In the first case, a three-party settlement among all involved will see THQ paying WWE $13.2 million, and Jakks another $20 million in four installments over the next four years. THQ and Jakks had been partners in the WWE venture, and this settlement effectively buys out Jakks, as the two sides have announced that their partnership ends Dec. 31.

THQ and Jakks had been in litigation since July, after Jakks had notified WWE it would renew the two sides' license, but THQ then sued, saying Jakks wasn't authorized to make such a decision. The payments to both WWE and Jakks resolve those entanglements.

Secondly the license renewal between THQ and WWE begins on Jan 1. and lasts eight years, which is three years beyond the original renewal term. Terms of that were not disclosed.

Got all that? What's it mean? One, THQ will continue to make WWE games, such as its Smackdown vs. Raw series. And, two, it puts that license out of reach for the next eight years. The lack of resolution on this issue had led some to speculate that EA Sports, which has teased a new game announcement come January, might be moving in on 'rasslin. We now know that not to be the case, so EA Sports' new game will have to be something else.

It was my reputation among team Kotaku that got me assigned to reviewing what has proven to be the best wrestling game I've played in a decade — Smackdown Vs. Raw 2010, which is also the only wrestling game I've played in a decade. I guess everyone thought I'd be perfect for it. Maybe they know that the only website that I pay to read daily is a pro-wrestling site, a site that allows me to read about the often-mediocre happenings on modern wrestling shows without having to watch them. Perhaps they know I imported Bret Hart's autobiography from Canada and Ohio Valley Wrestling DVDs (when Paul Heyman was booking OVW shows) from Ohio Kentucky. Or perhaps it's that Hulk Hogan thing I did.

Regardless, you'd think that someone who has loved video games and, I guess, loved pro wrestling, for much of his life, would love the melding of the two. But I started this new game, the latest in the annual releases of THQ-published, Yukes-developed modern wrestling games, with almost complete alienation from the genre. (I have some professional embarrassment about this, since I've been to Yukes' studio in Yokohama and met the wrestling-obsessed people there. I even got a great tour that included a look at the back rooms that reek of body odor every summer as the team sleeps in the office while cramming to finish their game by fall). This new game brings to the series a revised Royal Rumble, an enhanced Create a Finisher option, a new training arena, revised rosters, new storylines and — the big feature — the ability for fans to create and share their own storylines. But it was all new to me. And, wouldn't you know it, the game is fun and… intellectually stimulating? Yes.

Loved
The Basic Flow: WWE pro wrestling games, as fans would know, are 3D fighting games played from a quasi-overhead perspective and battled on the surfaces of wrestling ring and floor, with the walls of a steel cage or the top of a destructible announcers' table sometimes also in play. You win not by eliminating an opponents' health bar but by executing enough minor and major strikes, throws, dives, taunts and more, all of which either damage to the opponents' body or build the momentum of your own wrestlers' adrenaline, which enables a successful pinning (or submission or count-out) victory. In other words, the game treats wrestling as if it's a hybrid of combat and performance, with the player driven by more competitive intent to maim than in the real thing. It's a good system that demands the player learn how to smoothly chain their moves to build momentum. And it is a a rewarding one, as Yukes has managed to capture and animate hundreds of moves that transition from one to the next with, of all the rare qualities in games, grace. Winning a match in this game is a performing pleasure.

The WWE Recreated: Even a lapsed fan of WWE such as myself stumbles across Smackdown on Friday nights or remembers older episodes of Raw well enough to see that Edge's shoulder-twitch during his ring entrance is true to life, that Shawn Michaels' super-kick should look as perfect as it does and that selecting Shelton Benjamin will grant the player access to a cool set of moves. The game's venues, from the pay-per-view-specific entrance ramps to the backstage announce areas, look perfect. The tone of violence and sex — an endless parade of T&A and at least one storyline involving a female wrestler sleeping her way to the top — matches squarely with even today's toned-down WWE. The announcing sounds right, issued by (mostly) the right people. This game is very WWE.

