#WCW vs. nWo: World Tour | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

flowergirlmiwa · 11 months ago

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i had a poll asking if yal wanted me to post my wrestling video game reviews here so heres the first one its a review of the game WCW vs nWo World Tour for the N64. TL;DR this game especially for its time pretty much fucks i mean it's just a great game even if it doesn't have a season mode. AKI made awesome wrestling games

this was written in like 2019 as a potential youtube script so if it reads like a youtube script i was writing it to be a youtube script ok ty also i just put in some pictures so it's a little less drab ok ty again

Graphically, for 1997, World Tour looks pretty good… for the most part. The crowd is a strange flat texture that doesn’t necessarily even resemble a crowd, but it does its job, and reacts accordingly with the crowd noise. The wrestlers themselves generally look good, although body proportions can be totally off at times. Everyone appears to have the same height, meaning Rey Mysterio Jr. and The Giant stand practically shoulder-to-shoulder. It’s quite strange, but besides this, each wrestler has a decent approximation of their real-life look and attire for the era. That is, with the exception of the faces. Sometimes, the faces look good enough, and sometimes they just look totally off. For example, Rick Steiner looks okay, but Scott Hall just looks strange.

There are some strange quirks like the 'back spike' which can be seen every so often, as well as things like parts of a body disappearing from view in certain camera angles. All-in-all, the models themselves are rather detailed, and the faces kind of fall into the back of your mind while you’re playing anyway. Each wrestler in the game has four attires, clearly accounting for the possibility that 4 players would all want to play as the same character. While half of the time, this amounts to alternate colors, this feature is deeper than one may expect. For example, both Hogan and Sting feature their ‘classic’ look in alternate attires. The feature clearly wasn’t just an afterthought by the development team. (2024 edit: also the alternate colors are probably relatively accurate to real world gear they've worn for all i know)

Each wrestler has a drawn picture as their menu sprite, which sometimes looks great and sometimes just looks odd. It’s quite like the in-game faces in this way.

While the action plays out, the camera angle will often change to give a better or more exciting view of the moves being performed. At first, this may seem distracting, but as the camera angle typically reverts back to the same view by the time you’re back in control of moving your character, it just serves to make the match seem that much more dynamic.

Each wrestler has a variety of moves at their disposal, which I’ll get into later, but in general, these moves look GREAT. There is a lot of very fluid animation and the sheer variety of available moves goes to show that the developers were passionate about professional wrestling. Especially for the time, the animations in general are top notch. In addition, as wrestlers take damage, they will get visibly weaker, with arms clutching at pains in the chest and head, for example. This level of detail is above and beyond what one would expect from a product of this time. There are also a variety of fighting stances, taunts, etcetera for each wrestler, and the fictional wrestlers even get plenty of totally unique animations. Each character truly feels distinct, from their movesets down to their unique animations, even though they all control the same way.

There is one arena for each promotion in the game. These are generally unremarkable, and don’t really reflect any actual arenas, but the visual variety is nice. Each arena has differences such as turnbuckle colors and the size of the crowd. The Independent Union even has a very unique Japanese-style ring. Some may be disappointed that arenas such as the one for Monday Nitro were not included, but I’m just surprised the different promotions have this many differences in their arenas, and find them to be a worthy inclusion.

In terms of entrances, there… kind of aren’t any. I say ‘kind of’ as there are match introductions which play out as a name card and a brief taunt by your wrestler. It’s bare-bones, but it’s passable. (2024 edit: this is basically a truncated version of how Japanese wrestling promotions do wrestler introductions)

Let’s talk about sound. Like the arenas, the music in the game is pretty unremarkable. Unless you play the game a lot, a definite possibility in 1997, you probably won’t remember any of the songs after turning the console off. Most of the tracks have a rock ambiance to them, but they strike me more as Japanese video game music than, say, an edgy late 90s kind of rock you may expect based on the license. There are also no wrestler themes, or WCW-related themes included in the game. Each wrestler seems to have a single sound effect associated with them which they will use pretty much every time they do anything. Most of these are simple grunts, and they’re not, say, voiced by the original wrestler, so they’ll probably fall to the back of your mind as play continues. The aforementioned crowd noise provides a good backdrop to the action. The crowd will ‘ooh’ at moves during their setup, and cheer when the move lands. If a wrestler happens to take an attack to their dick area, the crowd will react with shock. It’s easy to overlook, but the crowd noise does a good job all the same.

