![\"\"](\"http:\/\/totfc.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/jobbers.png\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Impetus<\/a>: Thirty years after WWF Wrestlefest<\/em> is released in arcades, some company announces the release of RetroMania Wrestling<\/em>, the \u201cofficial\u201d sequel to WrestleFest<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019ll still probably impulse purchase this on Steam so that I can play with my brother and my bros.<\/span><\/p>\n When I was a kid, I loved Wrestlefest.\u00a0 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\u2019t 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<\/em> mode.\u00a0 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.<\/span><\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 I dabbled with all other characters I didn\u2019t 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.<\/span><\/p>\n Needless to say, you\u2019d think I would be over the moon that when a \u201csequel\u201d was announced, I\u2019d be more excited about it, especially since at first blush it\u2019s basically the same game, just with different characters, settings and some modern polish.\u00a0 But you hear the title, you see the roster, and realize that there\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Now I don\u2019t say such because I\u2019m some sort of WWE-can-do-no-wrong zealot, but I think I\u2019m 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.\u00a0 It\u2019s almost like ripping all the fake Mario skin off of Super Mario 2<\/em>, and claiming Doki-Doki Panic<\/em> to be the sequel to Super Mario Bros<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s just that there\u2019s something hokey about RetroMania that gives me pause at taking it very seriously since there\u2019s nothing more fucking serious in the world than professional wrestling.\u00a0 Maybe it\u2019s 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\u2019s undoubtedly the laughable roster playable characters that are so far listed as available:<\/span><\/p>\n 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.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Excluding the Legion of Doom, because it\u2019s evident that they\u2019re there solely based on the fact that they\u2019re 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.<\/span><\/p>\n Don\u2019t get me wrong, I still respect the hell out of the capabilities of most all these guys, but let\u2019s 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\u2019s than anything else.<\/span><\/p>\n I mean seriously, Zack Ryder and Curt Hawkins (under their real names)?\u00a0 Tommy Dreamer?\u00a0 Colt Cabana?\u00a0 And as entertained as I was by the bWo, there\u2019s no denying that Blue Meanie, Nova and Stevie Richards were basically jobbers their whole careers.\u00a0 And as talented as Johnny Nitro is, he seems to have a different name everywhere he shows up, now including in video games.<\/span><\/p>\n 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?\u00a0 (I mean I would, but that\u2019s because I love playing as jobber characters in wrestling games)<\/span><\/p>\n At least the game play appears to have been allowed to evolve a little bit, after 30 years.\u00a0 It\u2019s apparent that the game isn\u2019t 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.<\/span><\/p>\n And it\u2019s not all criticisms from me, in spite of the last few paragraphs.\u00a0 I think it\u2019s hilarious that the arenas literally can be in what appear to be high school gymnasiums, which makes me wonder if there\u2019s also a level that will be the Young Bucks\u2019 backyard or Matt Hardy\u2019s property, since there appears to be some very large liberties with anything that isn\u2019t intellectually linkable to the WWE.\u00a0 I\u2019d 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.<\/span><\/p>\n Make no mistake though, the allure of getting to play more Wrestlefest is undoubtedly going to win out, and all it\u2019s 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\u2019d drop what I was doing to log in and start playing.\u00a0 Even if the roster looks like they\u2019d 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\u2019s even a third of quality as the original Wrestlefest was.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Impetus: Thirty years after WWF Wrestlefest is released in arcades, some company announces the release of RetroMania Wrestling, the \u201cofficial\u201d 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 … Continue reading I want to like this more, but the jokes<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[100,129,99,19,54,49,55],"class_list":["post-47420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brog","tag-comparison","tag-nostalgia","tag-reminiscing","tag-video-games","tag-wrestling","tag-wtf","tag-wwe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47420"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47420\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47422,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47420\/revisions\/47422"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}