The Buscher

Even though he was good today, the Bills have got to be regretting the Ryan Fitzpatrick extension. The team has been on a downward spiral since then and this was his first good game in a month. If I'm a GM I'd never negotiate extensions mid-season as a general rule.

Managed to get online long enough to download a halfway decent Colt Cabana. Then I started punching in the names of various current WWE guys who weren't in the game. Passed on all of the Tyler Reks' and Epico's that were there because they all sucked, and before I knew it I was booted off again. Guess I shouldn't be picky when the servers are like this.

I'm still enjoying Universe a ton, but interference is becoming exceedingly annoying. Allies/rivals running out in nearly every match. Forget about ever having a tag team compete in a singles match without shenanigans.

The Community Creation servers are totally down yet again. Simply ridiculous. It's really a wonder to me how they've been so bad 2 years in a row. Even the SVR10 servers were better than they have been. At least I could go on and consistently download CAWs without having to attempt signing on 20 times in a row.

Somebody tweeted Ledesma a bunch of pics with various game-breaking physics issues, and he more or less fucked them off, asking them to make light of it and "be cool about it". Getting online and community creations up and running is clearly the priority to them (another fix being deployed tomorrow apparently). But no reason for him to be a douche when it's the game that people spent $60 for that is flawed. I feel fortunate that I've not yet encountered most of these glitches...sounds like they are particularly prevalent in matches with a lot of weapons involved though. Also Mysterio always glitches out because of his small model size. THQ very rarely ever patch up their games, so there's no real reason to be optimistic that the bugs will actually get fixed this year. It'll never happen but I feel like they could benefit by skipping a year, providing a steady diet of DLC for WWE 12 while ironing out all issues for WWE 14. I like Universe Mode as a whole but there is still more to be done to make it the best mode in any wrestling game.

It took many tries for me to get on. It seems like they focused on getting Matchmaking up and running first. I really do hope Community Creations is up soon though. I have a feeling that the "What's Hot" is never going to change throughout the duration of this game's existence, though. Everybody is in the same boat. Only a few good CAWs have been properly uploaded. So everybody is downloading them and skewing the "times downloaded" scale. Angle's been downloaded 5,000+ times, for example.

To be fair, at the time the game was being developed, Riley had become inexplicably over and looked on his way to a major push. They were probably taking a gamble at making him seem a slightly bigger deal than he was at the time. The craziest part about my Riley push was that it all started in matches against Del Rio where I had the CPU play it out and I watched. Riley just seemed to be unstoppable despite having like a 78 OVR rating. Right now I'm watching/playing most of the matches on the card, except for multi-man matches, which I tend to skip over. Managed to get online long enough to download some of the highly rated CAWs on the front page. Angle, Jericho, RVD, Sting, and Hunico. I didn't preview any of them because I got kicked out the one time I tried, I just downloaded them and looked after. I'm not too impressed with the Sting, but the others are very good. Jericho's face is dead on, and he has his 2007 return attire. The game immediately booked Hunico in a match against Justin Gabriel. After winning, Hunico went to Pillmanize Gabriel when RVD (who I had set as a legend) returned to rescue him. Decided to throw them in a tag team to bolster the division. I've now got enough teams to have 2 sets of tag belts...pretty annoying that even with two sets of belts, they're technically not brand specific and teams can continue to wrestle on both shows/compete for the other show's tag belts. It's also completely stupid that you have to have all THREE sets of tag belts on active Raw/SD guys even if one or two of those belts are meant to be inactive.

Reading lists of glitches that people have had, I feel fortunate that I haven't encountered most of them. Some have even gone as far as saying that they feel like they've just spent $60 on an unfinished beta. The only ones that I've seen are storyline related, namely the random cutscenes of non-roster people getting involved. But that was always going to happen. The producers even said they purposely have non-roster people getting involved for the surprise factor. It's really a shame that they can't program it so that you ONLY have people on specific brands appearing on certain shows if you want. But I can work around it.

I really wish that people who I've set as Free Agents will stop appearing in Universe. Vladimir Kozlov keeps attacking people despite the fact that I've severed all of his relationships. Ideally I could download some CAWs so that my roster will be so large that random people no longer need to be added...there's apparently a good Jericho up already that I'd like to add. But the server is just complete shit. They claim it's being fixed but I have my doubts that it ever really will be.

Gabriel's theme is up to date. Slater's is something random that I don't remember hearing before, though. I probably would have changed Slater's back to "Black and White" which made the cut, but I actually like that theme so I may claim it as my own.

