I just returned from a quick trip to THQ headquarters in Southern California where I had a chance to see their new WWE pro wrestling game in action.
Yeah, I know.
But I was available, my editor needed someone there, so off I went at the expense of the publishers of Company of Heroes and Dawn of War.
Naturally, the talk was all about ladder matches and tag teams and heel turns. You know. The stuff that keeps West Virginia up at night.
Still, it was great, as a writer, to come face to face with a preview about a genre/series that I knew little about. I could focus on the technical presentation, the features advertised, the differences between platform interfaces, etc. without any pollution from high or low expectations. Media journalists can’t really promise to be impartial, only fair, and nothing is fairer than a blank slate.
I’ll let you know when the preview is finished and online.
What ya gonna do, when Goodfellowmania stares you down in the ring? Grrr!
Ha! That’s awesome, Troy!
I reviewed WWE Day of Reckoning 2 for the Gamecube some years ago, and it was really a great change of pace for me to step into a genre I had only really had a passing interest in for years before that. Mat Mania was probably the last wrestling game I had played with any gusto before that.
It was a good time, and gives you an entirely different perspective on the industry as a whole. When you’re just staying in your wheelhouse all the time, you tend to form opinions of how things are supposed to be done, and stepping outside lets you see that maybe there are other cool things you could do for those games you’re familiar with, too?
This was a preview event, so my cluelessness wasn’t necessarily a handicap. But I am in no way qualified to write a review of Smackdown Vs Raw 2009.
Kudos to THQ, though, for saying throughout the presentation things like “Last years’s Wii version was inadequate because X, Y, Z” so I had some idea what was being changed and why.