Hammerlock Wrestling (SNES)

 Also known as Tenryu Genichiro no Puroresu Revolution (which was also a tie-in with the excellently named 90s promotion WAR: Wrestle And Romance), Hammerlock Wrestling is a game I vaguely remember trying out back in the ancient days of DreamSNES. Something about it just caused me to bounce off of it (something I've identified and will get into later), but its unusual and very effective presentation did stick with me, so I went back to it decades later.

 

The thing that really stands out about Hammerlock when you start playing a match is that the screen is split into three horizontal areas: the middle shows the arena, and the little sprites of the wrestlers and referee inhabiting it, and the top and bottom areas showing big close-ups of each wrestlers. As the action gets underway and the actual match gets going, the middle part will sometimes be moved to the top or bottom, to allow for a big version of a move that's taking place in-ring, filling two thirds of the entire screen. It's a display of spectacle befitting pro wrestling! 

 

Even more impressive is that while you might expect the individual wrestlers to be represented in the larger scale animations by generic pugilists, but no: the entire roster of twelve wrestlers each has unique sprites at both sizes! Very impressive for a cartridge game released in 1994! In fact, this is generally a game that could only have been released at this time: eight-bit consoles would have a hard time with the three-way split-screen, never mind the huge animations, while this whole approach would have been pointless on more powerful consoles that could push polygons, and with them, offer moving cameras.

 

What's also interesting about the roster is that while it's mostly made up of the regular faces you expect from Japanese wrestling games of this era: copyright-friendly versions of Hulk Hogan, Big Van Vader, The Great Muta, and so on, a lot of them have been changed more than they usually are. Hogan's stand-in Sam Warhammer, for example, looks more like a red-bearded viking than an orange-skinned surfer guy. Also, it's a little unusual that there's no fake Jushin Liger in there, but there is a fake Lex Luger. And only one fake Road Warrior.

 

So, that thing that turned me away from the game in my teenage years? Well, like a lot of the better wrestling games, it attempts a Fire Pro-like timing-based system, but the problem is that it's not really clear exactly when you're supposed to make the input to successfully perform moves when going into a lock-up. I've somehow mangaed to win a few matches, though I can't do it consistently, and it seems like when I think I've figured out the timing, the next match begins and I'm getting it wrong every time once again. I'm not sure if it's a flaw in the design, its implementation, or (most likely) my playing, but it's frustrating.

 

Hammerlock Wrestling (or Genichiro Tenryu no Puroresu Revolution) is obviously a high-quality game, and I really wish I could figure out what it is that's stopping me from consistently pulling off moves successfully. As it is, though, I definitely think it's worth a try, at least, just to see a game with such an ambitious presentation. It really feels like that even though it was developed as a tie-in to an independent promotion, the developers wanted to make a game that stood out, looking bigger and more spectacular than the games put out by the likes of New Japan and WWF.

Robo Pit 2 (Playstation)

The original Robo Pit was a game that I rented multiple times back during the Playstation's heyday. Not alone, of course: Royal Video, the local video shop let you rent one game for two pounds, or two games for three pounds, so Robo Pit was usually the undercard to whatever game was the main event: Soul Blade or Klonoa or whatever it might have been. It was a very basic game in which you built a robot and had it fight against other robots (all built from the same pool of parts to which you had access) in arena battles to gradually make your way up the ranks.

 

It was the robot building that kept me coming back: the idea of character creation was so exciting to me back then that something even vaguely close to that got my interest (I was, of course, very disappointed when the creation feature that had been made so much of in magazine previews of Rival Schools wasn't included in the European version of that game. Furthermore, WWF Warzone's inclusion of a creation mode was so effective that it made a lifelong wrestling fan out of me!). Robo Pit 2 keeps that customisation, but has an all-new structure, and an actual plot!

 

The plot is that the arena from the first game has been taken over by evil robots, and you have to liberate it by fighting them all. But you do so by selecting a path through a semi-linear map instead of a list of ranked opponents, so it's a little different. There's also occasional cutscenes set in a moody prerendered techno-dystopia world slightly reminiscent of Final Fantasy VII or Galerians. Slightly. These maps are made up of concentric circles, with the opponents getting more difficult towards the centre, where lies a boss. At least, I know the first one does, and I assume later ones are the same.

 

The problem is that the first boss represents a massive step up in difficulty compared to everything that came before: its standard weapons are more powerful than any you've faced up to that point, plus it can perform wrestling moves on you, which is something of which the game has made no prior mention. These wrerstling moves are, of course, devastating (wrestling is the strongest fighting style, as we all know). He even tells you in his victory quote to train and come back to fight him again. The audacity of an action game explicitly telling you to grind! Anyway, I spent almost an hour after reaching him grinding (which means fighting the exact same few opponrnts over and over) and gaining two levels. He still annihilated my robot without breaking a robo-sweat.

 

If the actual game itself was fun enough, or if the way it looked was a little more charming (while the low-poly robot models look really cool and toyetic when the camera focusses on them for their win poses, in battle they just kind of look like indistinct brightly-coloured blobs), I might have given Robo Pit 2 a bit more of a chance, maybe ground another level or two to see if I could get any further. But it doesn't. It's a somewhat silly-looking game that's very repetitive to play, and the designers, in an effort to squeeze more runtime out of it, have given it a structure that only serves to exacerbate that repetition. There's still something about this game and its forebear that make me want to root for them, but unfortunately, I do have to be honest and say that Robo Pit 2 isn't worth your time, and worse than that, it won't respect your time.