Video Game Preview 2011 Part II
Last time, I wrote about the state of Create-A-Wreslter features in WWE video games. One important element that's been sorely lacking over the years is the ring introduction. In fact, I usually turn this off because it's so damn annoying to create your own custom wrestler and have Tony Chimel or whoever announce you like this:
"His opponent... from Lexington-Fayette Kentucky... The Man."
This is beyond stupid.
First of all, just because Lexington and Fayette County incorporated or whatever, essentially becoming a single political entity, that doesn't mean human beings would refer to it as "Lexington-Fayette". In case you're wondering, the reason I even used Lexington as my CAW's hometown is because I at least used to live there at one time. Most of my other residences were never available as options. I get that Tony Chimel can't spend all day in a recording studio reading off the names of every single city in North America, but there's more than two cities in Kentucky for crying out loud. The only other option would be to have the announcer say I'm from just "Kentucky" or "Indiana", but that's dumb. The only thing worse than Tony Chimel saying the wrong city is Tony Chimel saying no city, as if he has no idea where the wrestlers come from. It's his job to know. Yeah, it's just a video game, but a lot of the appeal to the experience is in creating an accurate simulation of a live wrestling show, and that means the ring announcer has to sound authentic.
A really easy solution to this would be to set it up where you can select city names and state/country names seperately. For instance, I lived in Columbus, Indiana for a number of years, which would never make it onto the game. But Columbus, Ohio probably could, so if I could choose the city and state names separately, that increases the odds that a user can get something he wants. There's a lot of Springfields in the country, for example.
Besides all that, there's plenty of fictional/satirical hometowns in the annals of wrestling history. Most famous of these is "Parts Unknown", a dramatic way of saying that the ring announcer has no idea where the wrestler is from. Residents of Parts Unknown include the Ultimate Warrior, Demolition, the Powers of Pain, and a lot of other masked or face-painted wrestlers from the 80's. I don't think they've ever used "Parts Unknown" as an option in video games before, which I think is a crying shame. Anybody who plays these things would love to use it, especially if the desired city isn't available. But besides that, there's even more choices out there, like "WCW Special Forces", or "The Outer Reaches of Your Mind". Sid Eudy hailed from "Wherever he damn well pleases". The possibilities are endless.
Anyway, the other problem with the ring introduction is that you have to choose from a limited selection of one-word nicknames. Some of these are pretty decent, and if you wanted to build your CAW around a name like "The Superstar" or "The Irresistible Force". But most of them suck. Wrestlers like Ric Flair or Bill Goldberg have been referred to as "The Man", but that's not how they're identified when they come to the ring. Shawn Michaels used to call himself "The Icon", but that wasn't his name. They didn't say "Coming to the ring, the WWF Champion, The Icon". That's dumb. The dumbest one was "the Diva". In itself, this wouldn't be so bad, except WWE branding has labelled all of its female performers as Divas, so if you name a female CAW "the Diva", it'd be like calling her "The Lady" or "The Female Wrestler".
Fortunately, it looks like WWE actually did something about this for WWE'12. I found a YouTube video that announced that the game will now have a system where you choose up to four words from a list of about 500, and the ring announcer will say them as your ring name during your entrance. The list of words is by no means exhaustive, but it covers a lot of common names and wrestling-related themes. If your favorite CAW is something like Demon Vampire Jerry Stone, then you're out of luck. But if you're creating a brand new guy for the game, you could very easily draw inspiration from this list. It's like a bunch of prompts, actually.
This is where being named Mike Smith really pays off, by the way, because Mike and Smith are on the list. So is "Dog", but not the word "Butt". That kind of sucks, but it wasn't totally unexpected. "Nut" is in there, so maybe when Tony Chimel says "Nut Dog Mike Smith" it'd sound close enough to work. Alternately, I could just tweak my gimmick. For example "Submission Master Mike Smith" would work. "Mack Daddy Jim Smith" is a bust, but "Sexy Daddy Jim Smith" would fly. So would "Max Daddy Jim Smith" or "Masked Daddy Jim Smith". He could wear a mask to the ring. That'd be pretty cool.
It's kind of fun just looking over this list of available words and seeing what you can come up with. Some good ones:
-"Soviet Sniper" Yosef Sokolov
-"Mexican Thunder" Ricardo Vega
-The New Black Scorpion
-Disaster Master Alpha
-Disaster Master Omega
-"The Ultimate" Tony Golden
-"Dark Cloud" Jordan Storms
-Rick "Dirty" Sanchez [Holy shit I can't believe this made it in]
-Lilith Crimson
-WCW Phantom
-"Heavenly" Rick Angel
-Mortal, the American Nightmare
-MK Ultra
-The Flying Tiger
If they were smart, they'd make downloadable content packages of new words you can use. I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to find first names for Russian or Mexican wrestlers. Why have words like "Dublin", "Frenchman" and "Scottish" if you're not gonna have any names to go along with those descriptors? So there are some drawbacks, but this is still far beyond what was possible a year ago.
