Sunday, December 18, 2011

Nostalgia Sunday: WWE SmackDown! Here Comes the Pain

WWE SmackDown! Here Comes the Pain

Now this game is something really special. It was one of my first games for the Playstation 2 and was immediatly bought, after I got into the WWE and wrestling. I remember going on vacation to France and when we drove home, this was the first game I immediatly wanted to play after arriving. No SmackDown! vs Raw or anything else. Just this.

Story:
While there was no real Story Mode like "Road to Wrestlemania" in the later games, there was the Season mode. And by god it was awesome! First you could choose between all the different Wrestlers like The Rock, Goldberg or Stone Cold Steve Austin, or even your created Wrestlers. After choosing you could draft people from SmackDown! to Raw or the other way around and basically create your own show. While playing you will often get cutscenes like shown in the above picture, where people make you offers, just talk or even attack you. There was no voice acting by the wrestlers, but that didn't matter, because it opened way more possibilities you can choose from, where the story should go. You'd get title shots, feuds with other people or just funny stuff, that happened, because you chose it, by taking your own way in the story. In my opinion this was way more fun than "Road to Wrestlemania". Atleast THQ introduced the "Create a Story" mode in SmackDown! vs Raw 2010, which can be the same as the season mode, if the people are creative enough, who make those stories.

The Game:
The game featured several game modes, aside from the Season mode. You could have Hell in a Cell matches, Ladder matches, (the newly added) Elimination Chamber and Royal Rumble matches and of course normal 1 on 1 or Tag Team matches. Alone against the AI, it was kind of boring, because it wasn't that good, but with friends...Oh my...
Playing against or with your friends, creating hilarious new wrestlers and then fight against each other, or just making up your own TV show, with several matches after another. It was definatly the most fun I had with a video game.
Also the gameplaymechanics weren't that good, I still think it holds up today.

Prequels and Sequels:
Of course there were games before Here Comes the Pain like shown above and of course there came more games after it: The SmackDown! vs Raw series. While all games before HCtP were good, the games after it slowly went downhill. HCtP can be held as the "Best Wrestling game ever", because of its content. Hours of fun, no downsides aside from maybe the graphics and some mechanic issues. I haven't checked out the new WWE 12 yet. It might be good, atleast that's what some critics say.

Sadly I sold my Playstation 2 with all my games for a Xbox 360, which was a bad move in hindsight. I haven't got a good enough PC to emulate PS2 games either, which just lets me hope, I'll find a cheap PS2 someday with this game.

5 comments:

  1. I love WWF, i played it my whole youth ;D

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  2. I played so many hours of this on my ps1, I'm gone search for it and play again!

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  3. Oh this game is so good, classy WWE on ps1 is deffinatly the best fighting game. Awesome post.

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  4. I love this game... WWE is fantastic

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