NES Pro Wrestling

Review by Loc

There have been so many wrestling video games, and some of them have been sooo good. The first WCW game for N64 was easily the greatest thing I played on that console for months. Ah, but before the days of polygon goodness, there was the 8 bit world of NES, and nothing entertained better than the generic sounding Pro Wrestling. Just how good was Pro Wrestling? It had features that later games often failed to capture and delivered a simplified, yet challenging gameplay system.

Let's start with the grappling system, one of the biggest challenges to any wrestling game. Limited by the era of a control pad and two buttons, Pro Wrestling delivered an intuitive and nuanced fighting system. Simple exchanges were punches and kicks, but once you grabbed your opponent, it was a race to execute a move. Pushing a direction and hitting the A or B button produced different moves. From suplexes to piledrivers, you had quite a repetoire at your disposal.

But that's not all! You had additional lariat moves, attacks you performed by running off the ropes. Sometimes, a well-placed clothesline is just so damn satifying. What about the ringposts? Of your course you could climb the turnbuckles and deliver a top rope maneuver. There was even outside-the-ring antics. Really, NES Pro Wrestling let you do all that you could have wanted in the 8-bit era.

Moving on to the wrestlers, there's nothing more important than the personalities you can control. For NES Pro Wrestling, the characters were fake, but based on some real-life counterparts. As a kid, I had no idea who they were referring to, so Starman was simply the pink dude with a star on his face and King Slender was the dude with the sweet backbreaker finisher. Each of these characters looked the same except for the color schemes and heads. But I gotta say, the Amazon did look like a piranha head was stuck on a wrestler's body, so kudos.

Each of these characters also had special moves, signature moves reserved just for them. Thus, Fighter Hayabusa was the only guy who did the Back Brain Kick, and Starman had the Sommersault Kick. The grappling system was simple in that special moves usually just replaced a standard move, so no learning new things. But I still have to commend the AI involved, as not all moves were created equal, especially something like King Slender's backbreaker. You had to wear your opponent down a bit before you could bust out huge moves like that or the pile driver. Otherwise, you got yourself reversed into a painful counter. Ouch.

Don't get me wrong, this wasn't a perfect game. There were no life meters, so you had to guess how tired your opponent was. There was a crazy sounding buzzer when you beat your opponent to near death, that was always nice to hear. If I recall correctly, a couple back suplexes followed by three backbreakers and that screaming buzzer went off like clockwork!

Plus, beating the game was damn near impossible. First, you worked your way up to a title match by winning 5 in a row. Once you won the championship, and it was a trophy, not a belt??, you had to defend the title 10 times in a row. Let's say you've now completed your 15 match win streak, you get to the fight the hidden boss: The Great Puma. The bastard had every special move, which kinda sucked. But what sucked more was his near invincibility. Trying to wear him down in the 5 min time limit was almost impossible. Either you got the cheap win by getting him disqualified from 20 seconds outside the ring. Or you had the NES Advantage joystick, which allowed you to crank on the Turbo button and win every grapple...I was poor and did not own said joystick...I am still sad about it.

Yet, for it's time, Pro Wrestling really captured the must-haves of a wrestling game so well. Nice big move-set, simple-not-stupid grappling system, open ring and outer-ring antics, fun characters, it was all very enjoyable. This was the precursor to the later wrestling games and it did itself proud. Out of the required 10 match winning streak, NES Pro Wrestling drops a stunner on 8 jabronis! Oh hell yeah.