WWE All-Stars demo

[Murgatroyd7]

I was ranting to some friends and thought I'd share. Edited slightly for profanity.


Just played the WWE All-Stars demo and pretty much hated it. It's cool that you can do reversals now, but I think the old N64 games are way better than this. First of all, I can't stand how this looks. Even the skinnier guys look like massive bodybuilders. Ultimate Warrior never had a damn 24-pack. I can't even tell who most of these guys are. I know about 25-30% of them; the rest are either new wrestlers I've never seen before or are so deformed that I can't recognize them. The visual style alone takes away a lot of the potential fun.

Of course, the controls don't help much. The buttons feel like they're completely wasted...quick hit, strong hit, quick hold, and strong hold? Give me a f***ing break. It would've made a hell of a lot more sense to use LT (or L2 for PS3) to toggle Strong on (i.e. hold down LT and hit X), allowing you to do more with the action buttons. With the way it's set up now, it's just a bunch of button mashing. It even feels like the AI is doing it!

And is it highly unrealistic on purpose? I know Rey Mysterio is an acrobatic motherf***er, but I swear he flew a lap around the ring and did a few loops in the air before teleporting behind me and kicking me in the neck. Okay, so maybe not, but it was obvious that his moves were connecting when they shouldn't have. He jumped at me (from the turnbuckle; I'm surprised I remember what it's called) when I was in the middle of the ring. While he was still in the air, I jumped backwards, putting me at the other end of the ring. Instead of landing on his @$$ in the middle of the ring like he should've, he continued to fly at me and hit me square in the chest. It's a bit hard to explain, but it was obvious that he was defying physics; he sort of "skipped" mid-air in order to make the connection.

And if that wasn't bad enough, I couldn't even tell who was getting hurt half of the time. Yeah, I know there are health/stamina/whatever bars, but I can't stare at them every time something happens. It just drove me crazy that I would do what looked like a great move, only to realize that I was the one getting hurt. The character models are stiff and it's often not obvious when a move has been countered.

I had no intention of getting back into wrestling games, but if I did, this would've made me change my mind completely. This will never ever be a purchase for me. I'd actually be interested in reviewing it if given the chance, however. It's been too long since I've had a chance to really complain about a game; everything I've been playing lately has been at least somewhat decent (poor me, I know) or not bad enough to be interesting. I would still give it a fair chance, of course, and see if the game eventually grows on me. But I don't expect that to be the case.

[StatiK TactiK]

lol is it that bad? I stopped watching wrestling years and years ago and haven't touched a wrestling game since Wrestlemania 2000 on N64 lol. I was actually supposed to get a review copy of this but I passed on it and gave it to another reviewer since its been over a decade since my last wrestling game.

[Murgatroyd7]

I think it's pretty awful. I too haven't watched wrestling in years; I watched back when it was still WWF. And the last wrestling game I played was SmackDown for the PS1, which I also thought sucked. The games made by Iguana and Acclaim were great, but they've gone downhill ever since THQ took over the license. I thought maybe they would've improved after all these years, so I'm a bit surprised by the quality. Makes me glad I'm not a wrestling fan anymore.

[Juppy]

I don't have the system to even play that new wrestling game, Chris, but even if I did, I decided I probably wouldn't want it anyway just from seeing the commercial for it. It been airing on WWE programs for several weeks now and yeah, like you said, the character models look way off. I can't remember which wrestler it was that I saw....wanna say it was John Cena....anyway, it's just like you mentioned; the dude had muscle definition out the wazoo. And that's not to say Cena isn't strong, because yeah, he can lift the Big Show (500 lbs) up on his shoulders, but the game character looked like his abs were so defined that there were shadows from the cuts between muscles being so deep!

Another one on the commercial that fell in that "unrealistic" department (with Mysterio) was Undertaker. Okay, granted, the guy's tall.....almost 7'. And yes, he does the choke slam which lifts the opponent up above his head somewhat. But they showed him picking up some other wrestler and as he's lifting him up, he also JUMPS in the air at the same time to make the slam even higher (and harder). Sooo....7' tall 'taker + 2' arm length above head + jumping 5' in the air = a 14 foot choke slam. Might as well have tossed him off the top of the steel cage and been done with it!

Not surprising though, because I haven't seen very many wrestling games that ever really got the total package going. Either they look good but the playability sucks, or they look terrible but play fairly good. For quite a few years now they seem to have been going with the first one.....capitalizing on the graphics ability of newer consoles and making the game look good, then throwing physics, good controls, and believability out the window. To be quite honest, I stopped buying wrestling games a long time ago, just for that reason (even though I'm still a fan of the tv shows). Haven't bought one since the old WWF game that came out for PC's in the 486 era. For me, a fun wrestling game?.....heheh....that old "Pro Wrestling" game on the original Nintendo system. LOL
http://nintendo8.com/game/627/pro_wrestling/

[Murgatroyd7]

Oh man, I hate Pro Wrestling. Ha ha. I always liked that WrestleMania game with Yokozuna, Sgt. Slaughter, Million Dollar Man, Randy Savage, Hogan, and...I'm not sure who else. I might not even have all of those right, but I know the first three were in it. It was during the NES days, but I always played it at the arcade. I miss how gaming used to be back then. Sure, I love today's technology and the fact that anyone can make and distribute a game, but there was so much less hatred back then. Of course, maybe people were only less vulgar/insulting because you had to play side-by-side and they didn't want to get their asses kicked. I always did used to look fairly intimidating before becoming a dad and wearing pajamas to every occasion. Heh.

Anyway, I agree that they definitely seem to focus far more on the visual style. In this case, even that didn't turn out well. They look like walking refrigerators! Overall, this game seems to have about as much depth as a petri dish.

Oh, and I totally forgot to tell you, Juppy...I'm not sure if you've noticed or not, but Steve is alive and well and GlitchPC is back. It's not quite as active, but it will hopefully get back to how it was when more people notice that it has returned. Of course, it wasn't terribly popular in its heyday, but it's still nice to see the site again. If you want to check it out, just go here:
http://www.glitchpcforums.com/forum/forum.php

[DeYanKees1]

Its like an arcade twist to wrestling. I played the demo its meh never planned on getting the game but its like the burnout of wrestling I'm guessing a crazy twist to the genre just not as fun.

[Juppy]

Thanks for letting me know about GlitchPC, Chris. That's kinda weird really, because when it first shut down, I'd go there about once a week to see if anything changed or it was back up. Never happened. Then one day the domain name led to one of those goofy search engine type of pages....you know, the ones that have the name of where you're going right (Glitchpc in this case) but then there's like links to all other kinds of crap and you just sit there going "This isn't what I wanted!!". At that point I thought "Meh, it's done and gone. R.I.P. Glitch." The weird part though is that I checked in there about, I dunno, 2 or 3 weeks ago probably and it was still down. Guess I'll have to go check out the new site. Thanks again.