Jingus

What do you do with the super-difficult random monsters in the last dungeons? Do you just run away, do you have some secret strategy? Whenever I get my ass stomped at the end, it's usually not even by the last boss; I'm always dusted by some random Behemoth or something just a few frustrating steps away from the end.

Betcha ten to one that the plot is something along the lines of "He's a pro wrestler who's secretly a VAMPIRE" or something like that. Bastards. I wrote a short story with that plot like two years ago.

Compared to your average fat guy laying on the couch? Hell yes they do. Rikishi's belly never really jiggles, you ever notice that? It just kinda stays in its place and moves with the rest of his body. Almost every single one of the WWE boys is in awesome physical condition. Now, that condition is targeted towards looking good for the TV cameras than having quality matches or staying healthy, but ah, I digress.

She'll probably get some commercial endorsements out of the whole deal, and that's where the BIG money comes out to play. Not to mention selling the dramatic rights to her story for movies, books, etc.

It's not worth the search, she's got a small C-cup at best, and pointy ones at that.

That's very unusual, Mighty Dormroom. (There's an old chestnut we haven't hauled out of mothballs in a while.) I usually have to have my characters at least 40, preferably 50, in IV-VIII or else I get slaughtered pretty much every time I go into the last dungeon. Level 30 just doesn't give you enough time to level up to the really cool stuff.

It was amusing to watch, but it's nowhere near as stiff or brutal as some would have you believe. It's mostly just Brody no-selling and occasionally taking Luger down to the mat, with a hard kick thrown in there every now and then. It doesn't come close to some of the other shoot incidents in wrestling history in terms of violence (New Jack, etc).

Iceberg wouldn't make it, unless he got in better shape. WWE: Where All The Big Fat Guys Somehow Have Great Abs.

He could've done it at level 30, in theory, if he was really clever with his chained materias. Or really, really lucky. Or both. Personally, I found the regular random encounters at the bottom of that damn cave to be harder than Sephiroth himself, but anyway. I've gotta back Sakura on her last post, too, chaosrage. Sure, you can buy more Fire or Cure or whatever materia. But how many people are actually going to spend all the time it takes to level it up? By the end of my FFVII games, I usually had only one Master materia of all the simple stuff like attacking and healing, and a lot of the time didn't have a master at all of the ones like the stronger summoned monsters.

And I'd say her days of competitive surfing are probably over now. Kinda hard to balance on a precarious platform like a surfboard with only one arm, much less try to swim in the ocean with it. And if someone came up to you and said "Hey, you almost died in a really spectacularly brutal way, we'd like to pay you to come to NYC and talk about your experience in front of millions of people and become rich and famous," would you say no?

Rey as 3rd? Did anyone else they've discussed here ever have as good a match as Rey vs. Eddie HH '97? A couple of Ultimo's came close, but I can't think of any that matched it. Even aside from that, I'd vote for Rey because of the context issues. He's really the only guy that the WWE has let be a real cruiserweight, for whatever reason. I mean, just take a look at every other guy you mentioned to see how they usually treat a smaller guy who can outwork the hosses. Ultimo has been kept off TV, London's been stuck working jobbers on Velocity, Tajiri has been buried a thousand different ways. Noble has fared better than most, but he's still mostly working 2-4 minute matches that inevitably revolve around some really dumb angle. Rey is the only one they let go out there and actually have some time to work a match.

Now, if she'd charged back into the water, grabbed the shark with her other arm, dragged it onto the beach, and then ripped its stomach open with her teeth to reclaim the arm in question, THEN she'd be a hero.

Thing is, the Illumina sword is pretty damn hard to get (you have to get Ragnarok made into a sword, bet it at the Coliseum, and then win the fight to get Illumina) and getting Offering isn't like taking candy from a baby (plenty of people would've never learned about the Buried Castle without their FAQs). And to get the Ragnarok sword, you have to pretty much give up the chance of ever learning Ultima, unless of course you've got a spare month or two to uncurse the Paladin's Shield. And finally, either Terra or Celes has to be at a relatively high level to get anything decent out of the Atma Weapon. I'm not saying those are harder to get than a gold chocobo, cuz they're not, but it's far from easy to get the perfect Atma/Illumina/Genji/Offering combo.

Why is this even an issue? I mean, public school is NOT the place to express a manly love for the cock, or to express your certainity that such people are going to burn in flames everlasting for the oh-so-evil sin of plugging Tab A into Socket B. This shit shouldn't even be discussed in public schools. Leave it to their parents, or church, or whatever else, but the schools have no say in this.

