It was my reputation among team Kotaku that got me assigned to reviewing what has proven to be the best wrestling game I’ve played in a decade — Smackdown Vs. Raw 2010, which is also the only wrestling game I’ve played in a decade. I guess everyone thought I’d be perfect for it. Maybe they know that the only website that I pay to read daily is a pro-wrestling site, a site that allows me to read about the often-mediocre happenings on modern wrestling shows without having to watch them. Perhaps they know I imported Bret Hart’s autobiography from Canada and Ohio Valley Wrestling DVDs (when Paul Heyman was booking OVW shows) from Ohio. Or perhaps it’s that Hulk Hogan thing I did.

Regardless, you’d think that someone who has loved video games and, I guess, loved pro wrestling, for much of his life, would love the melding of the two. But I started this new game, the latest in the annual releases of THQ-published, Yukes-developed modern wrestling games, with almost complete alienation from the genre. (I have some professional embarrassment about this, since I’ve been to Yukes’ studio in Yokohama and met the wrestling-obsessed people there. I even got a great tour that included a look at the back rooms that reek of body odor every summer as the team sleeps in the office while cramming to finish their game by fall). This new game brings to the series a revised Royal Rumble, an enhanced Create a Finisher option, a new training arena, revised rosters, new storylines and — the big feature — the ability for fans to create and share their own storylines. But it was all new to me. And, wouldn’t you know it, the game is fun and… intellectually stimulating? Yes.

Loved
The Basic Flow: WWE pro wrestling games, as fans would know, are 3D fighting games played from a quasi-overhead perspective and battled on the surfaces of wrestling ring and floor, with the walls of a steel cage or the top of a destructible announcers’ table sometimes also in play. You win not by eliminating an opponents’ health bar but by executing enough minor and major strikes, throws, dives, taunts and more, all of which either damage to the opponents’ body or build the momentum of your own wrestlers’ adrenaline, which enables a successful pinning (or submission or count-out) victory. In other words, the game treats wrestling as if it’s a hybrid of combat and performance, with the player driven by more competitive intent to maim than in the real thing. It’s a good system that demands the player learn how to smoothly chain their moves to build momentum. And it is a a rewarding one, as Yukes has managed to capture and animate hundreds of moves that transition from one to the next with, of all the rare qualities in games, grace. Winning a match in this game is a performing pleasure.

The WWE Recreated: Even a lapsed fan of WWE such as myself stumbles across Smackdown on Friday nights or remembers older episodes of Raw well enough to see that Edge’s shoulder-twitch during his ring entrance is true to life, that Shawn Michaels’ super-kick should look as perfect as it does and that selecting Shelton Benjamin will grant the player access to a cool set of moves. The game’s venues, from the pay-per-view-specific entrance ramps to the backstage announce areas, look perfect. The tone of violence and sex — an endless parade of T&A and at least one storyline involving a female wrestler sleeping her way to the top — matches squarely with even today’s toned-down WWE. The announcing sounds right, issued by (mostly) the right people. This game is very WWE.

The Thesis-Worthy Story-Editor: Of all the new features this year, conveniently marked “NEW” in the game’s menu for people like me, the best and most interesting is the storyline editor. In the past, wrestling game fans could create their own wrestlers, customise move-sets and even, more recently, chain pieces of animation to create new match-ending finishing moves. In the new game, players can craft a storyline, mixing matches that include player-defined outcomes with story-advancing sequences. The latter scenes are comprised of WWE-related locales (rings, locker rooms, offices) with wrestlers, a variety of conversational and confrontational emotions, adjustable camera angles, selectable music and crowd-noise background sounds and, most importantly, player-written dialogue. The system’s interface has some rough edges that players can work around but is nonetheless fascinating.

This is what you’d write your thesis about: Pro wrestling is already an odd blend of fake sport and acted drama, something fans appreciate as real and unreal at the same time (We know that John Cena is a man really named John Cena, but we also know that the Undertaker is not really a man who has risen from the dead. We buy into the idea that the Stone Cold Stunner hurts, because it looks like it does; we laugh with The Rock that the People’s Elbow does not hurt, because we know that he knows that we know that his big elbow move is a love tap at worst). In a wrestling game, that reality/unreality gets twisted some more, as the action in the ring is made to seem both more real than it is in real life (The depicted action in a WWE game involves hurting an opponent thoroughly enough to win, not simply entertaining the crowd through fake-fighting) and less real (The moves in the game, animated without fear of causing bodily harm, are made to look more impactful, thereby exposing how deadly and illegal they ought to really be). The new game’s story editor knots these strands of truth and untruth even more. Maybe gamers have been able to re-arrange games through mods for years. Maybe they’ve been able to puppeteer fake lives through The Sims for over a decade. But now we can mangle and morph the pseudo-reality of real celebrities through the WWE. We could craft a storyline in which CM Punk demands to know John Cena’s favourite colour and then wrestles the answer out of him (I did this. Search for it on Xbox Live using the keyword phrase “Favorite Color”). We could make a storyline in which WWE Diva “A” falls in love with WWE Wrestler “Z” but is seduced away by the Create-A-Wrestler character who you designed to look just like a muscular Bill O’Reilly. (I did not do this.) You’re playing with sort-of real lives. You’re creating officially-sanctioned slash-fiction. You’re kind of writing the next Indiana Jones adventure at the same time that you’re kind of writing the next thing for Harrison Ford to do. The layers of reality and unreality are dense.

