Monday, August 17, 2015

the lost opportunities of 90s wrestling games

hello there

i got a few moments to myself this evening, look you see. not long enough to do something productive, such as watch a film or read a significant portion of a book, but some time all the same. in determining what to, then, i for some reason opted to see if some sort of emulator for a 90s video game machine wouldn't allow me to - briefly - become an overlooked legend of 80s American wrestling, or if you like wrasslin'.

to this end, then, and to extend what i consider to be a good working relationship with the Japanese, i fired up some sort of Nintendo emulator and set about having a look at all the smart wrestling games that they had available. well, all the smart ones and, as we shall start off with, the non-WWF ones, such as WCW Nitro, whatever the hell that is.



 i really rather fancied playing a game of wrestling as one of the three most significant wrestlers in the history of WWF, with those three being his eminence The Honky Tonk Man, his angriness Bad News Brown or his eternal coolness Rowdy Roddy Piper. i was, alas, as the kids of the 90s were, royally f****d over in this regard, as none of the WWF variants featured any of those three.

and it was called WWF, folks. back then a quest to save pandas and an entertainment engagement in which steroid laced sweaty Americans grappled each other could carry the same name and no one got confused. this generation, it seems, are unable to tell the who apart, which is why the steroid sweaty version has changed its "F" to an "E".

the above is indeed a screenshot of the WCW Nitro character select screen. it is animated, too, if not animated that a child of today, with their X-Stations and Play 360 machines, would understand, but animated all the same. as you can see in this sensational video.


that is indeed, assuming the video is the right way around, Rick Flair in the top right corner. or bottom left, if it is upside down. no, i have no idea who the rest are.

i switched on the WCW one in the hope that, with it being early 90s, either Honky Tonk, Bad News or Rowdy had engaged in the sort of career slide that saw them relegated from WWF and into the murky world of WCW. i am not sure, but i seem to think that WCW was the cheaper version of WWF, for kids who had fathers that were not quite good enough at mining coal in order to be able to afford easy access to WWF.

no was the answer, as i think you have worked out. none of the three, it seems, sank so low that they were licensed for use in a WCW game on any form of Japanese games console.

not that the WWF games were a complete write off, mind. here, as you can sort of see in this Commodore 64 mode, Hulk "thunderlips" Hogan was allowed to be in it. he isn't any more, so far as i am aware, due to some sort of Mel Gibson like "misunderstanding" of the correct way to address people with a common ethnicity, but that's none of my concern.



whereas i was denied the chance to play as Rowdy Roddy, Bad News or Honky Tonk, one of the WWF games did, at the least, allow me - if i were to so choose to select to do so - play as Jake The Snake. that's at least something.

i think on these fancy new versions of WWF games you can download and play as Honky Tonk or Rowdy Roddy. i shall consult the kids, as they seem to know more about it than me. but if i consult them, then they shall expect me to play a game against them, and they shall be ruthless in the beating they administer to whatever character i select.

if what i consider to be my very good working relationship with the Japanese ever flourishes to the extent that someone off of Japan ever responds to my correspondence, i will try to breach the subject of why the 90s wrestling games they produced succeeded only in failing to promote class wrestlers.





be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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