Loki

This is so hard, and would change all the time, so I'm just going to bash it out rather than spend ages on it.

10 points - Elite II Frontier (Amiga)
The single greatest programming creation in history, a whole galaxy on a single floppy disk.  Every space exploration game since is just a pale imitation.  You want to be a peaceful trader or a pirate, or a fighter pilot, or an explorer?  It's all there for you, all perfectly balanced and you can flip stories at any time just by buying a different ship.  I've never played a game as immersive - fulfilling a bounty by parking outside a spaceport on a planet, waiting until the ship takes off at its alloted time, tailing it into orbit, blowing it up and then hightailing it before the Galactic Police arrived.  But wait - the target was part of a cult, and now you have cult members pursuing you across the galaxy until you change ships!

9 - Super Mario Kart (SNES)
Really hard to pick a single version of this,  (the GBA Super Circuit is probably the apex of the series) but I tend to prefer originals.  I once held off all challengers on Battle Mode in Hamleys for 2 hours, my finest moment in gaming.

8 - Battlefield 1943 (Xbox 360)
It's hard to pick the exact best game in this series, but I think it was with the move to the Frostbite 1.5 engine and the introduction of destructible scenery.  This was the first game in that new engine, and its simplicity is its key feature.  Every round is a level playing field, you can choose from 3 beautifully balanced classes, no unlocks or perks.  Just 3 maps.  Perfection.  I played it from launch in 2009 until the servers were turned off earlier this year.

7 - Halo (Xbox)
The game that revolutionised fps shooters and made consoles their natural home.  Beautiful control system, great AI, fun campaign, great sound.

6 - Bard's Tale (Spectrum)
The game I played most on the Spectrum, an absolute classic dungeon crawl.  Very very long and insanely hard near the end, but you could save games onto tape, so it was completable.  Considering the simple graphics, incredibly atmospheric and scary.

5 - Manic Miner (Spectrum)
One of the hardest games I've ever finished, and that was on an early PC emulator.  But pixel perfect jumping, crack cocaine gameplay, a triumph of 80s gaming.

4 - UFO: Enemy Unknown (Amiga)
Disclaimer, I probably played this more when it was remade for the Xbox as XCom: Enemy Unknown, but even on the Amiga this was a vast time sink.  Super atmospheric, great strategy, it was X-Files on a computer and perfect pre-Millennial zeitgeist.

3 - The Great Escape (Spectrum)
One of the few games I played, and completed with my Dad.  Also one of the best film adaptations ever, let's be honest.

2 - Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (Xbox 360/XbOne)
Across the original and the remaster, probably the game I've put most hours into.  One of the last really good single-player fps campaigns, and the high point of the online play modes as well.

1 - Assassin's Creed Origins (Xbox One)
I almost never finish modern games but I finished this one.  Gorgeous world, combat just the right side of hard, a minimal amount of the shit AC meta story that ruins the rest of the games.  And as a bonus you get to explore ancient Egypt and interact with Imperial Roman culture.  As a history buff it was real wish fulfilment.  When one is in Egypt, one should delve deeply into her treasures.

On 2/20/2024 at 7:17 AM, Egg Shen said:

Michael Chander out there cutting promos on Raw.

"I've only got one man on my mind 🥰"

1 hour ago, Supremo said:

Discovered today that Lance Archer is 47 years old. Between him, and Orange Cassidy being 39, it’s the perfect example of how there’s a huge difference between real age and TV age. Unless you’ve been on national TV for years, you feel far you get than you actually are. I’d consider both of them fresh, young talent with a huge upside.

You obviously weren’t a TNA man, Supes, I remember Lance Hoyt in the Rock n Rave Infection about 20 years ago!  So for me it’s more “blimey he’s still wrestling”.

Just looking at Psycho Sid's stats, and it occurred to me that he essentially retired in 2001 after WCW folded.  Apart from that wonderful Raw squash with Heath Slater he's done a handful of indy shows since.

