Smackdown 2 Know Your Role

Greetings wrestling nerds and video game geeks alike, and welcome to Review, Recap and Remember. Each week we will sit down and take an in-depth look at wrestling games from the past and find out if they've withstood the test of time! From the different generations of PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo and all the other ports that brought us that much closer to the squared circle. I'm Joshua-Cain from 4PW, and we're about to dust off our nostalgia glasses.

So the first game we're going to look back at, is Smackdown 2 Know Your Role as it was known in America and across Europe, or Exciting pro wrestling 2 in Japan, created by the fine folks at Yukes. Now, I'm not just doing random entries, which may lead some of you to ask why I'm beginning with the second entry in the beloved Smackdown series. I'm going to try and bring you guys closer to my thoughts and review each game in the order I played them. Now, before we get started on gameplay, let's set the tone. It's the backend of the year 2000, we had survived the Y2K problem (not the Y2J problem mind you, that's still running wild nearly 2 decades on) the Internet was just starting to evolve, WCW was on its last legs, and the undertaker had decided to stop being the lord of darkness, and become one of the hells angels. Now, I was 7 at the time this game out, and having just watched my first live PPV (Armageddon 2000) there was only one game I wanted for Christmas. Again, being 7, it was easy for my sister to throw me off the trail and convince me the game would be too difficult for me and thus, I wouldn't be getting it. Now, come Christmas morning, you can imagine my elation and surprise when I opened a small square present to see the bright blue Smackdown 2 cover with my heroes on the front of it. Off came the seal, open went the box, and in went the game. I had never been so blown away by a video game, to be able to control my idols in my own home, it was a safe bet I wasn't going to do much else over the Christmas holidays. Now that we have a general feel of the time, let's fast forward 17 years and see if it's still as good as I remember.

First Impressions, Again!

Now the first thing I noticed about this game, was the sound bites. Good old JR hitting us with "Ladies and gentleman this is proof, that anything can happen in the world wrestling federation" before the game has even started really got me excited, it made me feel like I was about to really enter the world of WWF. Then the cinematic of the camera and sound crews adjusting just before Smackdown started, it's all building up to a crescendo, that crescendo comes in the form of the intense, bright, and unforgettable Smackdown opening. As I'm watching this back, it really does remind me how exciting WWF TV was at the time, and I think they captured it perfectly here, personally, I am still sucked in before the game has even started, it's a feeling I don't find with many of the newer wrestling games. Whether it's the rip-roaring "Everybody on the ground" (created by none other than the legend himself, Jim Johnston) or seeing the wrestlers going all out and at it during the intro, they really got it right from the off here. There truly was a unique attitude about this time, the name wasn't given for the sake of it.

Title Shots and Title Screens

Now we're past that hectic beginning of this game, we are brought to a quieter, darker and more relaxed title screen where you can decide where you want to start off with the game proper. (A small side note, even the soundtrack and noises when you toggle up and down are holding their own in this day in age) we begin with an exhibition, and it is exactly what it says on the tin, you can play matches for fun against the computer or your friends. Further down we have creative suites and my personal favorite, season mode. As you're probably aware of the saying, "save the best till last" so before we delve into the creative side and season mode, let's have a look at the wrestlers at our disposal and which matches types we can put them through.

TLC or TNA?

