Part of the problem with being a fan of both wrestling and video games is that you have to endure the occasional outright terrible game. From WCW/NWO Thunder for the PlayStation to WWE Raw for the Xbox, there have been a lot of terrible games that have escaped from their manufacturers. Below the cut, I list five games that I, personally, never want to play again and show you exactly why. I made all of these YouTube videos, and after I was done, I had to cry. They are that bad.

#1: Tag Team Wrestling (Nintendo Entertainment System)

Tag Team Wrestling first saw life as The Big Pro Wrestling! in the arcades in Japan back in 1983 by Technos Japan. Technos is typically known for quality gaming, especially with wrestling (WWF WrestleFest and Hybrid Wrestler are from their lineup), so their stumble out of the gate is forgivable in this instance. However, nothing can change how horrible this game is, from muddy controls to outright confusing layout. The arcade version was okay for the time and downright unplayable today, but the NES version got butchered, bringing us Atari 2600-level graphics and poor sound. It also has the typical flaw of a bad game… a cheating computer player that, just as it’s on the edge of defeat, will make a monstrous comeback and crush you. That does nothing to add to the challenge in any game, and it’s almost as if programmers realize they made a bad game but are close to deadline, so instead of improving it, they allow this shit to happen in the hopes it increases replay value. It doesn’t.

#2: M.U.S.C.L.E. (Nintendo Entertainment System)

In 1986, in spite of never receiving the cartoon on American airwaves, Kinnikuman became something of a smash in the United States thanks to the highly-collectable M.U.S.C.L.E. (short for Millions of Unusual Small Creatures Lurking Everywhere, the most forced acronym I’ve seen in a while) series of figures. These little figures were about two and a half inches tall, with no coloring aside from pink, but there were a ton of them, and a bunch of wrestling-crazy kids (like myself) snatched them up. Then, along came the video game, hoping to capture the magic of the figures and, well, to say it failed would be a huge understatement. The gameplay features your team randomly flailing around the ring, trying to hit your opponent with kicks or clotheslines. Occasionally a powerup will come across the screen and make you invincible, as well as your attacks more powerful, but as you can see by the video, the Cheating Computer Character syndrome continues and you’ll be lucky if you collect one. Ick.

#3: WWF WrestleMania (Nintendo Entertainment System)

Oh, Acclaim. Someday I’m going to have to write an article describing how much I hate Acclaim. In the NES days, Acclaim’s main mode of money-making was to license a hot property, churn out a terrible game, and profit. It’s not a horrible idea, but considering that they had the WWF license locked up for almost ten years, it gets a little frustrating for wrestling fans. This pile of shit is the one that started it all, and even in 1989, we knew better than this. After all, most of the kids in my neighborhood were playing Pro Wrestling from Nintendo and pretending that each wrestler was a WWF counterpart. Even when we got a WWF game and could actually play as Randy Savage or Hulk Hogan, we had one good hard playthrough of this and decided to go back to the realms of our imagination. They should’ve just called this WWF Tag Team Wrestling, because that’s how bad it was.

#4: FMW (Super Famicom)

Technically, the name of this game is "Onita Atsushi FMW", but really, why bother? The game does have a sweet intro, which I could watch at least a few times and not get bored, but the problems start at the title screen. Yes, the title screen, which features the top two stars in FMW at the time of the game’s release, Atsushi Onita and Megumi Kudo. But then you get to the character select screen and… wait, there’s no Megumi Kudo? Well, it turns out you have to beat the game first, and then you get a special mode where you can play as Megumi Kudo against Combat Toyoda, but honestly, we have another instance of the Cheating Computer Character, and good luck getting past the E. Honda knockoff in the first round. Oh, and right… FMW is a wrestling promotion, right? So why exactly was the game made into a clone of Street Fighter? A poorly made one, at that. Ugh.

#5: WCW SuperBrawl Wrestling (Super NES)

This was the most frustrating for me as a kid. In 1992, I switched my allegiance from the WWF to WCW. My logistics around that were a little odd; in my nine-year-old brain, the WWF was fake while WCW, man, that was real. Vader pummeling enhancement talent only solidified that for me. So I became a WCW fan, ignoring most of the WWF releases at the time because I knew surely that a WCW game would be better. After I picked up WCW for the NES and saw how awesome it was, I knew a WCW Super NES game would be even better. So I waited and waited until 1994, when SuperBrawl came out. I eagerly opened the game up and watched the intro. "All right!" I shrieked, hearing Tony Schiavone’s voice welcoming me to the game. "The WWF games don’t have voices! This is going to be great!" Even when I watched the character select screen, where wrestlers would bark out greetings to me, I was still thrilled, even though the voices of Ron Simmons and the Steiners weren’t right. I chalked it up to the Steiners being traitors by going to the WWF (where they had been wrestling for a year and a half and actually had just left in favor of New Japan Pro Wrestling) and Simmons being a jerk after he turned on Ice Train and refusing to record his sample. Then I actually played the game.

My heart sank the first time I saw Vader, the bonecrushing beast of a man who plowed through everybody. "That’s not what Vader looks like! He doesn’t wear short tights!" It turns out that FCI used the same leg model for every wrestler, so each wrestler had skinny legs, thus resulting in the comical-looking Vader, having a giant torso and toothpick legs. Not only that, but the game itself was baffling. The controls made no sense, special moves were nearly impossible to pull off when you need them, and I was becoming increasingly annoyed with Schiavone’s constant call of FLAT ON THE MAT! I tried and tried to like this game so much, but I just couldn’t enjoy it. The game was horrid; so horrid, in fact, that the first time I played Fire Pro Wrestling, I immediately assumed it was a WCW SuperBrawl clone because of the diamond layout of the ring and refused to play it. Fortunately, common sense got the better of me.

So there you have it. Five games that I never want to play again. Sure, there are more games out there that are just as bad, but these ones are painful.

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