Welcome to hell!!!

-Hey yo! Past couple weeks have been crazy. Aside from being trying to maintain my already hectic class/work/sleep schedule, my phone crapped out on me twice this past couple weeks which resulted in a few too many trips to the local Verizon dealer. Spare time has been slim, minus weekends which can sometimes develop into their own unique beasts too with so much going on. I'm not going to try and remember every little detail past couple weeks, but here goes nothing....

-I journeyed out to the Twin Cities to attend RAW in person this past Monday with Dick & Dave. Was quite the experience as I never attended a RAW TV taping before. Did quite a write-up for it for Robot Panic which should be going there soon, but in the mean time you can check it out here...

As much as I enjoy feeding my professional wrestling addiction each and every week with several hours of prime time television programming, there is something special about seeing it live in person. I have attended nearly a dozen events over the past ten years. I have been to a few un-televised live events, which are unique because those audiences I discovered consists more of passionate fans like myself and features more straight up wrestling than an average television taping card would. However, I would be lying to admit that the energy level and being surrounded with the elaborate entrance sets and spectacular pyrotechnics that are part of the television tapings help complete the overall package.

I attended past tapings for episodes of Smackdown, Nitro & Thunder, but the only big television taping that I missed out on in the past is WWE’s flagship broadcast, Monday Night RAW. So when my fellow wrestling podcast co-hosts alerted me that RAW was coming to the Target Center in the Twin Cities, I instantly hopped on board and anticipated the day the superstars of the WWE would invade the land of 10,000 lakes.

This past Monday finally came and I made sure to showcase my rarely-worn DX jersey for the occasion. The five hour drive breezed right by, and after getting acquainted with the Interstate for a little longer than we bargained for we found the Target Center and awaited the opening of the arena doors (thanks John for help pointing us in the right direction!).

The show came and went, and I can safely say it lived up to my expectations. This RAW wasn’t the greatest episode ever by any means, but I went home happy. Live television taping consists of very little down time, usually on commercial breaks and even then the WWE is rolling highlight packages or performing something special for the live crowd off the air. Instead of giving a segment by segment rundown of the show, I’ll run through some of the highlights from the live crowd perspective of the night instead.

-We got to the Target Center 45 minutes before the doors opened, and in that 45 minutes we heard literally hundreds of fans constantly delivering the famous Ric Flair “Whoooo.” I tried to interject a “Hacksaw” Jim Duggan “Hoooooo” to mix it up, but regrettably it didn’t take off.

-While the arena was filling up, there was already some rowdy fans that had a few too many. One was constantly failing at starting a “Let’s go Tigers” chant. After his 12th attempt or so, one of my friends ignited a “Shut the fuck up” chant that immediately caught on in our portion of the arena.

-I was determined on purchasing a new wrestling shirt, as its been forever since I got my last (which was ironically a Chris Benoit shirt, that legitimately got lost several months before he went bonkers, don’t regret losing that shirt now). After scouring the souvenir stand, I settled on Triple H’s latest “WWE Wear” which is a gray shirt featuring Trips designed as one of the menacing skeletons of all time, and ready to wage war with his sledgehammer. My friend Dave went with the CM Punk straight edge t-shirt, but told me he plans on crossing out the words “straight edge” off the front so he won’t have to risk a potential future beat down.

-We were looking forward to the opening preliminary “dark” match before RAW went on the air. Lately WWE has been featuring more high-profile dark matches, but we weren’t so lucky and instead received D-Lo Brown and the ever-friendly Dolph Ziggler squaring off in a by-the-numbers bout.

-I think I now hold the honor of being in the same arena with one of the most anti-Candice Michelle fans of all times. The guy was just throwing down non stop inflammatory remarks throughout her match.

-Sign of the night I noticed had to go to several signs strung together by a number of fans which read “JBL how about some butter on those rolls!”

-When Shawn Michaels was announced to be in the main event tag match with a “mystery partner” I thought it would have been insanely wicked if Triple H made a guest appearance on RAW to do a one-night DX reunion, on the night I decided to wear my DX jersey, and sure enough, once DX emerged from the entrance stage, I went crazy. After the cameras stopped rolling after their joke of a tag match that ended abruptly after a crummy DQ finish, DX won the crowd back with Shawn doing a splash off the top of a ladder and by staying out and posing and celebrating with the fans for nearly a half hour after the show went off the air.

