“So I have to make myself the babyface with one promo against a guy the crowd loves? Because the booker thinks he should be the heel? Man, I’m going back to Chikara.”
On the current episode of Ring of Honor TV as of August 5th, 2012, several instances occurred which lead me to believe that ROH is hurting, both creatively and from a production standpoint (the latter of which influences the former, I suspect).
First, the Guardians of Truth. The idea of Truth Martini having faceless henchmen bolster the ranks of the House of Truth and give the Briscoes somebody to feud with isn’t a bad one. In fact, it’s pretty solid. The problem I have with it is that the Guardians look like somebody dragged them kicking and screaming out of the 1980s and plopped them into Ring of Honor. They’re big, muscular, and decent workers, but they’re wearing gear that I’m pretty sure was stolen from the Undertaker’s bag back when he was “The Punisher” and working the territories. If they didn’t have little House of Truth logos on the front of their singlet tops you could make a strong case that they were bootleg action figures of the Punisher that were turned into people through some sort of mad science on Truth Martini’s part. He can do that. Fact. It’s why Roderick Strong has no discernible personality; that’s a side effect of the process of action figure to human conversion. My point is less absurd than the science I just invented. Simply put, the Guardians don’t look like they belong in ROH. They look like they’re up from Memphis to do some jobber matches on WWF Wrestling Challenge. I’ve read a lot of complaints online that Jim Cornette’s old school approach to booking is hurting ROH, and the Guardians are a clear example of something that SCREAMS “Jim Cornette thought of this.” They LOOK like Jim Cornette recycled them from Smokey Mountain. Hell, maybe he DID. But these guys in the ring looking like they robbed Memphis in the ’80s isn’t helping their already lacklustre production values.
The second, and more important, was the Eddie Kingston promo. Considering that Kingston is challenging for the World Championship, which ROH builds as its pinnacle of achievement, his inclusion in the whole process came off to me as a bit of a mess, which is disconcerting because a lot of things I really liked happened in that promo. He cut a fiery, heartfelt, and compelling promo about what being a World Champion meant to him and how that motivated him to do whatever it took to beat Kevin Steen for the belt, and in the process do Jim Cornette’s dirty work. The problem? Kingston’s previous appearance had been as a guy who did a run-in and got into a fight with Steen. Now he’s trying to cut a promo about why he’s challenging for the WORLD TITLE without having had a match in ROH since, what, 2009? That’s a loooooong time in wrestling years. So these fans may or may not be familiar with Kingston, depending on how long they’ve watched ROH and whether or not they’re familiar with Chikara. That’s a big problem for me, from a booking standpoint. Relying on your fans to know your product’s history isn’t unreasonable, but it might be asking a bit much. Asking them to do that AND be familiar with another company’s product so that they understand this other character that you’ve introduced into one of your stories is crazy.
That brings me to the fans themselves. They were dead during Kingston’s promo. Part of it can be attributed to lack of familiarity, as Kingston hasn’t been exposed to them as a significant player much, but I think a bigger problem is that ROH films four episodes of TV in one shot. Let’s say they shoot the Kingston promo in the third or fourth of that four episode session, because that seems about right based on the amount of times I’ve seen the Liger-costumed fan in his current location in the audience. That means the fans have already seen a minimum of three hours of wrestling, and that’s if ROH shoots the shows in essentially real time with little to no lag between episodes, which is pushing things, I suspect. More likely they’ve been there for five or six hours, and seen two or three big main event matches. Now have a guy who they saw run in (if that was the same set of tapings. I think it was) but know little else about cut a promo about how he’s getting a championship match. Nobody will care, because they’re goddamn tired. And Liger-costume guy is probably having his fourth or fifth heat stroke since arriving.
So the crowd is tired and doesn’t really know how to react to Kingston because he’s a new face. Let’s add a third problem to the segment, because it totally needs that: Kevin Steen is getting the wrong reaction as far as the bookers are concerned. His defiance of Cornette is supposed to make him a hated heel, but it’s getting him monstrous pops because Jim Cornette isn’t sympathetic. He’s an old, southern man clinging desperately to what he thinks wrestling should be and trying to dictatorially enforce that on Ring of Honor. That’s not an indictment of Cornette as a person, it’s what I’m seeing on my television from a character standpoint. Those are Cornette’s defining characteristics as he is presented on TV. He’s concerned about affiliate dinners and other network BS while Steen, who was denied A JOB for a year then came back to destroy the golden boy while simultaneously looking like 80% of the audience. How does that guy not become the hero of the people? Cornette has a bounty on him now, so Steen’s championship is in peril not through the threat of a powerful babyface but because “the man” is manipulating things behind the scenes. Now Eddie Kingston has to come out and try to get a crowd behind him against Steen. A tired, confused crowd. Good luck with that.
I like Jim Cornette, but for ROH’s sake, the man’s gotta go.
Two of the luchadors in Lucha Libre AAA: Heroes Del Ring that you have heard of. I have no idea what the hell is happening in this picture otherwise, however.
I have a problem when it comes to wrestling video games. That problem is called WWF No Mercy for the Nintendo 64. Since playing the bejesus out of that game for years, I found myself unable to really enjoy later wrestling games, particularly WWF/E ones, because No Mercy was just too goddamn good. Everything after that just seemed… wrong. The Smackdown games were okay, but had arcadey weirdness like being able to hit people with an elbow drop after they stood up. Fire Pro Wrestling for the Game Boy Advance was the next best thing to No Mercy, although I only recently came to fully appreciate how brilliant the Audience Match concept is, but the wrestling games on consoles still didn’t stack up to the increasingly awful-looking (by comparison) but still outstanding N64 classic.
