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DISCLAIMER – THIS IS A LIST OF GAMES I’VE PLAYED/CURRENTLY PLAY THAT HAD IMPACT, PUN INTENDED. I HAVE NOT PLAYED EVERY WRESTLING GAME BUT HAVE PLAYED A LOT. IF YOU’D LIKE TO CONTRIBUTE YOUR OWN HALF-ASSED REVIEW, NAIRBY@GMAIL.COM.
A very short form of a long story for another day goes like this:
I was introduced to professional wrestling in the Spring of 1986 and was hooked immediately. I attended a decent share of live shows, including two Wrestlemania’s over the years as well as collected and played with the toys when I was a kid. As of this writing I have not watched wrestling regularly since 2004 but I do keep up to date via wrestling podcasts like Wrestling Soup and Don Tony & Kevin Castle. And I obviously don’t play with the toys but I do still play the video games.
I can’t think of anything deep or ‘journalisty’ to say. In all honesty this is the second time I am writing this up because my dumbass didn’t properly save the nearly half-finished first draft of this edition of Half-Assed Reviews! I can totally cut a promo on myself right now, and that’s why I still love pro wrestling and still play the video games! In the ‘olden days’ you couldn’t put yourself in the game. Now you can.
Now you can put whoever you want in a wrestling video game, you can run the company, set the matches, do it all, exclamation point. You can create the shows, design the logos of the shows! It’s madness! And for me it started with a bite to the face on Christmas day, 1986.
PRO WRESTLING (NES)
RATING: Young me – 10/10. Now – 6/10
CEREAL: The original with Star Man!
GRAPE JUICE: It was no secret that I was getting a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) for Christmas in 1986. But it was a secret that one of the games I was getting with it was Pro Wrestling. I knew ahead of time because for a few years in a row I managed to ‘accidentally’ find birthday and Christmas presents buried deep in the backs of closets. I was less than a year into my wrestling fandom and Pro Wrestling for the NES was a dream game for me. As simple as it is by today’s standards, I still got hundreds of hours of play from it. A small cast of characters to choose from. My guy was the Amazon with his bite to the face and monkey wrench to the head! There is a basic challenge mode where you beat the roster of wrestlers, win the title, successfully defend the title against each guy and earn a shot at the super champion. I forget the name of the super champion because I only made it to that match once. I was lucky enough to win by count out only because it felt impossible to beat him in the ring. Nonetheless, a winner was me!
TECMO WORLD WRESTLING (NES)
RATING: Young Me – 10/10. Now – 4/10
CEREAL: A wrestling video game with on-screen commentator!
GRAPE JUICE: The only thing I remember about this game is the play-by-play guy on the bottom of the game screen commenting as the match plays out. That’s seriously all I remember but I included it in this list because that was a HUGE deal for me as it meant that wrestling video games were already getting more like what we see on TV.
WWF WRESTLEMANIA (NES)
RATING: Young me – 0/10. Now – 0/10
CEREAL: The awful first attempt at a licensed WWF video game on console.
GRAPE JUICE: Look at that cover! The Hulkster in all his glory. This game was crap. I was still early in my wrestling fandom so I was obviously super-pumped when I heard about this title. Andre the Giant does a dropkick in this game, FFS. For those not in the know, Andre the Giant was over 7 feet tall, 500 pounds and barely mobile at the time. I know we are currently living in times where anyone can do anything or you’re a bad person but even a 12 year old me knew that Andre the Giant doing a dropkick in a video game was stupid. Shite!
MARSHMALLOWS: TAG TEAM WRESTLING (NES) – 1/10 – First tag team wrestling game but only four wrestlers. No story or challenge mode. Just pick a team from a choice of two and have a tag team match.
WRESTLEFEST 1 & 2 (ARCADE)
RATING: 9/10
CEREAL: The quarter-sucking 4-player arcade awesomeness featuring the Royal Rumble match!
GRAPE JUICE: I can still play the Wrestlefest games today via an emulator on my computer but it’s no comparison to playing them in the coin-op arcade back in the day. The first game’s big game mode was a tag team gauntlet where you choose two wrestlers to compete in a series of tag team matches to earn a shot at the champions, the Mega Bucks! But it was the Royal Rumble match in Wrestlefest 2 that had kids crowding around the arcade cabinet, waiting for their turn to pop in a quarter and enter the Rumble match. Unlike the real match, however, where there are 30 participants, the Royal Rumble match in Wrestlefest 2 had as many participants as there were quarters available. My guy was always Earthquake. Once you had an opponent flat on his back and gave the thumbs down, your real life opponent went into panic mode and started frantically tapping their buttons so as to avoid the big butt squash! Such a beautiful scam but even better was that our wrestling video games were continuing to progress and turn more into what we see on TV.
