Rasslin' Video Games

[Rika]

I deleted one belt in VPW2. What i really want to do is two world belts, one set of tags and a shoot style belt.

[Cliff Hanger]

Apparently the key to the "no running, no specials" tower in World Tour is to get the enemy DQ'd by repeatedly whipping the ref into the corner, then whipping the opponent into the ref.

[blitzkrieg]

I think World Tour is an overall upgrade for MyFaction but Dallas is a bit annoying with needing three male Legends cards and two female Legends cards to complete. On the male side there are at least a good amount of 13k male cards to buy but on the female side the only cheap option is Molly. I'll take it as a sign that I probably should explore more of the game.

[Cliff Hanger]

Finally spent more than ten minutes on the Island. It took about 90 min to unlock some sweet mecha-samurai gear that I will never use on a character but nonetheless coveted when I saw the locked parts in MyRise creation. And I got my Nikki Cross and finished Orlando, which also put me over the top to collect that red Roxy at 100 cards.

[blitzkrieg]

I never want to do a hud-less 6 man ladder match again, I can safely classify my victory in that one as complete luck.

[Cliff Hanger]

Underground matches are actually really fucking cool and I need to add belts for them to my Universe.

[Casey]

1 hour ago, Cliff Hanger said:

Underground matches are actually really fucking cool and I need to add belts for them to my Universe.

This reminds me, another QOL improvement they could do for Universe mode is make it so you can have custom rulesets for your shows. The one thing that takes me out of making an ECW every year is that I would have to manually edit every single match to make them no DQ/no countouts.

[Cliff Hanger]

That is my new #2 wanted QOL after "for the love of God let me buy a deluxe edition without pre-unlocking the whole fucking store, just please let me make myself earn the right to play as Molly Holly if I want to"

Edited March 19, 2025 by Cliff Hanger
Turned a comma to a dash

[Casey]

14 minutes ago, Cliff Hanger said:

That is my new #2 wanted QOL after "for the love of God let me buy a deluxe edition without pre-unlocking the whole fucking store, just please let me make myself earn the right to play as Molly Holly if I want to"

Ooooh yeah, I hate that too. It makes the currency you unlock absolutely fucking useless.

If you're going to unlock everything in that store when I pre-order, then it should extend to every mode in the game (besides Island/MyFaction since that's their microtransaction hell).

[Cliff Hanger]

I finished My Rise and started over to get more unlocks. A few points with spoilers tagged:

 

1) if you check the "story progression" arm of the Hub menu, you can pick some of your options to optimize. To get everything, it'll cost a minimum of 4 runs, if you never duplicate choices. I count probably 3-4 more points where you won't get a different set of goodies but will get different cutscenes. You will need to do 2 with the same pair of characters (you can change their origin and prior relationship, but not their class) to get Cody and Rhea as ally options, but beyond that you can export and delete as you see fit.

2) for your first run, picking Seth and Becky gives you the most Stuff as your allies. All the women options give you at least something, but Drew and Jey do not on the men's side. 

3) the game doesn't explain "live events" in Rise til you pick them, so here's how it is. Between story segments, talk to Troy and he'll throw randomly generated matches at you. You get chargen points as you win, and the match rating gets added to total stars. Most of the star rewards are old 2k story mode chars, but the top 3 rewards are "what if joining The Judgment Day made R-Truth a badsss again?", an alternate look and longer entrance for Demon Finn, and a "living diamond" skin for DDP. That last one takes 280 total stars, and i am unlikely ever to see it.

4) at launch, one reward that was meant to be super easy was not getting given out. The Japan Dome arena will unlock post-1.05 patch if either of your characters gets the "rival promotion" origin. None of the other origins has any special unlocks.

In other modes, my big Universe is coming along nicely while Roxy is floundering a bit in Superstar Mode, having lost the title to Jaida on an open challenge. (It's weird that they have the CW-era NXT Arena, and belts that debuted after that arena, but the NXT men's and women's titles are the ones with gold plates with an X that would make Charles Xavier envious) and I FUCKING HATE the blind-draw Wargames tower. 