-We took a wrong turn and headed to some of the less desirable areas of the Twin Cities while attempting to get back on the Interstate, and in the process nearly saw someone get shot over a dispute with two vehicle owners stepping out and engaging in a nasty verbal spat.

-I’ll end this by with a quick mention of my first time frequenting a White Castle during my trek to the Twin Cities. Damn those are some tasty yet tiny burgers! They beat the hell out of the ones I pick up occasionally at the grocery store. Fries are surprisingly scrumptious too! Don’t know if I would spend several hours of the night hunting them down like Harold & Kumar, but it was a fast food feast to say the least.

-In movie happenings, I caught the last half hour of Return of the Jedi a couple weeks back on Spike. First time I recall seeing anything from Return of the Jedi other than bits and pieces I can't remember at all from my childhood days. I was telling this to my coworker Paul, and how I am in a similar state with Empire Strikes Back. Next day at work he loaned me the original trilogy. I caught Empire Strikes Back so far, and while I liked the original Star Wars, the sequel was so much better. Still got to watch Return of the Jedi, so when that is said and done, I can finally say I watched all 6 live action Star Wars films in their entirety.

-I picked up my 5th Blu Ray past week. Forgetting Sarah Marshall holds the dubious honor. I almost didn't, because I initially picked up the lacking single disc DVD release after noticing the special edition 3-disc DVD was running for $30. This whole new digital copy era is starting to irk me with special edition DVD costs going up now for adding a whole new disc because of them. Anyways, the extras looked pretty worthwhile on the back of the special edition case, and if they're anything like the extras that were on the special editions of other films by those filmmakers such as 40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up & Superbad, then they will definitely be worth my time checking out. That aside, I noticed the 2-disc Blu-Ray of Sarah Marshall was also $30, and contained all the same extra features as the special edition DVD, but also exclusive HD content to boot, and after noticing all that, I convinced myself to exchange the DVD for the Blu Ray.

-I checked out Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist the other day. With Michael Cera playing nearly the identical role he does for most of his parts, and similar dialogue, Nick & Norah reminded me a lot about Juno. That's not a bad thing as I still ended up digging the movie, though I can't put my finger on it, but I wanted something more out of the ending. Perhaps there were some post-credits surprised but I neglected to stay put. Either way if you dug Juno, and even Superbad I would easily recommend checking out Infinite Playlist.

-Last thing I want to touch on about movies in this update is I learned today our local theater, the Columbia 4 is shutting down. Earlier this year they turned into a $1 second-run theater, which I loved because it was several years since we had one of those in town and I would chance nearly any film for a $1. Guess charging $1 a pop obviously wasn't helping their financials as they're now closed after being in town for 25 years.

-I decided to order a few wrestling "shoot" DVDs recently. For those unfamiliar, it's essentially a no holds barred interview with wrestlers who don't hold anything back and tell it like it is without fearing repercussions from the WWE. I preordered the 4-disc Ric Flair shoot which I'm expecting to be legendary! I also ordered and already received the Outsiders and Steve Blackman (imagine my shock when I saw this for sale!) shoots. Can't wait to dig into these, and I hope to have some thoughts on them in one of my next blogs.

-I finally upgraded my desktop after 6 painfully long years. Goodbye AMD 700 mhz processor and 320 SD, yes SD ram! Been meaning to upgrade that beast forever, and many thanks to Chris for taking the time to order some parts and install some of his older parts for me. I don't have a state of the art gaming rig by any means, but it's a huge leap to the aforementioned stats, and it means I can also run some PC games I accrued but never bothered installing because of old crapbox with games like Axis & Allies, Age of Empires III, and getting back into Warcraft III. For those curious, my new stats are a Celeron 2.6 ghz processor and 1.5 gigs of DDR2 ram.