The Thesis-Worthy Story-Editor: Of all the new features this year, conveniently marked "NEW" in the game's menu for people like me, the best and most interesting is the storyline editor. In the past, wrestling game fans could create their own wrestlers, customize move-sets and even, more recently, chain pieces of animation to create new match-ending finishing moves. In the new game, players can craft a storyline, mixing matches that include player-defined outcomes with story-advancing sequences. The latter scenes are comprised of WWE-related locales (rings, locker rooms, offices) with wrestlers, a variety of conversational and confrontational emotions, adjustable camera angles, selectable music and crowd-noise background sounds and, most importantly, player-written dialogue. The system's interface has some rough edges that players can work around but is nonetheless fascinating.

This is what you'd write your thesis about: Pro wrestling is already an odd blend of fake sport and acted drama, something fans appreciate as real and unreal at the same time (We know that John Cena is a man really named John Cena, but we also know that the Undertaker is not really a man who has risen from the dead. We buy into the idea that the Stone Cold Stunner hurts, because it looks like it does; we laugh with The Rock that the People's Elbow does not hurt, because we know that he knows that we know that his big elbow move is a love tap at worst). In a wrestling game, that reality/unreality gets twisted some more, as the action in the ring is made to seem both more real than it is in real life (The depicted action in a WWE game involves hurting an opponent thoroughly enough to win, not simply entertaining the crowd through fake-fighting) and less real (The moves in the game, animated without fear of causing bodily harm, are made to look more impactful, thereby exposing how deadly and illegal they ought to really be). The new game's story editor knots these strands of truth and untruth even more. Maybe gamers have been able to re-arrange games through mods for years. Maybe they've been able to puppeteer fake lives through The Sims for over a decade. But now we can mangle and morph the pseudo-reality of real celebrities through the WWE. We could craft a storyline in which CM Punk demands to know John Cena's favorite color and then wrestles the answer out of him (I did this. Search for it on Xbox Live using the keyword phrase "Favorite Color"). We could make a storyline in which WWE Diva "A" falls in love with WWE Wrestler "Z" but is seduced away by the Create-A-Wrestler character who you designed to look just like a muscular Bill O'Reilly. (I did not do this.) You're playing with sort-of real lives. You're creating officially-sanctioned slash-fiction. You're kind of writing the next Indiana Jones adventure at the same time that you're kind of writing the next thing for Harrison Ford to do. The layers of reality and unreality are dense.

The Unintended Consequences: Maybe a simpler way to praise the interesting aspects of the Create A Storyline editor is to mention that I downloaded a storyline called something like "One Night After Raw," and after meeting a condition to have Shawn Michaels win a match, and after sitting through a series of backstage vignette's written with not the best user-generated spelling, my Shawn Michaels was then ambushed in the ring by three definitely-not-licensed wrestlers from rival company TNA. For years wrestling fans have wanted to book Raw themselves. Now they can do it virtually, for me to play through. Too bad the game's canned announcers were still plugging the WWE website instead of reacting to what this one user created.

The Royal Rumble: The game has a revised button-mashing mini-game for eliminating people in its Royal Rumble. The 30-man elimination match is often the most fun pro wrestling match of the year, so any improvements that more authentically let me, as Vince McMahon, team up with The Great Khali to flip some-user's Street Fighter Sagat over the top rope is ok by me.

The Sense Of Pain: WWE Smackdown Vs. Raw 2010 is one of those eye-catching games that other people in the room, who may be tired of the Bret Hart and Mankind books on the bookshelf, can't help but be drawn into. Why? I believe it's because the animations are so good that they look like they connect and that the moves hurt, which, given the combat that is supposed to be depicted here, is a victory.

Hated
Poor Counter-Attack Training: The game's menu-screen training arena allows players to swiftly try and learn many of the basic single or double-input commands needed to execute the extraordinary variety of maneuvers available in the game. Consider, for example, that you may want to make your wrester who is standing next to the ropes in the ring either jump over the ropes, crawl under them, wind up on the apron of the ring or on the floor or not do any of that and climb the turnbuckle… or take the padding off the turnbuckle. And there's a button combo for each of those. Offense is easily learned and joyfully executed. But the trick to mastering the game seems to be the execution of a single-input counter-move. The same button counters anything. Animated prompts appear during training and in the game's matches to alert the player that a window to counter has opened. But those windows close so quickly that that game does a poor job teaching the player how to execute this key move well.

