EWR

I started watching wrestling again recently and I've had a bit of an itch to play this game, this is an old game, basically it's that football management game but it's managing a wrestling company. It's different to the football thing in that you aren't exactly trying to win matches and get to the top of a league, what you are trying to do is handle wrestlers and their personalities, keep them in your show with contract deals, match their in ring skills with other wrestlers to put on good matches, create storylines etc, deal with television networks to host your shows and ultimately get good ratings so that your show doesn't get cancelled.

EWR is completely free and it was made by one guy, it's a text based game so there is nothing in the way of graphics. It's a bit of a cult game and people keep the rosters up to date with what is going on in the real world.

I have a slight proplem playing this game now in that all the wrestlers I know are retired or non-wrestlers, I know a hand full of guys and they aren't all in the same company which means I need to wait for their contracts to run out and try to buy them. Also the roster of the company I picked is full of people I either don't like or don't know, so I'm trying to fire as many of them as I can, problem is some of them are friends with the guys I want to keep and so firing them will cause problems with their friends. I've also cancelled a lot of the shows as there were 4 a week, and remembering what I was doing on each show would be difficult at this stage. I also want to fire people because it's easier to do bookings with a smaller roster and when you actually know who the people are...

The guy that made EWR was hired by a company to make more of this type of game, I bought one and actually I liked EWR more because there were too many options in the new game, also because TEW (The games he makes for Grey Hound Software) isn't free they can't use offical wrestlers so the roster you start with is made up, which isn't a problem since fans make the real rosters and shows and it's just a matter of replacing the old with the new.

If I really get into EWR again I might buy TEW 2010 it's about £20 or $34, I never trust conversions to work properly. A stupid thing with Grey Hound Software is that they don't make the older games cheaper. Oh I just looked at the 2005 version of TEW and they have made that free, I think the 2005 game must have been the one I owned. Well thats pretty cool.

Ok... A bit bored of TEW 2005 already. It's really confusing, I remember there being a lot more stuff you could do in TEW 2005, I thought I might have been confusing it with later releases but they seem to be the same. I don't know if they changed it because people didn't like the things that were in the game, I'm sure I read something that hinted at that.

The thing with this game is you really need to know what you want to do before hand, it's not the kind of game that you can play as things come up, you need to think about where you are going with things, when you are going to do them and who is best suited to it. You play the long game, not just going off the cuff. And you need to have some idea what you want to do with all of your wrestlers and other staff.

I'm still tempted to buy the newest version despite everything. I think the thing that I dislike about these TEW games over EWR is that there's no play by play at the end of the match, you just hear how it ended and if wrestlers did well or badly. I like to read what happened through the match when it's a big match that I've been building up to. I've installed the demo of the 2010 game, I don't think there's much thats different really but I'll see if there is a play by play.

Yeah nothing much is really added in 2010, the menu's a just a bit more streamlined, and for some reason it seems to use less wrestling language for example workers are called characters in the 2010 game, if thats trying to appeal to non-wrestling fans it's really stupid.

There are too many match variations in the menu of the game, which I suppose is good but it's a pain in the arse to navigate through, the 2010 game reduces the problem by making it easier to find the matches you want though. I might try deleting some of the matches and angles in the game since I'll never use them and add in something's I might use.

Ahhhhhhh that explains it, I just found out that there was a 2004 version of TEW, it's no longer on sale, thats the version of the game that I owned. It's not even freeware, if you don't have your e-licence you can no longer play it, I'm not even sure if you could play it any more anyway. The support seems to have dropped from the game completely.