So he retired aged 41.  41!  Got in, made money, WCW and WWF heavyweight champ, watched some softball, retired.  Great career.

13 minutes ago, Supremo said:

bag after bag

Careful, you'll get yourself Houchen'd.

Biggest =\= best for sure.

But conversely, it's actually a little bit patronising when people dismiss popular things as "shit".   You may consider yourself a burger connoisseur and feel that McDonalds is beneath you but the fact is that a LOT of people LIKE McDonalds - that's why they buy it.  McDonalds doesn't get to be the biggest fast food distributor in the world just through sheer force of will, it does because it's giving a LOT of people exactly what they want, on a regular basis.

What they want and what you want from a burger is different, and its your taste that is the minority.  Doesn't make you wrong, but it's worth considering for a second what other people want from McDonalds.  They might like the taste.  They might like the price.  They might like the convenience, the fact that you reliably get the same thing every time, no matter what shit you've put up with that day, or how bad things are at home, that McDonalds burger is going to give you the comfort hit you want.

A really, really large number of people watch and enjoy WWE every week.  It's giving them what they want from wrestling, and that's not headdrops, blood and Japanese legends.   They might want simple good guys and bad guys, familiar faces, big time presentation, sparkly jackets and lots of hair extensions.  They're getting what they want, and they keep coming back year after year and town after town. 

So maybe there's something to the product after all?

I hate Coldplay, but I've reached an age where I don't consider people who DO like Coldplay to be idiots.  Maybe that music helped them through some tough times, maybe it reminds them of a lost love, maybe it makes a cold world a little less cold.  Maybe they're entitled to like what they like.

Tag Match
Young Bucks v Undertaker & Kane

Women's Match
Jamie Hayter v Bianca Belair

Main Event
Sid Vicious v Will Ospreay

Watched The Creator finally.

 In terms of how to film scifi it feels like a generational step forward.  Just fantastically shot, great locations and the way the cgi is added to the world feels more natural than anything I’ve seen before.

 Great world-building too, a really interesting backstory and concept.

 The actual plot is a bit bobbins though, a paper thin excuse for some bang bang.  Still it doesn’t get in the way of the spectacle too much.

 Casting was nuts - CJ from the West Wing as the main baddie!  She pulls it off but that’s nuts.

 Best sci-fi film I’ve seen in a while but I’ve not seen Dune 2 yet.

2 hours ago, Merzbow said:

It has to be Bucks vs FTR, right? It's a weak set of teams overall.

Ugh, again.  Very uninspiring.

Bit of a "what if", I remember DiBiase Jr being pretty good.  Am I right in thinking he more or less decided he didn't want to be a wrestler and left the business?  (and then became a scammer, natch).

Laurence Taylor won in the main event of Wrestlemania XI and then couldn’t even get on the card the next year!

Missed this post and just discovered the BBC coverage.  Nice!

It’s Ronda Rousey though, isn’t it?

Wrestling debut, at Wrestlemania, with Kurt Angle and HHH, and she looked like a million dollars ( and indeed she was for a year or two there).

 How exactly the wheels came off I can only speculate but this first run has to stand as one of the great unexpected runs in wrestling history.  I saw her at the O2 and she blew the roof off the place.  By far the WWE’s biggest star for about 12 months.

Edit: I went and watched the match back, and it's even better than I remember.  HHH and Angle start out and both look pretty rusty and obviously well past their prime, but from the moment Rousey gets in against Stephanie, the whole thing just takes off.  

It's not about how well she adapted to doing the movezz... she flubs a couple early on in fact, but Rousey just gets the important things - timing, selling, facial expressions... storytelling.  She hits every mark perfectly.  The story of the match is great too - everyone thought the climax would be Rousey getting her hands on Stephanie, but no, what it really builds to is her getting her hands on HHH at which point the rulebook (and the crowd's expectations) go out the window and it's just one long pop to the finish.

HHH and Angle manage to roll back the years, Stephanie looks hot af in her leather jumpsuit, and Rousey has the best wrestling debut of all time.  What a match.

