Suffice it to say, the WWE franchise has effectively given THQ a license to print money. With Vince McMahon's face on it. One could theorize that in this generation, the hardware discrepancies between PlayStation, GameCube and Xbox have completely cemented the dominant franchise for wrestling games. Xbox especially suffered; between Anchor's mediocre Raw series and Studio Gigante's deplorable Wrestlemania 21, Microsoft's console was not the system for wrestling game fans. Nintendo's showings, while not as disappointing as Microsoft's, paled in comparison to the quality wrestling titles developed by AKI for the Nintendo 64. That left Sony and the SmackDown games, which were left to constantly evolve from the Toukon Retsuden engine, rather than be wildly experimented upon like WWE games on other systems. While the releases were somewhat good, it took six games to finally get a title on par with the gameplay quality seen in the previous generation of consoles.

And now, with the seventh (and possibly final) game in the SmackDown series on PlayStation 2, Yuke's has made some fantastic updates, as well as delivering a promising debut on Xbox 360. While it's undeniable that the age of the engine is showing (the flaws of the counter-reversal system in comparison to other wrestling titles really shows itself during online multiplayer), it's still a solid game to play.


What we've discovered since our Out of the Box feature is that while the overall differences between the single-player experiences aren't that distinct between PS2 and Xbox 360, we retract what we said about PS3 owners taking advantage of the system's backwards compatibility to play online. Unless you have a standard definition TV, SvR 07 looks awful on the PS3, since the hardware upscales backwards compatible games to 480p, and the current-gen game is not optimized for 480p on its native platform. Every jaggy is heightened dramatically when it's played on a PS3 with an HD setup. On the other hand, for PS2 owners with traditional TVs or for HD owners running component 480i who haven't upgraded to PS3 yet, it looks perfectly fine; if anything, it looks exactly like SvR 06 did last year.

On the Xbox 360, the game looks absolutely stellar, with solid lighting and textures. Since first seeing the game some seven months ago on Wrestlemania weekend, the game has undergone visual improvements by leaps and bounds. One of our biggest complaints was the concern that certain superstars would appear too shiny and action figure-like in the final product, especially based on the tech demos featuring John Cena and Kurt Angle.