WWE Smackdown vs Raw 2009 got released almost two weeks ago. Is it worth the upgrade over 2008? If you judge only from the graphics and the controls the answer would be no. But don’t let that hold you off in getting the best wrestling game to date, because there is more then just graphics and controls!

I haven’t played through the career mode yet and haven’t explored other things fully yet. Therefore I don’t see this as a review, but more like a hands-on impression of the game. I doubt I’ll fully review this game, because I covered almost everything I wanted to talk about in this blog post.

Let me tell you a bit about the bad stuff first. SvR2009 had competition this year in the form of TNA Impact. I thought about getting the game, because it looked promising. The graphics of TNA Impact seems slightly better than SvR2009 and their controls are easier which makes the game plays faster. But those are the only good things about TNA Impact. Everything else seems minimal. SvR2009 has way more stuff of everything else; moves, animations, arenas, wrestlers, modes, you name it! Besides, the only interesting wrestlers I would like to play with from TNA are Samoa Joe and maybe Sting. Besides that, I’m content about the graphics of SvR2009 even though it hasn’t really improved since SvR2008.

Controls of SvR2009 are almost exactly the same as in SvR2008. I read comments of people that because it has the same controls, they won’t buy the game, because it plays and looks the same as the previous SvR game. I don’t agree with that and I’m actually happy that they didn’t change the controls for once, because they changed the controls in the last two games. At the time I felt they only put new controls, because they needed something new to show instead of the developers being unhappy with it. They added two signature moves next to the two finishers you can have. They also added new moves for tag team play, which works pretty well in matches against the CPU, but I don’t know how this plays off when playing with and against other people. The hot tag is pretty fun, but hard to pull when you have don’t have a player as a teammate. I’m happy with the controls except running into the ropes and bouncing back still glitches sometimes. Another thing that was annoying in SvR2008 was that whenever you did a strong grapple, you needed to wait after he punched or kicked you once in order to perform a successful move or else the CPU would just counter you right away. Because of that, the gameplay felt a bit slow. This was at default settings. Fortunately in SvR2009 you don’t have to wait for that punch or kick anymore, you can perform your strong move right away, making the match faster and more intense.



There is a couple of more stuff I don’t like in SvR2009. The backstage brawls suck major balls now. The two areas where it can take place barely have any interactivity compared to SvR2008, unless you need a signature move stored or a finisher in order to use the environment (which I haven’t tried it out yet) all you can do is slam your opponent to a wall or item and use some weapons. Very disappointing and kind of makes the backstage brawls obsolete. They removed the area behind the fans as well, but I don’t mind that, although it is fun to clothesline your opponent over the railing. An other thing that seems to be a bug or glitch is that you cannot irish whip an opponent or run into a turnbuckle during a Elimination Chamber match. You can however climb the cage and get on top of one of the corners. I hope they are going to fix this bug in a DLC patch. I haven’t tried setting a barbed wire bat or a table on fire, but it was doable in SvR2008. Which brings me to the new mode in SvR2009: the inferno match. It’s a fun gimmick mode, but doesn’t add much to the game IMHO. Road to Wrestlemania is a good replacement for that awful 24/7 mode and a more satisfying way to unlock your stuff. There are decent “mic-work” from the wrestlers that you can use during the Road to Wrestlemania mode. You cannot however pick your own wrestler of choice.

Have I put you off in buying the game now? I hope not, because the good stuff comes now, apart from telling you the faster gameplay in two paragraphs above. The roster has been up-to-date again. Chris Jericho is in, woohoo (but why the fuck use him for licensed theme music crap)! Though there are still wrestlers that are already gone from WWE, some wrestlers are wearing outdated outfits and some wrestlers that are main eventing now are missing. Don’t worry though; they’ll update some outfits and adding new wrestlers in an upcoming DLC patch. The only question is when they’ll release it. The DLC is another good addition to SvR2009, but it has to be seen how, when and what they’ll release with the DLC. I don’t care if you have to pay for it, I’d be happy to. You can also easily update their face/heel status, what brand they are on and who’s wearing what championship belt via a menu called My WWE. The only thing what is a bit of a miss are two wrestlers: The Masked Man and Tony (John Cena’s marine friend. Who? Yeah …), why the hell did they put up those in the game?! No one would play with them or even beat them up. You can still change the wrestlers moves with other moves of your liking. You can even change their entire entrance. New in SvR2009 is the fact that you can make your own finishing move now. It’s a fun idea, but unfortunately, it feels very limited.



