WWE Creative Sample #1: Big Show vs. The Corre

As most who know me well enough to find themselves here, I was a former wrestler and former Narrative Director on 3 WWE games – creating and shepherding Road to WrestleMania mode. As fewer people know, a year after quitting THQ (as in 2011), I was deep in the process of being recruited to join WWE’s actual Creative team. If you want a bit of info, I talked about it in this YouTube video, as a part of my kind of oral memoirs I called Justin’s Leep to the Past.

I live in Japan now. And foolishly, on my 2 trips back to the US, I neglected to return with my hard drive which contains all my writing. So I thought my samples from that process were stuck there – if they existed at all – along with my THQ WWE game scripts. I was wrong.

After a chat with Twitter pal @xharperco, I decided to look deep in my email box. And I found them! I thought about doing a video somehow, or a long Twitter thread, but this just seems the best method of sharing them.

As they’re all pretty long, I’m going to split them up. So this is the first of two samples that got me all the way to a face-to-face interview with Stephanie McMahon at WWE Headquarters. I’ll then post the 2 additional samples one at a time.

Team Leeper’s 2nd Anniversary

In a rare instance of me being single, back in early 2018, I decided to play the field and see what was out there. Old (aka younger) me would have settled for the first decent girl who showed interest, but I resolved to be picky. It was almost like research: noting things I liked and things I didn’t like about the girls I’d go out with. 

Then I met this remarkable girl, in honestly an unremarkable way. The “Hollywood” story we sometimes tell is about I saw this hottie playing a rhythm game at a Shinjuku arcade and asked her to teach me the game (Maimai, which we play to this day). 

still playing maimai! (12.3.20)

Justin’s 2018 Year in Review

I won’t bury the lede: I got married in 2018. This is my second marriage. I didn’t think I’d do this again. But I saw this beautiful, joyful woman playing some weird washing-machine-looking arcade game and I had to talk to her. That turned into a 7-hour date. A week later, I asked her to be my girlfriend. A week later, I dipped to the US – my first trip back since moving to Japan March 2016. I hung out with Dan and Kristen and my folks, and even had a political argument with my uncle. Emptied my storage unit (meaning I took out about 10% and left the rest for the employees to pick through) and drove my worldlies across country to my parental’s – bringing select items back home to Tokyo. 

Yeah, that’s all fitting in the SUV I rented…

Anyway, this summer Tomoko moved in with me. This proved even more life-changing than anticipated. I embraced her clean lifestyle, as well as kept closer to her schedule (early-ish to bed, early to rise). I want to spend as much time with her as possible – maybe give her a good start to her day. And any chores I do aren’t a “chore” because I was doing them for her.

We got engaged Halloween night (romanticreepy, right?!), and decided to forgo the long engagement to make things official on December 8 – our 8-month dating anniversary. A photo wedding and an LA honeymoon await us in 2019. 

Top 12 Underground Idols

Most of the world is aware of Japanese idols by now, right? Those bubbly, talented performers that take the stage by the dozens to sing, dance, and look cute for our enjoyment are practically synonymous with Japan. 

But like every cultural phenomenon, there is an alternative, underground movement. Called chika idol (地下アイドル, literally “underground idol”), these girls often veer into the wild, the weird, and the absurd. Also the extremely entertaining. 

Doki Doki Literature Club Review

Indie games get to play with concepts in a way that large-budget commercial games wouldn’t dare. We’re fortunate to live in a time where a small group of devs can take a niche genre and turn it on its head – or even turn gaming as a whole upside down. Frog Fractions comes to mind.

With that in mind, I wanted to review Doki Doki Literature Club, a game my friend Ryan recommended for me. I had only heard a little about it previously. I’m going to try to appease and respect both those who have played it and those who haven’t with this review.

Justin’s 2017 Year-In-Review

A shot I took at my home station of Tsutsujigaoka

2017 was quite a big year for me. I know politically and whatnot, it kind of sucked for a lot of people. But personally it was on the positive – especially when weighed against how I was coming in.

