Kinnikuman Nisei - Shinsedai Choujin vs. Densetsu Choujin (Gamecube)

 So, this game did get a western release, under the title Ultimate Muscle: Legends Vs. New Generation. I played the Japanese version instead, though, since I read somewhere that the western publishers removed the character creation mode. Now I'm not so sure whether that's true or not, but really it doesn't matter much either way, since the character creation mode isn't very good.

 

I had high hopes for it, since a character creation mode in such a cartoony-looking game seemed like it could be really interesting. Unfortunately, you just select a head, torso, arms, and legs from a pretty small selection, and they're all obviously meant to be matched together in sets, and mixing them up really does look like you just mixed up parts from different characters. Also, you can't use them in the game's main single player mode, only in one-off fights.

 

It's a simple wrestling game based on the anime Kinnikuman Nisei/Ultimate Muscle, obviously, and it really is very simple: there are no pinfalls or submissions, you're just trying to get your opponent's health to zero in every match. Furthermore, the game is mostly controlled using just the analogue stick for movement, and three buttons: strike, grapple, and jump. Each character has a short string of strike attacks, a couple of wrestling moves done with the grapple button, as well as a mid-air strike and grapple each. There's also a super meter, and by holding the left trigger, you can expend one segment of meter to perform a more powerful strike, two segments for a more powerful grapple, or all three to perform a big super move, which is like its own little cutscene where you do some big crazy impossible wrestling move on your opponent.

 

There's a ton of characters and stuff to unlock (including a gallery of photos of over four hundred keshigomu figures!), but the preblem is that all the characters feel the same when you play as them, and they only have very few moves, and it's pretty boring seeing the same couple of moves over and over during each match. Take into account that a single-player playthrough comprises five consecutive matches, and it's even worse. 

 

As it is, the game attempts to occupy a space between fighting games and wrestling games, but while each genre has its own complexities, this game kind of eschews both, leaving you with a great-looking, but repetitive and over-simple game. I can't even really recommend it for multiplayer, since the main skill you need is the ability to press the attack button before your opponent does. It's a shame, since it mostly feels okay to play and it has a lot of charm, but it's just so completely unexciting that it's not worth bothering with.

Pocket Pro Wrestling - Perfect Wrestler (Game Boy Color)

 Its strange that though handheld consoles in the nineties were often treated as lesser systems aimed at kids, and filled with licensed games of wildly varying quality, wrestling games were relatively rare compared to home consoles. In fact, GameFAQs only lists six wrestling games for the Game Boy Color, and one of them is WWF Betrayal, which isn't even a wrestling game, it's a beat em up starring wrestlers. 

 

Pocket Pro Wrestling is the only one of the six that isn't a licensed tie in to a promotion that now belongs to WWE, so there's no tie-ins to Japanese promotions, nor are there any Fire Pro games. But that's okay, since the wrestlers in this game are all thinly-disguised stand-ins for wrestlers popular in Japan in the nineties, and it plays kind of like a Fire Pro game. Like in Fire Pro, you perform moves by pressing a button at the exact right frame in the lockup animation that occurs when the wrestlers walk into each other.

 

There's a few differences to Fire Pro, but they don't do much to make Pocket Pro stand apart. The most obvious is that the ring is shown as a regular square instead of a diagonal one, and that doesn't really affect game at all. The next most obvious change is one that actually kind of harms the game: there's only one button for moves, as opposed to at least two, sometimes three, in the Fire Pro games. I guess this is linked to the fect that there aren't actually many moves in the game overall, with each wrestler having six main standing throws from a pool of maybe ten or so? 

 

Another thing there's a conspicuous lack of is match types, as there's actually only one: singles match. There are a few modes: there's a championship mode where you fight every other wrestler, and can continue or use passwords to pick up where you left off if you lose, a survival mode, which is the same but without continues or passwords, and a King of Fighters-style team battle mode, where two teams of three wrestlers fight one at a time. I think I'm being a little too harsh on a low budget Game Boy Color game, but when a game is so similar to an already-existing series of games, it's hard not to compare them, and to point out the ways in which the imitator falls short.

 

But, in its historical context, Pocket Pro Wrestling actually comes off a lot better. While the modern player in search of handheld wrestling fun would just put the Playstation's Fire Pro Wrestling G on their emulation device of choice, that wasn't an option in 2000, when this game was released, and there wouldn't be an actual handheld Fire Pro until the following year, on the GBA. So, at the time of its release, Pocket Pro Wrestling was actually the best handheld wrestling game money could buy (as far as I can tell, at least). So while there's not much reason to play it now, besides historical curiosity, at the time, it would've been a great game to get your hands on. Shame it was never released outside Japan, really.