Recently, perhaps just because I haven’t played No Mercy in several years, I have become more accepting of wrestling games. I’ve gotten back into Fire Pro Wrestling and embraced the aforementioned genius of Audience Match mode, but I’ve also played some console wrestling games and found myself much less harsh in my judgement of them. WWE ’12 was genuinely enjoyable, although not to the point where I wanted to spend $60 on a game where the online servers still don’t work a year later. The wrestling game on the XBox Live Arcade, Action Arcade Wrestling, was crude but also a ton of fun and reminded me of the old WrestleFest arcade game. It probably didn’t hurt that it was, like, a dollar. The most recent wrestling game I’ve played was Lucha Libre AAA: Heroes Del Ring. I hadn’t heard good things about it, but a friend of mine bought it for five bucks so we decided to lace up our masks and throw down.*
*We didn’t have actual masks. I wish we did, though, that would have been awesome.
My first impression, upon being told the controls, was that there were a surprising number of buttons dedicated to striking, which made me think it would have a more fighting game-y feel. Against a human player, it kind of does, as a lot of time is spent trying to hit the big B button strikes (we played on Xbox 360) while making liberal use of the reversal button and occasionally using one of the light grapples if one got lucky. Against the computer, however, both grapples were able to be utilized because they were much worse at reversing things that humans. Despite only being able to use light grapples with any regularity against human opponents, we were still able to hit some pretty big moves as the light grapples included, inexplicably, an ace crusher variant of an Osaka street cutter.
In what is an accurate portrayal of lucha, as far as I can tell, the wrestlers move quite slowly when not making gravity their bitch and kicking people. I’m going to talk about that a little bit more in a bit, but as a result of the sluggishness of the luchadors, the run button got used quite, not just to throw dropkicks and leg lariats and stuff but often as a way to close the distance to do grapples and things. Performance and appeals to the crowd are important in lucha, and as a result the taunt buttons have pretty marked effects on the N64 style spirit meters which fuel your specials and determines which moves you can do. Many high level grapples are tied to your spirit meter, so if you don’t have the spirit you can’t do the move even if your opponent’s body is essentially non-functioning. In a nice touch, Rudos got extra spirit from brawling on the floor, cheating, and taunts outside of the ring while Tecnicos got their bonuses from being in the ring and upholding the rules. Once your special was activated, both human opponents and the computer AI would bail out of the ring as soon as was physically possible and run frantically around it in circles while waiting for the special to fade out. This naturally led to the opponent with the special attempting to time a dive to the floor so that your panicking opponent would run into your torpedo attack. The actual result of this tended to be smashing head first into the ringside barricade or splattering on the floor as your opponent gets halfway around the ring in the time it took you to fly through the air.
A lot of the reviews I read of Lucha Libre AAA really hammered the game over how slow the luchadors were, claiming that real lucha libre is fast and furious with the luchadors bouncing and flying all over the place at breakneck pace. I’m pretty sure these reviewers have never actually watched lucha. It’s actually not that fast. The rules are structured to make it SEEM fast, but nobody is actually moving at lightning speed most of the time. In that regard, I think the speed of Lucha Libre AAA actually does an excellent job of capturing the pace of lucha, because while the characters are kind of slow, they end up doing a lot of running between spots, which involve a lot of flips and big moves. So while the physical speed of the characters is sluggish, the action moves at a fairly good pace.
Aside from a bizarre system for saving created wrestlers that links them to Gamer Tags in a move that makes sense only to whoever’s idea it was, Lucha Libre AAA was surprisingly fun, and worth the $5 my buddy spent on it. It was DEFINITELY worth the $0 that I spent to play it.
I posted this in the Bonus Art section as well, but I have no idea how many, if any, of you actually read that section at all. Actually I’m not sure if any of you really read THIS section much either, but meh.
I’ve been watching a bunch of stuff from Japan recently, and as a result I’ve been making notes and developing ideas to use later on in the comic. Part of those notes were a big list of Japanese wrestler names that I came up with, and I decided to take a crack at designing one of the first ones I thought of, Michi Okagawa. Michi was the name of my dad’s Japanese business partner when he was over there all the time in the late ’80s/early ’90s, and Okagawa was the result of forgetting whether Yoshinari Ogawa’s last name was Ogawa (which it is) or Okawa (which it is not). I was going to go with one of them, then couldn’t remember which one was attached to a semi-legendary-by-association wrestler and which one was made up, so I mashed them together and went with the result of that instead.
The “Diamond King” nickname came from the idea that he should have gear based on the suits of a card deck. I don’t know why I thought that, but in my brain at the time that was very important. Then I started thinking about “king of ______” which morphed into “the Diamond King” when it occurred to me that he could use Diamond Dust as a finisher.
I’m not sure at what point in the card suit thought process I decided to use Hiroshi Tanahashi’s tights as a basis for the design, although that may have been influenced by the fact that he was on the cover of a Japanese wrestling magazine I had on my drawing desk. It doesn’t hurt that he’s the 100% Ace of the Universe and has really cool gear, I suppose. Actually, he’s basically Suwama’s head on Tanahashi’s body. Which I suppose is fitting for a character that will be holding a major title, since Suwama was the AJPW Triple Crown holder in most of the DVDs I was watching, and Tanahashi was the NJPW IWGP Heavyweight Champion.
Also, it just occurred to me that this guy won’t be appearing in the comic for at least a year. So… SUPER sneak preview!
