Cliff Hanger

Game engine!

American fans are much more likely to know the creators' next project after SI, Red Dwarf.

Pure RNG but you can only earn each reward once, so if you do it 4 times you're guaranteed all 4 rewards.

A LOT of people went down significantly, especially NXT main eventers. I have completed all the historical matches in Showcase. The only one that really requires spoilers is Firefly Funhouse since a lot of people wondered how they'd even do it. It was a cool experiment. The equivalent of last year's fucking rotten elimination 4 way to unlock Bruno (which took me over a month to beat because I kept getting frustrated and giving up) is Now to walk away from that mode for a while and start a Universe mode with Roxanne.

Even on normal it feels significantly harder this year IMO. Among other things, your stamina starts to run low a lot faster and you have to rest more, but also everything just seems to take tighter timing and it's easier to get caught in a Doom loop.

I forget who called Sabretooth's two minis unnecessary but i absolutely disagree. Hellions was my favorite of the first wave Krakoa books and those minis were a solid followup. Much like MTMTE/Lost Light was my favorite part of IDW Transformers, I think there's always room to be had for a story about the characters who can't or won't fit in with the group trying to build and maintain a whole new society, especially when the society has such distressing vibes from the outside looking in. Exiles wasn't as good as the first mini, but I loved them both.

Yup. Apparently they feel that their use of archival footage doesn't allow them to show anyone not under contract (or a Legend deal with the family for decedents), including announcers or refs. My thought is that THEY think (right or not) that the contracts they signed allow for reissues of the matches, but they would still need likeness rights to show them in a different, interactive medium.

I got to the points where Brock and Vince really couldn't be erased--Austin/Rock at WM17 and Brock/Taker at XXX. Vince appears un-blurred in video footage of his run-in and is referred to as Mr. McMahon in Graves's narration, but you never see him in the game engine. The Brock match is exactly what you'd expect, you play as him and he gets talked up hard, but when you beat the match you get the arena, those versions of Taker and Heyman, but not the guy who you played as. I get that 2k were over a barrel and there was no good way to handle this that didn't involve delaying the game til they could replace two matches the mode would feel bizarre without with something different. But it just feels so fake and weird to have Brock in for that one match, or to blur Vince's face in all the scenes of him holding a mic up to Hogan or Bret and then spend several minutes showing him and talking about him.

I don't know about Q ,specifically but he was all in on the Q-adjacent Operation Underground Railroad stuff. A friend of mine worked with him at the civilian job hr held between leaving WWE and when announcing became a full-time gig again and they were Facebook friends for years. According to Ed (and this is admittedly gossip) he suddenly got super active when Sound of Freedom came out after years of being pretty quiet there, and child trafficking conspiracies were all he talked about and he was super belligerent with anyone who tried to explain that it doesn't remotely work like the movie portrays.

It's back. I don't know how expanded it is beyond a wider variety of GMs and brands because I've never played it in 2k22 or 23

I regret to inform everyone that there is no "whoop that trick" chant in Williams's intro. Maybe one of the DLCs will address this grievous oversight like last year when they fixed Sami's music. After work I'm probably going to finally buckle down and make one of my Rise characters (those always take me hours because I'm not super inclined toward that type of creativity but I am still weirdly persnickety about them being good enough). I want to finish one of the stories and Showcase pretty soon, at which point I'll go back to Like a Dragon and this game will mostly be me doing Universe and Faction modes while I listen to podcasts for a bit

I feel really weird for not realizing til this weekend that Trick Williams was almost certainly named as a pun on late actor Treat Williams

I bet the quote tweets of this report are totally normal

So two I know in there are Elite John Cena (same action figure gimmick as last year, use code YOURSTORY2K24 to get it) and Trick Williams 22 (basically the version from last year's game). It looks like the main things unlockable now (more may get added) otherwise are parts for create mode, and Trick is tied to collecting a particular matched set.

After a couple of pretty disappointing weeks, NXT had a lot fewer problems tonight. Crusifino does what I honestly expected to happen as soon as I knew who they were last summer, the main matches were all good, and the forward motion was much needed. Luca going from showing up in Dijak's dark closet to talk about human rights law and then joining the Mafia two weeks later is pretty funny, but I'm kind of surprised it took this long to get the Italiam-American lawyer into the consigliere role.

