A while back when I did my movie review for The Wrestler I admitted straight up that I had a huge pro-wrestling phase in my middle school and early high school years, and at the center of it were Japanese Developer AKI's wrestling games for Nintendo 64 that culminated with...
Day 4: Your Guilty Pleasure Game
WWE: No Mercy
Here's the thing: As a 25 year old man, I'll now admit straight up that pro wrestling is a bizarre and mostly juvenile exercise mostly consisting of people yelling at stereotypes while they actually destroy each other for a fake fight, but I don't regret so ever the hours that I put into this game and it's predecessors (they did 1 other WWF game, 2 WCW games before that, and some other games with no actual wrestling federation licenses that I think were Japan only). The game did a great job of combining a system that was intuitive and fun to play and that actually pretty well resembled the "sport." This nonsense came out just a couple years earlier, and even though they seem to work through a lot of the actual moves in that video, (which are completely random button combinations) you can usually do just fine mashing the punch button. In No Mercy, you had striking moves that you used with B, and then with A you could try and either execute a weak or strong grapple depending on how long you held the button down from which you could do one of 8 other moves from each type by hitting A or B and one direction. The other player can try and time hitting one of the shoulders right to counter either the strike or the grapple. It also just kind of ran smoothly. In a lot of wrestling games of that era, you tended to have little to know idea who you were facing, you'd clip through people a lot, you'd just kind of fall down instead of attacking a guy on the ground... stuff like that. With No Mercy, maybe the animation wasn't all that smooth because of the technology it was made on, but the gameplay usually worked the way it was supposed to.
One of the coolest things about wrestling games is that they usually include a create-a-wrestler, which for some reason tend to be some of the deepest create-a-anythings in console games. In No Mercy the detail you could get into was completely ridiculous. There was only so much you could do in terms of appearance because it was a cartridge game and they'd already somehow squeezed onto it intro music and horrifically compressed intro videos for like 60 wrestlers, but the amount you could customize a character's move set was insane. If you really wanted to set what your character did when he was on a turnbuckle and your opponent was on the apron facing down while it was Tuesday and raining, you could. Say what you will about real life wrestling, the fact that it's insane and tends to kill people before they hit 40, but I defy you to come up with a lot of things more fun as a 14 year old than getting together with a bunch of friends, making create-a-wrestlers, and having them beat each other with trash cans. Ah, memories.
Next: Day 5 - Game character you feel you are most like (or wish you were)
Hmmmm....
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