Let’s talk roster. This is one MAMMOTH of a roster for the time. Forty-two total wrestlers, each with their own distinct look and move set, in 1997 no less, is nothing short of impressive. There is a caveat here, however. Many WCW fans were and will be disappointed to hear that only about half of the included characters are from WCW, and for that matter, the other half are entirely fictional. This is where the “World Tour” aspect comes into play. Ostensibly, this other half of the roster is foreign wrestlers with all sorts of strange personalities. Unfortunately, this means that for many people, there won’t be much appeal in half of the roster, as they are, for the most part, inherently uninteresting compared to the WCW wrestlers. However, there is a hidden secret behind these characters. Each one is actually a stand-in for a wrestler, mostly Japanese, which wouldn’t have made it into the game otherwise as they didn’t have the license to use those likenesses outside of Japan. So, if names like TAKA Michinoku, Genichiro Tenryu, The Great Sasuke and Abdullah the Butcher interest you, they made the game in the form of these fictional characters. The full moveset for these characters are based on these wrestlers. It’s a smart way to include these move sets, although it may still disappoint fans, as the character who receive these move sets usually bear little resemblance to the wrestler they represent. It is good to have these extra characters, though, as they make the roster fuller than it would otherwise be.

Back to the WCW guys, there’s 23 of them, and most of them are worthy inclusions. You have guys like Hogan, Hall, Nash, Syxx, Macho Man, DDP, Regal, Sting, Dean Malenko, Ric Flair… if you were a WCW fan at the time, you were pretty much guaranteed to have one of your favorites make the cut. I know most people would have preferred if the entire roster were WCW guys, but by all accounts, this is still a big, impressive roster.

In terms of general presentation, I think WCW vs. nWo World Tour does its job quite well. The biggest issue here for me is a tenuous link to the WCW license. There is, for example, no Monday Nitro arena. There aren’t any WCW belts seen in the game. There’s no commentary of any kind, there’s no music from WCW, there isn’t really anything that relates the game to the WCW license other than the included talent and the logo being seen in the WCW ring. And, of course, half the roster isn’t WCW guys. It’s not a huge deal, but it does give a bit of an air of having the WCW license put on in the final stages of development, which I’m not sure was actually the case.

A big roster doesn’t mean much if the gameplay doesn’t hold up, and fortunately, World Tour delivers. It has a gameplay system I’d describe as easy to pick up but complex to master. The A button provides access to grapples, and the B button handles strikes. The C buttons handle things like running, pinning and exiting the ring, while R and L provide ways to evade or block attacks. Unusually for a Nintendo 64 game, movement is controlled by the D-pad, with taunts and special attacks mapped to the analog stick. You can do a strong version of a strike or grapple by holding down the respective button. For grapples, there are 12 total moves that can be done from a front standing position alone, by using any combination of A or B, up and down, after getting your opponent into a hold with the A button. Moves are context sensitive, you can grapple your opponent at a turnbuckle, from behind, and there’s even different moves on a grounded opponent depending on what side they’re laying on and whether you go for the head or the legs. The opponent can also be irish whipped and attacked while you’re running. There’s a lot of different ways to deal damage to your opponent, and most importantly, all of this has a great flow to it. Reversals can be done by tapping R at the right time, there’s backing away to evade grapples with L, you can use a strike to interrupt the opponent or go for a surprise strong grapple when you catch them guarding too much. In addition, when both you and your opponent go for a grapple at the same time, a test of strength occurs. I’m not sure how this feature works, but it may just be that the winner is whoever can button mash the fastest. Speaking of button mashing, both pin falls and submissions work this way as well. Submissions will occur whenever a wrestler happens to have a submission move in their moveset, so it pays to explore each wrestler’s moveset thoroughly to find out where his best submissions are. The gameplay is a bit slow paced, but it does a fantastic job of emulating an actual wrestling match. As I’ve intimated, the game features simple controls with a lot of depth built in, for those who are interested in getting skilled at the game. There’s even unique maneuvers and moves that I haven’t mentioned, as there are just so many of them for seemingly every situation. Overall, I have no hesitations in saying that based on what I’ve covered already, WCW vs. nWo World Tour was the greatest wrestling game that had been released to America at the time of its release.