Championship Wrestling (C64)

A few weeks ago, me and a friend wondered if there was a World of Sport Wrestling game on C64. There wasn't, but in looking for one, a screenshot of this game caught my eye, with its isometric view and diamond-shaped ring being reminiscent of the Fire Pro games, the best series of wrestling games there's ever likely to be. Does "reminiscent" still apply, when this game predates Fire Pro by a couple of years? Anyway, I obviously wasn't expecting anything anywhere near as good as any entry in that series, but I still had to satisfy my curiosity by playing it.

The out-of-game presentation is pretty bad, even for a game from 1986. That picture at the top of this review with the plain text on a blank blue background is the actual title screen, and all the menus look like that. Also, there's no nice artwork on the loading screens, either: they're just black. Luckily, this is more than made up for by the in-game graphics since, as you can see in the rest of the screenshots, it looks pretty good. Even more impressive is that the animation isn't bad, either!

As for how it plays: it's not terrible. I've definitely played significantly worse wrestling games. As was a standard workaround on these old microcomputers with one-button controllers, you can do different moves by holding the button and pressing different directions. There seems to be maybe eight moves per wrestler, too (though obviously, there's a lot of move-sharing): while the wrestlers are roaming free, you do punches, kicks, and so on, but you can also get your opponent into a headlock, from which you perform a couple of throws. There doesn't seem to be any mat wrestling, though, as pressing the button next to a downed opponent goes for a pin, instead.

The main problem the game has is a lack of variety: though there's eight wrestlers that all look different to each other, they all feel the same when you play as them. Plus, there's only one match type, and there's actually only seven wrestlers, since if you select Zeke Weasel as your own wrestler or your opponent, the game will crash while loading. After ten minutes of play, I was already bored, and after half an hour, I was ready to never play it again.

It's pretty obvious that I can't really recommend this game, but I do feel a bit guilty about it. It wouldn't be a surprise to learn that this was the best wrestling game available in the UK in 1986. It's not 1986 now, though, and you can get literally hundreds of much, much better wrestling games instead of it.

All Star Pro Wrestling (PS2)

I'm sure you're aware that there are plenty of older games that look a lot better, and ever have certain graphical effects that only work properly on an older CRT TV. Some, like old rhythm games are actually borderline unplayable on flatscreen TVs, for various reason to do with refresh rates and the like. However, All Star Pro Wrestling is the first videogame that feels like it was made to not only be played on a CRT TV, but more specifically a black and white one from the 1970s.

This is despite the fact that most of the wrestlers featured in it were current at the time of its release in 2000 (though, since i know nothing about Japanese wrestling of that period, I can't tell you anything about them). It's just so incredibly austere in its presentation that it looks and feels like a tv broadcast from three decades earlier than its release date. If Jim Cornette were ever to play a wrestling videogame (despite his hatred for "videogame marks"), this would be the one he'd play. There's no gimmick matches(not even tag matches! There's nothing but singles matches on offer), barely any music, no finishing moves, no flashy entrances, absolutely no concessions towards the idea that wrestling is a form of entertainment and not a legitimate sport.

The game itself makes no concessions towards being entertainment, either, being an absolute chore to actually play. There's the controls, first of all, which are entirely mapped to the analogue sticks. You move with the left stick, and attack (or sometimes run to the ropes, if that's what your wrestler feels like doing) with the right stick. To grapple, you press L3 and R3 together, while standing so close to your opponent you're already touching them. When while grappling, you use the right stick to do a move, which will almost always be a snapmare, an Irish whip, or a backdrop, no matter what you do or which wrestler you're controlling. (Note: there is apparently an alternate control scheme that uses the buttons, but it also uses the universally terrible touch sensitivity feature the PS2's face buttons had that was so bad that Sony asked developers not to use it after a couple of years).To make matters worse, all this happens so slowly that you'd think the wrestlers were submerged in a vat of treacle.

This game was part of the second half of Squaresoft's "experimental period", which started on the Playstation with the likes of Einhander, Racing Lagoon and Tobal No. 1, and ended in the early days of the Playstation 2 with the likes of this, Driving Emotion Type-S and The Bouncer. You've probably figured out by now that I do not recommend it, and it might even be the worst 3D wrestling game I've ever played. There must have been an audience for slow, boring wrestling games in turn-of-the-century Japan, however, as it somehow sold enough copies to get two sequels.