You can have fun with it for a good while for free, probably all the way thru the current single pllayer content. But when the new additions start dropping, the free packs will leave you at a huge disadvantage. If you send a Gold or Emerald-ranked guy in against someone who's spending real money to get Diamond level cards as soon as they start getting added, or into a 3v1 handicap vs the CPU, you'll be up against someone with double your life bars who hits way harder than you. Last year I tapped out after chapter 5 of 9 of the big Proving Grounds mode (each chapter is 30 matches with 3 difficulties, and you get either a free pack of cards or a single high-level card for beating a five-match sub chapter with the Legend difficulty on every match) and at about week 22-23 of the smaller towers that get added Mondays--though I could still enjoy the Faction War 4v4 matches.

I'm still at work and can't check yet. The ones I know for sure are Steamboat, Savage, Liz, George Steele, Andre, retro Hogan, Rude, Warrior and Heenan. In later matches I'm not sure who's completely locked and who's just a Persona. There's also the fictional characters from prior years' Rise stories in this year's Rise, not sure if there are any Legends locked like Molly and Jean-Paul Levesque last year or if it's just arenas and fictional chars. ETA: Okay, while there are a lot of alternate versions in Showcase, it looks like the only other totally-locked wrestlers are Bret, Shamrock, Angle and Rousey per the Universe Mode char select, though there are 3 "???" entries that presumably come out in either Rise or, like Bruno last year and Dom the year before, are un-advertisrd Showcase rewards for 100%ing the mode.

I feel like I should mention that I have not spent a dime on that mode in the 3 years it's existed, I just play til it gets too hard to continue without spending money and then nope out. But I certainly don't blame y'all for just avoiding it entirely. At the very least you may want to boot up the mode one time to unlock classic Seamus (including his theme song) then bail without actually doing a match.

It's basically an arcade tower mode with EA Ultimate Team-style gachapon card drawing to unlock new characters. It's hypermonetized to shit and back, unfortunately, but you get enough freebies to hold my interest. You set up teams of 4 men, 4 women and a manager, and throw them at a series of matches with various rule sets. Right now, only the nerfed lower-quality versions of characters are available, more will roll out over the coming year and eventually most new cards will have better stats than the "real" versions in the other modes. I wish it weren't so determined to bully me into spending more money (I will not be spending more money), but I find it really relaxing to play with a podcast on because it's just an endless string of matches with different rules.

Immediate thoughts and observations after 2 hrs or so playing 2k24 before work: 1) it feels significantly more difficult. That's not a bad thing in the early going, but as I get deeper into Faction mode it's gonna piss me off. 2) Vince's face has been blurred out in the historical footage. No idea what the WM17 match is gonna be like. Corey Graves hosts the intros and narrates the historical footage; after 3 matches Hogan is the only other person to do new jnterview footage (but between Savage/Steamboat, Hogan/Andre, and Rude/Warrior, Steamboat's the only other one still around) 3) a lot of the Legends are gated behind Showcase matches; guys like Warrior and Savage who are usually purchasable are now there. (I wish there were a way to get the Deluxe Edition without having to get the Supercharger; I'm weird and I LIKE having a shop full of little things to unlock) 4) they added all the Big Event stage dress for NXT except I think Heat Wave, which is cool.

That was a really good podcast but I hope that afterward, someone took Dave aside and told him that the G-word is a slur against Romani and not appropriate anymore to describe people who live on the road because of their jobs. Maybe I'm oversensitive, but I flinched.

I am just starting to catch up on Evercade carts after not buying any since early 2022 (the Wolf Team/Renovation and Gremlin Graphics carts) with the second Intellivision and first C64 carts. It's really interesting that the C64 was a success both here and in the UK, but the Epyx games are the only ones that were hits in both countries and otherwise we had totally different experiences.

In advance of the new game dropping tomorrow at 11pm Central, I decided to try to watch some of the historical showcase matches I'd never seen (or in the case of Rock v Austin from WM17, only seen thru binoculars from the back row of the top deck of the Astrodome). My first stop was the first match in the game, Savage v Steamboat, and while by modern standards it was merely very good it must have seemed like an incursion from an alternate Earth at the time. I had intended to skip straight to the main on 17, but find myself watching more than I'm skipping. I have literally no memory of the hardcore 3 way or the trios match between Taz/APA and Right to Censor, my memory jumps from Jericho/Regal to Benoit/Angle

He hasn't been seen or mentioned since he lost the rematch with Oba Femi at V-Day, and if he's injured I haven't heard about it. I've been wondering what happened too.

At this point I think it's just gonna be a tradition that whoever picks the songs for the soundtrack gets to be DLC. I preferred Bad Bunny being a separate piece of launch-day DLC last year over MGK in 2022 and Post in 2024 being in one of the big packs. Man I fucking hate that we have to wait til Sept for Dragon Lee and Lyra Valkyria and Nov for the WCW legends.