[Chaos]

On 3/18/2025 at 10:25 PM, Cliff Hanger said:

That is my new #2 wanted QOL after "for the love of God let me buy a deluxe edition without pre-unlocking the whole fucking store, just please let me make myself earn the right to play as Molly Holly if I want to"

The DLC option to unlock everything used to be something you had to prompt the game to do for you. I believe it was labeled "accelerator" a few years ago. 

[odessasteps]

They had a stream  on UUDD the other day. Woods playing with Nia was a monster. 

[Cliff Hanger]

If they still did the little interstitial videos from the early days of The Network, I would absolutely watch as many 5-minute machinima eps about

Spoiler

R-Truth and his Timebulance

as they cared to give me. 

[odessasteps]

Truth was on fire on that UUDD stream from Vegas. 

[Rika]

WWE 2K14 was good. I should spend more time with it. The only flaw probably is the arcade style selling.

[Cliff Hanger]

2k tweeted an in-game pic of Oba in the current NXT belt, so presumably they will be fixing that weird oversight very soon.  Hopefully they will also fix the women's secondary titles, all 3 of which are the same absolute size as the men's and look silly as a result. We know there'll be MyFaction content on Friday and Tuesday, but not how much (at least one new card block on Fri, presumably 4 new Faction War cards in the FW Shop and an easy "Smash and Stash" fight for points and cards Tue, no way of knowing what else if anything) but that's all server side (which is why the "delete your save if you want Rise or Island to work" issue was an annoyance rather than a fiasco.)

[Casey]

I think my biggest gripe with MyFaction this year is they changed Faction Wars and the prices (or how much of that mode's currency) you get during a run and for completing a run. Last year, I did runs quite a few times and had enough money to buy several ruby cards. This year, I've done like 4 or 5 runs and have nowhere near enough to even buy one card. Which, in turn, makes World Tour difficult - which isn't even mentioning the fact that some tours require wrestlers from certain card packs, and you have no guarantee of pulling one, and you have to majorly grind MF as a whole to earn currency to buy a pack (unless you swipe your card, but fuck that).

Also, FUUUUUUCK Bloodline Rules. That shit is nigh impossible to do without using run-ins on the player end, and you can't use any if you want the trophy for beating Roman Reigns in that match. It's a fun clusterfuck if you aren't trying for that trophy, but otherwise... yikes. I got the Mami's Revenge trophy this morning (beating all members of the Judgment Day with Rhea). It feels like Legend difficulty is easier this year, but also 5 star matches are harder to get (which is good). But, again, in turn, makes the Live Event mini-mode in MyRise all the more difficult - which would be fine, except the rewards for it are pretty lackluster.

I know it's only been a few weeks since it's been out but I feel like the CC community is lacking this year, too. Probably because they decided to split it up amongst generations, and PC is on the last gen version. Also, ICONIC2K isn't creating this year I believe, so that's one good creator down.

[Cliff Hanger]

If anyone has recommendations for good Wren, Myles and Tavion available on PS5, please share; I'd like to fill out my NQCC. Same for Bronco and Lucien. I have previously never bothered to look for creations to download, but for some reason I'm deeply annoyed this year.

 

Deleted my Superstar Mode playthrough with Roxanne Perez because I think I want to do something incredibly stupid--I haven't picked a character, but after 2 years of losing titles because I wanted to win with a super finish or want to raise my match rating, I kind of want to do a run where I never get a win with less than 4 stars. Might use her for that, might use another right-around-80 char whose isn't a champ, but it's an idea I've kicked around.

[Brandon Bones]

My semi review of 2k25.  
 

Of course my criteria is much different than most because I’ll hardly play the game AT ALL.  For me getting a decent simulator is the metric.  2k24 isn’t it.

Of the bunch, 2k19 has been the best of the bunch since restarting my league a few years ago.  Good AI producing quality matches (though that doesn’t necessarily mean epic 5stars each time out).  Plus robust creation options both in characters and match making, and entrances.  The appropriateness of how it plays out is soooooo much better.

2k22 was really good in producing good matches but creations stuff was very limited.  At the time, stability was a bit more of a gifted blessing considering what a clusterfluck 2k20 was.  Thankfully I dodged that forcing me to crutch on 19 that much longer.

25 does have a very expansive creator suite and so far the matches have been surprisingly great.

Imagine if you will and match going back and forth and seems to be building toward something only for a three count after a simple kick to the leg.  Yeah.  No. That’s 2k18 and 24 for you.