 

So, let’s go back to 2016 for a bit. I had been told by USJ they weren’t going to offer me a second year-long contract. This came after I did everything in my power to kick ass at my job. I was late only one time (by <5 minutes), never missed a show, never called in sick. I delivered a quality show within the time frame asked, and stuck to script and other guidelines. So I was floored when they said I was done.

My Top 100 Video Games

Video games have always been a passion of mine. I was a game journalist for 8 years, from 1999 to 2007. Then I went on to make a few WWE video games at THQ. I’ve owned a lot of consoles and literally thousands of games. Back in November of 2009, I compiled a Top 100 Games list.

Years later, I still play games constantly and keep up with the industry. I’ve always had it in the back of my mind to do another list. After all, the PS3/360 generation was one of the best, and the current gen is no slouch either. To spice things up a bit, I decided to lift my rule only allowing one title per franchise. But I still need to have played a lot of any game that makes my list, which means there are some so-called shoo-ins that I couldn’t add.

Comment with your own Top 10, or harass me about something you feel deserved a spot. Or get mad at me for starting with number 100 instead of number 1. I will happily (and respectfully) engage. And maybe let me know if you’d like to see me put some capacity of it into a video.

If you enjoy my writing and want to see more, please consider one of my three published offerings on Amazon.

Note: I scoured the Internet for these screenshots. The majority came from MobyGames.com, a great resources for information on any and all video games.

100. Dig Dug

1983, TI-99/4a by Namco
Previous Rank: 67
Let’s start out my list with an obscure port of a classic. Like most in its era, Dig Dug levels featured a single screen. But you were free to explore every inch of that screen, provided you could pop the baddies before they killed you. The cat-and-mouse gameplay is very satisfying with both sides having vulnerabilities. I played this a ton on my TI computer as a kid, chasing the Guinness Book high score.

Morning Musume 20th Anniversary Review

I’d been to 4 concerts in the past (not to mention a couple mini-lives or shows they only did a few songs on), but I hadn’t seen Morning Musume all year. In that time, they’d gained three new members: two from the Kenshuusei juniors program and one from the sort-of-disbanding Country Girls. But my second-favorite member – Haruka Kudo – is also graduating after the fall tour, so I want to see her while I still can. 

This was not a typical show. The normal fall tour actually doesn’t start for a couple weeks. Instead, this was celebrating 20 years of Morning Musume. In 1997, I had only been out of high school a year. Okay, that’s making me feel old so moving on…

Persona 4 Golden: 40 hours in

Discovering the doorway to another world

I love RPGs, but I’m basically horrible at playing them. A former colleague asked on Facebook the other day what percentage of role-playing games people finish. I’d say under 10% for me. It’s not a matter of difficulty, mind you. So often start them, then just stop around 6, 9, or 20 hours, never to return again. 

There’s myriad excuses why; things just happen when you’re gaming. But as a result, I’ve only beaten 2 of the 10 numbered Final Fantasy games I played (including 13, which is probably the most-hated). I’ve completed 1 Disgaea, 1 Breath of Fire, 1 Fire Emblem, 1 Suikoden, and zero Persona games. I was playing and digging PS2’s Persona 3: FES when my launch-unit Playstation 3 shit the bed, around the 9-hour mark.

But now, I’m playing Persona 4 Golden on my Vita. And I’m loving it. I’m loving it so much, I decided to write about how great it is despite the fact that either people already know or don’t care about it.

Persona 4, like the others in the series, follows a group of high-school students in modern-day Japan. This setting has always appealed to me, and stood out in a genre so stuck on the medieval. Your characters rely on their Personas to do much of the fighting – demons they come to fuse with in one way or another. Not terribly dissimilar to Pokemon though predating it. And more recently, Persona installment stories entail going to a special netherworld – in P4’s case, by entering the TV with the help of a hollow bear named Teddy. 

Pony Rides & Freedom’s Cold Reality

Have you ever been to a carnival? They usually have pony rides. You’ve got a group of little horses strapped to a merry-go-round-like apparatus, and kids get to ride on the ponies for a little while. It’s dawned on me recently: I’m a pony. 

It’s not a bad life. I get fed well enough, even if it is a little bland. I’m soothed by the fact that there will be a place to rest until the next day, if a little meager. It’s a secure, stable existence, being a pony-ride pony.