Regardless of the ring introductions, I've been thinking about guys I want to create for the game. Normally I spend most of my time grinding the Buttdawg's stats to maximum, but I really want to spend some time on this game for a change, and make some cool stuff.
1) The Shockmaster
The above video pretty much tells you everything you need to know about the Shockmaster, but I'll spell it out in case YouTube dies. In 1993, WCW set up an eight-man tag, with a mystery partner for the good guy team. The bad guy team, including Sid Vicious and Harlem Heat, confronted Sting and the British Bulldog, demanding to know who the secret partner is. Sting announced that it was... THE SHOCKMASTER, who then burst through the wall to make his debut. But he tripped and fell, killing the character dead before he ever got a chance. Not that it really would have made a difference, though, since the Shockmaster was a big fat guy in blue jeans and a glitter-painted Stormtrooper helmet with someone else dubbing his voice from backstage. There were a lot of reasons this was never going to work, and really, his botched introduction just accelerated the process.
Personally, I dig the guy, though. For starters, the man behind the mask was Fred Ottman, who portrayed Tugboat in the WWF before he turned heel and teamed up with Earthquake as Typhoon. Also, the Shockmaster failed so instantly that we can only wonder what, if any potential he might have had. He could have been anything, said anything, done anything. Doubtlessly, WCW would have screwed him up no matter what, but since the gimmick never got off the ground, he's limited only to my imagination.
More importantly, Shockmaster called out D-Generation X.
Since Shawn Michaels retired and Triple H is busy being the COO of the company, and X-Pac has hepatitis or something, only the Dawg of the Butt can stand against the Master of Shock. And stand against him I shall.
Pro: A big fat guy in blue jeans should be fairly easy to make. I never figured out what the Shockmaster wears on his upper body, but I can just slap something together.
Con: Very doubtful that WWE'12 will have a proper helmet. Then again, I can't believe WCW would have made Fred Ottman wrestle with it on.
Theme Music: You wa Shock, the opening theme to "Fist of the North Star".
2) Draco's Dynamos.
Not that long ago, jbmcdragon was lamenting the lack of a satisfying character arc for Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies. The books are no better, as I can attest. My reviews of those books were only slightly better, since I quickly learned that Draco was utterly useless to the plot, so there was no point roping him into the gags. Still I managed to give him something. Skeletor turned him into Señor Draco, maximizing his evil capabilities, and he also formed Draco's Dynamos, his own stable to counter the organizations forming around him. I forget exactly who was on his team, but I definitely remember the Fabulous Ones, Stan Lane and Steve Keirn. Also on the group: Son Goku, Doug Ramsey from the New Mutants, and this gentleman below:
Also, those damn weinerkids Draco has on stand by. Crabbe, Goyle, and the chick.
Pro: The Fabs should fall into place pretty easily, seeing as they're no-frills wrestlers from the early 80's. The beauty of Arachniman is that the crappiness of his Spider-Man gear actually makes it easier to reproduce in CAW form. It's closer to a New Mutants uniform with a plaid pattern, and WWE games always have plenty of plaid textures. Doug Ramsey and Draco might as well be brothers, so I can just copy one and slap him in black and yellow tights. I think Warner Brothers re-cast Pansy Parkinson like forty-three times, so it really doesn't matter what my version looks like.
Con: WWE always puts Goku hair in the game, but their selection of martial arts uniforms always disappoints me. Maybe I should just make him wear an Arachniman costume.
Theme Music: "Everybody Wants You" by Billy Squier/ "Rockman" by whoever made WCW's music in 1991/ "My Dad is Rich" by Draco and the Malfoys HA HA HA no./"Aitsu Wa Son Goku" by Hironobu Kageyama
3) Demoltion Reserve
WWE '12 has Demoltion and the Legion of Doom on its roster, which is kind of a big deal because you didn't see them in past games. Foolishly, Jim has challenged me to a six-man tag with himself and the LoD against the Buttdawg and Demolition. But Ax and Smash are only the beginning of Demolition, because in 1990 they added Demolition Crush to the team. Later, Ax formed a new team with Demolition Blast. There are other alternate members of Demolition, but only Ax and Smash actually made it into the roster. Well, I'll just have to do something about that.
Pro: People have been making Demolition CAWs for years, so I can probably find some tutorials for assembling their costume. Again, it annoys me that the costumes are already programmed into the game, but they probably won't be accessible in the CAW mode.
