I wasn’t going to bother with this game originally. This
series of games is in its 16th year (crikey, that makes me feel
old…) and I owned all of the games at some point up to 2009.[1] As
the new iterations of the game are almost always better game play-wise than the
previous ones, I’d not usually touch the older games after I’d got the new
ones, and I put SvR 2007 and 2008 on the list of games that I was going to get
rid of at the end of the year, 2009 having already gone a couple of years ago.
Then when I made my list of PS2 games I hadn’t completed, I
remembered that I never finished the Season Mode for either game. And given my
almost obsessive-compulsive need to play games in order, even though it doesn’t
actually make much difference in the long run, I thought I’d play through SvR
2007’s Season mode.
I created my own wrestler for this. This is something I
don’t do very often. You’ve been able to create your own wrestler in every
iteration of the Smackdown games since the first, and while I enjoyed it hugely
in the first game, I found that by the time the second one came out, I hadn’t
actually played as many of the wrestlers. I thought I had missed out on a lot
and didn’t bother with it after that. I think I used the mode once in every
game but I’d usually play through the Season mode as one of the wrestlers.
Creating a wrester in the later games is a long and not
always enjoyable process so I decided this time to have a bit of fun with it
and create a video game character. I chose Abadede from Streets of Rage 2,[2] and
basically created a freakishly tall, muscle-bound god with purple underpants,
boots and wristguards that were as near as I could get to a metallic colour
(black.) Sadly I couldn’t get the right haircut. Apparently 80s bouffant never
occurred to the designers of SvR 2007; who knew? I made sure he was from
Mexico, gave him what I thought was a Mexican voice but actually sounds more
like a cool black guy, and gave him clean tactics. The latter option might seem
strange but for his boss battle in SoR2 he never uses a weapon, and it’s a
straight 1v1 fight, giving me the idea that Abadede at least had enough pride
in his own ability to fight properly. For his move set, I gave him a very
powerful uppercut, and made sure he had a lot of opportunities to do
clotheslines as these are his main attacks in SoR2, with a fairly standard
Power Bomb as his finisher. Sadly I’ve got no way of screen-grabbing anything
off my PS2, and trying to take a photo of it always turned out rubbish, so I
can’t show you. But I mention it because of the contribution it made to my
enjoyment of the game!
I took Abadede into the Season Mode. It works on an
experience points system, where you play a match and if you win you get 2000
XP, if you lose you get 300. You then get to spend these points in your various
attributes. Because of the build I was going for with Abadede, I put as much as
I could into Strength, Stamina and Durability, with Charisma as a secondary
consideration. But this brought to light a design flaw in the game that brought
the momentum of the game to a juddering halt: There is no way to apply
experience points from inside the Season Mode. Instead, you have to save your
game, exit the Season Mode, load up the Create Mode, apply your points, exit
Create Mode and load the Season Mode up again just to apply some experience
points.
This is made all the worse by the fact that the PS2 game
took a while to load each screen. I would imagine the position would have been
somewhat different with the Xbox 360 version, but with no hard drive, the PS2
had to rely entirely on reading the disc. It was a long and not very enjoyable
process to do this at the end of almost every match, and knowing that it could
have been better with just a single tweak of the game’s design was nothing
short of insulting. Thank goodness that I spent most of the time I spent
waiting watching videos on Youtube. I do seem to be doing that rather a lot
with PS2 games!
The actual wrestling is not bad but it takes some getting
used to. For a start there is a ‘Stamina’ system whereby if you use too many
big moves too quickly, your wrestler will run out of energy and will need time
to recover. Strikes are easy enough, but basic throws are done from the Right
analogue stick. You have to hold down R1 for a grapple, from which you can do a
number of different moves, again with the Right stick. Some moves target
certain areas of the body, and the body damage can impede your wrestler’s
ability to use that part of the body but significant damage can be reversed by
recovering your stamina. Aspects like Stamina, Body Damage and Momentum were
handled better in later games, but once you get used to it, it works.
Thankfully, as Abadede is quite clearly a heavyweight, I never had that horrible
problem where you can’t lift a wrestler much heavier than you. I guess it makes
the game more ‘realistic,’ a term tragically mis-applied given the sport that
this game represents, but it slows the game down to a crawl when it happens and
is never welcome!
 |
| Kind of sad seeing Chris Benoit in the game, given what was months away from occurring... |
The season mode follows a number of pre-set storylines that
last for 6-7 matches and culminate with a final match to resolve the situation,
usually at a pay-per view. Which stories you get largely depends on whether you
choose to be on Raw or Smackdown at the start of the game. I chose Smackdown
for no reason other than I like Tazz’s commentary.[3]
There’s little you can do that effects the progress of the story; it’s usually
the same matches whether you win or lose, but it is what it is – a background
giving context to your matches. And it’s got all the camp, hammy, convoluted
plots you would expect from a WWE storyline, with your wrestlers being as dense
as a wrecking ball in most cases. It’s good fun; wresting always is! After a
several storylines have passed you get traded to the other show, I suspect
because of the production with regard to writing and voice acting not having
enough material to carry one show on its own for a year.
I had a decent amount of fun playing through the various
storylines, and actually felt quite good about their resolution when it all
went my way. I didn’t feel too badly about it when it didn’t, though, as the
game would be very boring if I won all the time! It’s Wrestling – it doesn’t
always go your way. It is for this reason that I set the difficulty to Hard; I
would not have enjoyed the game much at all if there’d been no challenge. My
only complaint really would be the first storyline, The Deadman and the
Wolverine, which pits you against The Undertaker and Chris Benoit – two men who
few would consider pushovers, and since Abadede had no experience at that
point, it was hard to make any headway at all. Other than that, there are no
incompetent or out-of-context difficulty spikes that I saw.
My season actually ended when, having won the World Title at
Wrestlemaina and defended it against Triple H in the following story, I
actually lost it to The Big Show of all people at the end of the final story. I
don’t know whether the game would have carried on had I managed to win that
particular storyline, but to be honest I was about 2 more upgrades away from
completely maxing out Abadede’s stats at this point and there wasn’t much
mileage left in it. It was a fitting end to an altogether rather enjoyable
game, and I’m glad I had the opportunity to play it through.
The game also features a general manager mode, where you
compete against the other show for ratings. Now, I had a go with this in the
previous version of the game, 2006. While it wasn’t terrible, it was a bit of
rigmarole, so I think I’m going to tackle that when I play through 2008 – just
so that I’ve only got to do it once, with the best version of it.
I probably won’t play 2007 again, and will sell it when I
get enough stuff to do make a decent sale. But I did enjoy playing it through,
and while I would like to do something a little different for my next game (the
last 2 have been fighting games!) I will probably come back to 2008 before the
end of No Game New Year.
[1]
2009 was the Nintendo DS version. I didn’t own a machine capable of playing the
‘main’ version at the time!
[2]
I know Abadede appears in both of the first 2 games but the version of his
sprite in Streets of Rage 2 was a little more detailed and easier to copy.
Besides, I’d been playing the game, which is kind of what inspired me to do it
so…
[3]
While I’ll probably play through SvR 2008 at some point, Tazz doesn’t appear in
that version of the game.
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