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Thread: 8-bit to 16-bit Wrestling Games: the good, the bad, and M.U.S.C.L.E.

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    Default 8-bit to 16-bit Wrestling Games: the good, the bad, and M.U.S.C.L.E.

    I've always enjoyed playing wrestling video games with friends. Serving as the equivalent of video game junk food, they're fun to throw into a console for a few minutes of over the top, smack-talking, button-mashing mayhem. Also, for whatever reason, pinning a buddy for a three count satisfies something in my martial spirit that a Street Fighter or Tekken k.o. just can't, which is odd because other than the occasional online Sumo Wrestling, I don't ever watch wrestling of any kind.

    Anyway... What wrestling games kick ass and which ones suck ass for the 3rd and the 4th generation of gaming? Are there cult classics, guilty pleasures, or abominations that are so bad that they're worth checking out?


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    The Fire Pro series for the Super Famicom is really good, though if you're looking for the ROM make sure you look for one with a translation patch, which is not only in English but will usually have all the wrestlers with their proper names (all the characters are based on real wrestlers, with the right look and movesets, but the names are changed for copyright reasons). Everything else for the 3rd and 4th generation systems is crap, the NES/SMS isn't advanced enough to do a good wrestling game (and there's not enough buttons on the controllers), and the WWF games for the SNES/Genesis were made by LJN. Saturday Night Slam Masters for the SNES/Genesis is OK, but that's really a fighting game that happens in a ring.

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    Quote Originally Posted by A.C. Sativa View Post
    Saturday Night Slam Masters for the SNES/Genesis is OK, but that's really a fighting game that happens in a ring.
    I was going to mention this but you beat me to it, I've had fun with this title. Usually I'm not really into wrestling games that much.

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    Good: Pro Wrestling and Tecmo World Wrestling (both NES)

    Very bad: Tag Team Wrestling (NES)

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    I recently translated an old Famicom wrestling game called "Toukon Club" into English (Not that there was alot of text). It sort of plays like the Fire Pro series, but not as elaborate, obviously. Easily my favorite NES wrestling game. Check it out.

    You can get my translation patch and instructions for applying the patch at http://ericesoteric.com/blog/game-ha...-club-famicom/
    Last edited by EricThaDead; 06-11-2013 at 04:48 PM.

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    As far as US releases are concerned,

    On the NES

    Pro Wrestling on NES still holds up extremely well. Exceptionally well IMO. It's a shame that some of the characters/actions have kept Nintendo from re-releasing it on Virtual Console or elsewhere.

    Of course Pro Wrestling owes practically everything to Taito's arcade classic Mat Mania, which also holds up extremely well and similarly has characters (Coco Savage) that just wouldn't fly in an era of appropriate racial sensitivity.

    Tecmo Wrestling is good, some impressive presentation (cut-away cinematics on power moves) and power-up training system.

    The WWF games on NES are all horrible. With licensed property king LJN at the helm, play mechanics are all but an after-thought.

    WCW Championship Wrestling seems to have the seeds of good ideas (large roster, actual wrestling play mechanics) but it's just so stiff and ugly that it's not worth the time/effort required to learn how to play it well.

    M.U.S.C.L.E. gets a bad rap, it's not a technical marvel by any stretch of the imagination, but as a two player "fighting" game, it's certainly possible to have fun with. If nothing else it created a video game legacy that got us to the Ultimate M.U.S.C.L.E. games on GameCube and PS2 which are pretty fantastic IMO.

    Tag Team Wrestling is the bottom of the barrel for NES wrestling games, however - according to the Chapman Bros. who created him, the HomestarRunner character StrongBad got his name from the masked "Strong Bads" from that game. I do love me some StrongBad so I'll tolerate Tag Team Wrestling's existence for that.

    *Same goes for Tag Team Wrestling on Sega Master System with the exception that it's a tiny bit better looking than the NES version.

    On the SNES:

    The WWF games improve to some degree with the peak of quality being Royal Rumble. Good graphics, decent play control, finishing moves, etc.

    WCW SuperBrawl Not sure if this game uses early Fire Pro Wrestling tech, but it suffers from similar problems to its NES junior. It LOOKS a lot better, but it's generally too stiff and requires a lot of learning to get the most out of the wrestling mechanics.

