Once I had my heroes, I needed a villain, someone dangerous enough to inspire fear, without being too much of a threat for Da Kine Bail Bonds to handle safely. I couldn't, after all, put these guys up against the Legion of Doom, because Hawk and Animal will get pepper-sprayed in the face and just keep on comin'. Instead, I went for the villain that appears most often in episodes of A&E's Dog the Bounty Hunter: The Hawaiian Methhead. You see, crystal meth is one of Hawaiian society's greatest social ills and the Dog is constantly rounding up methheads who've skipped out on bail. My Hawaiian meth addict wears a bright orange Hawaiian shirt with what I believe are palm trees on it, as well as some not-so-stylish jean shorts and a pair of flip-flops. Perfect. I found it easy to find new parts, preview them, and slap them on with few to no noticeable load times. Loading has been a cumbersome issue with SmackDown! games in the past, and so far the creator menus were painless to navigate. You can even choose your character-select screen pose, giving me a great finger point for Duane, and a sassy stance for Beth.
Now that I had my actors, it was time to begin setting the stage. It would start with a scene from Da Kine Bail Bonds' front office, which I replicated using the Couch animation and the Office interior. Staging scenes is relatively simple, if very limiting. You select the animation for your actors to play out, which limits the locations that you can choose from. You can't, for instance, have a car narrowly miss running over one of your superstars in the middle of the ring: Instead, you'd set that scene in the parking lot location. I had Beth give the Dog his latest mission, which she relayed while reclining on the couch. While it wasn't necessarily very realistic, I thought it looked funny, considering how her arms would clip through her chest as she gesticulated during the scene. Clipping and bad hair, it's always clipping and bad hair with this series, no matter how much it improves year over year.
Here's Dog, cleaning up the WWE.
The gist of this intro sequence was that Hawaiian methheads were causing trouble for Vince McMahon, and he's asked for The Dog to clean up SmackDown! Not a bad premise, right? Considering Vince's stance on substance abuse, this fits right into his character. All I would need was for a couple wrestlers to get caught smoking Ice for it to feel like it was ripped from real-life headlines.
Scene two is what I thought of as the investigation stage, where Duane does some footwork to get information on the location of his bounty. I needed a believable criminal element, so I went for the scummiest looking dude on the SmackDown roster. This lead me to Mike Knox, who has a full, rather awesome beard. While I'm rather beardy myself, so I feel some remorse at ridiculing my brother in facial hirsuteness, if it wasn't for his beefy build you'd be convinced this Knox guy was sleeping under newspapers at a bus stop at night. An "aloha, brah" here, a warning about the dangers of meth there, and we were on the right track, with Dog finding that our Methhead was last seen backstage at SmackDown. Back-and-forth conversations are a cinch to enter, though I had to rework some of my lines of dialogue to work around a certain limitation of the cut-scene text boxes: no word wrap. You can easily leave a character or two dangling off the end of the first line, making your second line look pretty bad. Surely this was an oversight?
Here is where I added a scene that took place from the perspective of my villainous heel, the Hawaiian Methhead. He was looking for the briefcase full of Ice that he had dropped thanks to his drug-addled confusion. To create this scene I used "Found," one of the canned animation sequences where a wrestler finds a mysterious briefcase backstage, picks it up, and takes off running. Wanting to get this sequence into the ring, I went ahead and manufactured as good an excuse for our heel to make his way to the ring as any:
Methhead: "Dog the Bounty Hunter is after me, maybe I can go hide in the ring?"
Hey, he's a drug addict. Mental clarity and proper judgment aren't supposed to be his strong points.
This leads to the final cut-scene in my stirring tale, and the showdown between Duane "The Dog" Chapman and our befuddled Methhead. Duane offered our Methhead a chance at redemption, giving him the opportunity to turn himself in and go willingly. He declined, which works perfectly for our needs, leading up to a match between The Dog and Methhead. Play through this sequence, and you'll even see Youngblood run in to assist from backstage as backup.
I was limited to five "scenes" between our characters, as during any given show you're only allowed ten appearances by created characters. With two per scene, you have a very restrictive hard limit as to what you can do. If you had dreams of creating a fantasy wrestling league with its own complex storylines and plenty of promos, you're in for some disappointment. You'll probably have to mix in real wrestlers with your own creations to pad the content.
I also spent some time creating the GameSpy logo with the in-game paint tool, so that one day I can bring the masked GameSpy guy into the ring. It's a very basic MS Paint-styled tool, with the ability to easily undo and redo, variable cursor speed, and easy to use color pickers and zoom functionality. It wasn't hard at all to make a somewhat accurate version of our logo in about twenty minutes. A bona fide artist could probably whip something up much more quickly than that.
The beauty of Smackdown vs. Raw 2010's new community creation stuff is that it's a cinch to share your creations with the rest of the world. I uploaded my content, and other users could then download my characters and story, rate-them on a five star scale, or leave a comment. One ungrateful gamer left a three-star review for my Dog CAW, when it clearly deserved five. If you've already picked up a copy of the game, you can hop online and search for "gamespy" to find my created storyline, the GameSpy logo, and the Duane and Beth Chapman CAWs that I made while preparing for this article. (Note: We used the 360 version, so PS3 gamers won't be able to play with Dog. Sorry!) Check back soon for GameSpy's review of the game as well.
