Firebreaker Chip

Yeah, it would definitely help. I'd like to be able to make the matches go a bit longer as well, although I appreciate the intent behind making them quite condensed and bitesize for accessibility. Also noticed quite a lot of moves have pin combos (though they went unused in the stream) but so far there's still only one slightly awkward regular pin animation unless you're Orange Cassidy. They mentioned chain wrestling and secret hidden moves in each character's moveset abeing in there I think

Key takeaways are that Orange Cassidy's hands stay in his pockets after he taunts and he can pin people that way, and MJF has a signature headlock takeover with a pin combo Still some slight jank with collision and AI behaviours (AI taunting to get a finisher which it wastes because the opponent is outside the ring, then winning a match by pinfall after dragging an opponent who had been in a submission for one second before a rope break), but it looks fun

What channel was this on? Edit: OK someone uploaded it https://youtu.be/TEfwDzvrLFw

Feel like the main ticking timebomb at this point is how small and out of date the roster will be. If they have concrete plans for DLC packs or ongoing support they'd do well to get specifics out there really quick after the final roster is announced. Wonder if they were able to work on post-launch content throughout the delay

A clip from this was on one of the recent Botchamanias and it reminded me that even though I prefer Punk's vision of wrestling to most of the rest of the AEW roster, there's a decent chance he's still a garbage human being If that sort of stuff was the root of the Elite beef with him I could understand it, but it's not like Cabana wasn't sitting there with him yukking it up too

Ah gah I got allocated a floor seat by the entrance even though I wanted the ones in the same price band in the stands. I guess I'm not actually seeing anything. The seating chart they provided is like the most low res thing I've ever seen lol

Getting good seats for Wembley stadium was a piece of piss. The company's doomed

I was confused by this. It seemed to be saying you could use the Fite one to register between 9 and 11 and would then work when it opens at 11 but it wasn't clear

She seems really well-liked but I find her style way too corny and artificially screamy, idgi

Haha I've just seen the payload of Sting/Flair/Giant/Adam Cole content WhatsTheStatus dropped, Sting and Giant's old voice samples triggering, crowds actually chanting "Adam Cole Bay Bay", absolute king shit

Pushing Danielson as a top heel is never a bad idea imo. Both of the last times he had a heel run (WWE planet's champion->evil mob boss and the early AEW run) he pretty much immediately established himself as the most compelling dickhead heel in the business, and both times he just sort of got reverted back face prematurely without much fanfare while there was still plenty of mileage in it maybe they can commit to him as the deranged mob boss ordering the bigger guys around thing again idk I guess he went home to think and realised the reason he was so upset was that lost to MJF because he wasn't evil enough

I just bought that pack this evening because I decided to do a 2002 WWE Universe mode rather than wait ages for all the good AEW or WCW edits to be ready. There's a Deacon Batista alternate attire for the Leviathan on CC that I'm gonna push with Devon as a manager. WhatsTheStatus has also managed to make a 2005-era non-bald Bastista alt attire available (you attach it to the Batista '08 unlocked in Showcase) as well. I had to do a lot of wrangling and restarting to get the first Raw show to not be gibberish booking (and Scott Hall randomly decided to make Jeff Hardy come out as his manager as an angle instead of bringing Bischoff lol), but the in-ring in this game is so great. I had great matches with Syxx vs Hurricane (Syxx on top suckering Hurricane with a fakeout handshake, weathering a feisty comeback and tapping him out with the chicken wing after Hurricane had splatted missing a suicide dive), RVD vs Kane (RVD jumping Kane at the start to try and get an advantage, but missing both frog splashes he went for at the crucial points of the match and going down to two chokeslams in a row) and then a barn burner main event with Shawn and HHH vs Lance Storm and Test that I let the AI run. Both sides were taunting each other and exchanging blows a lot, Storm and HBK kept on having their superkick attempts dodged or interrupted, and when Shawn finally went for a superkick with a clear-cut window on Lance, Storm quickly went for a rolling boston crab at the same time and it interrupted the superkick startup totally smoothly and locked him in the submission. There were a couple of big nearfalls off HHH's spinebuster and Test's elbow drop, the pinfalls from the main finishers got broken up and the finish was a bloody triple H running along the apron with a jumping knee to knock Test off the apron to the floor where he was KO'd, then returning to the ring to drop a bloody, kneeling, helpless Storm with a vicious right hand for 3. A pedigree would've been better, but it had a kind of All Japan "doctors about to jump in the ring as soon as the bell goes" finality to it (and Michaels was in fact revealed to have sustained a minor leg injury after the match). Then Hogan and Nash came out to laugh at them. I don't know if it's having the "disrespectful" or "egotistical" sliders up high, but certain wrestlers taunt very often earlier on in matches, and it almost leads to a kind of story-driven aspect to AI matches where someone hits a big running attack, stops to taunt, and then their opponent pops up and hits a running move to them and does their own taunt afterwards in a tit-for-tat kind of way. And the announcers are always like "he's not going to lie there getting insulted like that!", it's kinda fun. I'd still prefer my early pace-setting to be in the form of actual chain wrestling but I'll take what I can get You can turn off the camera cuts and/or the shaky-cam individually. The camera cuts in the game are way less maniacal than Mr KD's though, other than the occasional one entirely taken up by a shot of the ref's ass

