John E. Dynamite

I'm fine with The Kyle Match on account of Fletcher assuming all the chants were in support of him during that long heat segment. And that was at the end of a four hour double taping - if that's what the crowd had to do to stay engaged, oh my God, go for it.

I made another More Than Halfway Done stack of games to beat from my backlog (+ accompanying Google doc) Atelier Ryza, Alwa's Awakening (NES version), Drakengard, Hypnospace Outlaw, Utawarerumono, the extra Persona 5 content, Zack & Wiki, Star Fox Assault, Layton Mystery Journey, Neon White, Ufouria, Pokemon Mystery Dungeon RRT, GTA V, Puyo Puyo Tetris, Plumbers Don't Wear Ties Knocked out Neon White first and it made me realize how much of my partially-finished backlog comes from games not having enough goddamn hand-eye bleeding-thumb my-thirtieth-attempt-will-be-THE-ONE kind of stuff. Cause I finish those. You know what's filled the void? Puyo Puyo Tetris. I got Platinums on every level of Neon White and even some Reds when I really liked the level and/or realized the super shortcut. The most gamerly thing I've done all year. But I'm on the seventh and final world of PPT, I got three star rankings on every level in the first four-and-a-half worlds and going for 100% is simply not gonna happen. There are good games I love. Like GTA V, turns out? I am a very low vote on 4. Guess I just love Los Santos There are bad games I love, I knew Drakengard was this going into it but props to Utawarerumono for being a truly engaging work that I would recommend to exactly zero people. There are good games I want to smack upside the head, like P5R (which would be better served by being half as long), and even games so bad that they're awful. Layton 7 is a travesty, but I'm glad LEVEL-5 has all that sweet, sweet Fantasy Life money to attone for it.

I know that some really cool person - quite possibly somebody within *our* circle - had an ongoing Twitter thing where they posted baffling Mongo McMichael solutions to the common "how do I do this move?" question. I want those .gifs and I want to spread them as far and wide as I possibly can. Osamu Nishimura -> Black Terry -> Steve McMichael feels outright personal. I would buy a ten tape compilation of their alternating matches in a heartbeat.

Still the best AEW show I've seen in that arena. Hook puked.

Absolutely mainlining AEW on Max so I can catch up for the next Baltimore show. November to Today is my monthy goal and it's going great. If I was still good at posting about pro wrestling I'd have a whole big list of takes and talking points, but in lieu of that, here's this - Mark Brisoe is at worst a Top 5 guy in this promotion. Mark Briscoe can do pure doomed JttS babyface better than anyone on the roster - Mortos is very good at the heel version, I should mention. He's the best ring general in tag team matches. His performance in the last Blood & Guts was the undeniable centerpiece of the match due to this. He doesn't just promo well, he promos in under a minute purely to get a crowd revved up in a way that is such a lost art. He bleeds good. I know what his character is, and he wrestles like it. And when called upon to deliver a big ol' kickouty epic, he finds ways to implement the face/heel dynamic and proper timing in ways that most are too eager to even consider. It's like there are two wrestling geniuses inhabiting his one body. I think he's the truest Five Tool Player in the entire business.

Jumbo and Misawa won multiple TC matches with cradles. And even if it wasn't a TC match, there's... Jumbo vs. Misawa.

Figured I'd pop in to share my thoughts for the first time in awhile but I forgot these threads are just the same guy making half the posts / responding to himself and talking about why things allegedly suck. I really don't know when to blame the product or blame the never-ending information war, but I used to like talking about wrestling on the internet. Now, without fail, every time I enjoy something I sign in to anywhere I just get blasted over and over again with hate and tired, compulsively negative talking points, regurgitated from the worst podcast and shitheadedest Twitter chuds. This is culture now. Negativity gets more engagement, the compulsively negative create more content, I can't tell what's actually good or bad because bad's going to win out regardless. This might be the same post I've been making all year, I don't know, I haven't been on a bender in awhile. Will Hobbes is neat. The semis were put together smart. Ospreay/Fletcher got to the point (relative to their expected excess) and Okada/Ricochet read the room and didn't burn the crowd out. I've been biting my lip for months re: Okada dooming while thinking the entire time "he's going to win the CC and wrestle Kenny in Texas". Funny that. I totally buy a Mox injury. Don't know if I embrace or dread a pivot if it comes to that. Two very good women's matches on a main PPV card and a very storyline-relevant one on the preshow hasn't happened that often. Ever? I think you can trust Toni, Kris and Willow with any-and-everything. They look like the division's unshakeable nucleus. WWE is trying to get wrestling media to describe their debut Netflix RAW as "Wrestlemania-worthy" so I'm less concerned about Rated FTR vs Death Friends being given away too quick when they should load that sucker up.

