Posted on June 3rd, 2008 in Kenzan, Video Games, WrestleRetro by Kenzan
Licensed wrestling games are rarely good. They were typically rushed, sloppy productions designed solely to grab a cheap buck based off of the name value of the World Wrestling Federation (now World Wrestling Entertainment), World Championship Wrestling, and, in the late-1990s, Extreme Championship Wrestling. Sure, there were rare exceptions, such as WCW for the NES or the AKI games (WCW v. NWO World Tour, WCW/NWO Revenge, WWF WrestleMania 2000, and WWF No Mercy), but on the majority, licensed games were usually quite bad and especially frustrating. Fortunately, some companies stepped up to the plate and delivered.
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Posted on January 25th, 2008 in Kenzan, Video Games, WrestleRetro by Kenzan
If you remember reading WrestleRetro #3, you can recall that I used to be, at the tender age of nine, a foolish young lad who thought that World Championship Wrestling was real and the World Wrestling Federation was fake. It even spread over to video games, when I refused to play any WWF games for almost two years because I knew a WCW game was going to be that damn good. I was even more inspired because, in 1989, the first WCW game ever hit the Nintendo Entertainment System and blew away the WWF’s first game, WrestleMania. It was even better than the sequels (WWF WrestleMania Challenge [which was actually kind of okay], WWF WrestleMania Steel Cage Challenge, and WWF King of the Ring)!
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Posted on January 3rd, 2008 in Kenzan, Video Games, WrestleRetro by Kenzan
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.
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Posted on November 21st, 2007 in Kenzan, Video Games, WrestleRetro by Kenzan
In 1993, Capcom was riding a wave of popularity that, at the time, most third-party developers failed to get. They had a revered home console series in Mega Man, an arcade smash in the Street Fighter II set of games, a popular brawler in Final Fight, and a litany of solid licensed titles, such as Chip ‘n Dale’s Rescue Rangers. (Although the quality of Yo! Noid was questionable; I like the game, but I may have been the only one here that did.) Still, Capcom wasn’t above experimenting, and they decided to take one of their more popular characters, Mike Haggar from Final Fight, and flesh out his backstory a bit. Thus, we have Saturday Night Slam Masters (or, if you’re in Japan, Muscle Bomber).
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Posted on November 15th, 2007 in Kenzan, Video Games, WrestleRetro by Kenzan
This is part one in a series of [until I run out of games to talk about].
Hybrid Wrestler (or "Funaki Masakatsu Hybrid Wrestler - Tougi Denshou", if we’re going to get technical) was released in 1994 on the Super Famicom in Japan. The game was made by Technos and is an interesting little entry into the wrestling game market. The game was sponsored by Pancrase, which was a wrestling promotion that marketed themselves as "hybrid wrestling", and generally promoted matches with a grappling, mat-based style. Pancrase later evolved into a legitimate mixed martial arts company in the late-1990s, but this was released beforehand, and boy, is it obvious.
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