WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2010

Handing the booking pen to the audience was the gamble here. Story Designer let you assemble your own WWE angles from a library of arenas, camera setups, character poses and dialogue text, then string them into a full season and play out the matches they set up. It was clumsy in practice, with menus that made writing a three-segment feud feel like filling in a form. It was also the most interesting thing a wrestling game had tried in years, because it admitted the obvious: the matches were never the part fans argued about.

The rest of the 2009 release followed the pattern Yuke's had settled into. Road to WrestleMania returned with six branching paths, including one built around a created superstar, which was the concession to everyone who had spent hours in the creation suite and wanted the game to acknowledge their work. Superstar Threads let you swap attire pieces across the roster, and the paint tool carried over from the previous year. Creation had become the franchise's real engine long before the wrestling caught up.

In the ring, this is the grapple system the series had been iterating on since the PS2 era began: strong and quick ties, a stamina-inflected momentum meter, limb targeting that mattered more in submission-heavy matches than anywhere else. Reversals still decide most bouts between competent players, and the timing window rewards memorising animations rather than reading an opponent. That is either the series' craft or its ceiling, depending on how many of these you have played.

The PS2 version deserves the caveat. By 2009 the hardware was two generations deep into this annual cycle, and the last-gen build trimmed modes, roster extras and presentation to fit, with the online component and several of the newer flourishes absent or reduced. What survives is a dense, fast wrestling game that runs cleanly and looks modest next to what the same team was shipping on newer machines.

What holds up is the sheer volume of things to build and the way the create-a-wrestler pipeline feeds every other mode. What has aged is the commentary, which repeats within a single match, and the cutscene direction, which was already stiff at release. Play it for the editor rather than the show it was licensed to recreate, and it still has a strange, generous appeal: a wrestling game that trusted you to write bad television and enjoy it anyway.