WWE Smackdown! Vs. RAW 2008

Some wrestling fans will tell you that the golden age of grappling is long gone: that the great days of technical matches and memorable storylines have been replaced by stupid gimmicks and high spots. These people are idiots. The eighties? Yeah, because everybody loved mad plumber T.L. Hopper. The nineties? What, when Vince McMahon was obsessed with storylines involving octogenarian Mae Young taking her top off? The old days were full of flabby men in too-revealing outfits doing endless clotheslines on each other - now a typical pay-per-view doesn’t feel like value for money unless someone jumps off a forty foot ladder and gets hit in the face with a burning chair. The golden age of wrestling is right now, as everyone knows. Just look at the latest SmackDown!, shown here on PS3 and 360.

The biggest change to the latest SmackDown! is wrestler types. In previous games, every character could do every sort of move - so the Great Khali could do a top-rope plancha just as easily as Rey Mysterio. The cruiserweights couldn’t lift the super-heavies, but that just made you less likely to pick them in a serious scrap.

Joel Snape
Joel Snape enjoys Street Fighter V, any sandbox game that contains a satisfyingly clacky shotgun and worrying about the rise of accidentally-malevolent super-AI. He's also the founder-editor of livehard.co.uk, where he talks a lot about working out.
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