Ah smackdown! It sold phenomenally well. It went on to spawn three sequels, all of which are better than this. The graphics are some of the best graphics for ps1 at the time. Faces animate, outfits were accurate and the ring looks great. There were all the trademark taunts like the people's eyebrow, undertaker rolling his eyes etc, Overall very good for the time. The frame rate never dips no matter what is going on, which is a definite plus! Sound is average the crowd sounds ok and all the wrestlers music is there but the in match music sucks hard and there no way to play the wrestlers themes in a music test which would have been cool to listen to. The sounds like punching and kicks make really quiet sounds, there no feel of impact; slams and weapon attacks also sound lame. The annoying gameplay ruined it; it's utterly unrealistic! Say you nail a guy in the head with a chair. He will do a tiny 1/2 a sec wince animation and grapple you, in real life a chair shot ****s somebody up big time, in smackdown it does nothing. same with a hammer, ringbell or coffin. Say you plant a double ax handle or a flying dropkick off the turnbuckle directly in a dude's mush. Chances are he will get right back up instantly. What kind of retarded crap is that? When you get booted in the face you stay down for a while. It's way too hard to pin somebody. I beat down chyna backstage with countless weapons, iron bars, rubbish bins, crates, and PEDAGREEED HER EIGHT TIMES with HHH and she kept fricken kicking out. Another major problem is the fact that you can only play certain matches with certain players and rules. So you can only have a singles hardcore match not a fatal four-way or anything. There's a hugely obvious glitch for tag team matches where if its a two player match and both players are on the same team, you can only control your wrestler when he's tagged in, all other times the computer controls it. Why wasn't this fixed? It's a glaring screw up and there is no way it could be missed. Also the season mode where you can pick any superstar and guide them through endless years of seasons is really undercooked and boring. It's just endless boring as hell singles matches. Hardly any special ones and there next to no backstage plots: sometimes you'll see a crappy movie of a wrestler saying he's ready for a match or something, really half assed facial expressions for some people do not help. Val Venus is one of the worst, when he's talking the facial animation is his face changing from a small smile to a bigger one about 5 times a second, it looks really weird. Also you hardly, if ever see a movie about your superstar, which sucks. Good points include the fact that SD! has an interesting roster including Vince and Shane McMahon as well as Paul bearer as normal wrestlers!! Wtf? There are also the oldies like Xpac road dogg Debra and a load of others. It still has the hardcore and Euro belts that were dropped from WWE for some reason. It also keeps the winloss of every single wrestler, as well as past champions. And rare for a wrestling game the hit detection is perfect. There is also a create a PPV mode so you can make your own wrestlemania XXI you can make six matches and set title shots you could make Debra fight Kane if you wanted! :D Each match is ranked by the crowd and the best ever ranks are saved in a high score list. Create a Wrestler (CAW) 4/10 Almost all sport games have a feature like this where you can design a competitor from the ground up. Wrestling games have always had some of the best! Just look at here comes the pain! This facet is rather average. First you get to pick your appearance, but you can't pick individual clothes, you can only pick your head, chest, and legs for a load of presets! How lame is that! You can also pick your weapon that you start hardcore matches with, but as I've said weapons suck in SD! so its pointless. But the major problem is not being able to pick your attire piece by piece like HCTP or something. After that you pick your starting trait. There are loads from being naturally good at hardcore matches or being sexy, to another wrestler hating or liking you. Some like roughneck skill+ are obvious and give you a bonus 1 or 2 starting levels in whatever the traits style is, Others are hard to figure out. I think sexy for a girl makes it so sometimes if they lose the ref will give them the match anyway! in a movie I saw Tori Wilson (now spelled Torrie) acting sexy and the ref said she won after Debra pinned her! There are also negative traits like sucking at hardcore matches, or having a leg injury. Annoyingly if you pick a trait that says your good at a certain match you get that match much more often in season mode. This my not seem like a bad thing till you know that once I got handicap + meaning a was very good at then and as such got them all the time in season. Which sucked. Roughneck is cheap shots like nut punches and chokes, power is hard slams speedy is things like dropkicks and high flying moves, and technical is submissions mostly. Then you allocate your points to status for different styles of moves: Power, Speedy, Technical, and Roughneck. There is a skill, attack and defend rating for each. The skill rating affects what moves you can use from that class the attack rating is how much damage you do and the defense is your resistance to moves from that style. Finally you set your entire moveset, from how you get in the ring to your taunts, standing punches grapple moves etc. There just aren't even close to being enough though, a limit of four grapple moves is really unrealistic and limiting. You also can't preview the moves, which sucks. Then lastly you set your profile name, nickname, gender, age, hometown etc after you have set this you can never change it, which again sucks. You can change your moves or appearance at anytime though. There is a huge amount of unlockables like new body parts and some personally traits are really hard to get, so if you enjoy this game you'll have lots to do for a while. Also the thirst for first place on the rankings and title belts can be powerful, but the gameplay can get very annoying sometimes. Good points *Having Vince Shane and Paul on the normal roster. *Win loss and PPV data saved. *Great graphics. Bad points *Cheating AI. *Crap music. *Weapons suck. *Can only save four CAWs. Overall this game is ok but it can be unrealistic and has many easily fixed problems. Its kinda hard to recommend now with here comes the pain and other great titles out, but if you see it, it might be worth picking up. If you only have a ps1 this is the best wrestling game for it. Fin
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