The year is 2003, a simpler time where both wrestling and the games it spawned were at their absolute peak, and no wrestling game came as close to perfection as SmackDown! Here Comes The Pain did.
Know Your Role
Growing up with the ‘Attitude Era’ PlayStation wrestling games it was clear that I was going to be a fan regardless, but the birth of ‘Ruthless Aggression’ alongside the PS2 gave us something special. Here Comes The Pain really went above and beyond after the launch of the now legendary console, and expanded on WWE SmackDown! Shut Your Mouth, as well as its predecessor Just Bring It.
The game had it all; a stacked roster, fun gameplay, insane areas to do battle in (you could climb buildings and throw your opponents off), loads of match stipulations in Exhibition and a customisable Season mode. The later SmackDown vs. Raw games were good also (but none can compare to this masterpiece), though after 2K picked up the rights from THQ the quality of the games decreased notably.
2K’s focus on realism at the cost of basically everything else really hindered the enjoyment of playing the games. Gone were the over-the-top, tight, fast-paced matches, in favour of slow, mundane slog fests. This emphasis on realism was buried further when 2K20 released in an extremely buggy state, which the older games never really suffered from. This is something that the recently announced 2K22 needs to learn from if it wants to be taken as seriously as it thinks it is.
Here Comes The Pain
Back to SmackDown! Here Comes The Pain. It’s up there as one of the defining titles of the PS2 for me, which says a lot as the system had classics like Jak and Daxter, Ratchet and Clank, Metal Gear Solid 3, Medal of Honor and Resident Evil 4. That’s just how fun the game was, it mixed outrageous gameplay with accurate presentations of the wrestlers that featured at the time. Making a character was fun, storing 5 finishers and using them one after another was fun, falling off a helicopter hovering outside the arena was fun… the game was just fun.
The moves had real weight behind them and finishers were devastating, with slow motion effects and replays. Tables, ladders and the introduction of Hell in a Cell matches all added to the carnage, as did the amazing backstage brawls, which allowed the player to use things like forklifts and the Undertaker’s motorbike to literally murder your opponent. It was great. Choosing your champions in Season mode and taking whichever wrestler you wanted and making them the greatest of all time was my favourite thing to do, as the choices you made really mattered to the story, and the replayability was fantastic.
The only gripe I ever had was that my favourite wrestler of all time, Eddie Guerrero, was rated at 74, a true crime for any fan (I loved the Top Trumps rating style though), but I promptly sorted that out with a cheat code to increase his rating to something more accurate (like 99), and gave him the WWE Championship belt. Apart from that there was no commentary, but this wasn’t so bad as the soundtrack popped off, and the gameplay spoke for itself.
The best there is, the best there was and the best there ever will be?
WWE 2K22 is coming a little later than usual in March 2022, and with the fan-favourite GM mode rumoured to be making a comeback, maybe the series can be brought back into greatness. I’d even take a road to WrestleMania mode or a focus on more classic gameplay, but it could just be the case that 2K don’t have that special sauce that made the PS1 & PS2 WWE games so good.
If that is the case then WWE may have to look to the past and remaster some of the older games, my favourites being the SmackDown! series as well as SvR, but I can’t see that happening with the many roster changes (please Sony more backwards compatibility). Either way, 2K need to improve on their last outing for the sake of all the fans that want to see another game like Here Comes The Pain.
SmackDown! Here Comes The Pain was both simple and at the same time had plenty to do with action at the forefront, and captured the era (the good and the questionable) perfectly in what is, in my opinion, the best wrestling game ever made.
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