Looking at the Pack's remaining games I'd be shocked if they didn't go at least 16-0. Everybody on the team has said they wanna go perfect and don't wanna sit guys late until it's out of reach. The playoffs are always a bit of a crapshoot though. Would be pumped if they somehow completed the perfect season since I mentioned the possibility when they started like 5-0. Nostradamus.

Same thing happened here. I had 2 draft matches on Raw and 3 on SmackDown. Big Show to Raw, R-Truth (one half of my tag champions...thought champs were ineligible) to SmackDown. Then on SmackDown I had Big Show going BACK to SmackDown, John Morrison (who had returned 6 weeks after his injury and turned heel) to SmackDown, and World Heavyweight Champion Daniel Bryan to Raw. I think after each draft match I'll go back to the menu to move them into free agency to eliminate "draft backs". I undid the Big Show draft back and moved Miz to SmackDown to keep Awesome Truth on the same show. Also shifted a few other people.

Hmm, sounds like it may be slightly better than last year. I would very rarely be able to get pins. And the first pick of the draft is...Big Show for the millionth year in a row! Wow, this game IS realistic.

I've not yet tried Scramble matches. Have they fixed it so that every single pin doesn't get broken up? That always irked me...only the champion should really be concerned about getting pins.

Just asked somebody whose had the game for awhile and in his game Arn Anderson got the "is his career over?" message 2 weeks after Wrestlemania. He's now on Night of Champions and Arn is still injured. My hope is that maybe it means you're out a year or something. I just can't imagine they're truly gone forever, otherwise you could have a situation where the game is pretty much unplayable because you've lost all of the big names you want to use.

Hit the "Rematch Menu" button instead of Next Match. It'll give you the option to exit and go on to the next match that way (so that you can edit participants). Del Rio's just injured Morrison and the News feed said that recovery is hopeless and that his career could be over. When I go to edit participants, he is blacked out so I can't use him. Surely that's just code for "he can return in a 6 months" or something, right? I mean...they can't be stupid enough to make it so that we can never use that guy in Universe mode again.

Dolph Ziggler finally loses the US Title to Zack Ryder in the opening match at the Rumble...but then goes on to win the Rumble match itself. Moving on to bigger and better things.

Can't help but feel like they've fucked up the Rumble. While the ability to break up eliminations was a nice touch...the CPU just totally overdoes it. They break up eliminations far more often than they actually double team, which means the Rumble gets to be extremely tedious. If you don't have an even amount of people in the ring, the "odd man out" will always fuck up eliminations. If Rumble finishers hadn't seemingly been removed, this wouldn't be as big of a deal.

Seems that you CAN change the Universe Rumble to 40 guys afterall despite initial reports that you can't. Just gotta use Freely Edit mode like with any other match.

"The WWE12 servers are not available right now. Try again later." Well...I guess some things never change. >_<

I got Fan Axxess so I simply used the unlock cheat. I wanted to dive right into my Universe game so I wanted everyone and everything available from the start.

My game is giving A-Ry a HUGE push. I threw him and Del Rio into a random CPU match, I figured Del Rio would destroy him. Riley wound up winning. So the next week I was planning on having a 6-man battle royal for #1 contendership at the Royal Rumble. I figured I'd do a CPU re-match in which I imagined Del Rio boasting that if Riley can beat him, he'll get his battle royal spot. And it happened. So then the CPU battle royal comes up. Riley, Cena, Nash, Miz, Truth, Dolph. And yep, you guess it...Riley WINS! Last eliminating Nash. Punk/Riley at the Rumble, kinda has that old school vibe where unlikely guys will get the title shots at the Rumble to save the bigger names for the Rumble match. Love it when it creates storylines for me.

The gameplay is a lot of fun and certainly different. Universe...too early to tell. Although I booked my own matches and did some CPU simming. Random interference in ALL of them, although it really had no effect on the outcome.

Ryan Braun wins NL MVP. He had a fantastic season by any measure, but Kemp clearly put up the better numbers. I'll never understand why so many writers think you have to be in the playoffs to be MVP. Kemp got 6 3rd place votes for fuck's sake.

Michael Young's first place vote came from Evan Grant, a Dallas sports writer. What a joke. They really should just have the players vote for these things with a rule being that they can't vote for people on their own team. Writers are often homers. -edit- Evan Grant's twitter is getting blown the fuck up...and rightly so. Some have even accused him of voting for Young 1st as a publicity stunt because he knows full well that the ballots are public domain and will eventually get out.