The Greatest Games Ever: 1985 - 1995. Part Five: Tecmo World Wrestling
"Hello! ....And welcome to the Tecmo World Wrestling extravaganza. I'm
your announcer Tom Talker coming to you live from the magnificent Tecmo
Coliseum. The Mega-Event is about to begin where the TWW Title Crown is
on the line. Who will win and become the new champion of Tecmo World
Wrestling? Just think, you could be sitting on top of the world wearing
the TWW Champion Belt! Go for it!"
This is how Tecmo World Wrestling commentator Tom Talker welcomed the player to the divine wonder that was the NES’s premier wrestling game. Anyone familiar with Nintendo’s little grey brick will not be able to read the rest of this review as they collapse into a heap, dribbling and muttering “A good wrestling game on the NES?! With…with commentary…but how…and why?”
Dribble ye-not Nintendo faithful for Tecmo did indeed sneak out a wrestling game for the NES in 1990 that would be the best wrestling game in the entire world until WCW vs The World came out on the Psone seven years later. Okay, I’ll quit with the italics now.
Before I get on with the Tecmo love-ups I’d like to digress a little now that we’ve staggered onto the greatest games of the NES. Aside from the Mario games (which won’t be covered here as they’re much too storied already) it struck me that the NES wasn’t exactly awash with great games. Good games yes, tons and tons of good games but very little which still provokes an-erection-for-the-worst-reasons in me today. What many NES games lacked was innovation. The Mario games cast a shadow over gaming of such length that almost every developer in the world was desperate to release it’s own Mario-beater which of course never happened. In fact, the only platformer to eclipse Super Mario Bros was…Super Mario Bros 3.
Okay, so you could say that the most innovative platformers on the NES was Gyromite a game which friendless shut-ins could play with R.O.B, a useless robot peripheral. But get this: It was rubbish.
Yes, R.O.B was a waste of cheap plastic and he made children cry. Not all robots are rubbish though and proof of this can be found here:
Baron Von Joy? Oh man!
Yes, the NES had loads of quite good/extremely insane games but greatness would have to wait for the SNES years later.
Okay, if you’ve been sitting here for the past two minutes imagining the NES’s sound-chip being put through the wringer as it utters thousands of lines of digitised commentary then put your cock away and look at this bubble-burster:
Yes, Tecmo’s commentary was printed on-screen below the action. I actually credit Tecmo with the fact that I have so little trouble watching subtitled films today as I quickly got used to reading Tom’s witty comments while placing my opponent in the Cambodian Reverse Donkey Breaker.
I’m not being facetious here either, whoever wrote Tom’s script possessed both a sense of humour and an adequate grasp of the English Language. Being Nintendo, we would have forgiven TWW if the commentary had been something like:
The stream of greatness didn’t end there though as TWW also featured close-up replays (actually standard cut-scenes) whenever your character performed one of his signature moves. Every wrestling game up to then (and for a long time after) suffered from a severely limited moveset which was completely inexcusable when you consider that each character in TWW had 23 moves apiece which should technically be impossible when you consider that the NES joypad only had two buttons.
Tecmo got around this by changing the moves which your character could perform when he got down to 50% health or less, meaning that your opponent would get more dangerous the more that you wore him down…Hulk Hogan style! The makers of the game were clearly wrestling aficionados too, as they’d crammed it with lots of technical (and properly named holds) and fun of the most brutal kind imaginable to a twelve year-old.
Hurl your opponent over the top rope with a Gorilla Press? No problem.
Elbow drop him from the top turnbuckle to the outside? No problem.
Scoop him up and pile-drive him onto the concrete? No problem.
Dance around his corpse while urinating and singing “Carry on my wayward son”? No problem (as long as your imagination was as vivid as mine was).
But wait, it doesn’t have to be:
There was such a satisfying crunchiness to it all too. When Road Warrior Animal-a-like Rex Beat piledrove Hulk Hogan-a-like Julio Falcon you really could hear the nuances of compacted vertebrae and Dr Guildo’s Argentine Backbreaker would have provoked copious vomiting in anyone sensitive to the sound of a snapped spine.
TWW’s only real weakness was that it was a button-basher, in that when your wrestler’s locked-up, the fastest to hammer on the joypad buttons was the winner. Games like this have left me with the nimble fingers of a jazz pianist and thumb-bones with the consistency of crunchy peanut butter.
I can only imagine that Tecmo World Wrestling was an unpopular title because no sequel to it ever appeared, in contrast to the ten billion lame and limp WWF/WWE games that are still being coughed up today. A shame really because anyone missing out on this was missing out on the greatest NES game never to feature Mario or that little blue catamite Mega Man.
Now don’t you cry no more!