Quite possibly fake, but...

Posting here just in case. Looks pretty bloody awful if its genuine!

Congratulations, THQ.

You've produced the first WWE related game that I will absolutely not ever be buying, picking up, trying, or even looking at.

P.S: Seriously. Good god this looks horrendously stupid. What pisses me off more is knowing that this worthless garbage is very possibly going to be sapping away and cutting into WWE '12's budget.

By the way, this is not fake.

Those little drawings are by the exact same artist that draws the caricatures for the WWE Kids Magazine. Which tips me off as being genuine.

Also, APM Music is also where WWE gets a lot of it's generic themes. (I also browse their catalog as well, as you know)

I also didn't go near that bloody awful WWE car game a few years back. But Christ this looks awful. I really hope it's either a third string game, or a PSN/XBL download, and not intended to be next year's Wrestlemania time release like All Stars or LOWM.

If it IS the Spring 2012 game, they have REALLY taken a HUGE leap backwards. They should have built on All Stars as that has been really well received.

What really bothers me, is that clearly someone looked at WCW Backstage Assault and WWF Betrayal and thought "Oh yeah, we totally need another one of those."

Despite the fact that both of those are widely regarded as the WORST wrestling related games ever made.

The simple fact is, that Wrestling Game - Ring = Failure.

There's another game that recently came out that was attempting to be a wrestling based version of a Final Fight-esque side scrolling beat-em-up. It was called "Lucha Fury" and it was also spectacularly awful, garnering 2's and 3's out of 10's on every major gaming website.

I can only imagine this is destined for the same fate.

I also hope and pray to GOD that this game is a simple Arcade servise downloadable title, only as well.

That way I can clearly ignore it, and give it a wide berth, and sleep easy knowing that it isn't sucking out too much of WWE '12's budget.

However, if they are honestly planning for this to be some kind of a $60 full disc title, than seriously. Fuck this. Fuck it on toast.

I'm sorry but the minute you have a wrestling game and you take away the ring, you're destined for an automatic instant failure.

If this does get released as such, this will stand as THQ's single biggest WWE licenced failure since, yes, that wretched Crush Hour game you mentioned. WWE related games actually exist on a precarious "make-it-or-break-it" balance as it is, and this embarrassment could actually do a lot to HURT the brand, imo.

The basic idea, extending the 'characters' is a good one but it looks so poorly executed that it'll put a lot of people off.

In fact, you know what? No.

Now that I think about it, I'm not even done ranting about this, yet.


This also represents the absolute nadir of WWE's current "market to little kids" strategy that I despise right now.

A little bit of that brand of sheer absurdity, is also the reason why this godawful WWE based comic book WWE Heroes was an utter failure. It was remarkable amounts of stupid.

Is anyone really going to buy the idea of these ridiculous caricatures in some Fist Of The North Star post-apocalyptic setting pushed beyond the boundries of ludicrous, when we all know these are based on REAL human beings and REAL atheletes?

Yes, it's WWE's "sports entertainment fantasy cartoon side show" concept they keep trying to ram down the standard 13 year old's throat, but just imagine if EA Sports was to have a game with Baseball players decked out like Conan The Barbarian or a Midevil Knight with swords and axes instead of baseball bats, going around fighting hordes of evil mutants. It's fucking stupid.

In fact, I feel very sad that I think that in some backasswards way, either the WWE or the THQ brass looked at the success of All-Star's competitive in-ring gameplay and learned precisely the wrong lesson from it's success and said...

"Hey, it looks like people loved seeing them jump 30 feet in the air and look like muscled cartoon characters. Let's make them fight evil creatures in a side scroller."

In fact, you know what this is?

This is WWE's version of Shaq Fu.

And we all know how that ludicrous Shaquille O'Neil Mortal Kombat rip-off fighting game ended up amounting to in the nostalgic memories of people today? There's a website that is dedicated to rounding up and destroying all known copies of Shaq Fu on Genesis and SNES.

I can't help but feel this game may not be THAT hated over time, but still deserves a lot of scorn for it's utter idiocy right now.

I would love to see this cancelled as I honestly think that after All-Stars, this is the wrong way to go, but that as I said before, this is such an utterly dumb execution of this concept and such a poor idea, that it may really do damage to the WWE Games brand in general.

The thing is, if it was actually well thought out and had a good storyline attached to it, a mission based beat-em-up which expanded on the WWE characters could actually make for a pretty good game. If you had decent beat-em-up mechanics around a wrestling moveset, it could actually be quite fun. A series of boss characters you had to beat inside a ring, and then fights along the way in which you had to either knock someone out to get past them, or make them submit and give you information, something like that. Well thought out and well executed, there is room to expand beyond the obvious I think. But this, this just looks lazy and ill conceived.

In other words, like a bad cartoon made by a committee of out-of-touch people trying desperately to imagine what kids want and then shoehorning that into a sloppy, embarrassingly stupid concept.

Sounds like this is just that, Mike. Like DS says there's a decent game in there. Create a character. Battle along facing Trips as Conan, Taker as a real Deadman, etc. Mix the fantasy in there. But it needs to be done well for that to work. If people just want fighting with swords then there's stuff like Soul Caliber which does this much better.