The One and Only Smackdown! HCTP Thread

[DrVenkman PhD 0]

I always bashed away at the buttons in No Mercy to try and kick out or move to the ropes in a submission, so this won't bother me.

 

As for different controls, I remember booting up Just Bring It and being off put by the fact I couldn't get right into it using Know Your Role's controls, but I quickly got used to it and enjoyed it, thought not as much as SYM.

[Downhome 0]

Well, I just got home with the game (as well as the Bloodbath DVD, oh hell yeah) so I'll post my first thoughts on this bad boy shortly.

[DrVenkman PhD 0]

It would seem Warrior is not in the game because Acclaim got the rights for the next LOW game with him.

[Downhome 0]

OH MAH GAWD!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

I'm playing my first match (I'm Hillbilly Jim taking on Kane in a normal one on one match), and I'm getting the ever living shit kicked out of me.

 

So Kane is working me over, and I think for sure I'm going to loose at any moment. He gets a Smackdown, and goes for his Powerbomb finisher on me.

 

I think for sure he has be defeated.

 

He lifts me up for the Powerbomb, and at the height of the move as I'm pressing the buttons like a mad whore on crack, Hillbilly switches the move around and comes crashing down with a HUGE ass DDT reversal on Kane.

 

I don't know the last time I marked that much at a Pro. Wrestling game.

 

Wow.

[Downhome 0]

OH MAH GAWD!!!!!!

 

So I'm fighting back, and the bastard goes for his Chokeslam this time. The kick ass animation starts up, and RIGHT before he lifts me up, Hillybilly kicks him in the midsection to break up yet ANOTHER finisher.

 

Wow.

[Downhome 0]

Good lord.

 

After working over on Kane's body the entire match, and breaking up TWO of his finishers and taking an ass kicking, I finally come back to win the match by making him submit to a Bearhug.

 

I love this fucking game already.

[DrVenkman PhD 0]

How were you breaking the finishers? Are SD! Icons not required?

[Downhome 0]

How were you breaking the finishers? Are SD! Icons not required?

No, you do not need a SD icon to break up finishers.

 

I thought I'd try out a Bra and Panties match next, and so far, as shocking as it is for myself to say it...

 

...it's fun as hell.

 

Yes, you heard me, I am actually enjoying the match. The mechanics of the match are just so smooth, it's great.

 

Thus far, I'm loving the grappling system. I'm talking, LOVING it. It's one of the best systems that I've ever played in a Pro. Wrestling game.

 

The reversals, oh my God the reversals, they are just wonderful.

 

If you have any questions, go for it.

[Repo Man jr 0]

Questions: Can you stand on the apron and move about/do moves, and and is there replays for some moves (like WM19).

[A Happy Medium 0]

which legends are available at the beginning again?

[dubq 0]

Just picked up my copy from EB... which was odd because when I called yesterday, they told me that they wouldn't have it until Thursday. Went in on a whim today, and there it was.

 

Should've probably waited until after work, though. These next four hours are going to be hell...

[Guest Dynamite Kido]

<----waiting at work.....can't wait to buy this later today.....goddamn work.

[Downhome 0]

Questions: Can you stand on the apron and move about/do moves, and and is there replays for some moves (like WM19).

Yes and I do not think so.

 

which legends are available at the beginning again?

 

Volkoff, Shiek, Jim, Steele, and Piper. I'm pretty sure that's all of them.

[Downhome 0]

I don't remember if it was in the previous games or not, but I am now Ric Flair vs. Val Venis. I went outside the ring to get a chair, and once I got back in the ring and was just about to clock Venis with it, the ref saw me and took it out of my hands and tossed it outside the ring.

 

Once again, I marked.

[rising up out of the back seat-nuh 0]

Is there any chance you could have a look at the created movesets and see if there are any notable ones (eg Low Ki, AJ, Danials, Puro/Indie guys, legends)?

 

Thanks.

[Downhome 0]

Is there any chance you could have a look at the created movesets and see if there are any notable ones (eg Low Ki, AJ, Danials, Puro/Indie guys, legends)?

