Now Playing: Smackdown vs. Raw 2010

As anyone who has ever seen the internet, ever, can attest, there are positives and negatives to letting people create and upload their own content.

On the plus side, there's stuff. A lot of stuff, and all right there. Some of it's even really good. On the downside, the bulk of it is so bad you feel dumber for having seen it.

That's the case with THQ's new WWE game, which allows players to create wrestlers or storylines and offer them up to be downloaded by others. It's a terrific idea, one of those things where you wonder how it could have possibly taken this long for someone to do it. Now you have an endless supply of soap opera-style, user-created storylines and created wrestlers based on everyone you can possibly imagine. No longer will you have to dream about Britney Spears vs. President Bush in a steel cage match. You can live the dream.

Like I said, it's a great idea. The reality of it? Less great.

There are thousands and thousands of user creations, and as you'd expect most of them are bad - the kind of bad that makes you sad about the future of the human race. There's a search mechanic which allows you to filter by keyword and rating, but this ain't Google. Do a search and you might find a created wrestler that was uploaded three months ago and has one 4-star rating (by the person who created it) ranked higher than one that was posted six hours ago and has 17 4-star ratings. The search engine sees no difference between the two.

What's more frustrating is the fact that the menu

...

stops to load

...

every time you hit

...

any button at all.


Scroll down a five-item list and you have to wait for it to load. Click to look at the ratings for a creation and you have to wait for it to load. Hit the "back" button to return to the previous screen and you have to wait for it to load and the game erases all of your search settings, which you then have to re-enter.

Poke around for long enough and you'll see that there are some amazingly creative people devoting a lot of time and talent to the things they're uploading. It's almost enough to make you wish they had been the ones building the menu system.

Until you see "Britney Spears" spelled with two Ns and a Q.