The Unintended Consequences: Maybe a simpler way to praise the interesting aspects of the Create A Storyline editor is to mention that I downloaded a storyline called something like “One Night After Raw,” and after meeting a condition to have Shawn Michaels win a match, and after sitting through a series of backstage vignette’s written with not the best user-generated spelling, my Shawn Michaels was then ambushed in the ring by three definitely-not-licensed wrestlers from rival company TNA. For years wrestling fans have wanted to book Raw themselves. Now they can do it virtually, for me to play through. Too bad the game’s canned announcers were still plugging the WWE website instead of reacting to what this one user created.

The Royal Rumble: The game has a revised button-mashing mini-game for eliminating people in its Royal Rumble. The 30-man elimination match is often the most fun pro wrestling match of the year, so any improvements that more authentically let me, as Vince McMahon, team up with The Great Khali to flip some-user’s Street Fighter Sagat over the top rope is ok by me.

The Sense Of Pain: WWE Smackdown Vs. Raw 2010 is one of those eye-catching games that other people in the room, who may be tired of the Bret Hart and Mankind books on the bookshelf, can’t help but be drawn into. Why? I believe it’s because the animations are so good that they look like they connect and that the moves hurt, which, given the combat that is supposed to be depicted here, is a victory.

Hated
Poor Counter-Attack Training: The game’s menu-screen training arena allows players to swiftly try and learn many of the basic single or double-input commands needed to execute the extraordinary variety of maneuvers available in the game. Consider, for example, that you may want to make your wrester who is standing next to the ropes in the ring either jump over the ropes, crawl under them, wind up on the apron of the ring or on the floor or not do any of that and climb the turnbuckle… or take the padding off the turnbuckle. And there’s a button combo for each of those. offence is easily learned and joyfully executed. But the trick to mastering the game seems to be the execution of a single-input counter-move. The same button counters anything. Animated prompts appear during training and in the game’s matches to alert the player that a window to counter has opened. But those windows close so quickly that that game does a poor job teaching the player how to execute this key move well.

The Online Limitations:The WWE game’s online competitive wrestling worked fine and minus the lag I saw some complaining about on message boards. But I found the skill-level-matching inadequate. I can breeze through normal difficulty but can’t find a player online who I can beat? I also can’t easily re-find my uploaded wrestling storyline to find out how people have rated it, nor can I select which ones to download with any filters other than most recent and most-highly-rated. Overall, the options for the game’s online modes are just not specific enough for the needs a player might have. The content and gameplay available through online, though, is solid.

Immediately Outdated: I played a developer-scripted storyline that involved a rivalry between Edge and Mr. Kennedy. But Mr. Kennedy doesn’t work for WWE anymore. Many of our matches were announced by Jim Ross and Tazz. But Tazz doesn’t work for WWE anymore, either. Both men left the company in 2009, and I understand the challenges of adapting to such changes. But this is one of those things that, as a potential consumer, I just want to have work right. This is an online-connected game. So let’s see it adapt to the present.

Buried Info:What are my character’s finishing moves and what position does his opponent have to be in so I can execute them? How am I doing in career mode in terms of raising my wrestlers’ ability to connect with the crowd and raise his charisma stat? There are many pieces of information that are relevant to the gameplay of Smackdown Vs. Raw 2010 that seem to have been omitted from menu screens and the instruction manual, possibly being reserved for the official game guide. That leaves the player to stumble across or guess many important details. This is not a bad thing for those who don’t like a lot of tutorials and explanations, but gamer beware that you’ll have to figure a lot of this game out for yourself.

