I've had this game for about a year, but never tried the GM Mode. Started one up yesterday, and I've been having a blast once I figured out how all the formulas work. Anyone else play/have played this mode? I'm two months in, and I've finally taken the lead in viewers after being about a million viewers behind. My current rivalries are:

Cena - Jericho
Batista - Angle
Benoit - JBL

I just ended rivalries between RVD - Rey and Eugene - Edge, with RVD and Edge coming out the winners.

Benoit and Booker T are close to being main event level, and will probably toss them into fueds with Cena/Jericho/Angle/Batista once those rivalries end. For the mean time, Eugene and Booker are going to fued with the Bashams for the Tag Titles to try and work up their popularity a bit. I imagine I'm going to keep the US Title on Benoit until it's time to move him to the World Title scene, dropping the US to JBL most likely and starting a fued with Rey or Edge. For the meantime, I'll probably just throw some jobbers at Edge to buildup his popularity a little bit before officially getting into the US title scene.

Current Champs:
World Title - Jericho, after beating Cena, Angle, and Batista in a HIAC. I was surprised. He was the underdog there.
US Title - Benoit, after beating JBL, Edge, and Eugene in a Fatal Fourway. Recently beat JBL in a cage match title defense.
Cruiser - RVD just beat the previous champ (London), Rey, and Chavo in a ladder match.
Tag - The Bashams. Their contracts were dirt cheap, and it gives Booker and Eugene someone to beat up. The titles are there just to make the match seem a bit more important than it really is.

Jobbers:
Spike, Scotty 2 Hotty, Bashams, and probably Chavo now that his fued with London is done.

Managers:
Davari and Lita. Davari will soon enter the Cruiser division. Lita has a pinfall win over Spike (overbooked the main event and needed a filler match.)

RAW is probably going to pull ahead in ratings again, as they have a PPV this week, and most of this month will be spent building up new rivalries. I hope to have two big title matches the week before the PPV to try and pull more viewers.

If there is interest, I'll keep a bit of a diary on how the season goes. Feedback and ideas are welcome!

Also, I plan on trying to trade Davari and Lita to Raw for Shawn Michaels. Raw has the Women's division, so I figure Lita might be desired. Shawn is cruiser in this game ( I think), and that would allow me to bring up Rey and RVD to higher popularity. It would also free up space for two new wrestlers for a jobber tag team (I'm thinking Masters/Jindrack). I just don't know what Michaels contract will cost. I have close to $3 Million in contract renegotiations in a month or so.

I tried it for about one show. It all fell apart kind of quickly when I realised that, in order to get the results I wanted, I had to actually play. Now, that's fine in a singles match, but tag matches are such a bitch in this game (with the AI constantly jumping off the apron and causing the whole thing to break down) that I couldn't stomach doing that just to have a decent tag division.

Maybe if I just simulate every match and roll with the punches? Is that what you're doing?

If I want a match to go a certain way, I just control the team I want to lose, grab a chair, and DQ myself. I get just as many popularity points. Something like a hardcore match I have to play. I usually simulate the match if I'm sure of the outcome, or if I don't care who wins. Like my 4-way HIAC, I didn't care which guy won. I just hoped that Cena would lose so it would freshen up the title scene.

The first two months of my season, I've spent most of my time raising my 60-ish guys to the upper 70's/lower 80's. RAW was beating me cause they just kept their four big guys in one on one matches the whole time. Now that I have more upper mid card, all my matches are in the 3 star range, and my main event at about 3.5. RAW's main event still usually beats mine, but my undercard destroys theirs. In the long run, I'll end up with a better show rating. At least, I hope this theory holds out for another 10 months.

So is this basically like EWR built into the Smackdown game?

Yeah, but you can play the matches and only have the WWE wrestlers to use...I'll take EWR any day to be honest.

You can put your Created wrestlers in there too, but it'll take quite a while before they're popular enough to get ratings. On the upside, they're dirt cheap.

Hah, Spike wants to renegotiate his contract. Yes, I'm sure RAW is barking at your door. You, with your 0 popularity.

I don't remember but I think when I stopped playing for a while Spike was my World Champ.

To my understanding, SD 2007 has been a bit hit or miss.