Did everyone just completely ignore what Zsasz said? This "story" is ripped, at times WORD FOR WORD, from a Monty Python skit. I think it was in their "And Now For Something Completely Different" movie, as well as on their Flying Circus TV show. Do we have any evidence at all that this actually happened? This whole thing reads as being just fake as all hell. Ya know, it just hit me... this is the perfect excuse to crank out my semi-annual DISSECTION OF DOOM. Have any of you ever seen a real news headline that ended with an exclamation mark? That's substandard journalistic writing, even if the story is true. Okay, show of hands: how many people who've ever attempted to learn a foreign language or travel in a foreign country have relied on ONE, and only one, dinky little phrasebook for the entire process? Since when does a lowly concierge arrange intercontinental vacation plans? And why doesn't it say which hotel she works for? The first line is almost a direct quote from the Monty Python skit. Bullshit. Just like in the States, the book publishing and selling industries in Japan are highly corporate and very centralized. There's no way that an independent prankster could've somehow convinced bookstores to carry even 500 of his books, much less 50,000. And oh by the way, 50,000 is a shitload of books. This supposed phrasebook would have to be one of the best-selling Japanese-to-English dictionaries of all time in order to sell that many in one year. What position does ol' Hiro hold at the embassy, praytell? Funny how these details are being consistently left out. BULL-SHIT. That many violent incidents involving Japanese tourists in America over the course of a single year would cause an international media uproar, and possibly even economic or political sanctions, depending on how feisty the bureaucrats are feeling. Two separate things wrong here. First of all, we've all owned (or at least seen) a Japanese-made camera or camcorder at some point, right? Well, don't a whole lot of them clearly have the word CAMERA stamped on them somewhere, right onto their frame? And secondly: the guy who wrote the "copious breasts" line obviously knows nothing about Japanese pronunciation of English. The way that any non-English-speaking Japanese person would pronounce that tongue-twister of a line, it would come out completely unintelligeble. Probably something like: "Whud-uh yu prace-uh yo co-pee-os-o bress in my mouf-uh?" Your average American would've had no idea what the hell he'd just tried to say. (And by the way, why didn't the story say what store this happened in?) So, let me get this straight: a family of FOUR separate people just HAPPEN to run into their UNNAMED "favorite American singer", and they had all just HAPPENED to read that naughty phrasebook, and had all just HAPPENED to have memorized that one terribly wrong phrase, in order to yell it at a moment's notice, just in case they HAPPENED to need to tell some American that they loved them so much? Yeah. Right. Uh... actually I could see this one happening, and it's kinda funny. I guess the Japanese police are just too damned stupid to figure out where the royalties from 50,000 sold copies of books went to. Oh my god, Masato Tanaka took one too many of Mike Awesome's chairshots and SNAPPED!!! . . . Okay, now that the inevitable joke is out of the way, who the hell are these "some" and "other" people who are suspecting various really vague and cliche'd suspects? And where would some random laid-off auto worker get the massive funds and connections it would take to pull off a job like this? I think that was either supposed to be a joke, or the moral of the story. Whatever. (But seriously, don't mess with sumo wrestlers, they're some bad mofos.) Go visit the original story, everyone, it's linked on the bottom. Funny how the story is attributed to NO author whatsoever? I mean, not even just the AP or Reuters, I mean NOBODY apparently wrote this damn thing. Along with no specific dates or names of anyone involved in this, except for Porseman and Hiro, and has anyone checked to make sure that they really exist? And top it all off with a GROSS misunderstanding of the entire book pulbishing industry in general. So, in conclusion, shame on you guys for swallowing this load of crap.

Can't be. If it were, then his people are lying about the surgery (which is major fraud, and would be far too easy for the media to find out) or the doctors falsified all the paperwork that comes with a major operation, which is a felony here in the US, probably the same in Britain. If it's a work, the only way Ozzy could've done it is to have purposely crashed the ATV, which is unlikely to say the least.

Oh, believe you me, IX is the Squaresoft poster boy for strong starts turning into lame endings. The entire last disc of the game would be better used as a clay pigeon. X was cool, and probably my favorite FF game overall (definitely my favorite of the PS/PS2 era). I mean, here you've got people pondering their place in the universe and the existence of God... in a friggin' VIDEO GAME. The first time I saw Yuna do the Sending in Kilika I damn near cried, I just wasn't expecting anything like that. Auron ruled, Lulu and Wakka were cool, and most annoying characters were kept to a minimum. The ending was fairly ballsy in some of its choices. And, in my favorite moment from any FF game: when Seymour got fresh and showed his true colors, the heroes straight-up KILLED him. You NEVER see that in an FF series, which gets worse than a Marvel comic with the bad guys constantly getting away from our protagonists. (Yeah, he comes back later anyway, but still, points for effort.) And as for VII, I thought that was the one with the ending that everyone bitched about? I know I did. I wouldn't count VI as recent. And I hope X-2 ends with stronger material than what I saw, I really do. I wanted to murder Tobli, and Brother, and half the population of Luca. Oh, and all the characters with lines like "Yeah, you supposedly saved the world, but that don't mean shit to me. Go dig in the sand/sell my tickets/hand out these balloons/run this gauntlet/shill my amusement rides/fuck off and die, and do a good job, and then MAYBE I'll give you some respect." I was really hating that crap. Well, yeah, I'm in the wrong there, as I never saw who the real villain was. But still, 30% into the game is a pretty long way to go with nobody but fucktards like Leblanc & Co. to feud with. Tidus' story did fascinate me: a guy thrown an entire millenium into the future, into a completely alien world that still retains frustrating glimpses of familiarity, followed the whole way by the shadow of your oldest enemy. Yuna's opening story of "He's alive, let's get more spheres and find him!" is kinda weak in comparison. Yes, I see all your points. I was arguing more for the massive adrenalin rush that comes with online debating than because I really disagreed that vehemently.