I used to avoid pro wrestling games because of my disinterest in fighting games and my belief that the games treated pro wrestling as something different than what I enjoyed. I liked the acrobatics and the melodrama of real WWE. The games, I guessed, treated the whole affair as if it was straight-up sport. WWE Smackdown Vs. Raw 2010 still does treat pro wrestling a little more as sport than I’d want. Things like winning streaks are almost required in the game, even though they are rare in the real wrestling leagues.

But the addition of configurable storylines provides that element of unpredictable, scripted entertainment that has made WWE programming, in some years, among the best and most enjoyably wild material on TV. Finally, I’m interested. The fact that the configurable narratives — the post-Sims, post-mods playing we can do with sort-of real lives — is a spectacular and mind-bending bonus.

(WWE Smackdown Vs. Raw 2010 was developed by Yukes and published by THQ for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable, Nintendo DS and Wii on October 20. Retails for $US59.99/$AU99.95 on the home consoles. An copy of the game was given to us by the publisher for reviewing purposes. Played the 360 version. Won the Royal Rumble as Vincent Kennedy McMahon. Made it on the Road To Wrestlemania as Edge. Progressed Shelton Benjamin up a career ladder to ECW and Intercontinental title glory. Created, uploaded and downloaded storylines. Invented a new top-rope finishing move. Got pinned a lot online, including by a female version of MVP.)

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Insomniac Games has kept to the Ratchet series’ tradition by making the newest installment on the PlayStation 3 aware of players’ activity in the older ones. Having played—and reviewed—the new Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack In Time using a final retail copy, I was able to see how my save files for the last two games, 2007’s Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction and 2008’s Ratchet & Clank: Quest For Booty, affect the new game.

I had completed both previous PS3 Ratchets and had the following perks activated automatically when I started the new game:

- My Tools of Destruction save file classified me as a returning customer when I visited A Crack In Time’s weapons-vending kiosks. I was given a discount. Thanks to the lower prices and my collection of new bolt money throughout the new game, I found myself lacking money to buy the next available item in the game only once.

- My Quest For Booty save unlocked the pirate hat you see my Ratchet avatar wearing atop this post. The avatar appear in the game’s community section, which displays a variety of player accomplishments and stats, shows leaderboards for many of those accomplishments. Players can customise their Ratchet avatar or look up the records and avatars of their friends. The avatar is essentially a visual shorthand for some of the things you’ve accomplished. For example, the pistol that Ratchet is holding in that shot looks as it does in the game, where I attached mods and selected its paint job.

Those are the unlocks I found so far that relate to the earlier Ratchet games, confirmed by a Sony representative. If I find any more I’ll let you know.

Which is where these new kind of Kotaku posts come in. This is a fantasy; an idea, a mock-up of something that we think should exist, but for whatever reason, does not.

Today? Today it’s PlayStation 2 games on the PlayStation Store. With the launch of a new dashboard yesterday, we’re reminded that Xbox 360 owners have at their fingertips not just a catalogue of current generation games, but a selection of downloadable games from the previous hardware generation as well.

And while there are some good ones on the list, playing old Xbox games via download isn’t that big a priority, since most of the original discs still work in the 360. But the PlayStation 2, well, take a look at that selection up there. With most PS3’s lacking backwards compatibility—and packing at least 60GB of hard drive space—a store selling classic, downloadable PS2 games would turn Sony a tidy profit.

A report published by the Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing reckons that you can find a gaming console in 40 per cent of American households. Meaning (at least according to this study) 60 per cent of American homes don’t have a console.

While those findings will show Nintendo still have some work ahead of them if they want to circumnavigate the blue ocean, Epic boss Mark Rein (and Microsoft, and Sony) will be happier to note that there’s been significant growth in the uptake of high definition televisions, with HDTV ownership rising from 35 per cent of homes at this time last year to 53 per cent this year.

(In Australia, Nintendo’s Wii and DS represented over 66 per cent of hardware sales in 2008 — a 50 per cent increase over the previous year).

Study: 40 Percent Of US Homes Have Gaming Console, As HDTV Adoption Rises [Gamasutra]

There’s the time I split my knee racing friends while wearing flip-flops. The stitches in my head earned during a vigorous match of tag. The countless skinned elbows, bumps and bruises of a youth spent on skateboard and bike.

Those were just the hallmarks of growing up outside. Each wound, each scar a tiny reminder of time spent running, laughing, playing.

But the summers of today’s youth seem far removed from those times. Over the decades the evolution of play has drawn children closer and closer to home, from side streets to backyards to, finally, dens and video games. As parents become more cautious and children more agoraphobic, is something getting lost?

In Roger Caillois’ famed book on play and games, Man, Play and Games, he divides play into four categories: Competition, chance, role-play and the physical effects of vertigo.

