stats had to be picked up by each char, and a "solo tour" where you had separate progression for every skater. In 3+4, unless there's an unlock I haven't reached, if you pick up 9 stat points with Tony Hawk and then switch to another character you just start with 9 points to distribute and repeating goals requires doing the Single Session mode. I've had fun in the 2 hrs I played, but this is absolutely not gonna get the level of attention from me that the first remakes did, and I do regret buying the DDE instead of waiting its first big sale.

The fucked thing is that this is still the most interesting (to me) WWE "major" of the weekend, followed by the Bash, with SNME only rating "welp, I guess if I really need MORE wrestling Saturday night after All In and the Bash, maybe I'll check reactions to see if there was anything worth checking out." I would really like for them to vow not to ever do a non-Mania triple-shot like this again, but I guarantee we will get af least one more before they give up.

Finished Gex 2. I said before that the comedy had aged badly but the platforming holds up better than expected, and that opinion hasn't really changed in spite of a final boss with just enough reliance on luck to make me do a mid-fight save state to get the W. Played a little bit of 3 but (a) the gameplay changes seem to make more problems than they solve and (b) the comedy is much hornier and thus cringier, thanks to the addition of a then-recent Playmate in live-action drop-ins to give you info between missions. I expect to get back to it eventually, but with THPS 3+4 out tomorrow night for pre-orders, I won't be making significant progress for a while.

I barely managed to do that Cody challenge, and only did when I woke up an hour and a half earlier than usual. I always, always forget about count-outs; I'll start a match planning to do one, then by the time I have the 90 points the thought has escaped my head. Thankfully, the card packs made it a wildly productive morning: I got Legends II DDP and Faarooq, the last Oddity I needed for Elite Wyatt, and then I saw that I now only needed one Bronze (Tozawa) to finish a Superstars block and snatch some tokens, I didn't notice that that Tozawa would put me over the top to get the Diamond Jacob for collection. Loaded him up with shitty bronze plates to get THOSE tokens, and then I had enough along with the 100 from Cody to buy two reds from the token shop. Shame the Jacob is the only thing I'm likely to use out of all that. As for Numbers Game II, I'm gonna *try* to only buy Rude and the 70 (Miz?), brcause I know that I will never buy cards from those blocks again. Does anyone know why Shaq's theme song is called "Bible Fight"? All i can hear in my mind's ear when I see it written is Peter Griffin yelling that.

I would buy this but my search is weak. When my parents bought a big ass Onkyo cabinet with our first CD player when I was 12, I inherited the JC Penney turntable/dual cassette/radio rig that had been in the living room since I was 4. My brilliant innovation was to hook the RCA audio output from the SNES into the aux port on the stereo and the video into the VCR, because my TV didn't have RCA jacks, and then laugh when I went to Scout camp and my brother couldn't figure out how to make it work. (The unit had an 8-track player, but I only ever saw one 8-track cassette in my home, a Dobie Gray best-of.) Shirakawa/Mone was real good; if Mercedes didn't have the All In match coming I might have been surprised by the finish. Toni bringing down the exact same meal Mercedes ate at the commentary table was a nice touch. 4-way was fun. Okada/Ibushi was good in that it's clear Kota isn't on the verge of death or dismemberment anytime he gets in the ring anymore, but no one who hadn't seen their earlier work together would really have a reason to get excited. A real Texas Death Match? Hell yeah. The Superman movie hype has me by the throat, as if John Byrne had drawn someone lifting me with one hand on my neck and then throwing or dropping me. Storm's hype segment with Brosnahan made me recall the Queen of the Ring hype segment where she complained to the director that he shouldn't have cut out her gratuitous nude scene despite him telling her the movie had to be PG-13, and that they couldn't use it. Now I kind of want her to bring her gloriously filthy mouth to Maxima.

I think that awareness is what bugs me; there was a time when a WWE ratfuck show would feel like they wanted it to mean something more than "here's a free show to keep you from paying for the other guys" and they aren't even doing that. Femi/Inamura is going to rule, Saints and Page will probably have their usual very good match, but this has been farted into the world as Content and the performers deserve better.