random thought occurred to me today as I stumbled into a half-casual wrestling conversation about the prevalence of Canadian Destroyers and how they're a sign of a world gone mad and it got me to thinking about the DDT. and how it was the prior example of a move that meant instant death when applied by its creator before turning into a transition move i was always sympathetic to what became of the DDT due to the time I spent backyarding in high school. they're easy. they don't hurt. the person taking the move is the one in control. they look good. i guess what i'm getting at is that the current generation of professional wrestlers have turned the Destroyer into what it is now because i have to assume Canadian Destroyers are significantly safer and less painful than taking a flat back bump. that wrestlers can't help but calculate the ratio between how much a move hurts (or can hurt) vs. how much the crowd thinks they hurt, and have decided that the Destroyer, no pun intended, offers the most bang for their buck. like i 100% have to assume wrestlers think to themselves, whether they mean to or not, "why do we do moves that actually hurt but don't look that painful instead of moves that look like death but don't hurt one bit?". and then end up devaluing the moves that don't actually hurt because they now possess the knowledge that they don't hurt. when you know for a fact that taking a reverse hurricanrana is exponentially more pleasant than taking a bodyslam, like... can we at least understand how things wound up the way they are? because i never see that point brought up in any conversation.

edit: i have one dumb idea and i forgot it breaks the rules

WWE won this phase of the war in part by courting a fanbase less interested in self-loathing. An actually good PPV and an important middle act in AEW's current "Misery Era". I expect more rainbows and spirit bombs to happen when that first wave of fresh eyeballs hits on MAX.

The number of kids outright wishing death on Dutch Mantell around the internet is what I get to wake up to today. On the bright side, maybe tonight will be worse. I just can't wrestling-on-the-internet anymore.

Lotta games took me maybe two or three spins to figure out what they were actually asking of me. I bounced right off of Attactics like I do all tower defense until I realize the enemy couldn't shuffle their units and archers were OP, then I started blowing through it. The mechanics behind Devilition are pure chain-reaction and get thick once they click. Block Koala isn't nearly as obtuse as it looks. Party House is probably the most modern game in the compilation, again I took one look at it and ran away, took two looks and found out it's pure deckbuilder, super tight and straightforward once you get to the nuts and bolts, all about managing risk and keeping your rolodex manageable. And oh my God is Rail Heist revealing itself to be the most mechanically sound thing in here. Once you realize how line of sight triggers stuff, what you can do with objects, how to stay crouched and rolling, what you can punch holes in, how to drop motherfuckers right outta the bottom of the train... I don't even use the pistol. I just get in there and raise hell. My lungs are back after COVID and I'm gonna return to my obsessive DDR playing soon, and I need to peel myself off of UFO 50 because I started the original Dark Cloud on PS2 and actually really like it. But I haven't had anything burrow its way into my brain like this since... *maybe* Bloodborne when I played it 2 years ago. My only pro tips are 1) Don't play chronologically. You end up playing the most simple games first that way and it doesn't represent the spread as well. 2) Pilot Quest is an idle game. It plays itself when you're playing other stuff, so try to start it early. 3) The biggest and fairest knock on the game is that there maybe should have been instruction manuals. Most of the games are straightforward enough to pick up and play, some stuff like Barbuta and Mooncat are very much vague on purpose, but something like tabletop resource-and-warfare game Avianos is made a lot better by going online and looking up what the hell you're doing.

Yeah, Ojiro Fumoto (Downwell guy) is one of the core half-a-dozen designers. We don't know exactly who made what because all the credits are in-universe and part of a fictional game company, but he's listed on Wikipedia as also having worked on Pingolf (sort of explains itself) and the... sidescrolling Outrunner shmup. Half the list is incomplete and I'm curious what else he did.

I don't give a tastefully-choreographed fuck about how we're defining the mainstream these days, all I know is UFO 50 has an idle resource gatherer, a deckbuilder, multiple tower defense games, two avant-golf joints, a proper Metroidvania, and an at-least-over-ten hour RPG on top of a lot of other games that push the point home that the game design involved is much more modern and QoL driven than the aesthetic lets on. Maybe not across the board as there's some deliberate obtuseness and arcade-ism in the top third of the "chronology", but those have their own charms and feel a lot more fair than your standard 80's score attacks. The games want to be played. Ugh. The Rally-X/Splatoon thing. The reverse Downwell actually made by the Downwell guy with the Kid Icarus vibes. The grid based chain reaction demon blower upper. The one where you use your spent 1UPs as meat platforms. The art game with the dumbest controls. Golfball Zelda. Two very different and brilliant polarity shifter/VVVVVV/Gravity Man-likes. Subnautica as Metroid. The Elevator Action? train heister. The physicsy shuffleboard/carom Stratego. The rock-solid Pocky & Rockylike. The Disney-license-Capcomesque with the smartest shrink mechanics I've ever encountered. The joy in being this overwhelmed is kind of hard to turn into words but tbf my brain has been reduced to absolute mush.

