Classic WWF/WCW Wrestling Games

[Cliff Hanger]

WWF Attitude was a terrible game that I somehow still loved dearly.  I'm not sure why, but I probably sunk 50 hours into that shithole.

 

Fire Pro is of course always worth enjoying; I would absolutely love to get to go through the story mode in G in English, but of course it'll never get a full fantrans.  D is probably the one I had the most fun with, because its too-simplistic "BEAT ALL THE PEOPLE IN THIS FED" single-player mode was exactly what I needed when I got hold of it.

 

I remember hating the PS1 Smackdown games; I don't think I actually played one on PS2 until the first Vs Raw.

[Petey]

I played WWF Attitude a ton. It wasn't a great game by any means, but as a huge WWF fan, it didn't really bother me. The entrances were terrific and I enjoyed how the wrestlers would bleed from the most random body parts.

 

I played FPR a lot for the PS2. Downloaded some CAW's/mods and had a blast. It was cool wrestling with ROH guys in a video game.

 

The PS1 Smackdown games were largely terrible. Smackdown 2 had a ton of game modes at least, but the gameplay was ridiculously arcadish. I'd imagine Smackdown 2 was a really fun game in college when you and your friends were drunk and didn't really care about playing anything requiring too much skill, but I was still in 8th grade when SD2 came out so I wasn't too concerned with drunk game playing.

[Tromatagon]

Man there was a pretty rare Xbox import wrestling game I had called The Wild Rings. It had a theme where it was different disciplines fighting against each other and they all had something that made them stand out. Japanese wrestlers would stick their chest out and block shit, Americans would Hulk up with taunts, boxers and mma guys and sumo dudes all had shit, they even had lucha as a style. Cool graphics too.

Too bad the gameplay was pretty fucking horrible, it was a promising concept, and it had 8 man battle royal matches on the fucking original Xbox, which YUKES still can't do a generation later

[Fat Spanish Waiter]

I played the old WWF games a little after the fact on PS1. Certainly after SmackDown! came out. Found them enjoyable chiefly because the moves were neat and the entrances were cool. The SmackDown! series was way better of course but only because they had a bunch of shit hot Japanese moves I'd never seen before.

My best friend to this day owns me on every video game apart from WrestleMania 2000. He got so mad at the triple threat match in career mode that he ended up taking a hammer to the cartridge.

The cartridge beat him at that, too.

[sydneybrown]

There was a group of us who played No Mercy constantly, and one of our friends just beat the shit out of all of us on a constant basis.  So we would do singles and tags against each other and random AIs, and it got to the point that the AIs weren't a challenge anymore, but our friend was kinda pissing us all off in how much we was killing us, so an offer was made:  Do a tag-team loser-leaves-town match with all four of us, whoever gets pinned is off of No Mercy for a set time, but the angle was that I would turn on my experienced partner and we'd all attack him, pin him, and then get equal footing in his off time to catch up to him when his time was up.

 

The idea was that I would attack my opponents so that he wouldn't expect anything, and then set it all up for the big heel turn.  Unfortunately, I fucked it all up by hitting a random non-finisher on my opponent and went for a fake pin, but then pinned him for real.  And then all hell broke loose.  Suddenly I had just booked the greatest heel turn ever, because now everybody hated me.  My opponents thought I had done it on purpose and told me to fuck off, and my teammate was pissed because I thought I was out to screw him and he told me to fuck off.  And no matter what I said, nobody believed me.  That's how awesome No Mercy was.

[Petey]

Yeah No Mercy's various bugs held it back. It's too bad because it did improve things from WrestleMania 2000 where you could drop the weapons and not have them disappear and stuff like ladder matches, special referee matches and the ability to fight backstage. But man, having your saves deleted and the slowdowns with four guys on a screen really sucked. I remember hearing that they actually recalled and reissued the game, allegedly free of the bugs. Not sure if that's true though.

[Craig H]

They did re-issue the game with a fix in place so your save file wouldn't get wiped.

[Ace]

VPW2 was so fun. I exhausted the fuck outta that game with my Kawada/Kobashi team.

[DreamBroken]

So many memories. I also put loads of hours into Attitude and of course later the n64 games. First rented an n64 for World Tour. No Mercy always had a ton of stuff to do on it. Still occasionally play it along with VPW2. FPR is the main game I still play today thanks to the endless match possibilities

[BrianS81177]

Man there was a pretty rare Xbox import wrestling game I had called The Wild Rings. It had a theme where it was different disciplines fighting against each other and they all had something that made them stand out. Japanese wrestlers would stick their chest out and block shit, Americans would Hulk up with taunts, boxers and mma guys and sumo dudes all had shit, they even had lucha as a style. Cool graphics too.