That last one is the feeling of riding a roller coaster, of running with abandon, of losing control. And that’s the only form of play that video games can’t tap into points out Ian Bogost, video game designer, critic and researcher at Georgia Institute of Technology.

“The sense of vertigo is missing,” he says, “of being very active, physically spastic in some way. I don’t see how we could argue that video games provide that.”

While some games include a physical aspect, like what is found with Nintendo’s Wii and in-development projects for both the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, they still require very controlled motion and physicality. For a game to truly tap into that fourth element, vertigo, there has to be a sense of abandon, of danger.

“Outdoor play has to be almost destructive in some ways, you have to be at risk at some time, of breaking something, of falling,” Bogost says. “You don’t really have that in games, simulating it isn’t sufficient.”

But don’t blame video games. Video games are just the byproduct of a society and encroaching suburban lifestyle that buys into the culture of fear, Bogost says.

“It used to be that before suburban life, in the early 20th century, people would play in the streets, not just backyards or parks,” he said. “But then you had to move the kid with the stick and the ball to the park.

“Now we’re taking the backyard and moving it into the den and the television screen.”

These relocated children still find ways to tap into three of those elements. They make up their own rules, games within video games. They play Rock Band or Guitar Hero with friends. But by limiting play to the relatively safe confines of home, children might be missing out on a chance to find and explore the raw edges of life.

“Something about play should be disruptive and antagonistic, not toward each other, but toward the environment. It should be about children finding the edges of their world, ” Bogost said. “When we were children our neighbourhood kind of become this kingdom.”

Now a child’s kingdom is often a haven of air-conditioned safety, of entirely explored space and little opportunity.

Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe today’s children don’t live in the same type of world that we did, don’t need to run the risk of injury or testing oneself. Maybe they should prepare for a life indoors, online, physically void of risk. Maybe that’s what we’ve all become.

If you find that hard to accept as a desirable beacon of progress, then do something about it.

But don’t just send your children outside, go outside with them, even at the risk of a skinned knee.

Play games with them, even if they’re ones that mimic their childhood pastimes.

Have fun.

Well Played is a weekly news and opinion column about the big stories of the week in the gaming industry and its bigger impact on things to come. Feel free to join in the discussion.

The guys at Mega 64 are up to their old tricks again, this confusing the non-gaming public with a live-action performance of hit Nintendo DS rhythm game Elite Beat Agents.

Sometimes I have a hard time figuring out if Mega64′ series of live-action video game performances is a work of genius or a work of madness. All I can think as I watch this latest clip is how utterly embarrassed I would be to be out there in public, dancing along to a rhythm game that’s only playing in my head. I suppose that’s why the Mega64 squad does this sort of thing… so I don’t have to.

In the end, I think I had more fun trying to make out the words to Josh Jones original song, which is just enough of Steriogram’s “Walkie-Talkie Man” to be recognisable, while still remaining utter nonsense. Hit up the link below to download the song as an MP3!

Elite Beat Agents {Mega 64]

As well as the expected ‘bonding’ (e.g. using America’s Army to learn about teamwork) one company issues staff with tokens for performing their jobs that can be exchanged for time playing videogames. Personally, in these uncertain times, I would prefer money. Perhaps that’s just me.

At Kotaku towers, of course, we are the exceptions that may prove the rule. Our jobs here involve a lot of gaming and the systematic absorption of gaming culture via machines like the ones they use in A Clockwork Orange. You could probably issue us with tokens that we could exchange for some time operating a photocopier or doing some filing.

How about you lot? Does a bit of causal gaming help you through the working day? Can you sharpen your boardroom skills in a first person shooter? Answers in the comments, if you please.

Does Gaming at Work Improve Productivity? [PC World]

Playing through it while sticking to the more virtuous decisions netted me a three-piece chicken costume. Playing through again on evil got me a nasty expression book and a vial of pink dye. Hit the link and let us know what prizes you come up with. Together we’ll collect the whole set!

Fable II Storybook Game [Xbox.com - Thanks Jose!]

Well, no, actually. To interrupt your scheduled grumblings about know-nothing moral guardians and anti-games cliches I bring news that several figures from Church of England groups and charities met at a round table chat organised by the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association (ELSPA) and came to the conclusion that this gaming lark might actually have something positive to contribute to society.

Mike Royal, national director of the Lighthouse Group said that games can encourage children to talk about ‘boundaries’ and what behaviour is good and acceptable, not only in gaming but other aspects of their lives.

Up next – Jack Thompson “really getting in to Tales of Vesperia”.

Computer And Video Games Are Good for us!! [Yet Another Review Site]

Hit the jump for the full run.