The Tino Standard

Hooters is nice for the... ahem... SCENERY... but if you want the most bang for your buck, I cannot pimp BW-3 enough. $5 cover charge, but they give you a ticket that is good for $5 worth of food. So, basically, you can get a full meal AND watch a PPV (not to mention with a fun crowd around you) all for less than $10.

Does the difficulty level have any bearing on games between two human opponents?

"Learn how to pass rush." OK, any suggestions on how to do that? It still seems to me that 5 offensive linemen blocking 4 defensive linemen is going to create a problem for bringing the heat.

BINGO. Bischoff's character in the first three months was awesome. He was a classic tweener and a true impartial authority figure. He didn't really give a shit about anybody on his roster- his only concern was what was best for his show. The WWE banked on him coming across as an uncaring asshole, making him the perfect contrast to Princess Stephanie. What they didn't realize was that people would LIKE Bischoff's character and the way he handled business. But because God forbid WCW's ex-head honcho goes over Princess Stephie, they had to water him down (perfect choice of words, Czech), and he turned into Generic Heel Authority Figure No. 103. Now, he's just a parity of himself for all the reasons listed above.

For the record, the XFL championship game ended up being called "The Million Dollar Game" (a switch that was made about 2/3 of the way through the season, IIRC), and Gary Strydem won both WBF pay per view competitions.

Good post, but I have to disagree with your Bubba Ray analysis. He was thrust into main event spot, despite them doing everything in the world to try to make him seem like a credible challenger to HHH. Despite the company's best efforts, there was absolutely nobody buying into it because... well, he's Bubba Ray Dudley. And back to the tag team ranks he went a month later, where he belongs.

Pulling the "we're entertainment and we do real things like the RNC" card is especially stupid when they're trying to enforce kayfabe in public.

Can anybody tell me if the $200 price applies to floor seats? If this is like past events, I'm going to guess that the $200 seats are the floor seats not in the first 10 or so rows. Trust me when I tell you this: Those seats are an absolute albatross to get. While it's cool to say that you had floor seats at WrestleMania, if you're not in the first 10 rows, floor seats are terrible because there is no elevation and everyone is waving signs in front of you. Totally not worth $200 - ESPECIALLY when you can sit in the lower bowl and get a BETTER view for half the price.

My entire week was made. Fuck New York and fuck the Yankees. Tribe is back on the warpath.

Absolutely. Everybody (the other girls, the crowd, the wrestlers) hates her. Look at the car wreck we got tonight. Are you telling me that they'd get anything nearly as interesting had Carmella been booted out earlier? Whether you like it or not, people actually give a shit about this now.

The really asinine part of that is that the Raw tag titles are referred to as the "World Tag Team titles," which is fine (keeping in theme with the World Heavyweight title). The old belts SAID "World Tag Team Champions." The new ones only say "WWE Tag Team Champions." The word "World" is nowhere to be found on them. They had it right and changed the belts to make them wrong. D'OH. And for the record, while I don't think it's a good idea to bring back the old belts, I do agree that the 1998-2002 WWF championship belt ruled all. Some people like the look of smaller simpler belts. Fuck that. If I'm the champ, I want the biggest, oversized piece of bling they can make.

I get both Spike TV and UPN. I work Monday nights, but not Thursday nights. Despite this, I never EVER miss Raw (via the magic of videotape, mind you), and I never watch Smackdown. I've got better things to do than watch the WWE's minor league show on my days off.

When you're praising and touting your tape library and past events more than your current product, that is a problem. Also, does anyone know when their contract with Spike expires? If I had to take a guess, it would probably expire in September. IIRC, they switched over to the then-New TNN in Sept. 2000. Sept. 2004 would mark the end of a four-year deal.

Wind back the clock and go old school with Tony LaRussa Baseball 2. To this day, it is still my favorite baseball game of all time.

Jim Ross was ALL over Paul Heyman and the Alliance in that match. Time to watch the tape I love SummerSlam '01 after the Austin/Angle match where Austin got himself disqualified to save his title. JR nearly gives himself a heart attack screaming at Heyman about how Austin couldn't beat Angle and he knew it. Heyman just sat there with a blank look on his face, and when JR finished, Heyman just looked at the camera and said: "You know folks, we've got this great new show debuting this Saturday night called 'Excess!' on TNN..." You could see the smoke coming from JR's ears.

Heel Austin on Raw in May 2001... Austin: ... right here tonight in Cincinnati (Crowd cheers loudly for him saying Cincinnati) Austin (looking at crowd): You say that like you're proud to live in this cesspool.

Whatever happened to them debuting a new WWE logo? I thought I heard rumblings about that around WrestleMania.

That Orton-HHH blurb looks like it was written before the angle Monday. It would seem pretty stupid to shoot that angle if they planned on having HHH go face.

AWESOME.

Bradley Center in Milwaukee, WI seats 19,000 people. Gund Arena in Cleveland, OH seats 20,000 people Philips Arena in Atlanta, GA seats 15,000 people. Save Mart Center in Fresno, CA seats 15,000 people. Mellon Arena in Pittsburgh, PA seats 17,000 people. Staples Center in Los Angeles, CA seats 19,000 people. Those don't look like 'smaller' arenas to me. They're not domes, but it's not like WWE is holding PPVs in Saginaw, MI or Florence, SC again, either. Bear in mind that these look like figures for basketball seating configurations, not wrestling. 15,000 for the Philips Arena sounds way too small to be worth replacing the Omni, and an ESPN almanac check confirms my theory, as they list 19,445 as capacity for an Atlanta Hawks game. If you want wrestling seating numbers for your average arena, remember that there are more floor seats but one end of the building has to be blocked off for the stage. This usually gets you somewhere in the high range of 12-15K for a 17-20K arena. Thus, the Rumble in Fresno, which is not held at a major commercial arena but rather the university's arena, could very well not break 10,000, depending on how they play around with the set. They'd be well-advised to go small-but-cool on this one. Gund Arena seats 20,562 for Cavs games. The sold-out crowd for Invasion was more than 17,000, and that was with a set that was basically the same as the Raw set.

Somebody better go alert CRZ.

Those graphics are AWFUL.... The font looks like a 1950s diner-style script combined with those stupid claws and hooks. Bleh.

Having an Elimination Chamber match on a brand-specific PPV like Unforgiven is a bit of a problem because you still have to fill out the rest of the card. I know a lot of the brand PPVs are one-trick ponies anyways, but if you put all six of your top guys in one match, that leaves you REALLY scraping the bottom of the barrel to fill up the other 2 hours.

This is one of the first times I can remember in AGES where they're actually listening to the crowd instead of trying to manipulate them with a bunch of contrived events to force people to react the opposite way. Thank god.

Considering kids buy a large portion of games and Hurricane is a character marketed to kids, I'm pretty surprised he isn't on there. Then again, the way the non-main event characters rotate on and off their shows, A-Train could just as easily be wrapped up in a PPV feud as any of the other lower card guys when the game comes out. Look at a guy like Chavo. He was in a highly-promoted match at the Rumble. What's he doing now? And then you have a guy like Rhyno, who was non-existant for the first half of the year, but is now getting a PPV tag title shot. With the lower card guys, it's a crapshoot as to who gets on. About the only guy I have no explanation for is Eugene. He's been a main player on Raw for quite awhile. No reasonable explanation why he couldn't be included.