Con: None, whatsoever.
Theme Music: "Demolition" by Derringer
"His opponent... from Lexington-Fayette Kentucky... The Man."
This is beyond stupid.
First of all, just because Lexington and Fayette County incorporated or whatever, essentially becoming a single political entity, that doesn't mean human beings would refer to it as "Lexington-Fayette". In case you're wondering, the reason I even used Lexington as my CAW's hometown is because I at least used to live there at one time. Most of my other residences were never available as options. I get that Tony Chimel can't spend all day in a recording studio reading off the names of every single city in North America, but there's more than two cities in Kentucky for crying out loud. The only other option would be to have the announcer say I'm from just "Kentucky" or "Indiana", but that's dumb. The only thing worse than Tony Chimel saying the wrong city is Tony Chimel saying no city, as if he has no idea where the wrestlers come from. It's his job to know. Yeah, it's just a video game, but a lot of the appeal to the experience is in creating an accurate simulation of a live wrestling show, and that means the ring announcer has to sound authentic.
A really easy solution to this would be to set it up where you can select city names and state/country names seperately. For instance, I lived in Columbus, Indiana for a number of years, which would never make it onto the game. But Columbus, Ohio probably could, so if I could choose the city and state names separately, that increases the odds that a user can get something he wants. There's a lot of Springfields in the country, for example.
Besides all that, there's plenty of fictional/satirical hometowns in the annals of wrestling history. Most famous of these is "Parts Unknown", a dramatic way of saying that the ring announcer has no idea where the wrestler is from. Residents of Parts Unknown include the Ultimate Warrior, Demolition, the Powers of Pain, and a lot of other masked or face-painted wrestlers from the 80's. I don't think they've ever used "Parts Unknown" as an option in video games before, which I think is a crying shame. Anybody who plays these things would love to use it, especially if the desired city isn't available. But besides that, there's even more choices out there, like "WCW Special Forces", or "The Outer Reaches of Your Mind". Sid Eudy hailed from "Wherever he damn well pleases". The possibilities are endless.
Anyway, the other problem with the ring introduction is that you have to choose from a limited selection of one-word nicknames. Some of these are pretty decent, and if you wanted to build your CAW around a name like "The Superstar" or "The Irresistible Force". But most of them suck. Wrestlers like Ric Flair or Bill Goldberg have been referred to as "The Man", but that's not how they're identified when they come to the ring. Shawn Michaels used to call himself "The Icon", but that wasn't his name. They didn't say "Coming to the ring, the WWF Champion, The Icon". That's dumb. The dumbest one was "the Diva". In itself, this wouldn't be so bad, except WWE branding has labelled all of its female performers as Divas, so if you name a female CAW "the Diva", it'd be like calling her "The Lady" or "The Female Wrestler".
Fortunately, it looks like WWE actually did something about this for WWE'12. I found a YouTube video that announced that the game will now have a system where you choose up to four words from a list of about 500, and the ring announcer will say them as your ring name during your entrance. The list of words is by no means exhaustive, but it covers a lot of common names and wrestling-related themes. If your favorite CAW is something like Demon Vampire Jerry Stone, then you're out of luck. But if you're creating a brand new guy for the game, you could very easily draw inspiration from this list. It's like a bunch of prompts, actually.
This is where being named Mike Smith really pays off, by the way, because Mike and Smith are on the list. So is "Dog", but not the word "Butt". That kind of sucks, but it wasn't totally unexpected. "Nut" is in there, so maybe when Tony Chimel says "Nut Dog Mike Smith" it'd sound close enough to work. Alternately, I could just tweak my gimmick. For example "Submission Master Mike Smith" would work. "Mack Daddy Jim Smith" is a bust, but "Sexy Daddy Jim Smith" would fly. So would "Max Daddy Jim Smith" or "Masked Daddy Jim Smith". He could wear a mask to the ring. That'd be pretty cool.
It's kind of fun just looking over this list of available words and seeing what you can come up with. Some good ones:
-"Soviet Sniper" Yosef Sokolov
-"Mexican Thunder" Ricardo Vega
-The New Black Scorpion
-Disaster Master Alpha
-Disaster Master Omega
-"The Ultimate" Tony Golden
-"Dark Cloud" Jordan Storms
-Rick "Dirty" Sanchez [Holy shit I can't believe this made it in]
-Lilith Crimson
-WCW Phantom
-"Heavenly" Rick Angel
-Mortal, the American Nightmare
-MK Ultra
-The Flying Tiger
If they were smart, they'd make downloadable content packages of new words you can use. I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to find first names for Russian or Mexican wrestlers. Why have words like "Dublin", "Frenchman" and "Scottish" if you're not gonna have any names to go along with those descriptors? So there are some drawbacks, but this is still far beyond what was possible a year ago.