The Online Limitations:The WWE game's online competitive wrestling worked fine and minus the lag I saw some complaining about on message boards. But I found the skill-level-matching inadequate. I can breeze through normal difficulty but can't find a player online who I can beat? I also can't easily re-find my uploaded wrestling storyline to find out how people have rated it, nor can I select which ones to download with any filters other than most recent and most-highly-rated. Overall, the options for the game's online modes are just not specific enough for the needs a player might have. The content and gameplay available through online, though, is solid.

Immediately Outdated: I played a developer-scripted storyline that involved a rivalry between Edge and Mr. Kennedy. But Mr. Kennedy doesn't work for WWE anymore. Many of our matches were announced by Jim Ross and Tazz. But Tazz doesn't work for WWE anymore, either. Both men left the company in 2009, and I understand the challenges of adapting to such changes. But this is one of those things that, as a potential consumer, I just want to have work right. This is an online-connected game. So let's see it adapt to the present.

Buried Info:What are my character's finishing moves and what position does his opponent have to be in so I can execute them? How am I doing in career mode in terms of raising my wrestlers' ability to connect with the crowd and raise his charisma stat? There are many pieces of information that are relevant to the gameplay of Smackdown Vs. Raw 2010 that seem to have been omitted from menu screens and the instruction manual, possibly being reserved for the official game guide. That leaves the player to stumble across or guess many important details. This is not a bad thing for those who don't like a lot of tutorials and explanations, but gamer beware that you'll have to figure a lot of this game out for yourself.

I used to avoid pro wrestling games because of my disinterest in fighting games and my belief that the games treated pro wrestling as something different than what I enjoyed. I liked the acrobatics and the melodrama of real WWE. The games, I guessed, treated the whole affair as if it was straight-up sport. WWE Smackdown Vs. Raw 2010 still does treat pro wrestling a little more as sport than I'd want. Things like winning streaks are almost required in the game, even though they are rare in the real wrestling leagues.

But the addition of configurable storylines provides that element of unpredictable, scripted entertainment that has made WWE programming, in some years, among the best and most enjoyably wild material on TV. Finally, I'm interested. The fact that the configurable narratives — the post-Sims, post-mods playing we can do with sort-of real lives — is a spectacular and mind-bending bonus.

(WWE Smackdown Vs. Raw 2010 was developed by Yukes and published by THQ for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable, Nintendo DS and Wii on October 20. Retails for $59.99 USD on the home consoles. An copy of the game was given to us by the publisher for reviewing purposes. Played the 360 version. Won the Royal Rumble as Vincent Kennedy McMahon. Made it on the Road To Wrestlemania as Edge. Progressed Shelton Benjamin up a career ladder to ECW and Intercontinental title glory. Created, uploaded and downloaded storylines. Invented a new top-rope finishing move. Got pinned a lot online, including by a female version of MVP.)

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In a binding arbitration between the two companies announced today, an arbitrator has ruled that Jakks is only entitled to six percent of sales from THQ WWE games, down from ten percent. The new, lower rate, is retroactive to July 1, 2006 and runs through the end of this year.

As a result, THQ says they expect to bring in an extra $23 million during the fiscal 2010 quarter ending this September.

The arbitration kicked off after the two companies came to an impasse while negotiating a new preferred rate return. It's just the latest in a series of legal battles between the two.

Back in June Jakks Pacific notified WWE of their intentions to renew their license to create games based on the wrestling franchise. But THQ said that the company couldn't cut the deal without talking to them first.

Jakks Pacific has gone ahead and notified World Wrestling Entertainment of their intentions to renew to license to create video games based on the highly popular wrestling franchise for another five years, extending the current agreement until December 31st, 2014. Seems like a good idea, right?