You're correct that Pearce announced this Monday; IIRC Naomi had to "earn" her place as Cargill's replacement in a 4-team match as well. Zaruca is probably the best choice for that match, too. A couple years ago when Perez hadn't really started turning heel yet but they were teasing it with her getting offended by innocuous comments from other women and popping them in the mouth, I kind of wanted to see her and Rodriguez do a "big bulldog little bulldog" gimmick where Roxy would swing at someone bigger than her and hide behind Raquel. I'm not sure how this "Raquel hates Roxy but is stuck with her to keep the belts in TJD" thing is gonna go but it should give us a few good matches if they don't drop the belt at Evo. Boy, Great American Bash sure is the 4th most important wrestling show next weekend, huh? I still don't buy Monroe as a face. Hopefully that's on purpose. Paxley joining the Culling is probably the right move except that the Loyal Perverts are never gonna boo her. But she has better matches working heel, she and Dame have good tag-partner chemistry, and her wandering around backstage being sad is just bad TV. Much as the Bash feels like an afterthought, Femi v Inamura is going to be fucking rad. No one will believe for a second that Inamura has a chance, but this could be the best WWE hoss match since Briggs/Femi/Dijak at SaD 2024. That is 100% not how Luca got brought into the D'Angelo family. He met Tony like a week before joining the Family, before that he was quoting international human rights law to try and get Dijak to stop torturing Joe Gacy in his little office in the loading docks.

Switch 2 version of 2k25 will be out 7/23 and will be in the ecosystem with PS5/XBS and will have the Island. The Switch listing also confirm that KSI is the 5th char in thr 7/23 DLC drop. July MyFaction updates: new factions, all red cards. One of them seems to have been unlocked already? New cards of the month are all 84 OVR. Naomi is the Star of the Month and the new Numbers Game is 63-70 with an OVR 89 Stephanie Vaquer as the prize for getting all 8. I had 3 of the cards (Lola Vice 64, Julius Creed 66 and Kofi Kingston 69) and it seems easier than last month's already not-hard matches as the opponents are greens.

1) I hadn't realized Retromania is still getting updates, but they've promised a pack for Sept with Demolition Ax and Smash (a deal presumably done before they reconciled with WWE), the Rock n Roll Express, Magnum TA and a mystery 6th wrestler. 2) finally contacted 2k support about the "game crashes when I try to update a women's Faction team" problem, and fixed it by clearing my PS5's cache. So I finished the first Numbers Game and got the Amethyst Big E. 3) happily, the "welcome" missions for the DLC are less obnoxious than the Vaquer and MCMG ones. Sadly, they aren't repeatable and only net you one Superstar II booster. 4) I'm not LOVING the Island, but some of its sheer unhinged-ness is pretty fun, like Truth's Coasterquest, the weird historical artifacts Bearer's ghost digs up, and the whole mob movie nonsense with Cena playing Elliot Ness and D'Angelo rolling the barber shop for protection money. And I almost hesitate to mention this, but all the youtubers seem convinced that Celebrity #1 Travis Scott is falling thru and will be replaced with another wrestler based on some Twitter leaker? I should stop looking at WWE2K YouTube.

So I'm seeing from the patch notes that the "Wrestlemania 41 pack" came out today but only the arena? Maybe they should just never announce "TBD" characters again if they're going to be this kind of hassle.

My memory is that the estate really, really doesn't like the Japanese Lensman material, but I could have misread or misremembered or heard it from someone talking out their ass.

I've seen very little GCW, but they seem to have pretty high highs but some absolutely insane lows. Still, they have more reach than just about any sub-TNA company. And I should check out some Deadlock, I've heard good things and some of the Texas talent gets booked there.

Abyss intro is up on Youtube. Not a HUGE surprise that they got his music, given that TNA is practically a vassal of WWE at this point, but good to see. https://x.com/WWEgames/status/1937308228628398340?t=yUZZnwOgC5v0McmVd4cCCw&s=19

So that was a big hit, the kid had the time of her life and wants to go again. Loooong show. Sad Epydemius had to pull out as I'm sure she would have loved him. It hadn't registered to me that United210 was the San Antonio group I'd seen on the news, who'd gotten in trouble with the city for running shows in an undeveloped yard in a residential neighborhood. Before the main, they announced that Borracho and NTPW were donating their share of the proceeds to U210 as they try to get back on their feet. Only a couple weeks after his return from injury, Li'l Evil announced his retirement as he has a C2 hangman's fracture. He had gone out with his prior injury before I got into the local scene, but it always sucks to see someone sustain a life-changing injury like that.