 

Thanks.

The Styles Clash is in, but I only know that by looking at videos last week. Check out this thread over at GameFAQs if you want to know what else is in there.

 

I just want to also say that the Ric Flair in this game, is absolutely perfect in every way. I've never seen him have a better representation in a video game ever. His taunts, moves, everything, it's in there. Of course, I doubt the turnbuckle whip thing he does is in the game, but if it is I don't know how to do it.

 

His Figure-Four just may be the greatest thing ever.

 

You even have a move where you roll them up in a small package and you PULL THE TIGHTS! I just beat Val Venis using that move, and after it was over Venis stood right back up and was complaining to the ref about it.

 

It's details like THAT which make a game truly something special.

 

I'm just in awe at this game so far, I really am.

 

Also, interferance isn't just random. If you press R3 someone will come and help you, and in Flair's case the one time I did it, Batista came out to give me a hand. If the ref sees them get in the ring though, he'll get in front of them and make them get out of the ring.

 

Like I said, the details are just awesome.

[KingPK 0]

I don't remember if it was in the previous games or not, but I am now Ric Flair vs. Val Venis. I went outside the ring to get a chair, and once I got back in the ring and was just about to clock Venis with it, the ref saw me and took it out of my hands and tossed it outside the ring.

 

Once again, I marked.

The ref did that in SYM too. Of course, all you had to do was whack him with it to be able to use the chair on your opponent.

[dubq 0]

I don't remember if it was in the previous games or not, but I am now Ric Flair vs. Val Venis. I went outside the ring to get a chair, and once I got back in the ring and was just about to clock Venis with it, the ref saw me and took it out of my hands and tossed it outside the ring.

 

Once again, I marked.

The ref did that in SYM too. Of course, all you had to do was whack him with it to be able to use the chair on your opponent.

Ever have the ref chase after you relentlessly in SYM? I hit him by accident once and he WOULDN'T leave me alone. Had to restart the damn match!

[Fökai 0]

Holy shit, my EB order shipped out at 10:36 P.M. EST last night, from Louisville...

 

...and as of 80 minutes ago, it's in a town ten miles from here, waiting for the delivery truck to take it to my mailbox.

 

 

Must resist temptation to jump up and down.

 

Check out the tracking status.

[Guest Choken One]

I feel sorry for the peeps that are watching it on a tracker...knowing I just can walk up the street and get my copy right now at Wal-Mart.

[Guest Coffey]

What difficulty have you been playing mostly on, Coff?

 

UYI

I played on the default setting (normal) for awhile, and then after losing the first five matches I played, I switched it to easy. There wasn't much difference in the difficulty setting that I could tell. I only win when I start with 5 specials and use 4-5 of them.

[Guest Coffey]

Hey what button do you hit to reverse a finisher ( of course when you have smackdown icon to spare)?

L2 + R2 together.

[KingPK 0]

Here's another review from 1UP. It got an 8/10:

 

Review

 

THQ's pro wrestling games of late are the source of unusual irony. As WWF games become more and more playable, the WWF itself becomes less and less watchable.

It sucks so bad nowadays they can't even call it the WWF. They call it the WWE, which sounds really stupid and inspires endless quibbling over what article you're supposed to use with it. If it stands for "World Wrestling Entertainment," common usage means you don't call it "the WWE." It's just "WWE." But you're screwed either way, because while saying "Anything can happen in WWE!" sounds silly, so does "Anything can happen in the World Wrestling Entertainment!"

 

My usual solution is to change the channel to something else, like Jean-Claude Van Damme in "Hard Target" on the TBS late movie. A flick like that, you get a decent enough supply of sweaty man-grappling and butcherous dialogue to make up for the weekly pro wrestling fix.