Well not according to THQ, Jakks' partner in the Joint Venture that holds said license. According to a statement issued by Jakks Pacific today, THQ has filed a lawsuit in California Superior Court, asking that the court declare that Jakks was not authorized to make such a decision and THQ is not obligated to consent to such a decision.

Even more telling, THQ is also asking that the court declare a restrictive covenant in the Joint Venture agreement that restricts THQ from publishing a wrestling title for a period of one year following the termination of said venture be deemed unenforceable in California.

So basically THQ is looking to cover their assets, making sure that if they terminate the Jakks agreement that they'll still be able to publish wrestling titles. Jakks and THQ have also initiated arbitration proceedings relating to the issues, so the court case might come to nothing. Either way, it should be an interesting match.

So how does Runescape snag top honors? One need only look at the remainder of the list to understand that a special cross-section of the populace is using Yahoo! to search the web. Half of the list reads like the front of a supermarket tabloid, with Angelina Jolie, Lohan, Alba, Miley Cyrus, and this year's number 1 search - Britney Spears. Number 2 on the list is the WWE. Of the whole list, the only two that really make sense are Barack Obama and Naruto, two characters I never thought I'd have to mention in the same sentence.

What does this say about Runescape players? I'm not going to speculate, as there are a lot more of them than there are of me.

Top 10 Searches for 2008 [Yahoo! - Thanks Alan]

Just when you thought things couldn't get any better than this, a fight broke out.

As you can see, James got really into character, carrying Marilyn Monroe to safety while the battle raged on. While perhaps not the most accurate Lara Croft costume out there, I could certainly see her taking on wild panthers much more readily than Angelina Jolie.

WWE Diva Halloween Costume Contest [WWE via MTV Multiplayer]

Connecticut Court Dismisses WWE Claims Against Jakks, THQ [Gamasutra]

GoNintendo was dubious at first that Rhodes deliberately put the Triforce on his boots. But the grappler makes it pretty damn clear in the latest issue of WWE Magazine:

"It's the Tri-Force from The Legend of Zelda," Rhodes confirmed. "You know how some people have a book they re-read every year? Well I re-play The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past for Super Nintendo every year. In the game, the Tri-Force symbolized power, wisdom and courage. I thought I could apply those qualities to my life."

In 1992 I actually refereed a pro rasslin' match in North Carolina. It's a long-ass story how I ended up doing that. But on the card was this clown who went by Mean Mark. Mean had Scripture printed on the ass of his trunks, which, if I was the Lord, I'd kind of grimace and nod at the sentiment but not really feel complimented, you know? Now 16 years later a value set inspired by a video game gets better treatment on a nationwide stage.

As for me, I replay Red Dead Revolver about halfway every year. It teaches me that revenge is a great and awesome goal but gets real boring after about the fourth time.

WWE wrestler Cody Rhodes Pays Tribute to Zelda via his Ring Attire [GoNintendo]

THQ president and CEO Brian Farrell said that most of its struggles were due to a crowded and competitive market for kids' games, as well as key franchises — Juiced, Stuntman and Conan that ultimately "were simply not competitive."

"Insufficient game quality led to inadequate sellthrough, resulting in markdowns at retail," Farrell said.

Farrell said the company spent heavily to promote Juiced and Stuntman, and had to take a loss when those titles fail to perform. What growth THQ did see, Farrell credited to Frontlines: Fuel of War, MX vs. ATV Untamed and WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2008, all of which exceeded expectations.

Farrell also said the kids' market, in which THQ has several franchises, was the most competitive in years, and that the company's currently struggling to compete with music games and Nintendo first-party titles.

Nonetheless, THQ appears to have placed its faith in the Wii, concentrating much of its upcoming original IP there. Although Saints Row 2 and Red Faction Guerrilla are still the "anchors" of its lineup, Darksiders, De Blob, Deadly Creatures, Big Beach Sports and All Star Cheer look likely to be slated for Wii along with other unannounced projects, though the company did not announce specific platforms.

