Pre-show notes

- Thank you for bearing with the semi-lateness of this week’s reports. I managed to attend SummerSlam live, so the report gets that cool live review feature some of you enjoy. The bad part about that is that SummerSlam is half a country and two time zones away from me, so I spent the entirety of Monday on a variety of airplanes. This report’s pretty long, though, so enjoy that, and I’ll have a thorough Raw report ready for you on Wednesday.

- Your comments, likes, tweets, Touts and whatever are appreciated. This column sorta lives and dies by your participation in it, so anything you can do to pitch in and spread the word is appreciated. Shout out to my Reddit homeboys, who I’d talk to all the time if I wasn’t 200 years old and could figure out Reddit. Somebody Reddit for me.

- Follow us on Twitter @withleather, follow me personally @MrBrandonStroud and like us on Facebook.

- If you read the report in its infancy earlier today, all the pages have been uploaded and the full thing is a thing. Enjoy!

So at long last, please enjoy The Best And Worst Of WWE SummerSlam 2012, sponsored by THQ. No, seriously.

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This weekend I’ll be in Los Angeles, California, for WWE’s SummerSlam 2012 pay-per-view, and one of the coolest aspects of that is that I’ll be around at SummerSlam Axxess for THQ’s hands-on experience with/live roster reveal of WWE ’13. For those of you who don’t know, THQ’s WWE series is more or less the Madden of wrestling games, and this year’s edition is set to feature one of the biggest talent rosters ever, including a bunch of guys who were around in the late 90s when you probably watched. For those of you who DO know, yes, I am going to ignore almost everything they tell me to do and just stand in the middle of Axxess making local indy wrestler create-a-wrestlers.

Anyway, here’s the important information: I’ll be tweeting my thoughts and impressions of the game as well as up-to-the-minute roster information (come on, Damien Sandow!) on my personal Twitter account all weekend, so be sure to follow me @MrBrandonStroud.

If you guys have any questions you’d like me to ask the developers, drop them in our comments section here and I’ll try to get them answered. This is going down at Axxess, too, which means I should be within shouting distance of Dolph Ziggler if you want me to scream something to him about his Ass Cape. But no, seriously, the folks at THQ and WWE are awesome to let me take part in this, so let’s make it a big deal.

Pre-show notes:

- First and foremost I’d like to thank my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ give a huge thank you to Bill Hanstock for filling in on the WWE Raw Open Discussion Thread and to Chris Trew for his excellent fill-in job for me on yesterday’s Best And Worst Of Raw. I’ve been in an airport for seemingly the last month and a half so I had to miss everything. Yes, it was spoiled for me before I got home. No, it won’t be as good when I get to write about it next week.

- Comments are appreciated. I’ve gotten a lot of WHERE’S THE WRESTLEMANIA THING feedback, so let’s hear what you thought about the show below. Shares, Facebook likes, Pinterests (?) and Google Plussage are all appreciated.

- Thanks again to THESTINGER for helping me out with show images and gifs. Anything that wasn’t grabbed from TV was taken by me, or someone holding my camera.

- I am extremely tired!

Please click through and enjoy my take on the live experience of WWE Wrestlemania 28. It was … something.

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We’ve talked about it all year, and it’s finally upon us … Wrestlemania XVIII happens in Miami, Florida, this weekend, and by the time you read this I’ll be on the scene to bring you up-to-the-minute live notes, reports, interviews and perspectives and/or taking mark photos with the Funkasaurus.

It’s Wrestlemania and you want to talk about it, so I’ll skip the hype. After the jump you can find the complete card and a series of polls asking you to select who you think will come out in top in the event’s big matches, so after you’ve made your choices, drop down into the comments section and earn a +Rhodes or two explaining your picks.

You may also earn literal +Rhodes for participating in the weekend’s discussion. More on that at the end.

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