WWF SUPER WRESTLEMANIA and ROYAL RUMBLE (SNES)
RATING: 8/10
CEREAL: The WWF Brings the Royal Rumble match to home consoles.
GRAPE JUICE: These two WWF games for me were home versions of the Wrestlefest arcade games. We finally had a Royal Rumble match we can play at home and that is pretty much the only match I played in these games. Thanks to the SNES controller having more buttons we were also given more moves to perform. Each wrestler had their special unique moves we see them perform on TV and there were no giants doing dropkicks. The Royal Rumble match was a great addition but I was still aching for the chance to run my own day-to-day wrestling promotion.
WCW NITRO (PS1)
RATING: 3/10
CEREAL: A World Championship Wrestling (WCW) video game that felt like wrestling at a disco club.
GRAPE JUICE: WCW was hotter than the WWF at the time so I opted for WCW Nitro as my first wrestling video game on Playstation 1. A very thin roster considering the PS1 could have handled a lot more. Playing this game felt very jarring as the camera was constantly going in a circle around the ring making it feel like constant spinning at a dance club. No real challenge mode which is inexcusable for the time. The WCW game for NES, which I did own but didn’t add to this list because it had no impact, had more to offer than the PS1 title that was released years later. When choosing your wrestler and opponent you have an option of hearing them cut a promo. This was especially strange for me because at the time this game was released, Sting (the wrestler, not the singer) was doing his crow gimmick where he never said a word. So hearing crow Sting cut a promo was weird. But it would get worse, and it did.
WWF WAR ZONE and ATTITUDE (PS1/N64)
RATING: 0/10
CEREAL: The WWF’s absolutely awful button combo crap releases.
GRAPE JUICE: Terrible. War Zone and Attitude are basically the same awful game. As video game technology was getting better, some clown thought it would be a good idea to release a wrestling game where you have to press a combination of six buttons to perform the most basic moves. And there were a lot of moves and button combos to learn. Hold UP on the D-pad and press X, O, Square, X and triangle to perform a bodyslam. Hold RIGHT on the D-pad and press X, X, O and square to perform a suplex. Awful! Even worse was the insane lack of realism. In one match i performed a flying dropkick off he top of a steel cage. No biggie, right? What if I told you that my wrestler was standing on top of the cage and my opponent was about 200 video game feet away. Terrible. As bad as War Zone was I had high hopes for Attitude. I assumed the long load times in War Zone were due to the PS1 being a disk -based console so I switched to the Nintendo 64 for WWF Attitude thinking a cartridge-based game wouldn’t take so long to load. Wrong! Same long load times, same crap gameplay, same crazy button combos. The only positive that came from these games was finally being able to create a wrestler. But that just meant you created a crappy wrestler you’ll never want to play with as the crowd chants “Player one! Player one!” for you. Garbage!
WCW/NWO REVENGE (N64)
RATING: 8/10
CEREAL: WCW video games get the THQ treatment in a sign of greatness to come.
GRAPE JUICE: I hated WCW during the ‘Monday Night Wars’. And I hated that they released a better game than the WWF did at the time. A lot of people give WCW World Tour the honors over Revenge but I never played it. While there was no true create a wrestler mode we did have the option of renaming the wrestlers in the game. THQ took the wrestling video game at the time and shit in the mouth of the awful WWF releases. We were now getting a mix of different arenas to wrestle in that looked like the arenas we see on TV. As great as this game looked and played, it was still missing that GM mode that I wanted for a long time.
WWF WRESTLEMANIA 2000 (N64)
RATING: 8/10
CEREAL: WWF and WCW swap game developers as things continue to look up.
GRAPE JUICE: It was the greatest swap ever! I still hated WCW at the time and felt it was only fair that they get the crappy game developer while WWF gets THQ. Wrestlemania 2000 gave me my first real good create-a-wrestler mode. We were also getting wrestler entrances by now and closer to running the everyday operation that I was wanting. Very simple controls and smooth visuals for the time. A good sized roster of wrestlers with a decent little story mode. Things were picking up in the wrestling video game world!
WWF NO MERCY (N64)
RATING: 10/10
CEREAL: Agreed by many to be one of, if not THE best wrestling video game of all time.
