WWE SmackDown vs RAW 2008

An image from the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games still lingers in the memory: a crowd shot that showed two children whose father had presumably dragged them along to take in some Greco-Roman Wrestling. They stood together, co-operating in holding up an Australian flag as they also co-operated in sharing the one, identical facial expression: pure, unadulterated boredom. We presume that the contest on show was ‘real’, but we can’t help but agree with the look on the faces of those two tykes, and we certainly hope that no British kids are subject to the same disappointment come the imminent future.

The lesson here is simple: sometimes it’s better to go with a product that is scripted, is corny as all hell, and that isn’t strictly real; but one that knows one thing above all else, and that’s how to entertain. America isn’t known as a nation of subtlety, but when you consider how this has resulted in a total rebranding and packaging of wrestling, this is no bad thing. WWE represents pure, cheesy, blinged-up, excessively macho bliss that throws around enough testosterone to make He-Man cry to his mother. It’s pure style, pure showmanship and, above all, pure entertainment. Shallow fun, and a delicious guilty pleasure, the appeal is hard to resist for even the most sensible of people, and it’s exactly this sort of appeal that Yuke’s has been banking on with each successive installation of the SmackDown Vs RAW franchise. Interestingly though, the Wii may well have provided said franchise more than just style, resulting in the best instalment to date.

With each passing year, the SmackDown Vs RAW brand has been nothing if not exceptional in regard to the amount of service that it manages to deliver to WWE fans, even if the gameplay has been a little clunky. The sheer depth of the base content has been nothing short of awesome, packed with enough Superstars, divas, arenas and game modes to easily tide one over until the following year’s inevitable offering.

2008 succeeds every bit as much as its predecessors in this regard, if not more so. The more underground ECW league makes a long overdue, beyond-the-grave appearance this year, and with it comes not only a host of new Superstars, but also new storylines as well as Extreme Rules Matches that throw a host of new weapons into the mix, inevitably upping the brutality factor in the process. Other, typical updates are no big deal – anybody with half a mind interested in WWE knows the drill and would know to expect at least this much. What they may not expect, however, is just how surprisingly enjoyable an experience WWE on the Wii has turned out to be.

Progress has been slow at times. Digital movement took far too long to be vanquished, but analogue is here now and so too, it seems, is the Wii Remote. The animations have been reworked entirely and when you combine this with Nintendo’s unique controller you have a game that contains all the burly fun of its forerunners, minus the frustration. The importance of the new animations cannot be appreciated enough, although they fast become taken for granted. No longer will players experience those annoying moments where they feel they’re left waiting for a set number of animation frames to play out while they get pummelled to a pulp. It’s nice that the new animation set is smooth, but even nicer that it allows for greater responsiveness. Add to this the unique Wii control setup and you’re halfway to a total gameplay revolution for the franchise.

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