Unlike THQ's Xbox wrestling games, which have remained lackluster, the GameCube WWE titles have gotten progressively better, beginning with the Wrestlemania series and continuing on to last year's summer hit Day of Reckoning. For its sequel, the aptly titled Day of Reckoning 2, THQ and developer Yukes aren't going back to the drawing board and crafting a whole new engine. Rather, both companies have agreed to use the original game as a foundation and simply build from it, and the result is a fully loaded sports entertainment product that may be the ultimate WWE experience GameCube owners have been demanding.

The original Day of Reckoning is a decent game and it's actually better than past GameCube wrestling titles, but much like the Xbox WWE games, the button-masher falls short compared to the PS2's SmackDown franchise. Thankfully, while you can still beat up your GameCube controller in the sequel, mat tacticians have a wealth of options at their disposal to prove why they are the excellence of execution. The grappling is still the same but it's the submission system that is of particular interest. Basically, all of the wrestlers have stamina bars that deplete depending on how much energy they expend, but unlike in other games, you don't have to back off in order to replenish it. Rather, it'll increase if you pull off big moves before your opponent, especially if it involves submissions.

If you're the one trying to slap on a sharpshooter or even something as petty as an arm bar, you may want to think twice before you twist your opponent's legs into a pretzel shape. Instead of just pressing a button and automatically performing the move (which is the norm in wrestling games), you can actually decide what holds you want to perform using the C-stick. When you get a guy on the ground and go for a submission, you'll be able to do humiliation, rest, and show off holds by tapping the stick in the appropriate direction.

All of these moves expend a certain amount of stamina, so if you want to play it safe you may want to go for that arm bar, but if you'd rather go for the kill (and the gold, I'm assuming), you can elect to attempt to end the match quickly by going for a more powerful hold. On the positive side, you can make your opponent cry mommy in a hurry, but the negative (and this is a really bad one) is if you fail to finish him or her off you've just wasted the majority or all of your stamina bar, leaving you wide open to a vicious attack.

In the SmackDown games, if you're on the receiving end of a submission you can either escape by breaking the hold (which isn't always easy to do) or suck it up and take the pain, but in Day of Reckoning 2 it's a bit easier to turn the tables. Yukes has actually come up with a system where, if you're about to be the recipient of something particularly nasty, an icon will pop up that allows you to use the C-stick to guess what your opponent will do. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to figure out all of the details to this system, but based on what I know, if the opposition wants to do a cross face and you correctly guess that that's the move they're about to perform you'll successfully break the hold.

It's quite an exciting concept, a roll of the dice that adds a hefty amount of strategy to the mix. No longer will you always need to use a rope break to bail you out of a Boston Crab. Now it's all a guessing game, a moment where your opponent has both of your legs up in the air and you're trying to bore a hole right through their thick skull and into their brain to figure out what he or she is thinking. Since the offensive player has a wealth of options guessing their next move may prove difficult, but at least you'll have a fighting chance.

Another cool feature in this game is its story mode, which is actually a sequel of sorts to the original Day of Reckoning's. In the previous game you rose to the top of the WWE ladder and captured the World Championship, and you basically pick up right where you left off. Now that you have the belt, everyone's gunning for you, and you'll be taken on branching paths that have multiple twists and turns where you may even turn heel. The narrative is being penned by writers of WWE SmackDown, so it should be very faithful to Vince McMahon's product.