So between the AI being much more intuitive and my experiences with these games schooling me on adjusting those sliders both in characters and in the options menu.  This has me thinking 2k25 might be the most bang for my buck.  

A few headaches remain.  Titantron video creator is still very unstable.  They changed the set up for sims in contrast to how it’s been historically.  Which had me growling at the sky.  Community Creations is a bit different with only Most Downloaded and Most Upvoted as search categories and it’s very annoying.  Arranging it under new uploads kept me up to date on newer things to find.  I’m betting this is probably over the ridiculous amount of porn that’s you can find in the images.  

Yeah.  That’s what my next arena needs.  People covered in jizz.

2k24s one saving grace was the introduction of the manual camera.  Love it.  Adding it to entrances doesn’t do much for me since entrances are back to being custom again.  But I’ll mess with it eventually.

Fuck The Island.

 

 

[Casey]

I've never simmed AI versus AI matches, but I can also say I've definitely never had a match on Legend difficulty, me versus the CPU, end from a leg kick or something. More often than not, they're kicking out of 3 finishers like it's PWG on a Friday night.

[Cliff Hanger]

Myfaction April 1 update:

New monthly 'smash and stash' event with 4 booster packs, 3 point rewards and 3 side plate packs (green/blue/red)

New blue cards on the Faction War store for 3200, a 20% discount from normal price (Gigi Dolin, Jacy Jayne, Tommaso Ciampa and Damian Priest( with no new boss squads

Blue tier cards in the Token Market for 50 each (i am not writing down all 10 names but I'm most interested in that Dempsey)

 

They made me agree to the ToS and privacy policy again and input my DOB. I am nearly 50 and I do not appreciate having to scroll back to the 70s, just let me pick "19" or "20" and set the last two digits individually damn you.

[Ramo2653]

On 3/29/2025 at 7:12 PM, Cliff Hanger said:

If anyone has recommendations for good Wren, Myles and Tavion available on PS5, please share; I'd like to fill out my NQCC. Same for Bronco and Lucien. I have previously never bothered to look for creations to download, but for some reason I'm deeply annoyed this year.

 

Deleted my Superstar Mode playthrough with Roxanne Perez because I think I want to do something incredibly stupid--I haven't picked a character, but after 2 years of losing titles because I wanted to win with a super finish or want to raise my match rating, I kind of want to do a run where I never get a win with less than 4 stars. Might use her for that, might use another right-around-80 char whose isn't a champ, but it's an idea I've kicked around.

Regarding getting 5 start matches, I figured this out from playing the MyRise to get stars to unlock those extra characters and cards:

Dives/top rope moves are easy ways to get that meter going up but only to a point

The environmental attacks on the outside do almost nothing

Weapon attacks are big

Reversals  and a reversal fest will fill up the meter quickly with reversals of signatures and finishers being huge

Hitting signatures and finishers are huge

So a spotty, reversal fest with finisher spam is the way to get those 5 star ratings. And I think it would be hilarious if the Japan dome arena had the option for 7 stars.

[odessasteps]

So, just like real life? 

[Cliff Hanger]

Finished my second Rise run; I did Rhea and Cody as my allies (Timebulance!) and after planning to choose the Mutiny finale the whole time, I picked the former 2k Heroes just to see what the "official" versions of those characters are. They're pretty meh. It's like the opposite of last year's Slade side-story; that was about Slade (the prior year's tag-partner-turned-big-bad) being completely baffled that after their brutal final showdown at Mania, both he and his nemesis just suddenly did not matter and had ceased to even get onto Main Event. This time, you go visit the prior stories' heroes at the 2k mocap studio, and it's all jokes about the exact same thing except they all know they're in a video game and make jokes about quests and how your character will understand after they win their final victory. 

 

I like the Slade idea much more.

[Cliff Hanger]

The patch is out with the SNME arena, the 2024 NXT titles, which will be auto-assigned to whoever has the prior ones (renamed NXT Champion 22-24 and NXT Women's Champion 22-24), makes a bunch of vaguely described bug fixes, and makes balance tweaks both to the roster and MyGM (and adds the women's secondary brand titles to Raw, Smackdown, and NXT in that mode.)