Too bad the gameplay was pretty fucking horrible, it was a promising concept, and it had 8 man battle royal matches on the fucking original Xbox, which YUKES still can't do a generation later

Isn't that the one where they released 2 or 3 different versions of it with different colored discs, and each disc had a different roster?

[Tromatagon]

No, that was King of Colosseum for the PS2, which most people like but I don't

[Playa Shunna Ver 3.0]

KOC2 is still an amazing game.  I loved it.  I just remember playing WCW/NWO World tour and thinking it was as good as any wrestling game would ever get.  Then they improved it with Revenge, the turned it up even further with the 2 WWF games.  Just an incredible engine.  I still remember the first match I had in Revenge was Eddy vs Dean.  I also remember there was a game genie code that unlocked Wrath and someone else.  

[ultimoDANK]

Not sure many can match how nerdy I got with VPW2. I still have a ziplock bag with 5 N64 memory cards filled with CAW's. If they didn't erase, a common problem.

Tag matches were great. My Angle/Benoit team was the best. Even on the hardest difficulty I pretty much had that game mastered. I was so crazy I'd be watching tapes and say Tanahashi would do a new move I'd make a note and go in and tweak his moveset.

[Salads]

Renting WWF Warzone on the N64 is the thing that got me into wrestling. Before that I thought it was just camp fake-punching so I was impressed with all the inventive ways for throwing each other about. I ended up buying WWF Attitude and then ECW Hardcore Revolution, which was just as bad but impresses me to this day by existing. The amateurish recorded-in-the-office crowd audio which anyone would acknowledge as dodgy in the former took on a cruel Bingo Hall vibe for the follow up. No Mercy was the only N64 game I sought out for the console after its heyday because of its rep, but I never clicked with it and sold it. I wish I could sell WWF Attitude.

 

Timely thread for me because I've just this month picked up Here Comes the Pain. The great roster is somewhat undermined by names like Eddie and Rey given wet paper jobber status, but had great fun trying to guess the unlicensed wrestlers from their unlockable movesets alone. Chuck Palumbo having both superkick and torture rack as finishers was baffling.

[Tromatagon]

It's pretty hilarious because every store I've been to that sells old n64 games that isn't a Mecca for that kind of thing only has Attitude, Mayhem, and the ECW games, never any of the good ones.

Game Dude in NoHo is the Mecca if you were wondering

[assfax]

I have an idea for a fire pro guy. It's a fat redneck nazi from the 50s named Tater Totenkopf. I can't come up with anything funnier than Spud Missle Dropkick for a finishing move. The Goosestomp? The Heinrich Maneuver?

[Zimbra]

The Goering Special, naturally.

[Tromatagon]

The Final Solution, duh

[Zimbra]

A top row elbow called the Von Ribbendrop. I could do this all day.

[Salads]

Goering Special is a good'un.

 

Mein Stamp?

 

Welcome to Ouchwitz?

 

Messr's Mitt? (Brass knux)

 

Face Washtika?

 

[southofheavy]

The Mengele Lock?

[assfax]

 

 

[Salads]

SCHINDLER'S FIST

 

I don't care if I'm late.

[MGFanJay]

Here's an amazing Roman Reigns vs. Matt Hardy match I had in No Mercy last week. I was capturing footage for the MMA gaming thing and figured I might as well do some NM since it's plugged in. I updated Roman's moveset and using the flying Misawa elbow smash thing for the Superman punch. HOLY CRAP DOES THAT EVER WORK PERFECTLY for the pose he makes during it. This has a lot of back and forth stuff and went way better than you'd think a Reigns-Hardy match would go.

[No Point Stance]

Not sure many can match how nerdy I got with VPW2. I still have a ziplock bag with 5 N64 memory cards filled with CAW's. If they didn't erase, a common problem.

Tag matches were great. My Angle/Benoit team was the best. Even on the hardest difficulty I pretty much had that game mastered. I was so crazy I'd be watching tapes and say Tanahashi would do a new move I'd make a note and go in and tweak his moveset.

 

I did pretty much the exact same thing, obsessively documenting movesets and other minutiae for the purpose of CAWs - and I remember the horror of discovering a memory card had wiped and taken 8 of my painstakingly created wrestlers with it; cue cries of 'No! Not Satoru Asako TOO!"...