The Tino Standard

I saw Punk wrestle a dark match at Raw last year and thought he sucked. I'm willing to chalk that up to being a bad night. But after the amount of hype they've given him here over the last month, he better bring the goods.

If you click on the pictures once they open, it toggles between the scaled-down version and the full-sized version.

I nearly choked on my breakfast. That's awesome. By the way, to answer the Def Jam/don't like rap question, you can absolutely still enjoy the game. I don't know about the second Def Jam game, but the first one was fantastic.

Anybody else seeing the computer getting flagged a LOT for excessive celebration? Normally I just keep hitting the buttons to cycle through after the play is over to get to the play-calling screen, but after a couple times of getting stopped on key third-down plays, I've let it go and watched as the computer kept celebrating... to the point they got flagged, giving me an automatic first down. It has happened three or four times in the last few games alone. Kinda cheap. Then again, I've seen my guys doing ridiculous celebrating after touchdowns without me even calling for it. If I don't click through that, I get flagged, so I guess it's at least going both ways. Regardless, I don't remember that happening in past years, especially with the computer doing it and getting flagged.

Does having your feet in the ropes not break up a pinfall attempt under "extreme rules"? Because if that's not the case, then the referee should've never been counting Kane's pin attempt in the first place. Big Show had half his leg under the ropes/out of the ring.

Wow, I completely forgot these two were the last tag champs on Raw. What a sad indictment of the state of the division.

I don't know if this has already been mentioned, but has anybody else pointed out the irony in the announcers trying to put over Show - Heyman's hand-picked titleholder - as a fighting champion and lauding him for such a brutal schedule, yet RVD (in storyline terms) was turned on and dumped for doing the exact same thing?

I'm pretty sure the new Monopoly is going to have all the spaces renamed to real locations, and Times Square is going to be the new Boardwalk. They had an online vote a few months ago with landmarks from cities all over the U.S. The winning landmark would become Boardwalk and the rest would be distributed around the rest of the board.

Just got back from the show. Absolutely no idea how it came off on TV, but that was freaking awesome live. Loved HBK in the opening segment... Everybody in the arena was laughing with that bit. ... Ridiculous ovation for Hogan. ... AAE didn't get any mic time, which was a downer. Looked like he went for a mic and a crew guy cut him off and told him the segment was over. Boo. Cena was way more popular this time around than his last visit. Still an undercurrent of boos here and there, but he had probably 90 percent of the crowd on his side. Huge crowd there too. Biggest I've seen in five years. If nothing else, tonight was a friendly reminder that these shows are way more fun when you go to be entertained and not to just critique everything you see. Believe it or not kids, being a fan doesn't mean burying your head in the sand and pretending that everything your presented with is awesome. It's OK to cheer and have fun too. ------------ On the not-so-fun side... Victoria looked like she screwed up her leg pretty badly in a Heat match against Torrie Wilson. They cut it short after like 3 minutes, with the ref repeatedly doing the "X" sign the last half the match.

Ooooh, this is interesting. My buddy hasn't watched wrestling in about three or four years, but we had an extra ticket to the show tonight and convinced him to go. Triple H was his favorite guy and likely one of the only ones he would have recognized now. He's gonna love this news.

Going to the show tonight. God bless comp tix. If I can chant along with Armandoooooo Alejandrooooo Eeeeeeestrrrrrradaaaaa-haha~!, then anything else is just a bonus.

I've got an HDMI cable running from my cable box, and that's working at 1080i. Looks phenomenal. Like I was saying, I didn't even know these upgrades were available to go with a PS2. I mean, my system is like 5 years old. Do they even make an HDMI cable that works with a PS2? I know HDMI is the way to go, but even the component cable has been a huge upgrade over what I had.

Seeing how I recently bought an HD television, I thought the whole widescreen option on NCAA '07 would be nice. True, it was better than the traditional 4x3, as you can see more of the field, but I still thought the picture quality was shitty and all the writing on the screen was especially hard to read. ... Until I bought a set of component cables today. Oh. My. Lord. Seeing how the PS2 came out long before HD, it didn't even occur to me that something like that would even be made. A friend mentioned it to me yesterday, I went out and bought the set of cables today and I'm blown away. I'm probably way behind the times on this, but if you have a PS2 and an HD TV and you don't have the component cables for your PS2, go get them NOW. I can't get over how much better this game looks.

No doubt, Bossman was the man back in the day. Hell, my buddy was still a huge mark for him in high school during his return in the late 90s.

OK, I've got the PS2 version and I'm annoyed as hell by this "third person camera" on the kick and punt returns. First, why do they call this the "third person" view? EVERY camera angle is third person. It's like the early '90s WWE title belt being called the "winged eagle" version. Um, how many wingless eagles have you seen lately? Anyway, this camera is awful. I can't see around my kick returner because he takes up a third of the screen and you have no depth perception about how close defenders are as you are waiting for the punt to come down. I know this doesn't apply to two-player games, as you have two players sharing the same screen. But, as someone who spends the majority of his time playing 1-player games, I would GREATLY GREATLY appreciate it if someone could clue me in on a way to get rid of this. I've tried changing the camera angles, and I'm just not seeing a way to do it. I'd love to be wrong here.

That's true. It was only until about two years ago when he came back to WWE full time and did that interview on the saturday night show (I forget what it was called...the one where they usually devoted each episode to a different topic...) that he admitted he was in on the whole thing. That show was "Confidential". And yeah, while Shawn denied any involvement with the screwjob plot for years, i'm pretty sure anybody with any knowledge of the business figured he was BS'ing.

Check out WWE.com for their front page promo hyping the gimmick match between Khali and Undertaker this Sunday, titled "THE UNKOWN". Whaddya know? Their copy editors can't work either.

No boxing style intros for the championship match? Boooo. I think that's the first time that's been the case on any WWE broadcast since WrestleMania.

If that match was our "xtreme rulz~!" match of the night, then the title match is going to be a DQ. Hello, Khali.

The short answer is because, while he is making a modest profit doing things the way he is, Vince could be making a SHITLOAD more if he were smart about it.

I was not a regular viewer of the old ECW. Thought it was cool, but just never got into the habit of watching it every week. Having said that, at this point, I just feel bad for the die-hards. You deserve better than this.

Well, throw me in the minority here, but I like the first one. I don't take wrestling shirts seriously, and the picture of Angle on the first one is just goofy/80s cartoonish enough to work.

So, a night after Lilian just calls him "the champion," the ring announcer tonight intros RVD as "the ECW world heavyweight champion." If that is a subtle dig that, in storyline terms, Raw is so disgusted with RVD holding their belt, they won't even acknowledge him as the WWE champion, that's kinda cool.

The 99-01 one looks like the Star of David.

I'm not much of an ECW historian, but didn't they come like THISCLOSE to overloading the electrical circuits in the building the first PPV they did there? The building just isn't designed to handle a WWE-scale production. It's a shame, but life goes on.