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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New In-Game Screens Provide Glimpse of Top-Down Space Adventure for WiiWare

CHICAGO - Nov. 19, 2008

YUKE’S Company of America today revealed the first set of in-game screenshots and level details for Evasive Space, a new action space adventure for WiiWare™ under development by High Voltage Software. Set to launch this coming January, Evasive Space will blast you off on a space adventure in which you will be piloting Konki from a top-down view through various mazes and environments; creatively using the Wii Remote™’s infrared pointer for control. The new screens offer a look at Acts 1 and 2, out of a total of four Acts, each one featuring a central theme and five scenes of varying objectives.

Act 1: Crystal World
-Scene 1: The Gobo Caverns – Timed run through a cave maze
-Scene 2: The Terradyne Asteroid – Open space play; collect “spacemen” while avoiding the asteroids
-Scene 3: The Pirate Nagumo’s Space Cruiser – Timed run through a ship maze
-Scene 4: The Galdonia Nebula – Open space play with rotating level; collect energy cells while avoiding gas clouds from the sun
-Scene 5: The Gobo Caverns 2 – Timed run through new areas of the caverns with additional upgrades to collect

Act 2: Fire World
-Scene 1: The Rings of Minot IV – Open space play with rotating level; collect energy cells while avoiding asteroids
-Scene 2: The Lava Fields of Ikaku – Timed run through a cave maze
-Scene 3: The Mugavi Belt – Open space play; avoid asteroids while collecting “spacers” and returning them to their ships
-Scene 4: The Lava Fields of Ikaku Part 2 – Timed run through new areas of the caverns while avoiding shooting steam hazards
-Scene 5: Velkor’s Pyroclasitc Ship of Doom – Maze run; collect energy cells and find the exit portal

Stay tuned for screenshots revealing Acts 3 and 4, as well as additional details about the various environments!

Evasive Space has been rated “E” for Everyone with Mild Fantasy Violence by the ESRB and will be downloadable for 1,000 Wii™ Points.

The "Get Bent" pack is up on the Xbox Marketplace as we speak, weighing in at a paltry 100 Microsoft points.

CHICAGO - Sept. 17, 2008

YUKE'S Company of America, the U.S. publishing arm of Japanese game developer YUKE'S Company Limited, today announced that the all new “Get Bent” downloadable content pack is now available for Double D Dodgeball on Xbox LIVE® Arcade for the Xbox 360® video game and entertainment system from Microsoft. The in-game content will feature Curver, a new player with enhanced ball-curving capabilities and a super shot that causes the ball to disappear, challenging the opposing player’s catching skills.

In addition, new themes and picture packs were made available last week to commemorate the release of the “Get Bent” DLC. The Theme Pack contains five new images to enhance the look of your XBLA theme, while the Picture Pack includes images of the five original characters featuring a colorful art style for fans to use as a profile picture.

Double D Dodgeball, released on July16th, is an arcade-style take on the beloved sport, allowing players to face off in teams of up to four live players, or six including the AI, in a variety of arenas and match types. Players can strategize before a match begins by drafting a customized team and selecting from five specialized characters, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Compete on a variety of different courts, each version coming in Western and Eastern rules, to find out who is the top dodgeballer on Xbox LIVE Arcade for Xbox 360. Double D Dodgeball is rated E for Everyone by the ESRB.

The "Get Bent" DLC pack is available now and is priced at 100 Microsoft® Points.

The PSP version of the game is enhanced with new cut scenes, updated sounds and graphics, and all new ad hoc multiplayer modes that allow two players to battle it out in real-time. YUKE's says the game is "one of the finest card-strategy games ever created for the PSP", but of course they're biased. Find out for yourself this Fall!

Neverland Card Battles Stacks the Deck on PSP This Fall

YUKE'S Company of America to Publish Hit Japanese Title in its North American PSP Debut

CHICAGO – August 7, 2008 - YUKE'S Company of America, the U.S. publishing arm of Japanese game developer YUKE'S Company Limited, announced today that it will be publishing Neverland Card Battles for the PSP® (PlayStation®Portable) system in North America. The new title makes its debut on the PSP system, riding on the success of the original PlayStation®2 computer entertainment system hit for the Japanese market. Boasting an original Japanese art style and a cast of super-powered heroes and monsters, Neverland Card Battles will hit retail shelves across North America in October of this year, courtesy of an exclusive distribution agreement with Atlus U.S.A., Inc.

Neverland Card Battles for the PSP will be enhanced with all-new cut-scenes, controls, and ad hoc multiplayer modes. This card-based strategy RPG will shine on the small screen with updated sound and graphics, and a fully optimized 16:9 widescreen display. New ad hoc multiplayer modes will allow two players to battle in real-time for a card war experience unlike any other game.

Visit the Neverland Card Battles teaser website at:
www.neverlandcardbattles.com

“The original Japanese version of Neverland Card Battles was extremely well received and caught our attention as the best trading card game out there,” said Ken Koyama, Manager of Product Development at YUKE’S Company of America. “We have enhanced and optimized NCB for the portable experience, and will offer one of the finest card-strategy games ever created for the PSP this Fall.”

“We are honored to have a strong relationship with YUKE’S Company of America and serve as exclusive North American distributor of Neverland Card Battles,” said Tim Pivnicny, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Atlus.

About Neverland Card Battles
The war between humans and demons is tearing Neverland apart, and the ensuing chaos threatens to free the evil god Hellgaia from his tomb. Now, the future rests solely in the hands of the Dominators, those who can wield the otherworldly power found within the land’s Spectral Cards. As Galahad, a young and brash Dominator, set forth on a quest to banish Hellgaia back to his shrine forever and save Neverland from judgment day.

Neverland Card Battles has not yet been rated by the ESRB.

As revealed at the end of the trailer, Double D Dodgeball is coming to Xbox Live July 30th.

As promised in the vid, I've dug out the original posting of the intro song, and I am happy to report that after playing the game for a good hour I am pretty sure I am not dead.

Sucks to be the last to know. Rumble Roses developer Yuke's confessed that they no clue the PS3 controller will not feature vibration. When site Games Radar asked Yuke's senior director Taku Chihaya about this, Chihaya said:

We didn't know that! Wow, that stinks. In a lot of games, the use of the vibration can add so much. You walk around here at E3 and the floor's vibrating with bombs going off and stuff. It can really add a lot to a game to have vibration, so I'm kind of disappointed there won't be vibration in the controller.

Comforting to know that Sony's keeping everyone on the same page, including the folks making games for them.

More Here [Games Radar]