When you think about it, a wrestling game represents something of a unique proposition for a developer. For the most part, it's a sports sim: the performers can be motion captured and the action digitally recreated just as you would with a football or basketball game.
But professional wrestling isn't a sport. Those punches aren't connecting, the barbed wire has caps on and, let's face it, the People's Elbow really doesn't look like it would hurt that much. Unlike, say, FIFA, a WWE game shouldn't strive to be a true representation of its source material. Enjoying wrestling involves a leap of faith, and, more than anything, it's this gap between the real and the imagined which makes creating a compelling wrestling game so difficult.
It's fair to say then that, in recent years, the WWE2K series has failed to rise to this challenge. The joint efforts of developers Yuke's and Visual Concepts have been universally poorly received and, somewhat tragically, the genre has been sidelined. Whereas once every console owner would have a Smackdown! or WCW vs NWO in their collection, the titles seem to be released now strictly for members of the IWC.
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