What I’m happy about are the new animations of some moves. I really like the new lurking RKO performed by Randy Orton, the Moonlight Drive by John Morrison, the Reality Check by The Miz and many more moves. Unfortunately, not all wrestlers received their signature moves. For example, Beth Phoenix finisher and submission move aren’t in the game. They also removed the jump from rope and kick the opponent in the face move (I don’t know what it’s really called) that John Morrison does during IRL matches and in SvR2008, which is a shame. What I don’t really like is the camera cuts during a finisher/signature move. In SvR2008 you see your finisher a couple of times in rewind and slow motion with an extra stupid sound effect. In SvR2009 you see a glass breaking effect with another stupid sound effect (and sometimes slow motion too). I like camera cuts during some cool moves, but why did they put this bullshit during finishers in every one of their games?! I don’t like it at all and it just makes me disable the camera cuts, which I’m doing for years now. Why can’t they just do something more realistic, like displaying a high profile move next to the current action like they do on TV and displaying the finish in slow motion AFTER the bell rang? Then it looks cool. But enough ranting, let’s continue! The referee seems to be more interactive too; he talks! Speaking of sound. I really dig the new soundtrack of SvR2009. It has some great tunes. In addition, you can fast forward to the next track by pressing a button. You can still rip music from music cd’s and put them on the harddrive and select that song as your wrestler’s theme music. They also added the theme entrances of every wrestler in the game and the three brand show themes. Commentary by the RAW team is good, but some lines have been recycled from previous SvR games. The Smackdown team feels a bit less and the ECW team barely says anything, especially during the Road to Wrestlemania of CM Punk. The announcing teams haven’t been updated either. Because the current RAW team consists of Michael Cole and Jerry Lawler, while in the game its still Jim Ross and Jerry Lawler.

I’m the kind of guy that plays a match or two in exhibition mode almost every day. And I’m really happy with the improvements they made in SvR2009 over SvR2008. The game feels more complete than the previous one and I can’t wait for the DLC, because it features Jericho’s new outfit and Evan Bourne (or so I read)! Wrestling fans that are disappointed with SvR2008 will notice the small improvements in SvR2009 that makes this franchise great again, apart from some annoyances.

And now for something different, I present to you my:

WWE Survivor Series 2008 After Thought:

Spoilers below, don’t read if you still want to see the PPV without knowing the results:







Well, looks like we got another predictable PPV were people marked out big time. I’m happy Beth Phoenix got the win as Sole Survivor, but everyone predicted that. When news about the Hardy attack broke out and confirmation of Edge’s presence at the PPV, it was pretty obvious where things were going. The match itself was a bit unpredictable. I expected Hardy to either start the match or had a run-in before Edge, but it was Edge who ran in first. Eventually Edge was the one that stole the victory and the WWE Title. A Hardy vs Edge seems to be suggested now at Wrestlemania. It works for me, but what will Triple H do now? My hero and saviour Jericho lost to Cena. I knew this would happen. Most of the people predicted Jericho would win, because it would be more logical after all the awesome work he has done and Cena just coming back from an injury. But I think it was just in their mind that they hoped that Jericho would retain the belt, but they knew Cena would win it anyway. In the end, Jericho was just a transitional champion. Now I’m not a Cena-hater, I actually like Cena, but he beated my saviour to get the belt back. It makes sense for a Batista vs Cena II at Wrestlemania, but I don’t fucking care about Batista, he’s just a bad wrestler, I mean entertainer, I mean wrestler. I can understand why Wrestlemania hasn’t sold out yet *grin*. I can’t see Jericho going back for an other belt except the World Heavyweight Championship after all the great heel work he has done, anything would be too low for him IMHO. But who knows, maybe he’ll win it back at RAW tonight or next week just like when he did against Batista. But that’s just me hoping … Please … WWE? Let Jericho save us again … for the third time?

Hello all!

What better way to start a blog with telling a bit about myself? I wanted to put this little story on the sidebar on the right, but it became a bit too long for it. So I decided to put it here. Hope you don't mind :)

A little bit about me:
I cannot remember my exact age when I started playing games, but I remember fiddling with the Commodore 64. Putting huge black square discs in the disc drive and playing crappy games. I also remember games on tapes, but I don't think I was able to play them.

My parents owned a really old PC where you could play Prince of Persia in black and white at it's best. That was when I also owned my first console, or actually a handheld: The Nintendo Gameboy. My first two games on the Gameboy were Super Mario Land and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles! I totally loved it. Not much later my dad got me the Nintendo 8-bit system, The NES. Together with the one billion in one games cartridge, I could play forever on it. Unfortunately I was only allowed to play during the weekends.

