PUBLISHER/DEVELOPER: Sega
RELEASE DATE: 06/28/91 – (JP), 06/1991 – (EU)
If Wrestle War seems oddly familiar, it’s because you may have played it on the Sega Smash Pack compilation released for the Dreamcast back in the day. Before that, though, Wrestle War was a Japanese and European exclusive for the Mega Drive. At first, you might wonder why Sega never released the game for the Genesis in the early ‘90s — a time when pro wrestling was super popular in North America and there weren’t that many competing genre games on the market. Then, you actually play the game and realize just how many brazen, lawsuit-baiting facsimiles of famous, real-world wrestlers are included in it. All of a sudden, the lack of a U.S. release becomes pretty obvious. Had Sega tried to release this thing in ‘91, they would’ve been sued into oblivion by the then-World Wrestling Federation for crass copyright infringement. And I’m sure the suits of Sega at America didn’t want to repeat the mistakes of Revenge of Shinobi, did they?
So Wrestle War is one of those nominal “lost games” that has some built-in appeal because of its controversial nature. Pretty much every character in the game is an easily identifiable ripoff of somebody, blatant even by early ‘90s video game standards. But we’ll cross that bridge when we get there. Let’s delve into Wrestle War‘s fundamentals first.
When you boot the game up, you’re presented with a couple of options. You can set time limits for matches, adjust the difficulty level and mess around with a sound effects test. There’s a one player mode and a two player mode, with the game telling you upfront that it’s a fairly bare bones package in terms of attacks. One button kicks, one button punches and one button instigates a grapple. It’s about as simple as it gets. Indeed, Pro Wrestling on the NES from five or six years earlier had way more nuance and technical depth to it than this game.
You know how most wrestling video games let you select a character? Well, that’s not the case in Wrestle War. You’re stuck playing a generic character (whose hair color, blond or black, appears to be determined by which regional version of the cart is wedged into your console) who almost looks like a castaway from one of the River City Ransom games. Visually, the game has a very Technos vibe to it – and to be fair, the sprites here are pretty large and detailed; more so than most officially licensed WWF games on the Genesis.
Your first match pits you against some random looking schlub with a punk rock Mohawk. Off the top of my head he doesn’t call to mind any real world wrestler, but he certainly looks like a mook you’d find in a game like Final Fight or Streets of Rage.
From the outset, this debut match establishes a couple of hard realities about Wrestle War’s combat system. Number one, punching and kicking is pretty much useless most of the time. If you’re too close to an enemy all of their strikes will land before yours and if there’s too much space between the two of you, you’ll be socking nothing but air molecules. Now, there does seem to be a pixel-wide sweet spot on the canvas where your ranged attacks do land, and if you’re able to exploit that you can end pretty much any match in a matter of seconds. Of course, the odds of you getting punched or kicked out trying to find said exploit is about ten times likelier, though. Proceed with caution.
The grapple system is very unpredictable. You hit the C button to lock up with your opponent, then it turns into a carpal tunnel syndrome simulator as you mash buttons to “overpower” your adversary. If you prove triumphant, you hit your foe with a devastating power move like a piledriver or a suplex. But if you come up short, then it’s your turn to get body slammed or whipped into the ropes. Which brings us to the most irritating thing about the entire game … its camera.
Wrestle War does something I’ve never seen any other wrestling game do. When you send your opponent flying into the ropes (technically, it’s called an “Irish whip,” for reasons that are probably really racist), the perspective of the ring automatically shifts. The first time it happened I thought the cartridge glitched out on me. But nope, that’s actually a conscious design choice by the developers. That means every time a dude sprints across the ring, the positioning of the two wrestlers will flip flop. So if you’re closer to the top of the screen, all of a sudden you’ll be closer to the bottom of the screen. It always throws off your timing. Which is a major pain, because it usually keeps you from nailing your opponent with a counter move, like a dropkick or a shoulder toss. It’s so irritating that I intentionally avoided using the whip move at all. Probably not what the programmers had in mind when they were mapping out the game’s mechanics.
There’s a lot of routine pro wrestling stuff that’s NOT included in this game. For example, you can’t climb the top rope and do any high-risk aerial maneuvers, nor can you lock your opponent up in any submission moves and make them cry uncle. You’re pretty much stuck with about six or seven actual offensive maneuvers. Although I guess it is kinda cool that you can roll out of the ring and hit each other upside the head with … suitcases? Yeah, we’ll just say those are suitcases and roll with it.
The game itself is pretty short. As in, you can feasibly beat the whole thing in about half an hour. The “story” mode has you embarking across the United States to test your mettle against pro wrestlers clearly modeled after Hulk Hogan, the Road Warriors (or Legion of Doom, if you only watched the WWF when you were a kid), Bruiser Brody, Stan Hansen and lucha legend Mil Mascaras. My favorite opponent, though, has to be Mr. J, an absolutely shameless carbon copy of Jason Voorhees from all of those Friday the 13th movies. All that’s missing is the machete, for crying out loud!
So you blaze through those copycats and wannabes before doing battle with the big bad of the entire game, Grand Kong. He sorta looks like a skinnier version of Abdullah the Butcher, who already looks like an unused Punch-Out!! character come to life. You’ll get curb stomped the first couple of times, but once you figure out how to keep your distance (literally) and spam the downward stomp attack, pretty much all of the wrestlers become a cakewalk. Be forewarned, though: you may get a re-do if a match runs out of time without a victor. If you get pinned yourself, however, it’s an automatic game over, right back to the Sega logo startup screen.
Wrestle War is a port of a 1989 Sega arcade game of the same name. I’ve never played the coin-op version or even seen it out in the wild, but a quick playthrough over at the Internet Archive suggests that the MD port is pretty faithful to its source inspiration. Sure, the visuals are scaled down, but the central gameplay remains more or less the same.
Frankly, there weren’t a whole lot of good pro wrestling games on the Genesis. You had some subpar to just kinda OK WWF games, Saturday Night Slam Masters and a few Japanese only titles like Thunder Pro Wrestling Retsuden and that’s pretty much it. Compared to the SNES/Super Famicom library — which got legitimately awesome wrestling games like Super Fire Pro Wrestling X Premium and Zen Nippon Pro Wrestling 2 — the pickings for 16-bit Sega fans are quite slim.
I’m not 100 percent certain that Wrestle War is the absolute worst pro wrestling game on the Genesis/Mega Drive, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it is. The graphics are serviceable and the controls are mostly manageable, but the core gameplay and replay value just aren’t there at all — not even with its ho-hum two-player mode on the side. It’s an intriguing curiosity piece for hardcore wrestling fans, but even they will get bored by this game after an hour or so. No FOMO here, folks; this is one pseudo-sports title you can safely skip.
D