There are 100 CAW slots, and if you set up a 2k account the community creations are cross-platform so you can get the best version of each wrestler/arena/moveset /title available. If you don't like the moveset the creator gave them (which I often don't) you can edit it or download a different moveset from another creator to overwrite it. The servers on Steam have been mostly down for me since full release, but at the times where they have been up the functionality for previewing and downloading Caws has been way smoother and faster than previous years. Also cool is people can add custom renders to the CAWs themselves this year so they already have a proper matchup screen photo as soon as you download the CAW. Last year you had to manually assign them, and there was also a bug that corrupted saves if you downloaded more than a handful. You can edit stats, skills ("paybacks"), AI tendencies and movesets for any wrestler

It's just tendency-based, so you can set various actions' likelihood on a scale of 0 to 100, so theoretically Rock would climb the top rope rarely, Rey would often and Nash never would. It's like a much expanded version of a similar feature that was in the SVR games. There's no move sequencing logic like fire Pro, which would be a good next step for it

What difference does this make? It sucks that the career mode is back to dumb contempt for the audience wacky shit like the 2k20 one seemed to be. I didn't think the 2k22 one was bad, although the social media stuff was annoying. The storylines were just too self-contained. They really just need to make recyclable variants of the storylines that randomly recur as options to pursue, so you can be on any brand and have it run endlessly like the Here Comes the Pain one

It annoys me that the chain wrestling and rest hold stuff still isn't back, because that really makes the early parts of matches just a parade of moves and combos that don't make sense that close to the start, but it's really cool how some of the position feeding animations from 2k19 are back; the AI seems really well tuned to respond to them and take the opportunity to hit e.g dives and rope moves organically without there having to be loads of slow motion dragging or Irish whipping. Seen some cool sequences on youtube

I always assumed the Undertaker's streak ending was just to fund a few little retirement nest eggs for some officials in the company

Did GCW just name a show that first or something? Where does "fight forever" actually originate? I had thought it was just a (vaguely cringe) chant that occurred spontaneously during the Zayn vs Nakamura NXT match. It did seem a bit strange for AEW to coopt the phrase for their game name on that basis. It's presumably going to have to come out way later in the year and even more out of date anyway now, to avoid getting swallowed up by the seemingly competent WWE 2k23 2k23 having some rudimentary custom AI logic and more detailed difficulty tuning settings definitely has me interested (if they in fact actually do anything, which isn't guaranteed with this series).

That was a Foley-quality promo by Bryan imo On the preceding Khan announcement I was increasingly alarmed to note that he didn't blink AT ALL during it

That's better from the point of view of gradual wear and tear from repeat bumps and the associated fatigue of a gruelling touring schedule etc, but with the stuff Darby does he could easily kill or paralyse himself off a single bump

This was the ninth consecutive Dynamite where Tazz used the term "yambag" at least once. The streak almost ended, but then he said it during the main event.

Same! Except I'm 39. Worldwide was a godsend back then with all those Dustin/Barry/Steamboat/Dangerous Alliance matches, and the weird curios like Vinnie Vegas, DDP before he actually wrestled and the Diamond Stud

He's beginning to resemble this giant of the broadcasting game, which can only be an auspicious sign

Late rep for how incredibly dumb and funny some of the picture-in-picture commentary on the Fite feed was on this show Tazz quietly mumbling "I might buy a bat and name it"

The style recalibration thing, with Punk's scoop slams getting a big pop and everything, seems like a real wasted opportunity Weird to think that in the last decade NXT had got to the point where wrestlers were getting big reactions from crowds in high profile matches doing spinning heel kicks and belly to belly suplexes as finishers, and now we're at this constant parade of head drops on the apron and whatever else (not that AEW is to blame for that, NXT veered into the OTT maximalist direction post-Gargano-Andrade of its own accord, but AEW has certainly enthusiastically enshrined a lot of the most counterproductive aspects of the modern indie style)