Impetus: Thirty years after WWF Wrestlefest is released in arcades, some company announces the release of RetroMania Wrestling, the “official” sequel to WrestleFest
As the title of this post says, I really want to like and be excited about this game more than I am, but there are just so many jokes and snark to unleash and get out of my system before I can resign myself to the fact that I’ll still probably impulse purchase this on Steam so that I can play with my brother and my bros.
When I was a kid, I loved Wrestlefest. I almost always picked the Ultimate Warrior despite the fact that by then, I was already well on my way to being one of those contrarian mark types of wrestling fans and was a by far bigger fan of Mr. Perfect than I was the Warrior, but the cheapskate cheesing kid with very limited quarters didn’t like the fact that Mr. Perfect lacked many power moves, but most importantly the ability to drop a body slam, so there was no way to get cheap easy eliminations with Mr. Perfect when playing in the Royal Rumble mode. One of my fondest memories of this game was being a such a master button masher, that no matter the fact that I had zero health in a Royal Rumble match, I would still kick out of every pinfall attempt, and I ended up outlasting two other human opponents, with me winning the rumble after back dropping the last human player out.
Hell, even as an adult, I loved Wrestlefest, and I installed Mame and got a rom of Wrestlefest, it was basically the greatest thing on the planet, that I could now play one of my favorite arcade games ever, with basically unlimited quarters, since credits could be added with the press of buttons. I dabbled with all other characters I didn’t want to waste money with when I was a kid, and realized that the best player in the game was Sgt. Slaughter, who not only had good power moves, but an automatically initializing submission move in the cobra clutch, that anyone slapped into it had like a 20% chance of actually not tapping out of.
Needless to say, you’d think I would be over the moon that when a “sequel” was announced, I’d be more excited about it, especially since at first blush it’s basically the same game, just with different characters, settings and some modern polish. But you hear the title, you see the roster, and realize that there’s obviously no legal affiliation with the WWE, and it kind of feels like something is missing, and the whole thing kind of comes off like a non-canonical fan-fiction of a production.
Now I don’t say such because I’m some sort of WWE-can-do-no-wrong zealot, but I think I’m having more objection to the notion that RetroMania is being called a sequel, much less an official one, solely because some company bought the code and skeleton of Wrestlefest from Technos and is effectively reskinning it. It’s almost like ripping all the fake Mario skin off of Super Mario 2, and claiming Doki-Doki Panic to be the sequel to Super Mario Bros.
It’s just that there’s something hokey about RetroMania that gives me pause at taking it very seriously since there’s nothing more fucking serious in the world than professional wrestling. Maybe it’s the bigass ProWrestlingTees logo in the background of one of the levels that gives it that minor league tryhard feel similar to watching AEW, but the reality is that it’s undoubtedly the laughable roster playable characters that are so far listed as available:
The current roster includes, Legion of Doom, Tommy Dreamer, Colt Cabana, The Blue Meanie, Stevie Richards, Matt Cardona, Brian Myers, Johnny Retro, Nikita Koloff, Warhouse, Austin Idol, Chris Bey, Jeff, Cobb and Zack Sabre Jr. Additional roster members will be available via DLC.
Excluding the Legion of Doom, because it’s evident that they’re there solely based on the fact that they’re officially listed as The Road Warriors, but their sprites are still very much their LOD attire, the rest of the roster is embarrassingly hilarious, because the vast majority of them are historical jobbers.
Don’t get me wrong, I still respect the hell out of the capabilities of most all these guys, but let’s not kid ourselves that the vast majority of these guys, save for the random names of guys that are regular New Japan talents, and Nikita Koloff for some reason, have spent more of their careers taking L’s than anything else.
I mean seriously, Zack Ryder and Curt Hawkins (under their real names)? Tommy Dreamer? Colt Cabana? And as entertained as I was by the bWo, there’s no denying that Blue Meanie, Nova and Stevie Richards were basically jobbers their whole careers. And as talented as Johnny Nitro is, he seems to have a different name everywhere he shows up, now including in video games.
The roster just screams B-squad, and if this were in arcades, kids would be expected to pump quarters into a machine to play as the fucking Blue Meanie? (I mean I would, but that’s because I love playing as jobber characters in wrestling games)
At least the game play appears to have been allowed to evolve a little bit, after 30 years. It’s apparent that the game isn’t solely on an X/Y axis, and characters can now move diagonally and utilize turnbuckles, which should unveil some interesting freshness to the old Wrestlefest engine.
And it’s not all criticisms from me, in spite of the last few paragraphs. I think it’s hilarious that the arenas literally can be in what appear to be high school gymnasiums, which makes me wonder if there’s also a level that will be the Young Bucks’ backyard or Matt Hardy’s property, since there appears to be some very large liberties with anything that isn’t intellectually linkable to the WWE. I’d for sure choose high school gymnasium as my preferred stage selection, much like I used to always have Wrestlemania-caliber matchups but using Sunday Night Heat as my stage.
Make no mistake though, the allure of getting to play more Wrestlefest is undoubtedly going to win out, and all it’s going to take is any one of my bros to suggest we play this over Steam, and as long as my child is already asleep, I’d drop what I was doing to log in and start playing. Even if the roster looks like they’d job to Star-Man, the Amazon and King Corn Kong if push came to shove, it still would be a grand old time if it’s even a third of quality as the original Wrestlefest was.