Royal Pro Wrestling (3d0)

There's a long and fine tradition in Japanese wrestling games, most famously seen in the Fire Pro series, whereby the roster will be full of real life wrestlers but with their names changed to some silly nonsense, and that's apparently enough to get around any copyright laws. (And I'm sure you're aware that this was a common practice in arcade games in general throughout the 80s, leading to difficulties when it comes to modern rereleases of games like Outrun and Afterburner, as copyright holders begin to notice that their stuff was being used without permission). Anyway, Royal Pro Wrestling carries on that tradition in amazing style, with names like Mike Warrior, Golden Lips and Underdise the Morgan. My favourite is the name they've given Randy Savage, though: Andy Savage. Amazing!

Anyway, Royal Pro Wrestling plays like any typical Japanese wrestling game of the 16-bit era (except the Fire Pro series, which were always a class above the rest): you lock up by walking into each other, then hammer the buttons and direction in the hopes of performing a move. You've also got running moves, top rope moves, and there's always exactly one chair at ringside waiting to be used as a weapon. Some characters even have planchas where they jump over the ropes to land on an opponent outside the ring! The roster of wrestlers is pretty big, and split into American, Japanese and Mexican wrestlers (though most of the wrestlers in the Mexican section are just masked Juniors from Japan, like Tiger Mask and Jushin Liger). There's also four arenas, one for each country, and another, extravagant one that's inside some kind of ACropolis-style building.

You might have noticed the slight dig at the game in the last paragraph, saying it's a typical 16-bit game when it's on a 32-bit console. The thing is though, it really does play, and mostly also look like a SNES game, plus there are only two match types: single and tag, with no rule modifications or anything like that. There is a concession to the new hardware, though: the presentation, outside of the matches themselves, is excellent. If you play career mode, each match is preceded by a great-looking animated and voice-acted promo from your opponent (though the voice acting is awful, which lets the game down a little). There's also really great comic-style artwork for each wrestler on the versus screen, and a very short FMV clip of the outside of each arena, to add a bit more flavour. Come to think of it, there's some nice little touches in-match, too: during tag matches, the referee will argue with illegal wrestlers if they don't get out of the ring, and wrestlers whose real-life counterparts have managers will have them at ringside in this game too.

Royal Pro Wrestling is far from being a classic, but it is a very well-made game, as well as being the only wrestling game (as far as I know) on the 3d0. If you're curious, it wouldn't hurt to give it a shot. And if you need a break from actually playing, there's also a massive gallery of concept art in the menu, which is interesting, and the game being what it is, essentially a load of 90s wrestling fanart.

Monster Puroresu (PC Engine)

This game is a bit of a curiosity: it's a turn-based strategy wrestling game! Mechanically, it has more in common with Pokemon than Fire Pro Wrestling. This actually put me off the game when I first discovered it a few years ago: I saw the title and started it, expecting a probably-awful wrestling game along the lines of

Beast Wrestler or King of the Monsters, and greeted by many little boxes of Japanese text, I instantly turned it off.
Years later, I decided to give it another try and I'm glad I did! Although you'll be missing out on little, unimportant things like the plot or the names of moves, most of the stuff actually related to playing the game is expressed through numbers (and in case you're wondering, the plot, according to a website I found long ago is that an evil demon has taken control of the world, and a human scientist has created a group of mutant wrestlers to fight the demon's forces and liberate humanity).
Each wrestler has five stats: HP, ST, MP, SP, and GT. HP and MP are self-explanatory, serving the same purposes they serve in every game. SP isn't so obvious, and its purpose is still somewhat obscure to me. To explain ST and GT first requires explaining how the game works.
The matches are turn-based, and each turn both wrestlers select a move from their repetoire. Moves come in four categories: hold, hit, power and magic. On selecting a move, each wrestler also recieves a

semi-randomly generated number, the wrestler with the highest roll is the attacker and the other defends. Each move also has its own power rating, higher rated moves do more damage, but tend to get lower rolls. The ST stat also determines how likely a wrestler is to get higher rolls, and GT is a temporary stat, which is increased when a wrestler takes damage, and it can be decreased when selecting a move to slightly increase your chance of getting a high number. After moves have been selected, there's a few seconds during which the players tap button I as quickly as possible to affect a blue/red bar determining how much damage the attacker's move does. This repeats until one wrestler's HP is reduced to zero.
While all this is happening, the top half of the screen depicts the action. Although the animation is pretty limited, the sprites are huge and the animation that there is does do a good job. Moves look painful, even when there's very silly cartoonish things going on like heads being pulled off and limbs exploding. The

wrestlers also all have very expressive faces, and amusing reactions to dismemberment and pain, whether their own or their opponents.
Monster Puroresu is a pretty fun game, though it definitely isn't for everyone. If you like any combination of wrestling, monsters and strategy, and you don't mind wading through lots of Japanese text, you should probably give it a try.