If you're not on UFO 50 right now my heart cries for you. I don't know how it's mathematically possible for anything else to be GotY.

I'd say it's often the "default" gimmick in the way that a lot of redneck/cowboy/working man gimmicks are and thus wind up being the gimmicks of people who aren't particularly creative. But The Acclaimed are like, this very online modern rapper/Reddit troll/Attitude Era throwback/actually queer thing that for all its good and bad isn't anywhere near the standard "urban" gimmick. I will resist the urge to unpack further.

There's a completely legitimate case that wrestling should be an outlet for the most savage parts of the human heart, that the very foundation of the artform is built upon the tragic catharsis of retributive violence and its unending consequences. There's a completely legitimate case that wrestling should exist as live theater shonen anime, where magically strong buds struggle to beat the bad guys and then do because they learned a new move and their hair/pants changed color and they yelled real loud. I think an ideal version artform can and should have room for both.

The point of the violence is to shock the crowd and make them feel things. But every time you do that, a certain segment of the populace will take the trick the wrong way. Some inadvertently, some will be "performatively ignorant" and rail against it in a way that has become common in this weird, modern propaganda war that blights most forms of wrestling discussion across the lower rungs of social media. The last time I tried to express this, I worded it as poorly as I've worded anything on these boards. I haven't got my thoughts together on it, but... I don't know. Something about being mad at a magician for sawing a lady in half. Maybe it is sexist. Her intestines are fine, though.

Yeah I'd rather take the syringe spot than a superplex at this point in my life. I get my blood drawn just fine. Probably would as a teen, I'd take the bump better but the acne would hide the wound.

First half was an all timer. Second half was Mercedes *really really really doing a bad job trying to ad lib over a busted weave???* and some shock spots that I have seen too many times over the last 20 to 30 years. The bag callback, ok, Terry Funk fanboyism is fine. The syringe thing never grossed me out, I've just seen the same thing happen since buying Big Japan VHS when VHS was the only way to buy it.

I don't know when I'm going to be able to play it but I need Astrobot to sell every damn copy it can, and remind Sony that they are both still allowed to make fun single player games and use all the old franchises they are sitting on. Every version of a just universe has Astrobot paving the way for Ape Escape 4.

I could go on about WayForward. They were a small company that did a lot of cheap licensed games, but they usually managed to do a better job than anybody expected (Wendy the Witch as a gravity-flip platformer? I love it.). They made Shantae at the tail end of the GBC's life cycle, so it barely sold but it was so out-of-nowhere great that it instantly became a major "hidden gem" and has been one of the most expensive and sought-after physical games for collectors. When the series got revived the Shantae sequel became the defining DSiWare game. It is a legitimately great game of no small historical significance. They did Ducktales: Remastered, Contra 4, the Boy and His Blob reboot, Aliens: Infestation on DS, Mummy: Demastered, the Advance Wars remakes, Migty Switch Force, they did this real neat RPG/horizontal shmup hybrid on GBA called Sigma Star Saga that I guess is getting a remake next year? Even a lot of their "bad" games are pretty interesting and worthwhile, like the GBC WWF beat em up and the Silent Hill dungeon crawler. They're also making a brand-new GBA game, they're finishing a half-completed Shantae game from back when and it looks great. No chance in hell it beats Good Boy Galaxy as the best brand new GBA game (masterpiece~) but I really hope those two games can kickstart a modern GBA scene.

Shades of when the Styles Clash was breaking people's necks. This is a perfect example of the "wrestlers instinctively tuck their necks" problem that has led to less front bumps and flapjacks/back body drops.

The announcement of the Trails in the Sky remake is a pretty big deal. Trails has become thee story-driven traditional JRPG series of the last 20 years (the worldbuilding is frankly ridiculous), but there's always been the issue of their accessibility and which game to start with first. Before this, Sky First Chapter was only available on PSP and Steam and it looks and plays like a 20 year old game. Trails of Cold Steel 1 (sixth game in the series) was Trails' commercial breakthrough and is a decent introduction, but it 1) isn't on Switch 2) pushes the anime cringe + bloat boundaries. The Crossbell games ARE on Switch and they're great but they outright spoil the Sky trilogy. Add that to the daunting length and sheer amount of lore, they aren't exactly the easiest sell. A full 3D version of the relatively approachable first game, apparently using the good old translation and likely having English VA is exactly what the series needs. And I gather that the newest-to-the-US Trails Through Daybreak is both real good and doesn't deal too much with the other games' plots, so hopefully a lot of Switch nerds go Daybreak -> Sky FC.

Rest In Half The Peace That I Have It says something about modern wrestling that Sid's work and character is so resoundingly fresh to watch in 2024. I don't know *exactly* what it says, but I don't watch Sid for coherence. Maybe it's that we don't have anybody that gigantic, crazy and loud anymore but Sid set a high bar.