 

But sometimes there's just no substitute. Professional wrestling is, after all, perhaps the most unique and fascinating of modern artforms -- at its best there's nothing quite like it in the world. At its worst, it's 20 minutes of quasi-incestuous yammering between a senile Vince McMahon and his mongoloid children, but that's why we play videogames instead. WWE SmackDown!: Here Comes the Pain lacks the feature I would most like to see in a WWE game, a "No McMahons" option, but otherwise it has more or less all the tools you need to enjoy your own version of the World Wrestling Whatever-the-hell-you-call-it.

 

Last year's SmackDown!, Shut Your Mouth, was the first game in the series you could call truly playable. The first three, however well-liked they were in their time, featured hideously broken gameplay and terrible nightmares of interface design hidden behind the option labeled "Season Mode." Shut Your Mouth, by comparison, brought a sense of logic to the proceedings in the ring and offered a wealth of simple angles and storylines to add meaning to matches in the Season Mode. It didn't change the minds of the many fans with a fundamental objection to the SmackDown! grappling system, but nothing was likely to distract them from their Fire Pro Wrestling anyway.

 

Here Comes the Pain, then, is an evolution of Shut Your Mouth. Like a new Madden football game, it updates a successful formula with new rosters and enough gameplay improvements to make it worth the purchase.

 

Those improvements address a raft of common complaints about the peculiarities of the SmackDown! grappling system. Small movesets, irrational damage reckoning, cheap reversal systems, ineffectual submission moves -- all of these were problems in at least the first three games in the series, and Here Comes the Pain goes a long way toward fixing them all.

 

To expand the wrestlers' movesets and get around the limitations of a one-button grappling system, Yuke's implemented a two-stage grappling system. Executing a move requires two combinations of a direction and the grapple button -- one to enter a setup position, and one more to perform a move from there. This obviously expands the selection of available moves, and grouping types of moves around each setup position (power moves, strikes, submissions, and so on) makes it easier to execute the appropriate move without memorizing a wrestler's entire repertoire.

 

If this is more complex than Shut Your Mouth's system, it's balanced by simplified reversal commands. Instead of the direction-based reversals in the last game, Here Comes the Pain has two reversal buttons: L2 for strikes, R2 for grapples. Reversals are easier than before, but not as easy as in the painfully cheap Just Bring It, and a worn-out or less technically proficient wrestler can't reverse moves without perfect timing.

 

The most preposterously overdue addition, however, is location-based damage. For the first time in its history, SmackDown! now has GUI elements to indicate the state of a wrestler's vulnerable points, and submission moves are finally worth using as a consequence. They're still not necessarily the most efficient means of winning a match, since getting a submission requires that you work a body part continuously over the course of a match, but at least we're given some indication of whether a submission-based attack is having any effect at all. Wearing down an opponent and their corresponding sell of the damage is still a little inconsistent, and wrestlers occasionally pause entirely to go through a tedious sell animation, but this is still a huge improvement on the previous games.

 

Other additions are welcome, if not exactly necessary. Here Comes the Pain expands its roster of unlockable wrestlers with Legends, for instance, although the WWE plays pretty fast and loose with the definition of "Legend." The Million Dollar Man Ted DiBiase is a Legend, for instance, that's pretty hard to dispute, but I take issue with the decision that made Hillbilly Jim a Legend as well. Hillbilly Jim is a small cog in the legend of Vince McMahon's quasi-sexual redneck fetish, which revives itself every seven years or so (Hillbilly Jim, the Godwinns, and now Jamie Noble), but he is not a legend in his own right, I think. Still, I'll live with the inclusion of Hillbilly Jim, if we get DiBiase, Sergeant Slaughter, the Road Warriors, and some other '80s favorites along with him.

 

Those extra wrestlers are among the selection of bonuses unlockable in Season Mode, which works much as it did in Shut Your Mouth. The old 3D arena interface is gone, but that was no great loss -- its novelty wore off pretty quickly -- and the storylines the game delivers once again do their job of adding an angle, however minor, to each match. Some of them are a little bit silly -- Chris Benoit broke up our tag-team partnership in a dispute over the last slice of pizza -- but the dogs are outnumbered by some pretty compelling storylines.