Regardless of the ring introductions, I've been thinking about guys I want to create for the game. Normally I spend most of my time grinding the Buttdawg's stats to maximum, but I really want to spend some time on this game for a change, and make some cool stuff.
1) The Shockmaster
Click to viewThe above video pretty much tells you everything you need to know about the Shockmaster, but I'll spell it out in case YouTube dies. In 1993, WCW set up an eight-man tag, with a mystery partner for the good guy team. The bad guy team, including Sid Vicious and Harlem Heat, confronted Sting and the British Bulldog, demanding to know who the secret partner is. Sting announced that it was... THE SHOCKMASTER, who then burst through the wall to make his debut. But he tripped and fell, killing the character dead before he ever got a chance. Not that it really would have made a difference, though, since the Shockmaster was a big fat guy in blue jeans and a glitter-painted Stormtrooper helmet with someone else dubbing his voice from backstage. There were a lot of reasons this was never going to work, and really, his botched introduction just accelerated the process.
Personally, I dig the guy, though. For starters, the man behind the mask was Fred Ottman, who portrayed Tugboat in the WWF before he turned heel and teamed up with Earthquake as Typhoon. Also, the Shockmaster failed so instantly that we can only wonder what, if any potential he might have had. He could have been anything, said anything, done anything. Doubtlessly, WCW would have screwed him up no matter what, but since the gimmick never got off the ground, he's limited only to my imagination.
More importantly, Shockmaster called out D-Generation X.
Since Shawn Michaels retired and Triple H is busy being the COO of the company, and X-Pac has hepatitis or something, only the Dawg of the Butt can stand against the Master of Shock. And stand against him I shall.
Pro: A big fat guy in blue jeans should be fairly easy to make. I never figured out what the Shockmaster wears on his upper body, but I can just slap something together.
Con: Very doubtful that WWE'12 will have a proper helmet. Then again, I can't believe WCW would have made Fred Ottman wrestle with it on.
Theme Music: You wa Shock, the opening theme to "Fist of the North Star".
2) Draco's Dynamos.
Not that long ago, jbmcdragon was lamenting the lack of a satisfying character arc for Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies. The books are no better, as I can attest. My reviews of those books were only slightly better, since I quickly learned that Draco was utterly useless to the plot, so there was no point roping him into the gags. Still I managed to give him something. Skeletor turned him into Señor Draco, maximizing his evil capabilities, and he also formed Draco's Dynamos, his own stable to counter the organizations forming around him. I forget exactly who was on his team, but I definitely remember the Fabulous Ones, Stan Lane and Steve Keirn. Also on the group: Son Goku, Doug Ramsey from the New Mutants, and this gentleman below:
Also, those damn weinerkids Draco has on stand by. Crabbe, Goyle, and the chick.
Pro: The Fabs should fall into place pretty easily, seeing as they're no-frills wrestlers from the early 80's. The beauty of Arachniman is that the crappiness of his Spider-Man gear actually makes it easier to reproduce in CAW form. It's closer to a New Mutants uniform with a plaid pattern, and WWE games always have plenty of plaid textures. Doug Ramsey and Draco might as well be brothers, so I can just copy one and slap him in black and yellow tights. I think Warner Brothers re-cast Pansy Parkinson like forty-three times, so it really doesn't matter what my version looks like.
Con: WWE always puts Goku hair in the game, but their selection of martial arts uniforms always disappoints me. Maybe I should just make him wear an Arachniman costume.
Theme Music: "Everybody Wants You" by Billy Squier/ "Rockman" by whoever made WCW's music in 1991/ "My Dad is Rich" by Draco and the Malfoys HA HA HA no./"Aitsu Wa Son Goku" by Hironobu Kageyama
3) Demoltion Reserve
WWE '12 has Demoltion and the Legion of Doom on its roster, which is kind of a big deal because you didn't see them in past games. Foolishly, Jim has challenged me to a six-man tag with himself and the LoD against the Buttdawg and Demolition. But Ax and Smash are only the beginning of Demolition, because in 1990 they added Demolition Crush to the team. Later, Ax formed a new team with Demolition Blast. There are other alternate members of Demolition, but only Ax and Smash actually made it into the roster. Well, I'll just have to do something about that.
Pro: People have been making Demolition CAWs for years, so I can probably find some tutorials for assembling their costume. Again, it annoys me that the costumes are already programmed into the game, but they probably won't be accessible in the CAW mode.
Con: None, whatsoever.
Theme Music: "Demolition" by Derringer