Smackdown 2s roster is nigh on perfect for the time, between the wrestlers available from your first play, to the unlockable ones (we'll get into that later) they didn't really miss much. You had all your main event stars, favourite divas and mid-card wrestlers from that time in the palm of your hand quite literally. One cool thing playing this back now is noticing that everybody had a part to play on TV, there weren't really any lower card wrestlers like today. Whether it was the hardcore division, champions and number 1 contenders, it seems like nearly everybody had something of importance to do consistently at the time. You could pit whichever wrestler you wished against another, intergender, manager vs manager and more. This brings us to our match types, whilst nowhere near as vast as the standards that would be set later on down the line, Smackdown 2 had a fairly meaty selection for us to choose from compared to Smackdown 1. We were given our first ever taste of Hell in a cell in video game form, a casket match which has a simple formula that is still fun and holds up today, and the infamous Slobber Knocker match. Now if you're not aware of what this stipulation is, it's similar to the defend the streak mode in the WWE 2K14. You select your chosen wrestler, you're given full Smackdowns (finishers) and pitted against the entire roster one at a time. When you choose someone like, The Rock, Kane, Undertaker, Triple H or Stone Cold (wait, where is Stone Cold? He's not a playable wrestler? Again, more on that later.) it seems incredibly easy for the first few challenges, but once you run out of smackdowns, start taking damage, it becomes incredibly difficult even for the best of players. Though a very gimmicky match type, it stands out and is still called on to be brought back into current games to this day. Other match types include special referee, I quit, cage and table match. They all play pretty much the same apart from the finishes, however, the difficulty varies and can be somewhat frustrating at times with certain matches, step forward the ladder match. Now, playing against the COM isn't so bad, as it doesn't attempt to go straight up the ladder ten seconds in, but if you're playing against your best friend Pete who's a bit of a twat when it comes to games, he can Irish whip you out of the ring, grab the ladder, climb it and win within 25 seconds (take that Goldberg and Lesnar) There is no struggle mini game to retrieve the title it is quite simply climbing the ladder and fling yourself at the belt, if you touch it, you win it alah Jeff Hardy No Mercy 99. I can't finish this section until we speak about the hell in a cell layout, it looks completely different to how it does in real life, which isn't such a bad thing. Now, it's very cramped and just basically a grated box on top of the ring, but there's a certain charm to it. Yukes clearly knew they had limitations but they still put the effort in and it shows. There's still enough room between the crowd and the ring to move around outside, and about that, outside of hell in a cell. Now as I mentioned before I was a 7-year-old boy who was having his first rodeo with wrestling games, so when I saw no door to HIAC, I believed you couldn't escape, as I have been many times since I was 7, I was wrong. You can run into one of four panels on each side of the ring and your wrestler will throw himself through to the outside, I still remember being mind blown as I did this for the first time. The rest plays like a real hell in a cell match, you can climb the cell (quicker than spiderman on pre-workout) and brawl on top of the steel structure. Now anyone that hasn't played this is probably wondering, could they still fly off the top? The answer is yes, either through the cell or off of it you can knock your opponent to the ground or canvas below. To go through, it is pretty much the same as breaking out, however this time you slam your opponent through the 2 visible panels on top twice, once to dent, two to break and wallah, Mankind KOTR. Going off however isn't to the same effect, whether you knock your opponent off the side, or get Jeff Hardy to Swanton bomb through the announce desk, it's the same outcome hit or miss, both wrestlers get straight up 99% of the time, and whilst not realistic at all, it keeps the action flowing which this game does brilliantly throughout.

No Commentary? No problem.

Another thing fans who haven't played the earlier WWE games may notice with this gem is it has no commentary, at all during the matches. Does this affect the atmosphere? Not at all. The soundtrack of a strange genre is sublime, I want to call it unsurely a fast paced hard hitting rendition of metal. It's memorable, doesn't get annoying one bit and doesn't drown out the sounds of bumps at all. Well played on this one Yukes.

Arenas and Venues

The arenas are pretty simple here, RAW and Smackdown are incredibly detailed for the time, from the stage to the ring it looked exactly like it would on tv. The crowd look pretty good although it's just the same movements and animations throughout, nothing that throws you off though. Whilst you miss the boos and crowd interacting verbally like they would in attitude or war zone, the music makes up for it. Now, unlike newer games to reach the stage you would have to either play a hardcore or falls count anywhere match, from then you'd have to go from the ring and attempt to move up the stage only to be held in a force field with an arrow, but once you wait a few seconds you'll be loaded onto the top of the ramp and allowed to fight on the stage, same goes for backstage etc. Another cool feature was being able to choose certain designs to put on the ring canvas, you could do anything you wanted, even having a Smackdown arena with a WrestleMania 2000 mat, the design and customisation that you can do in this game really shines especially for the early 2000s. Now as good as the RAW and Smackdown arenas look, the PPV/Sunday night heat arenas are completely generic and the exact same, almost like house show arenas which in one respect is really cool, but in another lacks atmosphere when you take your wrestler to a big PPV. There are two entrances to the ring in these arenas and whilst again, cool for being different, I feel they should have maybe added special arenas for at least the big four PPVs, hell even maybe backlash with the swinging blades. Overall it doesn't detract much from the game but a game like No Mercy on the 64 definitely did the arenas better.

Gameplay; Stiff or Fluid?

