I feel that in the end of something’s lifecycle people tend to get a bit nostalgic for it, even if the history behind it was embarrassing, poor and downright awful. THQ had a lot of hit titles and a lot of fun games over the years, but there was always this overarching sense that they really didn’t care as much as they let on. I’ve been playing games with the THQ tag on the box for as long as THQ has been publishing games and something has always just felt a little off. I think that there are no better examples of things just being off than two of their more recent sports/entertainment titles in UFC Undisputed 3 and WWE ‘13.
Both of these games appeal to me as a gamer and as a fan of both brands (to varying degrees). WWE games have been around for a long time now and have a storied past. Some of the titles on the N64 are still some of the most revered wrestling games — if not some of the most revered games on that platform — ever. That is really saying something and the fact is, since the death of the N64 we’ve seen THQ try to convince the world that they are trying to produce a game that lives up to the standards that we saw over a decade ago on a long-dead system. WWE ‘13 is a fine game in its own right, but still feels a lot like the Smackdown games did all of those years ago, with only some tweaks made every year to keep them feeling moderately fresh.
The UFC licensed games have seen a similar arc, although THQ only had the license for three cycles before they were forced to sell off the license to EA and the team that made the cult favorite EA MMA. The THQ UFC games felt a bit robotic at times and were always fun for what they were, but seemed to follow in the path of what the WWE games did (which makes sense due to Yukes being involved in both). The little updates each year, the fresh coat of paint, the promises of overhauling things only for it to feel minor.
Recently my group of friends have decided to go back to these games to play them online against each other as there is always some fun to be had in it. What ensued was a series of obnoxious headaches and a lot of things having to be downloaded to make sure that everyone was compatible with each other. Sure, some of the early DLC was on-disc DLC, but having to slog through and download “compatibility packs” galore grew tiring very quickly, then came the fact that after multiple resets there would still be one person that for some reason couldn’t connect due to “different version errors.” This, on top of giant save files on certain platforms for no reason (looking at you, PS3) and continual server issues just made these games a real chore to even bother playing online.
What is sad is, while we could blame THQ’s problems for this, a lot of these issues are ones that we’ve seen before and are nothing new. I think that THQ has been given a fair enough shake and that it might be time to let someone else show them how its done.
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