We can’t talk about gameplay without bringing up the Spirit meter. This shows how well your wrestler is doing, and is another way that the game emulates wrestling fantastically. When your wrestler is doing well, his Spirit meter will rise, and when it reaches its peak, you are allowed to do special moves. There are two ways to do special moves in this game, done by strong grappling an opponent from the front or back and using the analog stick. If your wrestler is getting beat down, his spirit meter will become smaller. However, much like a real wrestling match, a comeback can be initiated by turning the tide of the match into your favor, and this will inspire the Spirit meter to rise rapidly. The Spirit meter has a surprising amount of depth to it, much like the rest of the gameplay, it isn’t a simple bar you fill up to gain super attacks. Keeping a close eye on your Spirit meter is key to success.

You can go outside the ring and attempt to find weapons given to you by the crowd, but I haven’t found a way to bring these weapons into the ring. Unlike most aspects to the game, the weapons seem to be a bit of an afterthought. You can’t get disqualified, and I haven’t observed weapon attacks to do that much more damage than, say, a regular heavy strike. Additionally, you can cause your opponent to bleed if you have ‘realism’ set to ON. How this passed on a rated K to A game is beyond me, but it’s fun to see happen. As for how this happens, I’m not quite sure. It seems to just happen at random in my experience.

Believe me when I say this, this is a finely crafted game from a gameplay perspective, and it’s still quite fun to play to this day. That especially goes for multiplayer, which was a particular highlight for many people at the time. The Nintendo 64 was equipped with 4 controller ports out of the box, and as such, four players can battle in an all-out war in the battle royal mode. This works in an elimination style, although eliminated wrestlers still stick around and can mess with other players by grappling their feet.

In terms of match types, it’s pretty basic. There’s the standard one on one, tag team matches, a two on one handicap match, and the aforementioned battle royal. That’s all there is in terms of exhibition, but even having a battle royal match in the game made for a great plus to the total package in a time when players probably weren’t expecting things like cage and table matches. Speaking on the tag team matches, they are actually quite fun in this due to your partner’s ability to interrupt the action and help out, whether it be hitting or grabbing an opponent from the ropes, opening an opportunity for their partner to make an attack, breaking up pin attempts, or just jumping into the ring to kick ass. With two players against computers, this can be quite engaging, and I’d imagine it would be even more fun against a second team of players.

There are three other exhibition modes seen on the main menu, these being the eponymous WCW vs. nWo, League, and Tournament. The tournament mode is pretty self explanatory, although there is support for a tag team tournament as well. The league plays out a Round Robin style tournament, commonly seen in Japan. I’d imagine this would take quite some time to complete if you go with the maximum of eight wrestlers and have them all controlled by people. I wonder what was the last time someone actually did that. Hmm. In these modes, matches that include only computer players can be skipped and simulated. WCW vs. nWo mode pits teams of up to 5 against one another in a gauntlet format. One wrestler stays in until they are defeated. It goes on like this until one side has won. Your reward for all of these three modes is the same basic congratulations screen. These modes don’t add a lot to the game, but they certainly don’t take away anything either.

The main single player mode and your path to unlocking this game’s 6 hidden characters is League Challenge. Each promotion in the game has a series of battles to face en route to a championship opportunity. In each promotion, finishing the Heavyweight title run will reward you with a WCW character, most notably DDP and Randy Savage. There are also Tag Team and cruiserwight paths to try out. Upon completing all of the other challenges of a type, a new challenge in a new promotion will open up, allowing you to unlock the strangest characters in the game, Joe Bruiser and BlackWidow. BlackWidow is the only female character, but she works exactly like everyone else and there aren’t any kind of restrictions against fighting or even bloodying her. She does look a bit odd, though. Joe Bruiser, on the other hand, is a boxer who has no grapples to speak of, just a lot of different punches. It’s worth unlocking Bruiser just for how unique and strange he is as an inclusion. Sadly, the hidden promotion doesn’t also unlock a new hidden arena, as the promotion just uses the WCW arena. Once you have these two, you can consider this game finished.

League Challenge is a pretty straightforward series of matches with no flavor or cutscenes. In the end, you are rewarded with a simple trophy screen and another check mark on the list. Besides the unlockable wrestlers, there isn’t much if any reward, so the tag title paths are essentially pointless. It shouldn’t take very long for most players to unlock all of the hidden characters. The game allows you to pick the difficulty of your computer controlled opponents, from Easy to Medium to Hard, which may add a little spice to this. My biggest issue with this mode is how damn long some of them can take. Some of these championships will require what feels like an endless amount of battles to win, especially the WWW challenges. It gets a bit stale simply doing matches one after the other, so it may be better to chip away at these over time rather than try to get them all done as soon as possible. And as a small note, as Wrath and Glacier are unlocked by doing the fictional promotion Heavyweight paths, they are put onto the selection screen in those promotions. I would have expected them to be put with the WCW characters, but instead they stick out put next to all these fictional wrestlers. Just a bit odd.