Stardust Suplex (SNES)

If you know me, you probably know I like wrestling quite a bit, and women's wrrestling even more so! Unfortunately, the time at which women's wrestling was most popular was about 20 years ago, so not many games get made about it any more. There's the Rumble Roses series, which plays pretty well, and is excellently presented, but it also has a really seedy undercurrent of objectification in a genre that should be about the opposite, and you can play as women in the WWE games, but they seem to go out of their way to  discourage doing so.

It feels bad knowing there'll never be a super-awesome Ice Ribbon or Shimmer videogame. By contrast, Stardust Suplex gets it right. The atmosphere is excellent thanks to little details like how before each match, you see the wrestlers wearing the fancy and elaborate entrance costumes that were (and continue to be) a characteristic part of joshi puroresu. For a game released so early in the life of the genre, Stardust Suplex has a pretty decent amount of match types and play modes. There's an elimination battle royal for up to 4 players, a versus mode with single and tag matches, and the main single player mode, that can be played as singles or tag matches, with the tag matches also allowing for two player co-op play. The wrestlers all have a lot of personality, too. From those entrance costumes, to the fact that they all look distinct without having lazy stereotypical gimmicks, and they all even have their own taunts and victory poses. There's also some kind of dialogue between matches in the main single player mode, but unfortunately, the language barrier gets in the way of my enjoying that. They're all fictional, but it's the Fire Pro kind of fictional, where they're blatantly supposed to be real wrestlers with slightly different names. THe most obvious examples here being Hell Takano and Raja Tongo, two characters who bear suspicious resemblence to real life wrestlers Bull Nakano and Aja Kong. Luckily, going along with all the other good things i've had to say about this game so far, it actually plays well too! It's not slow or stiff, and though the grappling doesn't have the precision of the Fire Pro games, it doesn't feel completely broken. The only real problem I've had is that I haven't been able to work out how to tag out in tag matches. But other than that, the game's a lot of fun to play. I'd say it's even better than Cutie Suzuki no Ringside Angel! I haven't played Fire Pro Joshi All-Star Dream Slam yet, so I won't go as far to say it's the best old-time women's wrestling game.
As an extra note, the reason the screenshots are laid out strangely in this post is because the new blogger interfact has made it impossible to move them  vertically. THANKS GOOGLE GREAT JOB.

Cutie Suzuki no Ringside Angel (Mega Drive)

Before the Fire Pro series came along in the early 1990s*, wrestling games were kind of awful. They'd be stiff, awkward affairs in which victory seemed to be down to luck as much as skill. I was surprised, then, to play this game and find out it's actually pretty great!
It's based on (and starring) real-life wrestler Cutie Suzuki (information you may have already gleaned from the title), though all the other wrestlers in the game are fictional. I assume someone at Asmik is a metal fan, since one of the characters is named "Helloween I. Sato" and another "Megadeath Saito". It's actually the second wrestling game on a Sega console that I know of to be based around a real-life female wrestler (the other one being "Gokuaku Doumei Dump Matsumoto" for the Master System, which was released as generic old "Pro Wrestling" in the west, as well as having all the characters turned into men. Booo.). Nowadays there aren't any, which is a shame. A game based around the Ice Ribbon or Shimmer promotions would probably be a day-one purchase for me. OH WELL.
Anyway, as I said at the start of the review, the game is a lot better than I was expecting. In single player mode, you pick a wrestler** and then go through a series of tournaments and leagues, winning trophies until you get to the final "Grand Champion" tournament. Well, I assume it's the final one. It's as far as I've been able to get so far, anyway.
During the match, you can do typical wrestling attacks and moves, including jumping onto a downed opponent from the top rope, which can even be done if your opponent is lying on the floor outside the ring! You have to be pretty quick to do it, but it looks awesome, does tons of damage andis incredibly satisfying. The wrestlers' health is shown by their portraits at the top of the screen: the less happy they look, the closer they are to losing the match, especially if they're shaking. When your opponent is looking their most unhappy, the music will change to a faster and more dramatic tune, and if you can get a pin at this point, you've pretty much won the match.
There's even a primitive form of running commentary, but only in text form. In the corner of the screen, a relatively normal looking guy, accompanied by one of his guest hosts (including a dinosaur, Colonel Sanders and a guy who speaks in nonsensical engrish) will constantly be talking, all in japanese unfortunately.
In summary, this is a really fun and cool game that's a lot better than I was expecting and definitely a lot better than most of it's contempories in the genre.

