tbarrie

This strikes me as a case of excessive insistence on traditional face/heel lines. You're not supposed to be cheering for anybody; you're supposed to be curious to see how things will play out between this mix of personalities. The fact that everybody involved is an asshole doesn't preclude its being compelling television.

Well, there's no reason to think Cap knew he could change that (if he even could, which I'm not convinced of). Presumably he assumed Bruce knew what he was talking about.

Yeah. Which implies you can change the past with time travel, you just have to be subtle enough that the universe doesn't catch you doing it.

And yet, there was an aged Steve Rogers in the present after young Steve went back. Where did he come from?

The Lee-Romita era Spider-Man came in at 50. I thought it would do better than that, maybe top ten.

Yeah, I don't know if I ever mentioned that I didn't get the hype around Silver, but after Full Gear that was no longer the case. His reactions to Orange's schtick were hilarious and he more than held his own when it was time for the action to get serious. Last night's performance wasn't as good, but it was still good.

I'm now imagining that Manny Fernandez had no prior involvement with either Valiant or Valiant's opponent, and that stipulation was just added so he could act as, I don't know, decoration or something.

Hall couldn't keep track of who was in the NWO any better than the rest of us.

So would that mean Lucas still has to pay royalties for works Disney republishes? I don't see how canonicity is relevant here...

I thought he lit his pants on fire to signify that he was a liar.

The three workers in question should all switch to just painting a quarter of their faces. That way they can avoid overlap, and there's even room for one more to join in.

I disagree. Butcher and Blade winning would have been the wrong result. I think B&B have a lot more future potential that QT & Dustin, but it was blow-off match to a feud that's been building for a while. The wronged babyface gives the heel their comeuppance by beating them in the blow-off match. That's booking 101. If they were thinking of hotshotting B&B into a title feud in the next couple of weeks or something, then maybe there would be an argument to buck convention and have B&B win. But they're not. There'll be plenty of time to rebuild B&B if they ever do decide they want to seriously push them.

I'd agree with that. Create-A-Wrestler seems to me to be a textbook example of the sort of frill they could do without in the first game and add it later if there's demand.

The worst thing is that I recall the commentary in the WWE games being decent about six or eight years ago. Not great, but perfectly tolerable if you had reasonable expectations. Then a few years later it started sucking again for some reason. That being said, being able to turn commentary on or off would be pretty fucking easy to implement and would probably satisfy everybody.

Just to be a random data point, I totally expect wrestling games to have a good GM/booker mode, and couldn't care less how good the CAW feature is, or frankly whether it exists at all. No idea how common consumers like that are, but we do exist.

I'm curious - are they sympathetic because she's taking beatings, or because she's a victim of bad writing? Not that I'm poo-pooing it if it's the latter or anything. That's clearly a valid way to get face heat in 21st century wrestling.

I'm sure on some level I knew this already, but... the Flair-Funk blow-off was on a Clash? Not a PPV?

That sounds like a good opportunity for me to segue into one of my favourite things, bitching about other fans' bitching. In this case, the not infrequent complaints about the fact that Bray's promos were ultimately just nonsense that sounded cool when you first heard it. Were these people expecting him to be giving sound, well-thought-out reasons why joining his family is a good idea? Reasons that would actually stand up to rational analysis? It's a fucking cult! There are no such reasons! Portentous-sounding nonsense is exactly what the character should be spouting!

Then you have to wonder why they hired such useless people in the first place.

Oh, the actual wrestling is light years better than the days when WWE would send out two half-trained models to wrestle for three minutes and call it a title match. No question there. But the booking of AEW's women's division is way too close to that era. Sure, and both Moxley-Kingston and FTR-Bucks were ultimately about wrestlers wrestling because they want to be champion. But I think you'd have to concede that they put a bit more effort into the build for those matches than a tepid interview segment two weeks before the PPV followed by some brief interaction on the go-home show. And if they hadn't, fans would rightly have given them shit for it. If it's not good enough for the men, it shouldn't be good enough for the women either.

Though interestingly enough, according to said calendar, it is Rusev Day. Odd that Miro doesn't have a match.

No. Wait, let me check my calendar. ...no.

Maybe I'm unfairly stereotyping Mama Kingston, but I'd think she'd rather have a grandchild. Which means he's not promising to celebrate with his mother, he's promising to rub it in his mother's face. That's some pretty great heeling.

Yeah, I normally don't agree with the criticisms that Cody positions himself as the top guy over Moxley. But that was certainly an interesting choice to end the show with.

Can't be the exact same way. You're not objectively wrong about Hogan.