GRAPE JUICE: I had no idea this game was coming out. I simply walked to my local mall one day and there it was on the ‘New Releases’ shelf at EB Games. I gasped and picked up the box. A ladder match? Take my money! No Mercy for the Nintendo 64 has sucked up hundreds of hours of my time. THQ added some simple but great new additions to No Mercy such as performing a running grapple maneuver. Create-a-wrestler, create a pay-per-view, ladder matches, tournaments, wrestler entrances. I have a VHS tape filled with hours of matches I had on this game. No Mercy is so good that people still play it today with their own modifications. Check them out on YouTube and Twitch.
WWF WRESTLEMANIA X8 (GC)
RATING: 9/10
CEREAL: An underappriciated entry into the wrestling video game world featuring the Hell in a Cell match!
GRAPE JUICE: After the N64 I moved on the to Nintendo Gamecube. WMX8 wasn’t actually my first wrestling video game for the Gamecube, though. My first for Gamecube was Legends of Wrestling which sucked so bad I literally returned it the next day and got WMX8. I had a blast with this game. The create-a-wrestler mode was so deep that it included custom entrances where you chose the time and place for pyro. I created a demon from hell character and had flames shoot up in time intervals on the ramp as he slowly made his way to the ring! This game also had my favorite version of the Hell in a Cell match. Simple to escape and climb the cage while games that came after made it a bit of a chore. SO close to what I was aching for for so long in a wrestling video game.
WWE SMACKDOWN! – HERE COMES THE PAIN (PS2)
RATING: 8/10
CEREAL: Universally agreed to be the best in the Smackdown! series of games. Nothing to do with the addition of the bra & panties match.
GRAPE JUICE: Ok I’ll be honest. When I went to EB Games that day and saw in the demo that this game had the bra & panties match it was a definite purchase for me. But overall the B&P match is a crumb of everything else this game offered. I remember that the on screen presentation made this game feel very big for me. Still not the day to day mode I was wanting but everything felt bigger in this game. The chair shots to the head were especially satisfying.
WWE 2K13 (PS3)
RATING: 9/10
CEREAL: GM mode. Attitude Era mode. Create an arena. A definite must-play.
GRAPE JUICE: I finally got my GM mode! Not perfect but perfect was coming. I especially loved the Attitude Era mode in which you take a wrestler and re-live moments from the Attitude Era as well as new original content in a fun little story mode. This was a wrestling game that every wrestling fan had to get just for the Attitude Era mode. There was also a Wrestlemania moments mode from what I remember. We were now on the doorstep to MY perfect wrestling video game.
MARSHMALLOWS: FIRE PRO WRESTLING RETURNS (PS3) – 8/10. A fun arcade style wrestling game that uses old school style very well. A ton of characters to choose from who are based on real wrestlers. Crazy barbed wire and explosion matches, famous in Japan. Worth checking out.
WWE 2K19 and 2K22 (PS4)
RATING: 10/10
CEREAL: Be a wrestler. Be a promoter. Create it all. The perfect wrestling simulator.
GRAPE JUICE: Ok, promo cutting time first. To those who disagree, make your own list and shut up! END PROMO. I love these games. LOVE them! As of this writing I just purchased WWE 2K22 three weeks ago and am loving it as much as I did 2K19, so I’ll talk about 2K19 which has a lot of the same features 2K22 does. You can do it all in these games now. Here’s a nerd story of about what I did in WWE 2K19 and have transferred over to in 2K22. I only play Universe Mode. I have 4 different brands: Raw, Smackdown!, NXT and NITRO. Each brand has its own TV show each week and one pay-per-view each month for a total 4 PPVs each month. I have created several custom arenas with names and logos using my animation program, Moho Pro. Every March there is a pay-per-view called King of the Ring where the main champions from the four brands compete in a fatal four way elimination match to be crowned WWE GRAND CHAMPION and defend their title in the main even of Wrestlemania the following month. I create a wrestler and play this mode forever and a day. So not only do these games let me BE the wrestler, it lets me be the promoter and create the shows. The game’s AI creates the matches and rivalries as I sit back and have a blast! I can share my creations online for other players to download and use and I can download their stuff. I can create special matches like an 8-person, 4 way tag team first blood elimination match. There are a lot of moves but the button combos are done smartly. I spent thousands of hours playing 2K19 and am in the early stages of playing thousands of hours on 2K22!
Every time I use my Amazon Fire Stick I think back to how far we came from the early days of watching television. It’s the same when I play wrestling video games now. We went from wrestling games that look like they were created with Microsoft Paint to the full presentation. I probably should also mention that the current 2K games have their own story modes which I dabbled in as well as playing online against others but I’m like an old time territory promoter from the 80s. I want to do it all and the 2K games GM/Universe modes let me BE a WWE ‘superstar’ while also running the company. If the lunatics of the internet wrestling community did what I did perhaps they wouldn’t be such asswagons.
