Gameplay of the hidden wrestler Chris Benoit in WWE Wrestlemania X8.
Ohhhhhhhhh boy. Let’s address the elephant in the room and get it out the way.

Chris Benoit was considered to be one of the greatest wrestlers of all time. A true sportsman, with the charisma, athleticism and star power needed to be a fantastic wrestler, who could wrestle with the best of them. That all changed, however, when in 2007 he murdered his wife and son, and then himself, in a murder-suicide. Now, all the praise for Benoit has been swept under the rug, and even classic wrestling fanatics seem a little weary of ever bringing this sort of thing up. But I’m an intense person, so it’s not something I’d avoid.

So yeah, Chris Benoit was a piece of shit. Wrestlers ultimately being shitty people, or getting into controversies, is nothing new though, with various wrestlers ending up in the doghouse over time. I’ve already discussed a fair number of them, but then we have other things like The Ultimate Warrior for talking about how “queering doesn’t make the world work”, Hulk Hogan for the racist comments on his sex tape, spousal abuse committed by various wrestlers; the list goes on and on.

Wrestlemania X8 was the first of four wrestling games for the Gamecube, and it’s also the weakest. As in, compared to No Mercy, it is hot garbage. Control is awful, the graphics don’t look very good, the controls are poorly implemented, and on the whole it’s a real chore to play. While the PS2 was being graced with some of the best wrestling games of all time, the Xbox was given the awful WWF Raw games, while the Gamecube was given this. Yeah, it’s not surprising they just eventually decided to make Smackdown vs. Raw instead, rather than try for three separate unique games. What’s more, would you believe this was made by Yukes, the guys who made most of the Smackdown games too? Yeah, they would also go on to make the decent Wrestlemania XIX, the fantastic Day of Reckoning and the pretty good Day of Reckoning 2, which are all far superior games to this one. What happened, then? Why is this one so bad? I can only guess that they were on a really tight deadline for this, and were working on other titles so they had to assign a B-team to it instead, or simply weren’t familiar enough with the hardware yet to make a good game. The latter sounds right to me, given that Just Bring It, the first PS2 Smackdown game, was also pretty underwhelming, while Shut Your Mouth and Here Comes the Pain were great.

In terms of unlockable wrestlers, X8 doesn’t have a bad selection. The others include former WCW mainstay Raven, ECW legend Rhyno, WCW legend Ric Flair, WCW diva Stacy Keibler and, of course, another appearance by Vince McMahon. The regular roster even sees appearances by Scott Hall, Kevin Nash and Ho Kogan, all in their NWO get ups. It’s not bad, on the whole.

One problem I had was that, for some reason, the savefile I downloaded had it so all the characters had the same default moveset. For Benoit here I had to change it considerably, which is how he ends up with such a weird selection of moves here. Editing wrestlers can be fun, but given that these videos are about showing default unlocks it does make the experience a little inauthentic. Still, I did what I could here, and luckily despite being pretty janky there is still some fun to be had with Wrestlemania 18. I did two matches just because the first felt a little short, and I was trying to go for the submit with Benoit’s finisher both times, but fate conspired against me, unfortunately. But, ah well, it wouldn’t be wrestling if something didn’t go wrong when you least wanted it to.

Next up, it’s the former ECW star who should have gotten much better treatment in the WWE.

свернуть