    Hammer Lock Wrestling is VERY similar to Tecmo Wrestling on NES. Very nice presentation with close-up large sprite cut away "cinematics". An odd one, can be hard to find in the wild, but worth grabbing if you like wrestling games. Like a lot of unlicensed wrestling games of this era it has aesthetic equivalents of current wrestlers of that time like Lex Luger, The Road Warriors, etc.

    Natsume Championship Wrestling More arcadey than other unlicensed wrestlers on SNES, but sadly another one that's tough to play due to some really terrible collision detection and very challenging computer AI.

    But, anybody who knows me knows that if there's one wrestling game in the 8/16 bit era that I hold above all others, it's:

    Saturday Night Slam Masters Capcom's amazing hybrid wrestling/fighting game. Excellent on both SNES and Genesis though the Genesis version trades 4-player multi-tap mode for a 1-on-1 electric barb-wire death match. With character designs amusingly reminiscent of WWF and WCW wrestlers of that era by Tetsuo Hara (of Fist of the North Star), incredibly balanced/engineered play mechanics that blend the best things from wrestling games of that era with the best things from Street Fighter games, tons of "nods" to Capcom fans (appearances from Street Fighter charachters in the crowd, etc.) and a great soundtrack by Capcom regulars Toshio Kajino and Shun Nishigaki.

    For my money Saturday Night Slam Masters, any way you can get it - SNES, Genesis, or on a good MAME/CPS emulator (it's CPS1, so it typically runs beautifully in emulation) is the way to go with 16 bit wrestling.

    I was actually a "challenge" competitor at PAX East last year. Anybody who could best me in a game of Saturday Night Slam Masters got a PAX Challenge Coin. Took the better part of the weekend for somebody to step up to the challenge, but instead of getting bummed about losing - I was actually thrilled to find somebody else who loved the game as much as me when it finally happened. Turns out the guy who beat me was a staff writer who did a review of the SNES version for a gaming publication in the late 90s (can't remember if it was GamePro or EGM) and wound up similarly falling in love with the game.
    Last edited by Frankie_Says_Relax; 08-28-2012 at 10:12 AM.
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    WWF Wrestle Mania: The Arcade Game is the best 8 or 16 bit wrestling game. I used to play this game a sickening amount... its so much fun! Each character has their own special moves and when they get hit stuff falls out, like Shawn Michaels loses broken hearts, but Yokozuna loses like hams when he gets hit. Its over the top and a ton of fun!

    WWF Wrestlemania on the NES might not only be the worst wrestling game I've every played... but may simply be one of the worst video games I've ever played. Its terrible

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    ^The 32-bit versions of WM: The Arcade game blow the 16-bit versions away and can usually be found for just as cheap. The SNES port didn;t even have Bam Bam Bigelow or Yokozuna

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    http://www.youtube.com/user/MikeAndTomPresent

    Joe Gagne's Funtime Pro Wrestling Arcade

    fantastic YouTube series on Pro Wrestling Video Games

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    Quote Originally Posted by Space-Ace-13 View Post
    WWF Wrestle Mania: The Arcade Game is the best 8 or 16 bit wrestling game. I used to play this game a sickening amount... its so much fun! Each character has their own special moves and when they get hit stuff falls out, like Shawn Michaels loses broken hearts, but Yokozuna loses like hams when he gets hit. Its over the top and a ton of fun!

    WWF Wrestlemania on the NES might not only be the worst wrestling game I've every played... but may simply be one of the worst video games I've ever played. Its terrible
    Agreed. WWF WrestleMania was terrible. I did, however, find WrestleMania Challenge to be an ok game.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Space-Ace-13 View Post
    WWF Wrestlemania on the NES might not only be the worst wrestling game I've every played... but may simply be one of the worst video games I've ever played. Its terrible
    That game sucks, but it's not even in the same league as Raw/Raw 2 for the XBox. Worst games ever, I'd rather play Action 52 than that shit. Thunder and Nitro for the N64/PS1 suck ass too, as does Anarchy Rulz.

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    Pro Wrestling on the Sega MAster System. There was only 4 tag teams. The music was just whacked out. I liked the chair bashing outside the ring.

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    Quote Originally Posted by DragonMaster Sam View Post
    Agreed. WWF WrestleMania was terrible. I did, however, find WrestleMania Challenge to be an ok game.
    Yeah, I wanted to mention that I found WWF Wrestlemania Challenge to be decent as well. It really shines in 2 player co-op, as you can innovate with the double teams. Unfortunately you're stuck as the generic characters going through a tournament, but it still works out quite well.