New installments in existing franchises for fiscal 2009 include WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2009, Disney/Pixar's Wall-E film tie-in, and its previously-revealed Nickelodeon portfolio. The company will publish a game based on DreamWorks' Animation's unannounced 2010 fall film, and has slated WWE: Legends of Wrestlemania for 2009.

Notably, the company seems to have an eye on the free-to-play, microtransactions-driven online gaming market in Asia, highlighting the co-publishing agreement it's signed with Shanda Interactive to bring Company of Heroes Online to China in 2009.

THQ is more confident about the year to come, with three new initiatives in place: "We are rolling out a stronger slate of products. We have put in place and are executing against initiatives to improve our product quality and competitiveness. We are also realigning our cost structure to generate significant operating leverage in fiscal 2009. We believe these initiatives will restore profitable growth and improve value for shareholders," said Farrell.

"We faced a number of challenges, but I believe we have the right strategy to overcome these challenges and achieve significant growth."

Microsoft has apparently planned to do right by the boy with the help of the World Wrestling Entertainment, gifting Kieran a free 360 game and getting mother and son backstage passes to an upcoming WWE event where the boy will receive an authentic piledriver. Exciting! Hopefully, Kieran will reclaim his old signatures and these dream-crushing maniacs obsessed with cleanliness will be stopped before they strike again.

Carlton Boy Meets Wrestling Heroes [Nottingham Evening Post - thanks, LanceJr!]

Love it.

John Cena T-shirt [WWE]

Solve me those issues and will talk. SmackDown vs. Raw 2008 for the 360 has the looks...but can it move it? Michael Fahey

WWE Smackdown vs Raw 2008, Wii demonstration video [Wii QJ]

According to the German THQ site, there will no longer be a PlayStation 3 SKU of THQ's WWE Smackdown vs. Raw 2007. Despite being announced in May for the PS3, the game appears to have been shelved for the time being. Or has it? A site admin for the German THQ site had this to say:

WWE SmackDown! vs. Raw 2007 will not be published for the PS3: the title is still coming for PlayStation 2, PSP, and Xbox 360. The background is that the PS3 version became substantially delayed and would be finished much later, so the development team would rather concentrate their resources on the three other platforms. Future games in the SmackDown! series will appear, however, for PlayStation 3. Still if something should change in the present planning, it will be announced here.

Okay, I'm with you. That's me paraphrasing a Babelfish translation of a message board post from the German Web site of THQ. Not exactly what I'd call a definitive source, but it still smells a lil' fishy.

True, there is no PlayStation 3 tab (no graphic even exists for such a tab) at the game's official page, but THQ's other announced PS3 game, Frontlines: Fuels of War has no Web site presence at all. And THQ has no PlayStation 3 section on their site. Plus, IGN just published a preview for the PS3 version of the game this past Friday, a day after the "announcement".

Would I be surprised that the PS3 version is substantially delayed? Nope. Would I be surprised that it would lead THQ to cancel the game outright? Maybe. Will I wait for an official announcement before proclaiming the PS3 sky is falling? Yesch. Michael McWhertor

Thanks to David and SF for the heads up.

Thanks to Metafuture for scoring this once-in-a-lifetime footage of a historic E3 media event. Florian Eckhardt

Wait for it! Wait for it! Snake! FLORIAN ECKHARDT

If you came to E3 wanting to see the clothes of burly men who wear tights, or if you've had enough of looking at women in skimpy outfits and want instead to be able to view the skimpy outfits without being distracted by the women, then you're in luck. THQ, the publishers of the upcoming WWE Smackdown! vs. Raw 2007, have some of the actual outfits worn by actual professional wrestlers on display, including Mankind's face mask and several small pieces of cloth whimsically referred to as WWE divas' "outfits." Several displays are filled with the goods and locked behind glass so that nobody can sniff them.

Come on, you know someone would.

Smackdown vs. Raw [Official Site]

The real lesson here is that almost anything can be made more tolerable when you are listening to Boots Randolph's "Yakety Sax"! This inflammatory video from YouTube is definitive proof.

(Thanks, Sho Nuff!)

Smackdown vs. Raw 2006 on PSP : Load Time Hell! [YouTube]