Although I have been pretty positive with World Tour so far, there’s a couple of gripes I have with it. For one thing, having only front and back specials means some wrestlers like Hollywood Hogan are out in the cold. His leg drop is just a regular move which requires no preamble and doesn’t do much damage. You can still finish a match by using it, but as it’s not contextualized as a special, it feels a bit odd. As well, Hogan’s actual front special is… a chokehold? Some wrestlers don’t have entirely accurate specials, either, with Nash famously doing a not-Outsider’s Edge, for example. As the moves are generally on point, seeing some guys lacking in terms of accurate specials is a bit disappointing. This also contributes to the ‘not-quite-WCW-enough’ feel that the game has. Another thing that may be an issue to some is that it is impossible to save your progress without a Memory Pak. All it does is save your settings and the League Challenges you’ve defeated, but this means if you don’t own a Memory Pak, you will have to unlock all the characters you want to use every time you turn on the game. Saving via the Memory Pak wasn’t a totally uncommon thing back in 1997, and most N64 fans will most likely have one or two laying around, but it’s worth noting nonetheless.

WCW vs. nWo World Tour is a very solid game. While it may feel rather bare bones by today’s standards, it was revolutionary for the time and basically wrote the book on how 3D wrestling games should work in the future. It’s a hell of a lot better than contemporary games such as WWF War Zone, and is still a fun time today. With no creation aspects and a simple arcade mode for single player content, wrestling fans may find themselves uninterested after a while. The gameplay is the main star here, however, and with a big roster, good graphics for the time, a selection of unique arenas and the famous battle royal mode, World Tour stands up to this day as a good wrestling game, and a great starting point for the AKI/THQ wrestling game series.

+Revolutionary, skill-oriented gameplay +Large roster including not just WCW but foreign wrestlers as well under aliases, each with their own unique moveset +Stellar animation work along with solid graphics for its time +4-player Battle Royal and a variety of side modes such as tournaments give the game multiplayer replay value -Single-player League Challenge mode is no-frills arcade style, with little in the way of personality, which gets repetitive -More WCW names could have been included -Saves need to be done with a Memory Pak -Not a lot of content outside of the standard Exhibition matches -Some wrestlers don’t have their accurate finishing moves, either because of a wrong move choice, or because their finishing move doesn’t fit one of the 2 Special move types included

Fake Sting here is playing the Japanese equivalent to this game, Virtual Pro Wrestling 64

#my post #wcw vs nwo world tour #long post

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flowergirlmiwa · 1 year ago

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My nostalgic experiences with the original Super Smash Bros on N64 I alluded to in this post

Sometime before the gamecube released, I rented super smash bros from my local momnpop video rental store. I had little familiarity with most of the characters, I probably only wanted to try it because I saw Pikachu and Mario. Kirby really stood out to me despite never hearing of him before because he could steal the abilities of other characters. And that's cool. At this time I had no idea you could play versus by yourself, I thought I could only play 1P Mode. Even so, I thought it was a really cool game, I might have even rented it multiple times.

When Melee came out, I tried it on demos and was pretty blown away by the tiny glimpses I got at the next gen-- IS THAT BOWSER??? Yeah pretty much all I knew about Melee until around 2005 was that it had some kind of adventure mode and Bowser and peach. I didn't get a gamecube though I got a Dreamcast.

In 2003 I made friends with a kid who lived in the apartment complex next to my dad's house and he had Super Smash Bros., though it couldn't save. I'm not sure exactly when, but he ended up giving me this cartridge along with several wrestling games, most notably WCW vs nWo World Tour (an incredible game). Now Kirby was firmly established as my main and we spent hours playing versus matches. I actually better remember playing games like Spawn In the Demon's Hand and Sonic Adventure 2 with him though

I even looked up how to unlock more characters online, learning about Ness for the very first time. I had only attempted to beat the game on Very Easy lmao. It was tough but I do remember getting him back then, of course the save would wipe itself. When they moved and I retained the cartridge, I would bring it out every now and then and now have an endpoint: unlocking Ness. Usually I'd unlock all the characters, beat 1P Mode with Ness, smile, then turn off the game and leave it for a few weeks to do it again

In 2004, my mom started dating some guy who had two kids. I was expected to become friends with the younger kid, but I quickly hit it off with the older brother instead. He had a GameCube too, but I think his only game was Star Fox Adventures, which he had 100% competed. At this point, I desperately wanted to try Melee and wanted to rent it and play it on his GameCube, but this would not come to pass

We had a sleepover where we watched Adult Swim and played N64 games like Banjo Kazooie and Smash. This was my first time playing Banjo Kazooie since renting it once several years prior, and it really revitalized my interest in the series. It ended up being one of my hyperfixations eventually and I don't think this would have happened without getting to play it so much at that sleepover and see areas I hadn't before.