My short views on FFVII: decent game, would've been tons more fun if they'd given you an option to skip through the summoning FMVs (KOTR is cool the first thousand times I saw it, but it gets old eventually). And a real ending would've helped. Overall, I see FFVII more as a daring technological experiment than a solid game. But still, a laudable effort. But it ain't no VI or X.

I'm just basing things on what I've seen so far, sonny boy. And the first third of X urinates upon the first third of X-2 from a great height indeed. (And the recent FF games are usually known for starting off strong but ending pretty weak, right?) Thank your lucky stars you're a La Parka mark, or else I'd have to, um, type more harsh words at you.

I rented the game, and played through about 30% of it before I had to take it back. Now, I'm a Squaresoft fan overall, but this game just wasn't doing it for me. The storyline is SLOOOOOOOW to develop. I played through almost a third of the damn thing, and they haven't once even mentioned Paine's past, at all. I don't know where she's from, what she used to do, where when or how she met up with the Gullwings, why she joined them, so forth & so on. Hell, even though they've referred to him several times, I don't think they've ever mentioned Tidus by name. And another thing: why are so many people in this game such assholes to Yuna? I mean, she just saved the world forever and killed Sin for all time; yeah, let's be a complete snob to her, act like she's an insignificant bug, and then run away crying about how we'll get her next time whenever she inevitably kicks our asses! Memorize that last sentence, because you run into that scenario a LOT in this game. Perfect example: Leblanc and her crew. Despite the fact that Yuna (with Rikku and, to a lesser extent, Brother helping out) killed the baddest monster to ever roam the planet, Leblanc still seems to actually believe that she can take Yuna in a fight, and still seems surprised every time she gets her cunt punched til it turns into a giant dick. That pissed me off to no end. And oh yeah: the villains suck. Hard. Leblanc? New Yevon and the Youth League? Blah. Golbez, Kefka, Sephiroth, or Sin would've murdered these fools within five minutes. The game also seriously sucked wind in terms of its supporting cast. THERE ISN'T ONE. Remember in the last game, where you had cool 2nd-level characters like Auron? That is SO far from the case here. You've got the three main girls (which means that the dialogue tends to be 30% Yuna, 69% Rikku, 1% Paine), the crew of the airship (and believe me, Brother is even more annoying here than he was in X), and then about a million various bit players scattered across the globe. And you will hate these people. Oh God, will you hate them! Especially Tobli. Jesus, but how I wished that FFX-2 had a "kill the person you're talking to" option. The only decent characters are the ones left over from the first game, but in this one they're pretty scarce. Wakka, Kimhari, and especially Lulu appear and vanish so fast that if you blink, you'll miss them two or three times. And finally, the Dress Spheres system: it's not that great, but it's not the worst RPG level-up system I've ever seen. The main problem I had is that they give you way too many of the damn things way too early. If you want your characters to have mastered even one sphere by the end of Chapter Two, you're gonna have to spend a TON of time fighting monsters and leveling up. In closing, the game isn't the worst RPG ever made, but it might be the worst (non-gameboy) Final Fantasy game since Mystic Quest. (Do keep in mind that I never played VIII, however.) Only a complete retard or someone on some hard-hitting drugs would say that it even comes close to X in terms of quality.

On a somewhat related note: anyone else besides me hate hate HATE the trend of female rappers writing and performing entire songs that are about nothing but how hot they are? Everyone from Kelis to Missy Elliot seems to be doing it these days, and by and large, these egomaniacal songs tend to suck, and their authors are never the hottest girls around. (Kelis' milkshakes can't hold a candle to Queen Latifah's, and her total package ain't even near the Myas and Beyonces of the world.)

From my own personal experience, I would say that ANY wrestling move CAN hurt. It completely depends on the talents (and styles) of the guys giving and taking the move, plus a lot of sheer luck (like getting the timing right to a quarter of a second, getting the placement right within an inch, etc). Any move at all, no matter how weak-looking, has the potential for pain and injuries. Yes, even the Worm or the People's Elbow could fuck you up if they're done wrong.

::points to sig:: I know Teddy... and believe me, he knows exactly what he's doing. The man is very talented (and will remind you of that, repeatedly) but he's not stupid. I see Teddy almost as the future of heels in wrestling. No, he's not Loose Cannon 2003, but nobody since Pillman comes to mind when talking about all the crazy shit they've done and all the people they pissed off.

Damn, miss a couple of months on the board, and look what you miss out on. Bart's a good friend of mine, and yeah, I've seen him deliver some amazing promos (and get pretty fucked up) on a regular basis. Sounds like he was a lot more loaded than normal for a show, but hell, I'd believe just about anything when it came to him. Question: who gave him the "beers"?

Someone's already done that gimmick. (COUGHitwasme,Austin,itwasmeallalongCOUGH) And congrats, Sass, it can be a fun gig and you've definitely earned it. My main piece of advice: stay the fuck away from the Puro guys.