Adam Ryland

I was referring to the part where you wrote "there's no denying that this IS a better game", which was lower down in your post; your wording strongly suggested that you thought anyone who didn't agree with you must be wrong, I was simply stating that I disagree, and giving the reasons why.

Fair enough, I don't know what his previous history is, I just thought he was being unfairly dismissed on this particular occasion; his points seemed to be valid to me.

I have to strongly disagree in regards to the "there's no denying that this is a better game" line - I'm quite happy to stand up and say that I found previous games in the series just as (or more) fun, which to me is the sole factor in rating a console game. While there is no doubting that this edition is the most technologically advanced they've ever done, I think a lot of the new features (while great in concept) don't work as well as they should, and some bits have actually got far far worse. I'm not saying this is a bad game by any means BTW, I just think that the bad points negate the good points, and therefore it isn't a vastly superior game. Incidentally, I have to side with Matzat on the subject of AI; I find tag team matches absolutely unplayable at the moment due to the god-awful AI, it was far superior in previous versions; it's got to the point where unless I'm forced into one in Season mode, I will never do any sort of non-tornado tag match ever. I also think the poor AI has ruined both ladder matches (which seems to be generally agreed from threads I've seen) and elimination chamber matches (due to the inexplicable breaking up of pins and constantly climbing the cage walls). And as I've said before, the new referee is not very good, both in the fact that he gets in the way so you get lame DQs, and because of the way he will occasionally stand around for a good three seconds before bothering to count pins. So I think it's very unfair to Matzat to dismiss his post as "fanboy bullshit", I for one am completely in agreement with him.

I found the easiest way is to wrestle it in two stages. You start the match already damaged from the earlier encounter, so the first stage is you need to level the playing field - I find the best way to do this (assuming you're the babyface) is to do lots of top rope dives and planchas to give yourself lots of momentum. As soon as you max out, go for the finisher: not to get the pin, but to weaken OJ as much as possible. Even on Legend difficulty, it shouldn't be too hard to get finishers at a rapid rate, and with luck, you can get him to orange very quickly. Once you've done that, leave the ring, get your stamina back up, then treat it as a new match, where you're both starting from the same level. Assuming you could beat him in a normal match anyway, there's then no reason you can't beat him again. Also, it might just be me, but on the handful of times I've wrestled him, I've always found Orlando to be very easy to get pins on with normal moves, even when he's not in red. While his body has been on orange I've gotten wins with a german suplex, a powerbomb into the corner, and other powerful-but-not-finisher moves. Maybe that's just coincidence, but it might be worth trying some earlier-than-normal covers to see if it works for you.

Totally agree with you, the referee positioning is horrid, almost all of my losses have come from DQs because of them taking inadvertant blows. And just to rub it in, it's always been during great matches, so the ending is completely flat. I had a 28 minute Benoit \ Guerrero classic that after a flurry of finisher counters ended with...an accidental forearm to the ref :thumbsdown: I wonder how a lot of these AI problems got through playtesting? I can understand how things like the animations not running in the create a moveset section got through, as they only happen at certain times with certain moves, but the referee AI, the ladder match AI, the retarded tag team partner AI...these happen in every match, and in the latter two cases completely ruin them. I'm wondering if they tested it using the AI from the previous game, suddenly made a big change right at the end, and didn't have time to correct it.

Only 99% screwed If you can hit him with a high powered strike at the perfect angle, you can get him to fall backward over the top rope and to the ring apron. I did it by accident as the Hurricane - cross body off the top rope into a pack of 3 wrestlers, and Big Show ended up getting knocked to the apron as a result. Admittedly it's a 1 in a million shot, but still a chance!

That'd be because of the weight difference. If you're much larger than your opponent, you don't need to deplete the ring-out bar, you just have to grapple and it's an automatic elimination. It's to make it tough to win if you're a small guy, which I suppose is at least a relatively realistic reason. You can also press slam them straight over the top if you're much larger too. So it's not really cheating as such, it's a proper feature, you can do it to the computer to.

Doesn't seem to, no. I think it's just a nice extra touch they added.

Apologies if this has already been reported, but I thought it was a very cool touch - I had Daivari at ringside, and occasionally you hear him start talking away, as in real life. I love little things like that NB: I was Hassan at the time, and commentary is turned off, in case those have to be in place in order for it to work.

I haven't played too many parking lot brawls, what is an "instant KO" move?

The easiest way to win the Buried Alive match is to do the casket finisher (I've had choke slam and powerbomb so far, anyone else seen a different version yet?), as then there's no chance for the computer to stop the lid coming down - i'm so glad they added that, as it was taking 25+ minutes to win the match, as the computer blocked the lid about 100 times in a row

The easiest way to get around this, I've found, is to get their body into red and then do down + circle - it'll automatically do a half crab, the default submission move, and it usually gets the tap out quite quickly as long as the opponent is beaten down enough. BTW I think the problem with the submission bar is that it's visually misleading - what looks like the end of the bar isn't, you have to go a little bit further until it looks like you're going to go right off the edge.

I was at the Nottingham gig too, wild show The "fuck S Club" chant was some funny stuff

Outlaw wasn't it? I broke mine I wanted to see how far Matt Tracker could be fired from the big cannon, and his leg got stuck and snapped off, jamming it. Thus was born a childhood trauma....