This was where I learned that you can play versus mode with computers, and you can even have computers face each other. Maybe. Could have been 2003. Either way, I would go on to use this to do stuff like tournaments between CPUs or use them to play out little stories. At the sleepover we made up a story and would use smash to act it out, usually using the CPU as a PVE element. Idk that's just the kind of stuff we would do. Most memorable to me were the 99 Stocks wars on Sector Z.

games I wish I had when I was a kid!

Yu-Gi-Oh The Eternal Duelist Soul

This was one of the best selling games on the GBA, but I got Dark Duel Stories on GBC instead. Eventually I got 7 Trials to Glory, a mixed bag of a game I nonetheless hold dear to my heart, but I wish I had EDS as a kid. EDS is the perfect game to be the first YGO game on GBA. The spelltraps are massive blowouts, caveman Yu-Gi-Oh is in full effect, and the cardpool is both small and nostalgic. EDS (or the original Japanese release) was the first video game that actually tried to follow the rules of the real world OCG/TCG card game and it did a pretty good job along with a clean presentation, great music and flavorful decks to grind against. Plus the packs you pull from are mostly based on real Japanese card sets! Basically I admire a lot about what this game did in 2002 and in a potential world where I got it alongside my GBA SP in 2003 I would have been set for years. Instead I got... Dark Duel Stories in late 2003 around the time I got my GBA SP, and that game is .. not as worth investing time into. Oh yeah and it has a cute calendar system with weekly matches at the duel shop and oooo it's just such a cute game!

Goldeneye 007

I didn't have a lot of N64 games as a kid, but out of all my regrets on the console, I easily missed out the most not owning Goldeneye. Now I can appreciate it as basically the Super Mario 64 of first person shooters and imagine that, even though I only owned one controller, those levels would have kept me coming back again and again obsessively for hours. I can just imagine how I would have organically find the island on Dam by myself and wondered what was out there. I never had that chance

Super Smash Bros Melee

Throughout the early 00s I had various nostalgic experiences playing the original Super Smash Bros, and eventually I craved very dearly to play it's sequel. Literally all I could tell you is that it had (Scott the Woz voice) "a freaky STORY MODE! now that's cool!" and you could play as Bowser. It looked so damn cool but I didn't have a GameCube. I would have dreams about playing this game I knew very little about. I actually can guarantee I read about the Sonic and tails in melee rumor before I had seen more than an hours worth of gameplay in my life (all through playing demos in 2002).

When did I actually get a GameCube? 2007. I actually remember visiting Nintendo World NY in 2006 right before release of the Wii and playing Melee on one of their demo kiosks (and wind waker for the first time ever, notably). I got my hands on a GameCube in summer 2007 thanks to a friend of my dad's and pretty much the first thing I did was go to the still surviving Hollywood Video in The City and rent melee. Now considering I was 12 the first time I got to extensively play melee and really enjoy it, you could say I was still a child and that's true. I wish I somehow had a GameCube around 2004 and got to play it then though. Look, things felt different in my life then, it wasn't the same kind of feeling to me. By the time I got to play it I didn't really have that childish exuberance and excitement. Plus I got a Wii that same year for Christmas so my overall excitement for the GameCube was muted lol.

The Simpsons: Hit and Run

I would have gobbled this up as a kid even if not the biggest fan of the simps, if I had gotten this at release for PS2 I could imagine I would have spent many hours playing it

Pokemon Stadium 2

As a kid I desperately wished I had this game and rented it a bunch of times. When I discovered you could emulate N64 I spent most of my time doing so playing this game. I eventually got my own real copy around 2019 but considering I would leave the first game on for days on end I would have loved to have had stadium 2 as a kid. Plus it actually has single player content and provides plenty to people without use of a transfer pak too! I was fascinated by the updates as a kid renting the game

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