What Were They Thinking? 12.05.07: WWF WrestleMania

Welcome back to another edition of What Were They Thinking?. This week, I continue my series of examinations of wrestling video games with the original WWF WrestleMania for the good ol’ Nintendo Entertainment System. I was going to cover ECW Anarchy Rulz and ECW Hardcore Revolution, but it occurred to me that I hadn’t played them in a while and was fuzzy on some details. Rather than get something wrong, I’ll delay the column until I can play the games again and do more detailed work on them.

This was, I admit, a pretty fun game. You could have up to six players at once without the need for that prohibitively-expensive NES Multi-Tap accessory, which was great on those days you had four or five friends over at once. The controls were simple, with one button for striking, one for running, and the directional pad for movement. You could rebound off of the ropes and do running attacks, or (with the smaller wrestlers on the roster, which I’ll be getting to in a moment) you could climb the turnbuckle and do a flying attack. Graphics were rather simplistic and the colors were off in one or two places (more on that later), but this game was a blast to play.

The roster was limited by modern standards, but it wasn’t bad. Hulk Hogan, Andre the Giant, “The Macho Man” Randy Savage, “The Million-Dollar Man” Ted DiBiase, Bam-Bam Bigelow, and The Honky-Tonk Man. Not a bad lineup, really. Sure, HTM wasn’t exactly a main-eventer, but he’s not a bad choice (seeing as how most wrestlers in modern games are mid-carders worse than HTM was). Hogan and Macho Man had the same move set and similar models, but you could, at least, tell the difference between them. DiBiase was infamous in this game for his black trunks with the butt crack showing, Bam-Bam looked like a hunchback, HTM resembled Elvis Presley (making him the most gimmick-accurate wrestler on the roster), and Andre had a flat-top haircut with green boots, singlet, and hair. Yes; green hair. Minor errors aside, though, the controls were as smooth as you could expect from the NES (though they were better with the NES Advantage) and animations weren’t jerky.

Game modes were limited to two: Exhibition and Tournament. Exhibition was a single match between two players, each controlling a wrestler. In the event that both chose the same wrestler, most characters had a palette swap to give the second player different colors (Hulk had red boots/trunks instead of yellow, HTM had blue instead of red, etc). However, Andre stayed green, making for much confusion if both players chose him and did not keep track of where they were on-screen. Tournament mode took all six wrestlers on the roster and pitted them against one another, with the winner becoming WWF Champion. You could have as few or as many (up to six) human-controlled wrestlers as you wanted, and any remaining wrestlers would be computer-controlled. This would usually take roughly a half-hour to get through; not a bad time-killer.

The music wasn’t bad. The MIDI version of Real American was pretty good, and the rest of the theme songs were more or less faithful MIDI renditions of the real things, as far as I can remember them from way back in the 80s.

The main failing of this game is replay value. There are no hidden wrestlers to unlock, no other titles to contend for, no tag-team matches, no cage matches, no additional areas, no weapons, no outside-the-ring fighting, no referees to beat up, and no create-a-wrestler or create-a-belt options. Once you’d gone through tournament with every character and played Exhibition as every character vs. every other character and every character vs. himself, you’d done all there was to do. For an early game, it was a good attempt. Like many, however, I kind of wish they’d put another year or so into it and added more depth. If they had, this would have been a fantastic game instead of just an “okay” game.

And that’s this week’s column. Short, I know, but I was pressed for time this week and had to toss out one of the shorter entries in this series instead of a more in-depth one. If you have any comments, or anything to add, please feel free to contact me. Remember to check out What Were They Thinking here next week – same 411 time, same 411 channel!!!