Select Answers: Taz, video games, CM Punk/AEW

Welcome to Select Answers, a feature that provides some of the answers to questions that were posed to Sean Ross Sapp in the most recent Fightful Weekly Q&A Podcast. The show drops every week on Fightful Select for subscribers.

When aggregating these posts please refer to it as "Fightful Select Answers Q&A" and tag Fightful, noting that it was in the Q&A format to avoid confusion.

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I'm curious. Aside from the wrestling games you grew up with, any other video games you enjoyed back in the day? Bonus points if there are any you enjoy these days. Merry Christmas, btw!

Growing up in the 90s, I honestly pretty quickly realized how shitty wrestling games were in the mid 90s. Being a little kid and playing anything on console kind of sucked when there was a WrestleFest machine at our local pizza place. I loved Saturday Night Slam masters, though. The first wrestling game that I loved as an actual simulation-style game was WCW vs. The World. That one gave me hope and made me realize there was something special that could happen.

I preferred WCW/nWo Revenge over No Mercy.

But outside of wrestling games, I've always been a big side scroller beat em up fan. Turtles in Time was my favorite game until Shredder's Revenge came out. Sunset Riders is an iconic game, and the Scott Pilgrim beat em up is great.

In the PS era, Thrasher: Skate and Destroy because of the ragdoll physics, and Driver because of the open world element. I was hyping up Driver because of all the ads in magazines before it came out.

For the next era -- Need For Speed Underground, the GTA series, True Crime: Streets of LA. The open world games hit especially hard for me here. Timesplitters is an all time favorite and one of the only shooters I was good at.

These days, I play sports games. MLB the Show and Madden primarily

If CM Punk signed with AEW when it first launched, do you think things would’ve played out differently? Thinking of an alternate series of events where TK signs him instead of Jericho.

Yes. I think he would have probably been more patient with the process, seeing the beginnings they came from. I think that he believed there were different ways of doing things, and as a company grows they'll certainly learn different ways. It just was no longer a good fit, and it's unfortunate it went the way that it did, but both sides and many parties were responsible for it. I think eventually they'll patch things up

Thank you for a great year of wrestling news and information. What is up with taz? Is he still with aew?

Yes! He's still with AEW, and still under contract. Taz needed a total shoulder replacement, and got surgery back in October. He's still going to be out a bit, but seems to be doing well in his recovery.