WELCOME TO THE MAIN EVENT! I had the opportunity to sit down with the new PS3 game WWE Legends of Wrestlemainia. I don’t know about all of you but there’s always been a fondness in my heart for wrestling games ever since they came out with WWF Steel Cage, which I thought was loads of fun for the NES. After playing games for the Genesis, PSX, Xbox, PS2 we fast forward ourselves to THQ’s newest version WWE Legends of Wrestlemainia.

As soon as it was popped in, running through the list of selectable characters seemed like going back into my childhood. There was The Big Boss Man, old school Hulk Hogan, Hawk and Animal from Legion of Doom, Sargent Slaughter, the Iron Sheik, Bam Bam Bigalo, Jake the Snake, and the list goes on giving us classic after classic.

At first the controls were nice and simple, not simple in little yellow school bus simple, but something you could easily pick up. Usually, I’ve found that older wrestling games require so many button combinations that you would need three hands, each with six fingers to pull them off.  They also usually  required you to play for hours on end to get the timing down. This really was a negative feature if you decided to play against someone who hadn’t played before.

The character intros for each character are as long as they used to be on TV, which is great when you want to relive the wrestling greats of old and their treks down the ramp to the squared circle playing to the fans cheering their name.

One huge thing I felt was a huge improvement over wrestling games of the past was the new combo system. When pulling off a move a person can do a series of them in a row but the catch is you have to hit the right button quick enough, if not the other player has the chance to steal it from you and create their own combo, by reversing it and making it all be on you.

Now the real downer of playing this game is that after you start playing  you realize that the computer is not very smart. Just like the games of yesteryear, you play against a computer who can easily be tricked into reacting the same over and over again. This really becomes tiring quickly, and in the end your mindlessly playing the game.

Ever since THQ started putting  create a character mode in their games, each new entry in the WWE franchise  finds this feature a little more degrading each time. Each game entry seems to have fewer options, clothing, hair styles, and accessories; even the ability to make a female character has been taken out over the past couple of games. One thing that really cheeses me off while I’m trying to create a character is not being able to use my own music. Having a full featured create-a-wrestler mode in a few games and then taking  it out, is sort of  like if a hot girl is teasing’,  she dresses up in a skimpy outfit, talks dirty to you and when you finally think your gonna get some action you turn around and realize that your in a middle of a sausage party where the music they play is from the mid eighties and its not any good.

One thing that they also seem to be lacking this time around are other unlockable characters, LIKE WHAT THE FIZ STICKS!!! Give me a choice, give me some fun ones, don’t give me the choice to select green hair from the wrestler Doink only to not have him in the game.

But it really comes down to this, although its nice to have easier controls and great looking character models, the real downer that needs fixing  in this and every other wrestling game is the AI of the computer. Give me some king of challenge.

You’re looking at a game I rate at 5.5 out of 10, worth a rental but I wouldn’t waste my money here, trust me you’ll get bored in about two days.