Tag: WWE

A Farewell to Brodie Lee

~ Matt Vetrano ~ Leave a comment

On 12/26/2020, the wrestling world lost one of its best as Jonathan Huber, also known as Luke Harper and most recently Brodie Lee, lost his life to a non-COVID related lung issue.  For years he had worked in WWE and was most recognizable as one of Bray Wyatt’s followers before spinning off with fellow Bray Wyatt follower Erick Rowan to form The Bludgeon Brothers.  This is where I first took note of him as I started watching wrestling again right as Wyatt was winding down (eventually teaming up with Matt Hardy to form The Deleters of Worlds and disappearing entirely before reemerging as The Fiend) and The Bludgeon Brothers definitely stood out as unstoppable monsters that the Baby Face teams had to overcome.  Despite having such an instantly recognizable look and an indelible presence, Harper wasn’t given many opportunities and he eventually left the company at the end of 2019 to join AEW a few months later.  This is where he truly started to shine for a lot of people and made his big debut as The Exalted One Brodie Lee, leader of The Dark Order, but as luck would have it his debut was on 3/18/2020; the very week AEW started having empty arena shows due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Phenomenal Fighters Wrestling – The Road to Virtual Sports Entertainment Glory!!

~ Matt Vetrano ~ Leave a comment

Everyone needs a hobby and as much as I enjoy writing for this website, I needed something else to pass the time and reignite my passion to create.  Now if you’ve been following me on twitter (which if you’re not you can VERY EASILY START DOING) you’ll know that this hobby I came up with was to create a Virtual Wrestling Federation; to create essentially from scratch a roster of fighters and a brand for them to fight on.  The initial fruits of that effort can be viewed above which is the pilot episode Phenomenal Fighters Wrestling: Melee, but hopefully I won’t be stopping there considering just how much work I put into this thing already, but if nothing else I can at least tell the tale of how it all came together.

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IN THE BEGINNING… wait, where do I begin?

The two things I knew right off the bat is that I wanted to use WWE 2K19 and that my system could not handle it at anything above PS2 level graphics settings, so while I saved up some money to finally upgrade my system, I started just writing things down.  I needed some sort of structure to start with, so I bought the World Wide Wrestling RPG books by Nathan D Paoletta just to get an idea of where I needed to begin.  Ultimately I didn’t really end up using them, but the character sheets gave me a starting point; come up with a name, a general outline, and a few wrestling moves.  From there I came up with my initial roster as well as the name of the company.  From there it expanded into an Excel Spreadsheet I’ve called THE BOOK that has like twenty different tabs at this point with all my ideas, all the details I need to keep track of, and so on.  With the groundwork laid, I knew I had to bite the bullet and buy the game.

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Jumping the Soapbox: Games of 2019 (Part 1)

~ Matt Vetrano ~ Leave a comment

I might be a little late here, but I always like to take a bit of time to showcase some of the games I managed to play in the preceding year; particularly those that didn’t actually come out at that time and just so happened to catch my interest for whatever reason.  Some were good, some were bad, all were hopefully worth talking about (otherwise I spent a lot of time writing for absolutely no reason), so let’s get started and I hope you enjoy it!!

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Apex Legends (PC)

GAMES2019-1

Developed by Respawn Entertainment

Pretty much the only online multiplayer games I’ve ever stuck with significantly were Team Fortress 2 and Rocket League, so while I haven’t played at match in this game for many MANY months, it’s not their fault; it’s just me.  Apex Legend was by far the best of these Battle Royale games and its astounding just how much better it is than Fortnite in every way that matters to me.  The cooperative gameplay make each match much easier to invest in as you have someone other than yourself depending on your performance, and the innovative team chat options made it effortless to coordinate tactics and efficiently convey new and prescient information.  So why did I stop playing it?  Well it’s not JUST that I’m terrible at it as I’m pretty bad at both Team Fortress and Rocket League which haven’t stopped me from playing them.  I think the matches might go on a bit too long to get into a really nice groove of match after match after match, and the closer we get to the end of one the less interesting the mechanics become.  I’m personally more of a sneaky player and I like to keep my distance from other teams, but it’ll inevitably come down to trading bullets with someone else (inevitably ten times more skilled then you are) and at that point I can only hope that my teammates can pick up the slack.  The game has the mechanics to do more than just shoot at each other, so I’d probably jump back in if they took advantage of that for some sort of racing or package delivery game modes, but as it stands it’s a really good example of the genre that managed to suck a good forty hours of my life away in its first few months, so I can only imagine what it’d be like for someone who’s actually GOOD at one of these!

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