Death From Above

From your front porch you can see the sea.

I just plugged in No Mercy for the first time in years. First of all my memory card is screwed which is probably no surprise. I'll have to see if it was one of those "haven't turned it on in years" wipes or if it just doesn't work at all before I fiddle with this too much. I forgot how relatively fun hardcore stuff was in that game. The part where you can brawl in the bar and break the pool table with a brainbuster is hilarious. The ladder match also isn't completely God awful which in itself seems nearly impossible.

This was an amazing game, for 8-bit. Doesn't really compare to the modern more fleshed out games but I agree it wins the 8-bit wars by a mile. It had some pretty neat features to it. The cinematic up-close shots of finishers that would play when low on health were really 15 years ahead of the curve. And play by play! I remember going to buy something else (probably one of the WWF games) and it being sold out, and buying this as second choice. That worked out really well. Dr. Guildo 4 ever!

Nine out of ten days, Keiji Muto. Problem is when he actually gets the knobs going all in the right directions on that tenth day he's actually really good, and has been in some amazing matches. But I really hate those other nine days.

Speaking of duplication, I honestly wonder what Lynch's life is like day to day. He had an astonishing amount of footage on tape pre DVD and I'm sure his collection has only ballooned since. Does anyone know if he actually has a normal job or if he just does the catalog full time? The sheer scope of it seems like it would really have to be full time. And I imagine the process of converting his collection was the work Herculean legends are written of.

I tried the TEW 2005 freeware game but it doesn't seem stable on my system. Not sure why but it froze a lot, and in different places. Fiddled with it for about an hour and had at least 5 freezes, then gave up. I guess being 8 years old you are bound to run into some glitches like that. I'll stick to EWR I think if I decide to do that sort of thing again, as it's always been stable for me.

Yeah it was one of the 30 for 30's. It's called "From Elway to Marino" and it a really great look at that draft. 30 for 30 in general is really excellent, although their doc on the Gretzky sale to LA was really bad, but that was an aberration.

I would have liked the group a lot on paper without Jarret, but that's not what WCW was at that point. If you had built up Hart/Hall/Nash/Steiner against Goldberg/Sting/Booker T/It really doesn't matter who, then you might have had something. Hall's personal problems and WCW being stupid would have probably destroyed the whole thing anyway. And Jarrett, I really don't hate the guy, but he's not a franchise kind of wrestler and trying to fantasy book around him is really hard sometimes.

I (like most Canadians) enjoy needling people from Toronto and brought out the "nobody in Toronto has won anything since the Jays world series" last year, and someone actually brought up their pro lacrosse dynasty in the NLL. I honestly had no idea how to even respond to that without resorting to the NOT SURE IF SERIOUS meme. Then again I guess it's not really more out there than Dana White calling Georges St. Pierre the most famous athlete in Canada.

In fairness the Bills did draft Jim Kelley that year who wasn't exactly awful. Of course... that Marino guy was right there. But the team that really should have kicked themselves over that was the Steelers since Marino wanted to play there as much as anything, and after they passed on him Bradshaw was done within weeks.

Generally you could produce "these people just don't have good matches" by putting on complete style clashes like Juventud Guerrera vs. Sid or something. Then you might get Juventud saying "I don't like working with Sid can I work with Psychosis instead I bet we'd have good matches". I can't remember seeing it happen much with, like Bret/Austin kind of matchups, but I haven't played it in a while now It might have something to do with workers disliking each other, but I'm not sure why that would apply to Eaton/Cornette either.

Football has been worked since the early 1900's when the Canadians decided to play by the real rules while the Americans added a fourth down and shrunk the field, then told the whole world Canada plays by goofy rules and people actually accepted it as the truth. It's all a conspiracy. A conspiracy I say. It's like the cause of the NWA/AWA split. Only real.

Yeah that's pretty sweet. Like 70's film posters sweet.

Going through my own stuff... God, why did I stop keeping a complete catalog of everything I had once I started buying DVDs just because I was pretty much done tape trading then? Anyway, at the very least I can start by watching the majority of the AJPW, NOAH, and NJPW for the first three years as a starter. Once I figure out what disk is what. Oh fun. Also... I have some GAEA. I seem to remember the Meiko Satomura vs. Aja Kong match on 12/15/01 being like 80 bajillion stars but I haven't rewatched that in a million years either. So it's possible it could now be like negative 3. You never know.

