AJ Styles says modern WWE video games are “too much” for him due to the complexity
While speaking on the Phenomenally Retro Podcast, AJ Styles and his co-host Tony Giles discussed the complexity of modern wrestling video games. Here was the exchange…
TG: “I haven’t really played a modern wrestling game for a long time now, but this goes the same for when EA were doing Fight Night, UFC, NHL, and NBA. I feel like it got too complicated with the control scheme. There was so much you could do. I preferred it when it was more arcade-style — rapid button tapping and trying to pull off certain moves, rather than having to be a wizard using the controller.”
AJ: “Yeah, it’s always too much. I remember playing UFC with the boys in the locker room. We had no grappling — just knockouts. That’s all we could do. If I played, that’s what I wanted to do, because the grappling is definitely much harder to grasp than throwing punches and kicks and stuff like that. It just got to the point where it was like, you hold the button and do a strong grapple, or you tap it and do a light grapple.”
TG: “And it’s like, how do I know if I’m doing a hard or a soft grapple? How long do I hold the button for? It got to the point where I was like, this isn’t as fun as arcade-style wrestling or arcade-style fighting games. That’s my sweet spot.”
AJ: “The more buttons you introduce, the harder a game is going to be to learn. If you’re not a fan, you’re not going to be willing to spend that time in the lab getting better and taking hours to learn it. The new 2K games are too much for me. I don’t want to spend all that time. I did a tournament where a guy was going to wrestle me in a 2K game for a million dollars. I was like, ‘Guys, I don’t know how to play the game. I don’t know how to play the game.’ So he just murdered me because I didn’t know what I was doing.”