Specifically, one of my biggest complaints about the series after EWR was that the games seemed to lack personality, something I know Adam Ryland has in spades. Before you start crying to me about how much charisma the virtual Cornellverse has, it still felt like everything in the games lived in a vacuum. Wrestling events didn’t feel like wrestling events and characters didn’t feel like characters. Often, after a few days playtime, it felt more like moving numbers around on a spreadsheet. It took a particularly strong imagination or a great love for hard stats to really appreciate lengthy TEW campaigns. To this end, TEW 08 has mostly succeeded. Running cards still loses a little sheen after the first 50 or so, but the underlying game has quite a bit more personality. The inclusion of an in-game website with articles about various promotions or workers along with personality scales that determine the level of asshole in each individual worker give the game world a bit more lived in feel.

The biggest weakness of TEW 08 is also arguably its greatest strength. The game is vast. Mindbogglingly so, at times. Even using one of my old converted data files from TEW 07, it took me several hours of tinkering just to make sure the new features in the editor were being used, and I don’t envy anyone planning a full-on mod of the game. The main promotion menu itself features 27 different buttons with hundreds more sub-buttons underneath those. They’re all divided fairly intelligently, but sometimes I found it a bit difficult to focus and find the button I was looking for. Additionally, not every screen has all the information you’re looking for, which can be a hassle when you’re trying to juggle multiple things at once.

The editor is as deep and varied as ever. I cannot fathom making up my own database from scratch with all the sliders and options that need to be set before it starts to take shape. The angle and storyline editors are about 1/3 bigger just by themselves, and with the addition of the Australia region, there’s a good deal of tweaking that needs to be done before even an old database becomes usable in the game. The upshot of this is that it allows for unparalleled customization, to the point where you can literally create any game world you wish. On the other hand, I can’t imagine that a lot of people are going to want to spend ten hours not playing the game they just bought. Thankfully, there are people in the TEW community more dedicated to this than I.

Incidentally, the editor you can use while the game is running is almost exactly the same as last year, which works just fine. I enjoy the ability to play around with different variables while I’m playing the game. Not everything is editable, of course, but enough things are that you’ll probably find whatever it is you’re looking for. In fact, one of the nicest features is that you can edit and add angles directly from the booking screen, which is nice if you suddenly find you don’t have any way to advance your latest storyline or if inspiration suddenly strikes.

The game is remarkably stable, especially given that the version I was playing was barely post-beta. Other than one minor in game error, a few grammar and spelling mistakes, and one crash that wiped out a save game I was pretty deep into, I didn’t encounter any of the problems I expected. I will say that I’m not a big fan of the fact that I had to shrink the text size on my monitor just to get the game’s layout to format properly.

One of the more highly touted features was the faster loading times from TEW 2007, and for the most part, the game comes through. However, the ability to sim through multiple days at once, which was a very welcome feature for those who like to run smaller promotions with almost no dates, comes up a bit short. This is mostly due to the game’s insistence on creating a new webpage for each day that you sim, whether you read it or not, causing things to chug along considerably if you’re simming weeks at a time.

Everything looks clean and well organized. The default settings for most graphics are pretty well done. The website has a tendancy to look a little “busy” at times, but it’s not too bad. I had to use my old picture set, so I can’t really comment on the character images, but apparently they will be sharper as well. Some of the Poseur heads from last year’s game look pretty good and some of them are a little…off, and I fully expect that that will be the same this year.

-While the new creative and website screens add a lot of personality to the game, there’s quite a bit of repetition there, which means you’ll probably kind of just gloss over at it most of the time.

-The new roster screen provides a surprisingly great amount of information within a few sentences. You can find out what style a person works, whether or not they’re jerks, and how popular they are without leaving a single paragraph, which is pretty nice.

-While booking really hasn’t changed from TEW 07, the look and feel of the booking screen is much improved. The sortable match options are a nice addition, and overall it looks much cleaner than it has in the past.

TEW 08 is not a perfect game, and it’s not going to be everybody’s favorite. But it is definitely a huge step forward for the series. While there hasn’t been any area that’s received a clear and massive upgrade, the whole game just feels much more personable and well put together than TEW 05 and 07. From the booking screen to the roster editor, everything just feels clean and efficient, but it never loses that feeling that everyone and everything in the game world is a living breathing entity with a personality of its own.

Even more than that, however, is that the challenge and entertainment afforded by creating and running your own wrestling promotions and competing with the titans of the industry (both real and fictional) brings a bit of joy back to an otherwise dreary industry. If you find a bit of joy in juggling numbers and tracking statistics, TEW 08 is an excellent management sim with a lot of personality. No longer is it a spreadsheet with a nice bit of makeup, TEW 08 takes that last wobbly step from TEW’s past as an engaging wrestling simulator into the realm of an engrossing game.