 

This game recognizes the virtue of simplicity in a way that the real-life WWE often doesn't. The Undertaker once cut a promo on my Brock Lesnar avatar that was better than anything the real Undertaker's delivered in years. Then I beat him stupid and dropped him with an F-5 on the concrete, which led to the epic double-juice cage match blowoff. End of feud, move on to something else. It's simple, sure, but it's effective and entertaining.

 

Outside the structured confines of the Season Mode, the selection of match types and creation options has essentially hit its zenith. Shut Your Mouth had one of the best character editors in any 3D game, and so there's not much to improve except for the breadth of edit parts and moves available, which is vast. The same goes for the match selection, which spans ladder matches, cage matches, first-blood matches (since wrestlers can finally bleed in a limited fashion), and even lucha libre captain's-fall trios matches.

 

Given all the game offers as a game, it's hard to still quibble over its issues as a visual display. Here Comes the Pain still looks very much like SmackDown!, though, with the lingering problems that's come to denote. Transition animations continue to grow smoother and cleaner, and new lighting effects add realistic highlights on skin and clothes, but clipping is still a problem, there are still glaring gaps in some animations, and the level of model detail probably won't ever compare to the Xbox's Raw 2. There are still seams and sharp edges that make a jarring contrast to smoother, more cleanly-modeled surfaces, and the new 3D crowd is nothing to write home about.

 

But like I say, those are quibbles more than anything. The total package is solid, and while it's not the holy grail fans have hoped for since the N64's No Mercy, it's light-years beyond what THQ used to try and sell under the SmackDown! name. If you're a wrestling fan with $40 to spare, the money that could buy a pay-per-view headlined by Stephanie McMahon would be far better spent here.

[fazzle 0]

Woo! Just got this time today and so far it kicks ass. The AI is *much* improved. No more cakewalks this time. I've had two matches so far, a backstage match with Flair, where I had to struggle big time to win, and then a regular match against Booker T, where he completely dominated me. He got two specials before I got one, and ended up winning on the second.

 

I'm playing Season mode as Jericho, and in a strangely psychic twist, my first backstage event was defending Trish's honor.

[Anakin Flair 0]

Undertaker is one cheap bastard in this game. He has punches you can't reverse, interference doesn't stop him, and oh, if you talk to him backstage and you say you respect him, he punks you out and you loose a superstar point. Bastard.

[fazzle 0]

woot! I just won the hardcore title from RVD! Took two lionsaults, multiple chairshots, and mutliple stair shots.

 

Edit: And my first bitching about the game...nobody's ever in the damn backstage areas. With the exception of the GM office, there's been ONE time in four weeks that' someone's been backstage.

[dubq 0]

Undertaker is one cheap bastard in this game. He has punches you can't reverse, interference doesn't stop him, and oh, if you talk to him backstage and you say you respect him, he punks you out and you loose a superstar point. Bastard.

Meh, he's not feelin' it.

 

Oh, and from that review above...

 

At its worst, it's 20 minutes of quasi-incestuous yammering between a senile Vince McMahon and his mongoloid children, but that's why we play videogames instead.

 

Priceless!

[Lightning Flik 0]

woot! I just won the hardcore title from RVD! Took two lionsaults, multiple chairshots, and mutliple stair shots.

 

Edit: And my first bitching about the game...nobody's ever in the damn backstage areas. With the exception of the GM office, there's been ONE time in four weeks that' someone's been backstage.

Congrats. On the accomplishment.

 

I can't wait till November 9th, so I can buy this game.

[Guest Metallica]

Quick question - Is there an Iron Man match mode? None of the reviews I've read have specifically mentioned it..

[Guest Scotsman]

The season modes pretty messed up. Even though I'm on Smackdown, Bischoff booked me in a match. Then Jerry Lawler said he could book me a tag title shot. And now because we're in Oklahoma, JR just told me he'll call my match as best as he can....even though hes a friggin RAW commentator.

 

Oh well, love the fact that while on the bike, you can grab the guy by the throat and drag him around.