I once started a "breakaway company" scenario where I got Steve Austin, Brock Lesnar, The Dudleys, and a couple minor people to break away from WWE. I had the Dudleys ace the tag division early, then they got beat by issuing an open challenge and having The Faces of Fear come out of nowhere and beat them on their debut. I also abused TNA's roster so bad they went out of business within 6 months.

Japan in 1992/93 is almost an unfair comparison to everything else because it was a time when it seemed like almost everything that was touched turned to gold. Having said that by 2004 which was around when I tapped out on keeping up on things, the drop off had been pretty rough. Still, there were great matches now and again. I'm curious to revisit Kobashi/Honda from '03 and Kobashi/Takayama from I think early '04 pretty early and see how I feel about those now.

Yeah it's been around for ages. Adam Ryland has done a ton of different versions. He started out the concept thinking it would be a card game, then decided it worked better as a PC game. I have not played the first version of EW which was out at some point in the 1990's. Second game was Extreme Warfare Deluxe which came around turn of the century I think, which although pretty simplistic compared to the stuff that followed was still sort of a landmark game as far as wrestling booking games goes. In some ways its simplicity was quite appealing, but it also limited the fun long term for me. Third was Extreme Warfare Revenge. This was the last freeware version and still has some degree of a following today. You get a lot more complexity with being able to set match types, tv networks, staff having more of an impact etc. It can be a bit much at points but overall it's great freeware. There are a lot of historical scenarios floating around and last I checked last year people were still putting out annual "roster updates" if you want to start from current. Then came the Total Extreme Warfare games, which I have not tried. I think there's been about a half dozen of those.

While we're on the topic, I also can't stress enough how bad original XBox owners got shafted on wrestling games. PS2 had that HCTP period, XBox got... pretty much nothing. Wrestlemania 21 is seriously one of the worst releases of that generation, in any field of game you care to name. Not only was the gameplay very poor but it was astoundingly buggy (the game freezing when going into a post-match replay of the finish was very common for one), the way it loaded things was such a hackjob that it honestly placed undue stress on your internal disk reader (I have never heard a game work a disk drive that hard... ever), and the in-game store was... just astonishingly poorly designed (things like having to play about 200 matches to have enough money to unlock one new arena, and there were like 12 of those... and it was like that for everything in the store). Also the CAW didn't even show you what buttons you were mapping moves to, which is so ridiculous it's hard to believe it really happened. I have pent up anger towards this shitty game and it felt good to release.

Does that mean Zero-1 was shit from day 1? Honestly not sure if this is a trick question or not.

Only big problem with EWR is the setup time yeah, where you have to re-work all the worker's stats because they were done in the most stereotypical smart mark way imaginable where we live in a world that has Lance Storm having better brawls than Hulk Hogan.

I watch a near-embarrassing amount of sport, and I think in a way sports have gotten even bigger over the last generation almost as a reflex to "reality TV" being thrown on top of regular TV. Just layers of fakeness on top of layers of fakeness. Sports are a method of rebellion against that for some. If you want to see real, unscripted, actual reality TV, sports are pretty much the only shows on earth where that happens. The genuine uncertainty of what happens next is clearly a huge part of the universal appeal. It's also the last bastion of true live TV, and the only market where being live is not only important but actually fundamental to what makes the show work. Being asked to watch a sporting event on tape delay is a way of directly insulting a sports fan, generally, which isn't true in literally any other format of TV.

Salman Hashimnikov wasn't around for like 15 years or anything, but he seems about right. Not a good worker, no charisma, sent by THE RUSSIANS because Inoki paid a bunch of money and got a big push in a desperate effort to create a hot angle. Won the IWGP then became nothing. No real matches of note beyond oddity value.

Actually come to think of it I have Extreme Warfare Revenge on my laptop too. I think I picked up some mod files so you can start from not long after The Outsiders joined WCW and basically play out the Monday Night Wars. Fun game, I play if for about a month every year or so then get bored again, but a month out of a game is still a month. And it's really well done freeware. Really in fairness not sure I've played a better freeware game.

All Japan Pro Wrestling: King's Soul on PS1 was essentially the first King of Colosseum game and it ruled the universe. Me and a buddy used to play the hell out of this. No Mercy and Wrestlemania 2000 both really good. The create a wrestler stuff has never been really done much better. I never got into Fire Pro at all and thought it was boring but everyone tells me I'm wrong.

Hell if nothing else, it's worth grabbing the list of matches simply as a reference point. My bandwidth limitations make online video in large quantities a real pain, but I'll try and at least watch... something.