    Also, unless you're an importer, as I don't see any other way than emulation to really enjoy this one, The best of the era would easily be Super Fire Pro Wrestling X Premium(which I believe was the one A.C. Sativa was trying to make mention of). An importer would miss out on the ability to hack a save state to be able to leave the ring during a battle royal(not to mention the ability to play it in English), which I think adds a lot to it, but it obviously doesn't function perfectly(the camera sometimes has a hard time trying to follow it, and you could be stuck off screen, trying to fight a guy you can't really see, for a while).

    Another great game I don't see mentioned yet is the arcade only WWF Wrestlefest.

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    Quote Originally Posted by MidnightRider View Post
    Yeah, I wanted to mention that I found WWF Wrestlemania Challenge to be decent as well. It really shines in 2 player co-op, as you can innovate with the double teams. Unfortunately you're stuck as the generic characters going through a tournament, but it still works out quite well.

    Also, unless you're an importer, as I don't see any other way than emulation to really enjoy this one, The best of the era would easily be Super Fire Pro Wrestling X Premium(which I believe was the one A.C. Sativa was trying to make mention of). An importer would miss out on the ability to hack a save state to be able to leave the ring during a battle royal(not to mention the ability to play it in English), which I think adds a lot to it, but it obviously doesn't function perfectly(the camera sometimes has a hard time trying to follow it, and you could be stuck off screen, trying to fight a guy you can't really see, for a while).

    Another great game I don't see mentioned yet is the arcade only WWF Wrestlefest.
    I was avoiding the arcade stuff with the exception of the footnote about Mat Mania.

    Lots of decent wrestling games in the arcade in that era. Wrestlefest is one of the absolute best, though, once you get the timing down you can blow through a Royal Rumble or the entire Tag Mode on one credit. It simply doesn't have a very aggressive AI.
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    The only one I could tolerate was Wrestlemania: The Arcade Game. I hate endlessly mashing buttons in order to get out of a grapple, and this game changes it up, making into a fighting game style.

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    The already mentioned Super Fire Prowrestling series is the cream of the crop, particularly Super Fire Prowrestling Special (the 4th game) and Super Fire Prowrestling X (the 5th).

    There's a rom translation patch for SFPX Premium (a 2nd release version of X, that I think just had more room for created wrestlers). Acutally, I don't know how hard they are to find these days, but there were a lot of really good hacking tools released so you could copy wrestlers to and from save games among other things.

    Another really good one, also on SFC, was Burning Prowrestling. The gameplay isn't quite as good, but is still lightyears beyond anything released outside of Japan in that era. And it even has a lot of features and options not in Fire Pro, like player controlled refs.

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    WWf Wrestlemania The Arcade Game is really the only rasslin game that's any good.

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    Quote Originally Posted by BlastProcessing402 View Post
    The already mentioned Super Fire Prowrestling series is the cream of the crop, particularly Super Fire Prowrestling Special (the 4th game) and Super Fire Prowrestling X (the 5th).

    There's a rom translation patch for SFPX Premium (a 2nd release version of X, that I think just had more room for created wrestlers). Acutally, I don't know how hard they are to find these days, but there were a lot of really good hacking tools released so you could copy wrestlers to and from save games among other things.

    Another really good one, also on SFC, was Burning Prowrestling. The gameplay isn't quite as good, but is still lightyears beyond anything released outside of Japan in that era. And it even has a lot of features and options not in Fire Pro, like player controlled refs.
    Fire Pro stuff is typically excellent, complex and wildly customizable, though it's precision-timing-based grapple system is a real barrier for entry for most novice players. It's plays pretty much the opposite of every other wrestling game that came before it. Totally an anti-button-masher.

    Also, shocked to see so much love for Wrestlemania the Arcade Game.
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    Wrestlemania Challenge for the NES is (was?) absolutely outstanding in two player mode. In single player mode, it was FAR too easy, but I loved playing it when a friend came over, either against one another or as a team. If you have someone else who likes old school games, it might be worth giving it a shot with them.
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    I have to believe some of the developers that created Pro Wrestling moved on to Human/Spike. You can see the same animations when you pick up your opponent after they're close to being beaten, within the Fire Pro series.

    I actually enjoyed In your House as well as Wrestlemania Arcade. I know some really hated that one, but I thought the power-ups and hindrance items added a layer of strategy.

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