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Here’s a bit of video game inside baseball for those who have any interest in such things: For as long as I can remember, a certain website has always had the exclusive first look at THQ’s WWE SmackDown vs. Raw series of wrestling games. That franchise is particularly near and dear to my heart, since I wrote the storylines and dialogue for it for five years, and I’ve written or co-written almost every WWE strategy guide that’s come out in the past decade. Plus, several good friends of mine continue to work on the series, and now that I’m no longer mucking up the game design process, they’re accomplishing some fantastic results.

image © THQ, GameSpot

Whether you’re a fan of the WWE product or not, there’s no denying that there’s an enormous fan base out there who will hungrily devour every scrap of information about it, especially when it comes to the games. So I was more than a little miffed when the aforementioned website, after enjoying months of page-view-padding exclusive looks at WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2009, crapped all over it with a C+ review that complained of a general “been there, done that” feel to the game—but never once considered that that might be due to the fact that they’d been playing it for nearly six months by the time the review came out. It seemed like a classic case of familiarity breeding contempt, and it was especially frustrating, because I truly believed that SvR09 was a big leap forward from the previous year’s installment, and I’d like to think that I was in a pretty good position to judge such things.

So it was with no small amount of amusement that I saw today that Gamespot.com had been given the exclusive first look at SmackDown vs. Raw 2010, while that other website has to content itself with posting the box art for the new game.

Game over? You’re damn right it’s over.

image © THQ, GameSpot

(Disclaimer: I have no dog in the race between GameSpot or its competitors. I also haven’t spoken with anyone involved in the production or marketing of the game, so I might be completely off-base with my observations here, which are solely my own opinions. Take ‘em with a grain of salt—or a chair to the head.)