-While on the road to my recent trip to the Twin Cities to attend RAW, I got a good dose of DS action in. Put a good amount of time into Hotel Dusk, and am now through chapter 5. Threw down in some Mario Kart multiplayer with Dick during the drive down also, and finally started up the Dragon Quest IV remake (didn't put too much time into it as my lack of RPG-skillz0rz resulted in me already getting lost about a half hour in).

That night we crashed at one of Dick's friend's apartment in the Twin Cities, and we killed the night away drinking some brews and throwing down in DS multiplayer. Played a fair amount of Mario Kart DS, and then moved onto LOL, a game which is essentially Pictochat, but with a thin layer of rules where the "host" throws down a challenge which could be anything he wants in the drawing field, and everyone draws a response to the challenge and votes on which response is the best, the one with the leading amount of votes then takes over as the new host. That's it, and the only way to play is single card multiplayer. As limiting and narrow as this sounds, when you gather four extremely tired and buzzed individuals, their creativity and vulnerability to any jokes resulted in some of the best DS, and multiplayer sessions I had all together this year. The back of the box for this game actually states "if you think this game is boring, then you're boring"....I couldn't of said it any better.

-As far as what I've been playing on consoles lately, I threw in Oblivion a couple times this past week. Glad to always make time for that again, if I somehow manage to get the full 1000 core game achievement points, it'll be a miracle! I actually started up Final Fantasy IX in preparation for one of my podcast RPG retrospective installments, but problems of my own stupidity resulted in me starting the game three times over to save successfully at the first save point, so the 2 hours I spent with the game only yielded about 25 minutes of actual progress. Finally, got Baja: Edge of Control in from Gamefly. It's an off road rally game like Motorstorm, only spent a little bit of time with it, but the graphics are stunning and I like the way the physics handle.

-Had a great gaming marathon with Paul last night. Played a ton of 360 games. Started things off playing several round of Halo 3 on Xbox Live. Paul is still somewhat new to the game, and first couple of rounds he went without a frag, but the last round we played which was a Team Snipers playlist, he started to pick it up and even pulled off a double kill. After that I threw in Scene It for the first time in ages on 360. A lot of talk about that new Buzz game on PS3 got me excited about movie trivia games again, and inspired me to throw in Scene It again. Forgot how much fun I had with that, well minus the fact that Paul obliterated me in the two rounds we got in. Don't think I'll get Buzz since I already invested in Scene It, and it has a sequel hitting 360 this year too, but I have to admit the quiz creator options in Buzz do look mighty appealing as I wouldn't mind tricking out my own custom video game and wrestling history quizzes for my buddies to participate in.

After Scene It, we started rocking out into a few Xbox Live Arcade titles. We played through the trial game of Castle Crashers, and yeah I totally have to invest in the full game now. Was cautious before because of it being $15 and I remember how damn hard the developers previous XBLA game, Alien Hominid was. Castle Crashers however is a top quality gameplay experience, its unique art style looks amazing in HD and most importantly it seems a little more Dale-friendly in difficulty, not too crazy hard, yet not a breeze in the park either. After Castle Crashers, Paul and I got a couple rounds of Worms in which I was lucky enough to win both, and finished the night off by starting and completing all five levels of Assault Heroes within two hours to make it game #14 completed of the year thus far! Watch out Steve and Sash, I'm right on your tail. :D

-I'll wrap things up by plugging awaythe aforementioned RPG podcasts I recorded. I recorded parts 3 and 4 within a day of each other, and was pretty happy with the content that got discussed. In part 3 (right click download) I brought Mark back on from part one to join Chris and I talking all about N64, Saturn and Dreamcast RPGs, and I want to say we did a thorough job of at least giving nearly every game its due. In part 4 (right click download) I bring on Matt to make his first appearance on the podcast in over a year, and Steve McFadden himself to join Chris, Scott and I as we spend over two whole hours reminiscing about PSone RPGs. If you do listen to part 4, I would advise using headphones as there were some syncing and audio level issues that occurred during recording which proved crazy hard to edit out, and listening on a laptop or PC speakers makes those audio flaws much more apparent. Hope that doesn't detract you away from giving it a listen though because there is some great discussion, as I think we cover nearly 100 RPGs that hit the PSone.

-OK, I'm finally done with another crazy long entry. Thanks for roughing out another seemingly endless blog with me. Latez!