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[theweaselking]

I'm a big fan of wrestling video games. I make no bones about this and am, in fact, happy to share the wonder of what are basically cartoon fighting games.

I bought Smackdown 6 (under the name "Smackdown Vs Raw") for the PS2 yesterday and spent all of last night playing it.

Man, it is a heck of a lot of fun.

If you know THQ's wrestling games, it's very, very similar to Smackdown 5 - it takes the same earned-experience statistics system, and expands it. First, there's an extra stat "Charisma" - the more charismatic you are, the faster your face/heel meter goes up and the faster you get Finishing Moves. Second, instead of "10" being the max in all categories, the maximum scores are actually determined by your weight class. If you're not a superheavyweight, you cannot get a score of 10 in Strength or Endurance - you're limited to 9 in those, and 7 in Speed at Heavyweight - but if you go superheavyweight, your max speed drops to 6, and your max Technique drops to 9.

There are a bunch of new features - chop wars, pre-match staredowns and tests of strength, a new kind of submission hold - most of which is good, clean fun. The chop wars will take practice, though.

On submissions: It still appears to be impossible to break up a submission hold in progress. This is not good, but it's a problem they've had in ALL the Smackdown games. There is, however, a new type of sumbission hold. In addition to the Smackdown 5 style "hit a lot of buttons" submissions, there is a new kind where a little ball moves rapidly back and forth and the person in the hold hits "x" to stop it. The objective is to stop it in the blue "escape" zone, or the much smaller red "reverse" zone - and you take damage as long as you're in the hold. I have never seen anyone tap out to this kind of submission, but I assume it's possible. On rope breaks, it's also possible to hold on to a move while in the ropes and do more damage, getting up to a 5 count.

Things I miss in the immediate sense: You can't lift people facing away from you any more. Instead, you can lift them to a sitting position, but there don't seem to be really all that many things you can do to them from there. It is, however, very much easier to get behind people while they're standing up, so all your "opponent facing away" moves will still be good.

Things I love in the new system: The new face/heel Match Tactics system. You choose whether to fight clean or dirty, and each has a separate meter like the Smackdown meter. Faces (good guys) hit their signature moves, go for top rope moves, kick out of pins at 2 in dramatic ways, win chop-trading contests, and play to the crowd. Heels use dirty moves (they're actually labelled as such - low blows, eye gouges, etc), expose turnbuckles, argue with the referee, hold on to submission holds when the opponent reaches the ropes, attack the ref, attack non-legal tag team partners, attack the opponent's manager, and generally Cheat To Win. When your meter fills up as a face, you become invulnerable and automatically counter all attacks and your finishers do double damage for a short period of time. When it fills up as a heel, all your grapple attacks are replaced with a free max-damage finisher low-blow for a short time. You have time to use it twice, I find, and that's usually enough. The only problem: Doing some face things while you're a heel loses you heel points. Doing some heel things while you're a face loses you face points.

As well, managers and tag teams partners are now brilliant things, and being in a stable matters. You can tell your manager to get you a chair, or to distract the referee, although the manager will get kicked out if you do this too often. You can tell your tag team partner to hit *his* tag team partner, or to attack the legal guy in the ring. In any match where interference is possible, you can call your stablemates to run in.

Balance changes: Weapons disappear (chair and sledghammer) or are automatically dropped (ladder and table) after a certain number of hits - usually 4. This prevents the Smackdown 4-style autocombo infinite beatings with the sledgehammer or steel chair. It's also MUCH harder to hit people with the sledgehammer, and tables, chairs, ladders, etc. This is, frankly, a good thing.

The Royal Rumble deserves a special mention all on its own: There's a new system for the rumble. Every character has a "ring out" meter, and when thrown over the top rope they land on the apron by default. From there, you can attack or grapple them, and they fall out when the ring out meter hits 0. Multiple people can gang up on one guy on the ring apron, and eliminating people refills your ring out meter. The AI is extremely annoying on this, though - it constantly retargets, much more so than in previous games, and often it will whip somebody over the rope, then choose a new target and whip him over, then a third, while the first guy gets back into the ring.... basically, without player interraction, the Rumble takes FOREVER, and in the campaign you don't want to skip the Rumble and if you're entering #30, like I was, you'll be there just kind of watching for 25-30 minutes before you get to do anything. Big throw moves, like the Awesome Bomb and the gorilla press slams can still toss a guy over the top rope regardless of his Ring Out meter, so watch out for the Undertaker and guys like my custom wrestler who have a couple of moves like that.

On the topic of custom wrestlers, I have one extra thing to add: The move selection system now has BOOKMARKING. Find a move you like, hit "R2", and it's stuck into a special page for bookmarked moves, so if you find a move you'd really like as a finisher while setting your Power Grapples, you can hit R2 and just select it from the list later. It's also great for marking moves for multiple characters, or copying moves from existing wrestlers, and if you're setting the same move to more than one location.

Three REALLY annoying things:

#1: You can no longer change your target while in a move (even as the victim) or while on the mat. This makes it extremely hard to retarget your attacks without the other guy getting a few free shots in.

#2: The season starts you with all stats of 2 and *0* XP to spend. This makes even the first few matches extremely hard.

#3: The stories. Dear Christ, the stories are offensive. First, in the season your responses determine whether you're fighting as a face or a heel. If you take a dirty fighter like Flair, you *have* to be a possessive, misogynistic asshole or else you're stuck as a face with half your moves causing you to lose progress on your special moves counter. Second, there is a LOT of "fight to own Diva X" - the first story, which I got twice after restarting, is fighting with Renee Dupree over who *owns* Torrie Wilson - face or heel, it's the same story. I then immediately got into the same thing over Sable, got in a story against Mysterio and the Dudleys, and came back for another story about owning the more-willing-to-sell-herself Stacy Kiebler - the payoff for which was that since I beat up all the other guys, I got a lap dance and Stacy as a manager.

All this, of course, with needing to pick reponses like "You're going to be coming with me, whether you like it or not!" to avoid being labelled a babyface and having a good chunk of my moveset become hazardous to my own health, because with your stats at starting, you NEED those extra finisher-class low blows.


One TREMENDOUSLY good thing:
There's always more things to spend Smackdown cash on, and you can't unlock *everything* with cash. You need to actually fight challenge matches to unlock some things. On the other hand, you can buy XP for your character outright with smackdown cash as many times as you want, as well as new moves and the standard new outfits and match settings. The unlockable Legends characters are pretty neat, too, with Bret Hart, Andre the Giant, the LOD, the original Dead Man Undertaker, Jimmy Snuka, and a couple of others available, for the right price. No Million Dollar Man this time around, which is kind of sad. You can also make your own championships (spending money on making a cooler belt) and defend it in multiplayer games and online.

The end result: If you liked Smackdown 5, BUY THIS ONE. It's a very similar game, with a host of improvements and gameplay changes to remove the old auto-winning tactics and make for mostly the same experience, but better.