*Although the Fire Pro series started in 1989, it didn't really kick off until the SNES games a few years later (in my opinion).
**PROTIP: Press C to see their names. Why aren't they displayed by default? Who knows?

Simple 1500 Series Vol. 52: The Pro Wrestling 2 (Playstation)

This game is a bit of a curious oddity now, since it was made by Yukes, shortly before they made the first WWF Smackdown game for THQ. It doesn't have any licence, obviously, so, when faced with the chance to create any kind of colourful, outlandish characters the likes of wshich pro wrestling is famous for, Yukes chose to fill the roster with... lots of pale, balding men in underpants. And a martial artist woman.
Other than that, though, thje game plays pretty well. As you would expect from a budget game, it doesn't have a ton of modes, just an arcade-style single player mode, exhibition matches, and a create a wrestler mode.
I didn't save anything from the CAW mode, but i had a quick look, and you could just mix and match heads, bodies and torsos.
The single player mode has you choosing a character and then having a series of fights against the other guys.
In exhibition mode, you can create your own matches. There's only three to choose from, though: Single, 4-Way Dance, and Deathmatch.
Deathmatch mode is the coolest part of the game. It's a single match, but you can apply a bunch of crazy modifiers to it. You can choose any combination of normal rope/ electric barbed wire/no rope and normal mat/straw mat/concrete mat, as well as turning on and off Inferno mode, in which the ring is surrounded by flames, and the winner is the wrestler who throws their opponent out of the ring to a firey death. (Amusingly, you can still get out of the ring yourself, resulting in an instant loss). Having a match set to concrete mat/no ropes/inferno looks pretty cool!
An interesting thing about the game is the fact that a lot of the animations for moves and taunts are being recycled in yukes' WWE games to this day. Is that interesting or just insulting?
Anyway, this is a pretty fun game, despite its simplicity and boring cast.

Jushin Liger (1989) Ep. 1

I'll start with the most obvious thing to say about this show, that it inspired the gimmick of a great wrestler of the same name, who uses the cartoon's opening theme as his theme song to this day and who in turn later inspired a live action movie. That's pretty much why I wanted to watch this in the first place, having been a fan of the wrestler for a few years and all. If I'm honest, I wasn't really expecting very much from it.
I was pleasantly surprised! There is a lot to like about this show. Lots of action, it looks nice, dramatic music.
The show starts with some kid dreaming about being killed and eaten by big monsters, before being woken up by his dad. We find out the kid's name is Ken, and he then makes breakfast before going to school, and on the way to school, flips up the skirt of the girl he likes, insults her fat friend, and beats up his own fat friend. Classy.
During class something terrible happens outside! The giant head of Skullgreymon descends from the skies and unleashes a few giant monsters, who wreck the shit out of Tokyo. And this must be the most fragile Tokyo ever, since it takes less than a minute of monstering before it looks like a typical post-apocalyptic cartoon: dark skies, ruined skyscrapers, and so on.
The army turn up, and not only make their usual inept attempt at killing the monsters, they actualy make things worse, as when one of the monsters is hit by tank fire, it splits in two for some reason.
Anyway, more devastation goes on until Ken finally summons Jushin Liger, which only bears a slight resemblence to the wrestler, and looks more like a heavy metal version of Lord Zedd from Power Rangers. A hole opens in Liger's chest, that Ken flies into, before a bunch of bony cable things attach themselves to Ken. Jushin Liger is some kind of living giant robot made of muscle and bone or something. There's then a pretty long (and actually very good) fight scene with Liger beating up/killing the evil monsters, while the real villains also do plot stuff in their giant ship (that really does look like Skullgreymon's head). He usus martial arts more than wrestling, though. One bizzare highlight is that at one point, Ken decides he needs a weapon, and that since he's in a (sort of) giant robot called "Jushin Liger", he'll just summon a sword, and it's called "Liger Sword". And that works.
Liger defeats the monsters, the bad guys run away, episode ends.
As I said at the start, I wasn't expecting much from this show, only watching it out of curiosity, but it actually turned out to be really entertaining, and by the time the next episode preview came on, I really wanted to watch another episode! Unfortunately, as far as I know, this is the only episode that's been subtitled. One last thing: while watching this show, various little visual things reminded me a lot of Go Nagai, then when I looked up the release date on Wikipedia, turns out it was actually by him! Oh ho!