Imagine an old woman sitting in her home, realizing that her family was to arrive that day to visit. Every year, she baked a batch of sugar cookies—a tradition, really, but the past years' batch was a little stale. Right now, though, the ingredients are all new... Which is nice and all, but as it stands there's half an hour before they arrive and they're used to the sheet of cookies coming out hot and fresh when they arrive.

So our matron saunters into the kitchen and pulls out the flour, baking soda, baking powder, butter, sugar, an egg, and some vanilla. Everything goes into the bowl, but then she remembers that her friends mentioned children loved sugar. So more sugar goes into the bowl...but the texture is all wrong. So a little water goes in, and it looks sort of right. The mixture then gets poured onto the baking sheet, and a glance at the clock shows there's 15 minutes to spare. Too bad the oven isn't on.

Quick thinking! The woman turns the oven on, and ignores the 375 degrees she should turn it to. Instead, 500 degrees. With 5 minutes to go, the oven comes up to temperature. She slides the sheet in, brushes off her hands, and looks out the window. Five minutes pass, and a car wheels up in the driveway. The woman opens up the oven, pulls out the sheet, and sees mushy lumps of brown that barely resemble cookies. They're barely together, and look rather distasteful. At this point, the decision is up to her whether to present the product or not.

And such is the problem with quite a few games that released in Q4 2007. More pressure was applied to developers to release in an unrealistic timeframe, and the actual games wound up to be rather poor. I've run into that instance once, with Eidos' Kane and Lynch, but the previous extended metaphor of course refers directly to Smackdown vs. Raw 2008 for the Wii.

Mind you, SvR isn't a bad series. 2007's edition was broken in a few ways, but still fun to play. 2008 is the year that THQ decided to try pushing the series in a new direction more akin to a party game. One of the fundamentals of the game, running, was stripped out and replaced with an automatic running event activation when at a specific distance. This doesn't always work, leading to some whiffed punches and not too many accurate hits. Compound that with the rather hit and miss control scheme and the game becomes a chore to play.

Another result of the party game concept shift was the inclusion of gesture-activated taunts. Much like the overuse of sugar at the expense of a fundamentally sound cookie, the taunt gestures are absolutely perfect and doubly impressive in comparison to the rest of the game. Through some coaxing of a friend, I ran through all of them—including Candice Michelle's GoDaddy.com dance, and found them to be accurate and quasi-embarassing to perform.

Outside of the control problems, the Wii edition of Smackdown vs. Raw 08 has a serious problem in the way of presentation. Visually, the game looks as if a PSP game were upscaled to a television, with textures and videos at a resolution that borders on insulting. I'm not sure why, but during entrance and victory segments, the camera takes its good time focusing on almost illegibly upscaled textures on fan-held signs.

Wrestlers themselves look fairly good, but not as accurate as they looked in editions from 2003-2004. They still animate about the same, which is to be expected, but long hair winds up being a huge problem when it pops up. Instead of being a fluidly moving object, it oftimes winds up being a texture that sticks straight out and looks awful from any direction other than a shot straight from the front.

Even through all of that, the game could still go from “mediocre” to “pretty good” had it featured any real variety of match-types. Expectations point towards the Royal Rumble, Hell in a Cell, steel cage matches, ladder matches... Wherein 2007's edition had a plethora of matchtypes, 2008's turn on the Wii is absolutely anemic with the only options being a singles match with or without weapons, or with a victory by knockout or no. As well, there's a single option for a tag team match, and a triple threat option.

Storyline wise, the game is equally thin. There are no cutscenes, no dialog, no storyline whatsoever. Whichever star is chosen has to slog through tiers of wrestlers multiple times to level up, with the option to directly challenge or tag with another grappler. However, even that option is broken. Given five attempts to tag with a member of Cryme Tyme, all with successful messages in reply, I was not able to get anything out of him but a generically angry challenge the next week for a singles match.

Smackdown vs. Raw 2008 for the Wii showed a lot of promise. It had a chance, but the rushed nature of the product, the dismal production values, the lack of variety, and the odd privatization of gimmicks over fundamentals make the game a failure in pretty much every regard. Hopefully THQ can take the great parts of this release, and shoehorn them into 2009's edition alongside a more fully developed game.