During a vacation somewhere in Spain I saw and played on an arcade machine called Street Fighter II. It owned so bad, that I really wanted to play it home as well. This didn't happened for a while until the Super Nintendo got released with Street Fighter II! Good times! But I didn't got the SNES at release. Instead on my birthday when my father asked me if I wanted to buy the SNES or two games for the NES, i choose for two games for the NES: Super Mario World 3 and some chipmunks game from Disney. What was I thinking?!

After a while, my father finally decided to buy a new PC. It was a Pentium something MX. I, of course, immediately looked into my game magazines to check for a game to play on the new thing. After some research I asked my dad to buy Duke Nukem 3D for me (at the same time he bought the new computer). I had no regrets. In fact, it's probably one of the best games I've ever played. I had a lot of time invested in that game. I even had my first multiplayer experience with it. Dialing in with our super duper modems to each other and start blasting each other away. I also made a lot of maps for the game.

When Quake got released, we also replaced our dial-up modem for ISDN. The phone bills were way up because of me. This was the best multiplayer experience I ever had. Everything was new for me. I joined some clans and had much fun (but still only during weekends). QW CTF was the best mod for Quake IMHO.

My next new game experience was when the Nintendo 64 got released. Super Mario 64 was such an awesome game, that I can't describe how I felt. But that wasn't the only game that amazed me; Lylat Wars (Star Fox 64) and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time are also one of the best (console) games I have ever played and I still haven't played a game to date that gives me that experience again.

Obviously, my next console was the Nintendo Gamecube. Why? Simple; I was a Nintendo fanboy. I didn't liked the Sega Megadrive or the Sony Playstation. Though I couldn't help myself playing on my uncle's Megadrive/Playstation every time I visited him. The only games I played on the Megadrive was the Streets of Rage trilogy. Those were one of the coolest beat-em-up games I've ever played (sorry Double Dragon). I also played Tomb Raider on his Playstation, but it didn't do much for me at that time. When (I believe) my sister bought a Playstation I was thinking about getting try out a game on that system as well, just like how I got Duke Nukem 3D. So I bought Metal Gear Solid. Again, I was lucky to pick such a great game. This is probably the best Playstation game I have ever played. The movie-like feeling the game gave me was new for me and I couldn't believe how I missed out on this.

Even though the Gamecube had some fun games on it, most of them were released on the Playstation 2 and the Xbox as well. I felt like the Gamecube was more of a multiplayer console, but I really wanted to play J-RPG and wrestling games. This was when I decided to drop the fanboy act and traded my Gamecube for a PS2 with Final Fantasy X and a WWE Smackdown! game. I really enjoyed it and I realized (but I already knew that) how much mature games were on the PS2. My hunger for games didn't stopped there though. I bought a really huge black box called: The Xbox. One of the advantages the Xbox had was how you could easily mod it and play pirated games on it and stream video from your PC. I didn't cared much for XBL at that time.

During the PS2/Xbox era I also played my first real MMORPG: World of Warcraft. I played many many hours and even made it in a guild that completed all content from Molten Core up to The Dark Temple (with Naxxramas along the way). In the end, the guild disbanded before the content patch that was before Wrath of the Lich King got released. So that was a good wake up call, which made me decide to quit WoW altogether. I am currently playing a bit of Warhammer: Online now.

I am currently owning a Xbox 360, which I got since Launch including the Red Rings of Death, a Nintendo Wii and a Playstation 3. I didn't got the PS3 at launch, because I wanted to skip it since the PR at Sony was so ridiculously bad. Eventually I still got it when the price went down. To date, I don't know why I got the PS3. Right now I only use it as a DVD-player (because it's silent) and playing sport games like FIFA09 and Top Spin 3. Except for WWE Smackdown vs Raw 2009 which I got on my 360, because I've bought the last 3 SvR games on that console and it's an US game on a US console. But hey, some people don't even call it a sport, so... At the moment, I play most of my games on the 360 while my Wii is collecting more dust than my PS3!

So there you have it! This is a summary of how I started gaming! But next to gaming and wrestling, I have more interests; like reading graphic novels, reading books (by Neil Gaiman), watching tv series, watching movies and playing tennis IRL. This is all next to studying Computer Science at a University of Applied Sciences (sounds much better than in my own language) and I'm currently in the middle of an internship.

On the right you can see what my blogs will be about. I hope to post more soon when I got the time. Comments are always welcome, I'm new here so if you feel like I need to put up some pictures between the wall of text just let me know :) Other comments are welcome too of course.