Speaking to an American friend of mine yesterday, a journalist, and they said they believed that the US was about to put boots on the ground in Gaza and that the Biden administration was gearing up to be a wartime government.  They believe that the building of the supply dock is effectively the start of the Americans trying to insert themselves between the IDF and Hamas, to effectively take over the campaign against Hamas but try and protect the civilian population.

They're not someone given to hyperbole and they have good connections so it'll be interesting to see if this takes place.

England have lost two games in the dying seconds, so the tournament could have turned out even better for them!

Great tournament, though not for the Welsh (what DID happen to all the Welsh members of the forum?). A belting match to finish the whole thing off, no complaints.

9 hours ago, Nexus said:

Having finished watching Justified for the first time - Natalie Zea. 

 

Her character is an absolute wet drip though and Rayland has hotter prospects, not least Amy Smart.

We’re seeing the potential shape of an opposition Tory party - QAnon, anti abortion, anti trans, hard right taking direction and money from the US right.

Truss doesn’t expect this or want this to pass.  She wants it to fail and give her supporters the victim mentality they need, and something to talk about on US alt right tv.

I just hope there are enough moderates left after the election to pull the party back towards the centre and Truss et al can fuck off to Reform and political oblivion.

I'm quietly hoping that LA Knight v AJ Styles will end up being great, if given enough time.   Always interesting to see two former TNA/Impact champions facing each other at Wrestlemania, from two different eras as well.  Both are guys who seem to excel on a big stage.  Outside of The Rock's match, it's the one I'm most looking forward to on the card right now.  If AJ is up for it, it could be the making of Knight in WWE.

4 hours ago, JNLister said:

I have gotten some good constructive advice from some of the more intelligent posters on the TWC forums

😎 You're WELCOME Herbie 😜

It's sad that there's not been a proper home for World Of Sport since the demise of TWC.  I know various efforts have been made to winkle those tapes away from ITV but there is just SO MUCH good material that has a huge potential audience.  Imagine all that captured in HD and properly cleaned!

I maintain that the largest impact of TWC was introducing travelling US wrestlers like Bryan Danielson, over here for indy shows, to the delights of World Of Sport and British wrestling in general.

There was definitely some cross fertilization back into the US indy scene, with people suddenly doing a lot of upper cuts, wristlocks and balancing on their head to escape a head scissors.

To be fair, nowadays all you'd need to do to beat Booker T would be to stand a couple of steps up a flight of stairs.  His knees are absolutely shot, he'd be stuck like a Dalek.

58 minutes ago, Kane said:

You should give him a listen, just not when he's talking Lizards lol

You should check out some of Hitler's watercolours, they're pretty good.

Let's say it's $10 million over 4 years or something like that, it doesn't sound insane to me if you compare it outside the wrestling bubble.  Top athletes in other sports get sponsorship contracts worth that even without a salary or fight purse.

UFC and pro wrestlers have historically been underpaid outside of the WCW Turner contract era.  If AEW is willing to shift the needle on this I'm all for it as it will force TKO to do the same over time.

For AEW she's going to get eyes on the product, shift a ton of merchandise and put on some good matches.  She also has had some Hollywood success and connections into that industry that they'll appreciate.  I honestly think she's their biggest signing since Moxley.  With the possible exception of Edge but he's come in more as a "legend" than a full time wrestler seemingly.

Gable obviously got the shoosh gimmick over, but for absolutely YEARS he's also been one of those guys who the crowd really watch the matches of, and get into the second by second of.  He's like Benoit in that sense (and only that sense) - even when he's in a no-story throwaway match he gets the crowd invested and anticipating his moves.

He's one of the best pure wrestlers and athletes they've had in the last 10 years in WWE, and clearly can promo, so it's only been I guess his size that's held him back from anything more.  He absolutely deserves a really good Wrestlemania match one of these years.

He’s playing a character, why not exaggerate the voice?   It’s getting him over, I like it.

 Not sure Macho Man would have been as big a star as he was without the oooh yeahhhh.