Hello and welcome back to the blog! I don’t have anything wittier for an intro so let’s just get into it.
I’ve been subscribed to the WWE Network for about a year now. Without question, it’s a great value based on cheaper access to monthly pay per view events. However, one of the things I enjoyed was being able to watch some classic programming from the 80’s. Bell has yet to come to an arrangement with Rogers to allow access to the online content. That means that I can only watch what’s on the cable channel which is a direct port of the US streaming service’s linear channel. At first this was fine because the content was all new to me. Over time though I’ve seen most if not all of the shows that they cycle through. They’ve also reduced the throwback programming to an hour of old Raw and Nitro episodes on Thursdays (and it’s still the early episodes before the Monday Night War caught fire). This is very disappointing. I understand the desire to push new programming, but in a 24 hour cycle, surely they could do better than to repeat one block of 3-4 hours of programming 6-8 times.
Given the above, it was a pleasant surprise to see that the Network aired the first Wrestlemania yesterday. It’s interesting to see how Wrestlemania has evolved over the years. Except for the main event, the show was very short on spectacle whereas today Wrestlemania is almost more about the show than the wrestling. The title matches were all interesting, but the undercard was pretty bland. I’m familiar with that era of wrestling, but there was next to no story to the first couple of matches. That changed with Wrestlemania 2. Sadly, they’re skipping straight to Wrestlemania IV next week. I would love to watch 2 and III (for some reason, they only started using roman numerals in Wrestlemania III) again. That’s what got me thinking about the lack of variety and access to classic content on the Network actually.
I attended my first meeting of La Crique ö jeux last Tuesday. It was co-op night and not knowing what to expect, I brought Pandemic: The Cure with me. There were a number of games available to be played including titles I’d never tried like Dead of Winter, Yggdrasil and Atlantis Rising. The people who told me about the club were there and they invited me to join them in playing the game they’d chosen, Shadows Over Camelot, which was of course, the one game that I HAD played before. Now, I’ve never won Shadows and the guy running it said he had so if anything I thought I might learn a few tricks on how to play more effectively. Sadly, the luck of the draw had us behind the eight ball almost from the start. For the advancement of evil phase, we exclusively drew from the shadow deck until late in the game. I’m thinking we should have let more catapults be set up outside of Camelot and just taken time to destroy them. This might make the game longer, but I think it would make it a lot more manageable. Even with the right cards we weren’t making any progress because the shadow cards would always undo what we’d accomplished. I’m not enamored with the game so it’s not one I’m inclined to pull out for game night. That makes developing a working strategy that much harder. For the record, we played without a traitor, so we all lost together.
That’s it for this week. Have a good seven and we’ll do this all again next Monday. Carja V.