Would a Wrestling-Promoter Oriented Game Work?

[closet_fan]

With all the hype surrounding the Madden franchise, with it's ability to build a football franchise from the ground up. And also NFL Head Coach, a video game based on coaching a team up the rankings, I ask you this:

Would a video game with the scenario of you taking over a company and building it from the ground up in terms of signing wrestlers, throwing and promoting shows actually work on one of the big-named systems?

I know there are a couple apps based on this premise that I have seen, but never tried.

Would this be something, as a diehard fan, that would interest you? You can be in charge of everything from promoting, picking the venues, setting the prices for seat, concessions and signing the wrestlers. Plus a lot more.

The ideas above are rather broad strokes in terms of ideas. I am sure you can easily put a lot more into it that would make it interesting for the gamers.

But the idea that you could run a federation like Vince McMahon would be pretty cool.

 

[Spunky]

EWR 4.0

Search it and you get what you seek. it's really a cool little game. the standard game starts in 2003, but you can get patches/pictures/databases that allow you to promote in senarios from the past and present. I used to play it a lot.

 

[Mike1411]

It would work definitely, but as you said only really for diehard fans.

I think it would be such a niche market they would be aiming at that no big name game developers would have a go.

There are some pretty decent ones online you can find anyway.

 

[Workrate]

Total Extreme Wrestling is another option.

Personally, I tend to like simulation style games more than action games anyway; wrestling included. The thing with every sports and wrestling game I've ever played is, after I've got a couple games or matches under my belt, it becomes impossible to lose no matter the difficulty. Simulations are fun because they focus on strategy, where regardless of whether you're winning or losing, there's always something to energize with.

 

[Kashagi]

EWR or TEW are both fantastic, I've never felt the need for anything else in terms of Wrestling sims. These games cover almost everything.

Both are free (well... TEW 2005 is free), every fan should check both out!

 

[Richard Blonoff]

There are a lot of them out there and personally I think they are pretty fun. There isn't really a perfect one, but each has their pros and cons.

People have mentioned EWR, its free but it isn't very in depth. Not much in the graphics department either.

TEW is almost too in depth at times. '05 is free, '2013 is coming out later this year. Go to Greydog Software to check them out.

Promotion Wars is another that is pretty simple.

I would like one where similar to the TEW series, those are the best in my opinion. I would add a play-by-play though, as all they list is the winner and method of finish.

 

[Ty Burna]

EWR is probably my preferred choice when it comes to the wrestling promotion sim games. It's not overly complicated yet highly has many options for customizing it how you like.

TEW is ridiculous. Just to book a simple storyline takes me forever and a day to setup, which I'll be honest is pretty cool that you can go that in depth with the booking but my god does it take forever. Even just setting up one show takes forever. With EWR at least I can jump in and start booking a show from the get go. Maybe I'm overthinking TEW, I'll have to give it another chance one of these days and see how it goes. I know in EWR I had ROH up to a national level in about four years (game time) and nearly overtaking TNA before I lost my save file.

There was one other program from way back in the day called Zeus Pro. While it wasn't persay a simulation, it was great for running efeds back in the day. You could add wrestlers into a fed and modify their stats as well as what moves they use, including creating custom maneuvers as well. You could then book a show matches wise and have the match auto created for you. I believe the software was discontinued a long time ago but I do remember spending quite a bit of time modifying in the program and knew a number of Efeds that relied on that software for writing their matches. They were cookie cutter for the most part but at least you could say you had a match ready to go.

One other one that I can recall is TNM7. I did not care for it at all, the GUI was ancient and horrid, and even a simple edit could end up breaking the client all together. Not to mention it was extremely expensive for some reason and any decent plugins you would end up getting charged for. I know it had some pretty interesting features, but the price they wanted for it was far too much. The base game is around $30 but by the time you add in the nearly required plugin packs you were getting up to around $80 total.

I think along with TEW I'll give TNM7 another try (provided I can find a free version) and post up a more updated take on both.

 

[Richard Blonoff]

Ty if I can find it again I'll send it your way, but there was a 90 day full demo of TNM7 out there, fully customizable and everything. I remember I went through the trouble of setting up a virtual machine that ran XP just to play it. It really seemed like there was a lot of potential in the game, I could even overlook the visually unappealing UI, it was just too pricey and took too much to actually set up a game.

I know what you mean with TEW taking a lot of time though. It seems like anytime I was in charge of a cult sized fed or higher, I would sit down to play, book a show, advance a week in game time, book a second show, and a couple hours of real time passed.

I did manage to take a custom fed in a real world mod of the game and overtake TNA as the #2 promotion. Nearly ruined my relationship I sunk so much time into that one lol

 

[all-about-george]

It could do, but do you not feel it would be pretty boring? Unless they done something like fifa for example where you could play the matches aswell as do the behind the scenes stuff aswell, i know Mdickies has a promotor game they made years ago, and it wasnt very stimulating, i guess its how its approached imo

 

[Slash-LN]

I'm also someone who played EWR and plays TEW 05. I actually just booked a show before I came online.

I really like the booking aspect of games like that and like to try to build wrestlers up by how I book them. You can find a lot of mods from different years. I'm playing one from 1995 as WWF right now. People put a lot of time and effort into making mods and there is a site where you can get real world stat updates every month so you don't have to do it yourself.

I wish WWE games were this in depth only allow you to watch everything play out. I don't know if it would be possible though.

If you don't want to spend hours on TEW then maybe you want to change your promotion style. Booking sports entertainment takes a long time but booking pure or hybrid shows really don't take long because they are based heavily on the wrestling side of things so match time takes up a lot of the card.

 

[Piss Bucket]

I used to love EWR 4.2, made some great matches and feuds, scored better TV ratings than the real WWE have had since the Attitude Era.