So this day in age we're very much used to mini-games during the match, technical grappling, chain wrestling, wrestlers being busted open, button prompts for reversals and possible comebacks when you're being mullered. But back in the early Smackdown days, this wasn't possible. In fact, unless you had a special guest referee match, having a man in a footlocker shirt to count the fall wasn't even possible. All we had was Earl Hebner's voice to count us out! It was a very simplistic system, you could quite literally repeat the same power move over and over again with little chance of a reversal. Take Undertaker, for example, you could run at your opponent, hit his swinging DDT a few times and cause serious damage, build up your Smackdown bar and get your finisher fairly quickly. The more powerful your move set, the quicker you build your Smackdown bar up. Also, you don't have to worry about people kicking out of your finisher after you've hit it for the 17th time like in 2K18, there's an option to have KO (not Jerichos mate) turned on or off. You begin the game with it on, so hitting an opponent with a powerful finisher when they're heavily damaged more often than not ends the match. This brings us to body damage, there is no meter or a way to bring a graph of your opponents body up, you can simply tell by them panting and sagging over, once you see them breathing heavy, the end is near. While it plays more like a beat em up rather than being technical like it is today, it's just fun. Whilst some of the matches can be tedious, most notably the cage where you take a long while to climb it, and your opponent never seems to stay down, I've never found myself complaining about it. Royal Rumbles you can never have more than four wrestlers in the ring at a time, but I still find it flowing so much better than today's games. It's a case where if you can ignore the graphics change, you may very well find yourself having a lot more fun playing with your friends with this one. No online, just two controller ports and you beating the hell out of each other.

A Default Creation

Now, this is the part most people rave about when it comes to Smackdown 2, the creation suites. This really was the golden era for creations in wrestling games and Smackdown 2 is no different. From creating Wrestlers to your own PPV even down to a wrestlers taunts, it was a bottomless pit of possibilities. I never got too creative as a kid, purely on the fact I didn't understand what I was doing but looking back now at what was possible It's pretty jaw-dropping. Yukes were very coy about what you could create, the move set and entrance moves from wrestlers working for other companies *COUGH DUBYA SEE DUBYA* were all included and with the right formula, barring titantron and music you had the perfect CAW. You could find the odd face of a wrestler that had recently left among the generic pre-made heads. And speaking of head, yes, al snows companion was included within this. If you were being imaginative and creating your own wrestler from scratch, you could get really creative with the attires that were available, all of the wrestler's gear in the game is possible to select and even a few from Smackdown 1. With some of the attires you can recreate a wrestler and give him different clothing, just copy his entrance and move set and it was a really cool way to have other attires as they weren't unlockable in this game. Now to the most individually creative part of the game, the taunts. To really put the icing on the cake of your own creation, you could create an in-depth taunt for your created wrestler. Instead of having your guy or girl taunting "just bring it" or raising their arms like Kane, you could have them doing backflips in the ring among other amusing animations. If you like to get inventive with your creations you could spend hours on end just in this part of the game alone. If you go and check some of the creations out on YouTube it's incredibly impressive, or better yet grab a copy and give it a whack yourself!