Well, here are my thoughts after a couple of days playing it:

- The new control scheme is an interesting idea but pretty counter-intuitive. I gave up early on and switched to a control scheme (it's D, in the options) that's almost identical to the prior entiries in the Smackdown series. I can understand wanting to change it to analogue sticks or whatever, but why change stuff like making attack square instead of X? Anyway, it's fine now.

- Gameplay is largely unchanged, except now you hold L1 along with circle and direction (or flick the right analogue if you're using the default controls) to do a proper grapple. Without L1 you do a quick grapple that's hard to counter (arm drags, snap mares, stuff like that). That's good and No-Mercyish.

- Pre-match mini-game is gone. It's replaced by a short animation (like a cut scene) of the wrestler's squaring up and the referee bringing his hand down to start the bell.

- The new animations are great. The counters all look really smooth.

- Lots of interactive stuff to play around with outside the ring, etc. I haven't tried out the 'fight in the crowd' area yet. Plus there's these new grapples you activate by pressing R3 that let you walk around with your opponent in a suplex or chokeslam or whatever (subject to your relative weight classes and stamina) and you can even dump them out of the ring, which is pretty awesome.

- Create an entrance no longer has annoying load times, as it gets a rolling preview in the background. That's cool, but you can't have a 'full preview' because the music won't synch up properly when you select it (the preview just repeats in the background, but you have to hit square to preview the music, so unless you time it perfectly, you won't get it how it'll eventually occur in the real entrance). Also I struggled a bit with changing camera angles. On the other hand, you can have pyros fire off exactly when you want so I have, for instance, a massive explosion go off when Darkness pushes his arms down after doing the little Brock Lesnar dance I use for his entrance.

- CAW is mostly unchanged except that the interface and controls are slightly different so it was difficult for me to do it as smoothly as before. There's also only about one decent long haircut (*sighs*). However, there's a new thing where you can select from pre-set colours instead of fiddling about with the colour chart like before. This is good for Darkness, cos it's just black for everything...

- How come I can't select the martial arts or luchadore movesets for Darkness? It could be to do with his weight class, so I'll have to experiment more.

- Talking of weight class, super heavyweights now no-sell almost anything a light-heavyweight or lighter throw at them. They literally just shrug off attacks - I tried to clothesline Big Show and just bounced off!

- Back to movesets: you only get 4 slots for rear grapples now. Initially I was horrified, but then I rememberd how boring it was trying to put in variations of bulldogs, back suplexes and sleeper holds in the old 10 slots, since no one really does moves from here.

- Season is a lot of fun. I have it on easy mode so I can just concentrate on unlocking and beefing Darkness up and I won the belt within a couple of months (no 'Virgil Runnels amendment' to screw you out of it this time...) and there's been two storylines since I won it that depend on me being the champ, so I assume there's a fair amount of variety (since there'd have to be alternatives to those if I'd lost the title matches). For some reason though, my CAW doesn't come out with the belt and it magically appears when he gets to his 'ring' animation. It may be something to do with the entrance moves I chose - again, I have to experiment with this some more.

- The Legends are cool. All three faces of Foley are in it, which is a nice touch, as well as the Hart Foundation and Dusty Rhodes. You get Eddie Guerrero without having to unlock him, which was nice.

- The commentary uses most of the same lines from last year. There's a couple of new things, but it was all fairly familiar. I haven't encountered any of the reported problems with it yet.

- The soundtrack is a lot better, in my opinon. Last year's was kind of...meh...but there's actually a couple of songs on this one that I enjoy listening to.

- There's all sorts of talk about the graphics but, honestly, I didn't notice the vast improvement that a lot of reviews seem to mention. It's better, sure, but it wasn't like 'wow!' like the step up between, say, JBI and SYM was.


In conclusion: if you liked '06, this is mostly more of the same with a few tweaks here and there. If you're after the seminal wrestling game experince....well, if you didn't have it last year then you aren't going to have it here either. I'd certainly say it's better overall and, if you have the spare cash, go pick it up. But if you hate the Smackdown series, or hated '06 specifically, then this one isn't going to improve your opinion.

I like it a lot though.

EDIT: One thing - the load times are a real bitch. I think it's pretty clear that this game is really stretching the PS2's hardware (unsurprising, as it was concieved for next-gen consoles but got shunted from the PS3 when the console got delayed). I doubt this is a problem on the X-Box 360 version, but for the PS2...make sure you have a book, because it's a good 30 - 40 seconds in places.