/vr/ - Retro Games

>>5835059
Some vids of the mentioned games

>>5459335
>How did Yuke kill it?
Like every franchise dies. Endless repetition, annual releases with only minor changes, lazy programming with outdated tech and also added micro transactions or the madness with different rosters for different preorders. And on top of that Yuke's didn't make any progress or even acknowledged what other devs did better.

But it's all too late now, there isn't any competition anymore. Only those damn Yuke's WWE games year after year, that I stopped buying altogether during the PS2 era. Yuke's did some fine games too but this was a long time ago. I especially think about Toukon Retsuden, which also was the base for the first Smackdown games (well there were some more stages to that mainly an intermediate game between Toukon and Smackdown - the budget games of Simple 1500 Series The Pro Wrestling, which already toned down the gameplay considerably). But later they took out everything from Toukon Retsuden what made these games special. Smackdown just had beefed up graphics but "arcady" and hollow gameplay.

>>5459335
>
Like every franchise dies. Endless repetition, annual releases with only minor changes, lazy programming with outdated tech and also added micro transactions or the madness with different roster for different preorders. And on top of that Yuke's didn't make any progress or even acknowledged what other devs did better.

But it's all too late now, there isn't any competition anymore. Only those damn Yuke's WWE games year after year, that I stopped buying altogether during the PS2 era. Yuke's did some fine games too but this was a long while ago. I especially think about Toukon Retsuden, which also was the base for the first Smackdown games (well there were some more stages to that mainly the intermediate game between Toukon and Smackdown - the budget games of Simple 1500 Series The Pro Wrestling, which already toned down the gameplay). But later they took out everything from Toukon Retsuden what made these games special. Smackdown just had beefed up graphics but "arcady" and hollow gameplay.

>>5107319
The original Smackdown was based on Yuke's old engine from their Toukon Retsuden Series (with NJPW license). Toukon Retsuden 1 - 3 were released on PS1 and TR4 on Dreamcast. TR1 was stripped of the NJPW license and fictionalized for a western release as "Power Move Pro Wrestling" and TR3 and 4 saw some weird Arcade Ports for the Namco System 12 and NAOMI.

And I wouldn't call the Smackdown games "realistic" at all. Quite the opposite, they pretty much threw away every little bit of realism (some call it sim) that was in Toukon Retsuden in favor of beefed up graphics.

I'm not sure how this engine was changed (or castrated) exactly, but some believe that Yuke's after Toukon Retsuden used it first for the budget titles "Simple 1500 Series Vol. 22: The Pro Wrestling" (aka "Pro Wrestling" in the US) and "Simple 1500 Series Vol. 52: The Pro Wrestling 2" where they already toned down the sim level. Smackdown must have been the next step of downgrading the engine.

And seeing the recent games by Yuke's I can only say that they were the grave diggers of the wrestling genre, since the genre is pretty much dead by now (with only very few exceptions) and only the annual updates of the shitty WWE games are left on the market. I gave up on their games when the first SD vs. Raw came out on the PS2.

I preferred the Fire Pro Wrestling Games and even more AJPW King's soul on the PS1, which IMO was the best wrestling title of this generation ... much better than even No Mercy/Virtual Pro Wrestling. But Arcade Wrestling games can be fun too like Giant Gram 2 and Giant Gram 2000 on the Dreamcast. But Smackdown wasn't even a good arcade wrestling game.

>>4723957
> Yuke's only had one good puro game, and that was Wrestle Kingdom 2

I don't know. After quitting the line of WWE games from Yuke's after SD vs. Raw for good (even before they started with the annual games) I wanted to give them another chance and ordered Wrestle Kingdom I

But I didn't find it that impressive. Yeah, it's using the Day of Reckoning engine that some compared to the AKI games, but I didn't like it at all. I didn't even like Day of Reckoning in the first place. Horrendous loading times (I'm talking about WK1), really awful edit and career mode

The roster of Wrestle Kingdom 2 looks awesome with so many true legends and current japanese stars, but the game mechanic was just so off putting with WK1 that I didn't bothered buying another Yuke's game and I haven't touched a single one of their games since

But I liked their Toukon Retsuden games on the PS1, at least until TR3. TR4 on the Dreamcast was meh. Bad roster and really bad GFX and animation for a DC game.

Despite their current status, many Yuke’s games on the PS1 were actually pretty good, but it went downhill pretty fast. I wouldn’t call it my favorite game, because I just don’t like the groggy-system with different kinds of groggy states that broaden the otherwise small moveset caused by the limited control scheme (Zen Nihon Joshi Pro Wrestling: Joou Densetsu: Yume no Taikousen did something similar), but all in all this was a good game. TK4 (Dreamcast) suffered from bad graphics and a thin roster, while the TR3 was awesome.