''Tis The Season

Now for the part of the review, I've been itching to talk about, season mode! It's something I feel WWE games are sorely missing this day in age, the coolest part of the older games for me was being able to take your favourite superstar through real storylines from the past year or so. Don't get me wrong, a career mode with a CAW is cool but it doesn't hold a candle to this in my opinion. You start off just after Wrestlemania with your selected superstar. The main storyline is straight away Triple H VS The Rock from Backlash 2000 and this plays out whether you choose to play as either superstar or not. You could begin your season as a champion, which would be highlighted by their name being blue when you select a wrestler, or by simply checking who is holding which title in the title management and rank screen. Something I appreciated very much was being able to select any superstar to play as but still being kept in the loop of every wrestler's storyline. Just like real life, you wait for your favourites but are still kept in sync with the storylines around. However with this, there are a LOT of loading screens coming back and forth from the various cutscenes that occur in the ring and backstage, many people didn't like this but I think it added more to the overall experience. And if we're speaking about things that people disliked, we can't not talk about the battle meters. Now when you start the week on the menu of season mode, you get a cool picture of the event logo on the screen followed by scrolling down the card with all the planned matches. Now say if you're on first, you can get your match out of the way but must skip through all the others, the only plus side here is if you selected to control more than one superstar for your season. Whenever you choose to skip a match you are forced to sit through two battle meters below the superstar's pictures depleting until one eventually empties and declares the other victorious. This is also another part of the soundtrack I'll never forget because it is SO repetitive, but yet for me never got annoying. The general consensus here was it shouldn't have been in the game and prolonged an already extremely long season mode which can span up to five years, but personally, from a child, I never minded it. The further you progress in season mode, the more you unlock. For example, the first PPV is backlash, and on the build-up, a bald man in control of a heavy piece of machinery begins to appear, then before you know it he's shown up as a special guest referee at Backlash on the side of the rock, opposing Vince McMahon. No this is not "Default" but indeed Stone Cold Steve Austin IS in the game but as an unlockable character, which always struck me as strange. This could possibly be because of him missing a lot of the year through a neck injury and Yukes wanting to surprise the player. Stone Cold is unlocked after winning your wrestlers match on the PPV and the other unlockables follow in similar fashion over the span of your season. Whether it matches types, superstars, parts and moves, you really do get excited at what you could unlock next the first time around of playing this, it adds that bit of excitement to PPVS that maybe went missing with generic venues. With the long loading screens, battle meters, and long match cards some people may be put off, but waiting a few seconds to see rival wrestlers brawling backstage or teams planning and executing assaults is more than worth it. Not to mention the appearance of mysterious assailants backstage, then getting the chance to wrestle them. This brought in the jobber factor, it made you feel like every now and then you'd have a one-off match against an unknown, which again brought the game closer to reality. It made an early PlayStation 1 wrestling game as unpredictable as possible.

Secrets and Bugs

I won't go too into detail here, but if you're seasoned and think you've clocked this game, you should maybe think again! There is a lot to see in this game. Without giving too much away, load up the royal rumble match, check the CURRENT roster you have thoroughly and give it a few plays, a few unexpected faces may appear... Now I never checked into Yukes confirming whether this was intentional or not but seeing some of these guys appear is cool whether a bug or not. The strong belief is that a few superstars were removed just before the game's release but still made it into the game through certain modes, one being the rumble. Also, an extra incentive to finish season mode all the way through is some of the unlockable parts. Once you've slogged through season mode completely, you'll have a nice surprise, if you win at Wrestlemania that is. Head on over to the create a superstar section and have a look at some of the attires and heads you've unlocked, have fun!

Final Thoughts & Verdict

Now as I said at the top of this review, I am a MASSIVE fan of this game, it's deeply etched into my heart as far as video games go. However, I have gone back and written this review completely unbiased to those feelings. The game took me back to a simpler time, and also to a time when computer games took an age to load. The graphics are obviously not up to today's standards of wrestling games and the entrances are extremely short, you can't even see a visual of the wrestlers walking onto the stage, instead just the superstar walking in front of their video. Seeing the Tron video up close with the wrestler coming out just in front was cool, but seeing the superstars coming down the ramp and into the ring like we see this day in age trumps the entrances on Smackdown 2 hands down. The fighting style was more simplistic and I do miss the times you could eliminate someone from a royal rumble by just slapping them close to the ropes or slingshotting them over the ropes, it wasn't as realistic as today, but is that a good thing? I believe so, wrestling games are supposed to be fun, when you put too much into them which I believe they do today, it makes it more of a chore to play the game. The roster is pretty massive for the time with a total of 66 playable superstars and a few more that can be created. The story mode is still what I feel to be the best of its kind, only rivalled by Smackdown Shut Your Mouth & Here Comes The Pain which we will cover later on. All and all, I believe Smackdown 2 is just as good as I remember it and any wrestling game fan that hasn't given it a go before would have a great time in doing so. Many believe this generation of wrestling to be the greatest ever, and in terms of wrestling video games, I wholeheartedly agree. This and Smackdown 1 were the catalysts for the Smackdown games that would follow and eventually evolve into SDVR and the 2K franchise. Smackdown 1 and 2 were released well within a year of each other which hasn't been done since. I think Yukes were really hungry to pump out good wrestling games in the year 2000 and they exceeded expectations in doing so. I hope you guys have enjoyed reading about this blast from the past as much as I have reviewing and remembering it for you! Thank you for taking the time to hang with me. Have a 2Sweet week and I'll catch you same place, same time next Tuesday!

#Yukes #VideoGames #Smackdown #Retro #Playstation #Review #Nostalgia