“One of the cool features about this game is the story mode, which covers my career as it went down in WWE. On stage, Stone Cold talked about how proud he was to be the cover of the game, and how cool it was to see some of his own storylines in videogame form. There are other cool elements of the game, too, such as the opportunity to play as the Terminator (if you pre-order the game), an option that Dean Ambrose was especially excited about (“Anyone in the WWE vs a cyborg sent through time made of steel, who are you going to pick? I feel like the Terminator might be the best player in the game.”) and the career mode that highlights the great Stone Cold Steve Austin. We all have that friend who frustratingly uses a million reversals a game while we yell at the TV, so this is an intriguing change. Oh, right-there are now reversal stocks, meaning you can only do a limited amount of reversals at a time before you have to wait for them to recharge. In 2K16, there are two types of reversals: Minor Reversals (they show up as green), which use a single reversal stock, and Major (red), which use two reversal stocks. One exciting new difference involves reversals. Working Holds are as simple as holding X while your opponent is seated submissions are X while rotating the right analog stick. The game is great for someone like me whose usual approach to figuring out fighting games is to mash all the buttons until something happens. But I can say that 2K16 is immense fun, and the gameplay hasn’t changed much. We did learn that it will feature a lot more WWE talent, including more divas and, most excitedly, some NXT talent (Finn Balor and Kevin Owens were both featured in the demo version). (As for 2K16, Barrett doesn’t play as himself because “I’m not very good, and I don’t like to lose.”) Dean Ambrose, however, stuck to lots of arcade games (“ Double Dragon, Street Fighter II, the Ninja Turtle game”) while Sheamus’ preferred consoles were Sega Genesis (which, in his thick Irish accent, he referred to as the “Sega Mega Drive”) and Nintendo 64, especially because of N64’s Wrestlemania 2000 where he would regularly play as Stone Cold.ĭuring the Kickoff event, there wasn’t much talk from the stage about the intricacies of the gameplay or the differences between this and 2K15, preferring instead to have the game speak for itself when we demoed it on the multiple televisions set up in the back of the room. Wade Barrett “used to love all the old WWE games, WCW games, FIFA soccer, Sonic the Hedgehog, Mario, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat.” (I got visibly excited when I learned we both always played as Sub-Zero.) He enthused about the vintage WWE games, and how he loved mastering all of the characters-but, unsurprisingly, he always preferred to play as British Bulldog. Many of the other Superstars had similar childhood memories of playing videogames. To see this all celebrated in such a big, fancy fashion was simultaneously exciting and completely bizarre.
It was always the underdog of sports-“sports”-in that baseball and football fans could talk freely wrestling fans could only within our little circle, for fear of being made fun of. It was a strange juxtaposition between Stone Cold growling his famous “And that’s the bottom line…” into the mic just mere seconds before the club’s sound system started blaring Ke$ha’s “Die Young.” WWE, something that I have embarrassingly obsessed over since I was about 10-years-old, was always the outsider sport, a secret shared between select friends who would excitedly talk in hushed tones about last night’s Raw in the school cafeteria, but never anywhere louder. There isn’t any real way to prepare for spending a night with various WWE Superstars-Seth Rollins, the Bella Twins, Stone Cold Steve Austin (!!)-in a giant club, Capitale, that used to be a bank. And after demoing the game, I might even agree.Īside from the game itself, there was so much more to take in during the event. Wrestlers are known for their hyperbolic statements-look no further than your average promo on Monday Night Raw-but when Stone Cold Steve Austin proclaimed, at Thursday night’s WWE’s SummerSlam Kickoff Event for WWE 2K16, that the game was “the biggest, baddest, coolest videogame that’s ever been put together,” I still believed him.