NCAA Football 2000

In the seventh chapter of his 2017 book ­­Bit by Bit, novelist Andrew Ervin sketches a compelling analogy between the history of video games and that of visual art. He parallels innovations made by Renaissance painters like da Vinci and Michelangelo with advancements made in video game development in the 32-bit era. While visual culture in the Middle Ages was characterized by a flatness of perspective and lack of dimensionality, Renaissance painters introduced depth of field, creating the impression of three dimensions on the canvass. Ervin submits that "one could say that Sony PlayStation and the Nintendo 64, successors to the SNES, accomplished something similar" (104). The PS1 and N64, then, in adding 3-dimensionality to video-gaming through the rotation of thousands of polygons per second, moved video games away from the flat, two dimensional imaginaries of the 8- and 16-bit eras and, in effect, ushered in something of a “renaissance” in their own right. Superficially, this comparison has a sort of intuitive momentum on account of the direct correspondence upon which it is founded: just like the Renaissance, game-designers of the 32/64-bit era added dimension to the visual representations they were creating. Adding dimension, however, does not a Renaissance make; truth be told, the 32- and 64-bit era was hardly a golden age for video games.

A fitting case in point is NCAA Football 2000. Among the most prominent selling points of the fin-du-millénaire edition of EA's popular college football franchise were its graphics. While its precursor NCAA 99 was the first in the series to feature three-dimensional polygonal graphics, NCAA 2000 updated the player models such that they came in varying sizes, and could be fully displayed in an array of camera angles during gameplay. Accordingly, wide receivers are lean and wiry, while linemen are Bunyanesque hosses. To the sports gamer of 1999, the year in which NCAA 2000 was released, this would have looked quite alluring. To the contemporary eye, however, NCAA 2000's graphics are abominable. Even when assuming the forgiving attitude the old-school gamer typically affords graphics from previous eras, NCAA 2000 is still an eye-sore. Especially problematic are those full-figured linemen, all of whom look like bloated quadrangular blobs. Of course, after the snap, it is nigh impossible to distinguish the bigger blobs from the littler ones, and play proceeds mostly in pixelated clumps. Animations, when discernible, are rigid and attenuated, and the gameplay is much the same, suffering from a damning combination of floaty movement and yet stiff articulation of actions. The game’s motion-captured sequences look passable in screen shots, but in-game they imbue the players with a jittery, cretinous manner of ambulation, a somewhat jarring break from their otherwise wooden movement patterns. In short, NCAA 2000 might have been better appreciated as a painting...in the Middle Ages. At present, NCAA looks and plays no more pleasingly than those vibrating motorized electric football games that were in currency (I hesitate to say "popular") in the 1960s and 70s.

Playing NCAA 2000, then, is to hearken back even further than the end of the 90s, to a time before video games, and potentially even a time before electricity. Seeing the abstract, undifferentiated masses wrought by these developers eager to make forays into polygonal graphics, one has scant convincing evidence for characterizing the PS1/N64 epoch as a "renaissance" of video gaming. Playing NCAA Football 2000, one wonders if the 32- and 64-bit era isn't more accurately described as a Dark Age.

NCAA Football 2000 is not without its bright spots, however, especially when it comes to bells and whistles. The game includes, for instance, a "Create-a-School" mode, which delivers as advertised, allowing you to pick the logo, stadium and even enrollment numbers for a cow college-cum-contender. Also, NCAA 2000 features a thoughtful "Great Games" mode in which the player can jump straight into bowl games of bygone eras, among other classics, such as the 1946 "Game of the Century" between Notre Dame and Army, which ended in a thrilling 0-0 tie.

As bowl season swings around, one might see NCAA 2000 among the cheap PS1 refuse in their local game store and get tempted to purchase it, revisiting the game as they would revisit classic bowl games of the past. Isn't there, after all, an ineffable appeal in a dizzying plurality of over-hyped perfunctory one-off playoff games for arbitrary championships named for foodstuffs and B-grade corporate entities? For even the most acute sufferer of bowl mania, however, NCAA 2000 is not the prescription. Although NCAA 2000 may have serviced a yearning among contemporaneous college-football fans, it is anything but timeless. Quite unlike a good piece of art, NCAA 2000 does not stand the test of time, not only against present-day college football fare, but even compared to college football games released a couple years later (such as NCAA 2002 for PS2). Its concomitant competitor on PS1, NCAA Gamebreaker 2000 by 989 Sports, though not a great game in itself, has actually aged better, largely on account of the fact that the developers weren't so overambitious with their player models. So while NCAA Football 2000's developers and many, many others in the 32-/64-bit era attempted a dimensional innovation not unlike that of Renaissance painters, the comparison falters when we consider outcomes. Da Vinci and other Renaissance artists did the additional dimension well. It wouldn’t be until the PS2/X-Box/GameCube era that three dimensions worked with consistent efficacy in video games. Like so many other games released for PS1 and N64, NCAA 2000 attempts to expand dimensionality, but it does so at the expense of coherence.

Olympic Hockey Nagano 98

Olympic Hockey Nagano ‘98 for the N64 embodies unrepentant exploitation of the highest order, though with that being said, it is not particularly good exploitation. Publisher Midway took the middling N64 puck proffering Wayne Gretzky's 3D Hockey, re-skinned the teams with international vestments, but didn't bother to make any improvements to the game in the process, all in hopes of getting it out in time for the Nagano Olympics.

As such, the flaws of Olympic Hockey Nagano ‘98 are largely those of Gretzky's 3D. Most egregiously, the game defaults to manual player switching—that is to say, without turning this off, you're stuck with the player you choose at the start of the period, which makes passing or even following the puck-carrier up ice far more difficult than it should be. Hockey video games should always allow you to control the puck carrier; this is not a point of debate. As such, expect a lot of off-sides and icings until you finally toggle player switching to “on”. On the sonic side, Olympic Hockey also features the usual Midway announcer, a generic radio type paid to lend his jack-of-all-trades Stentorian voice to hockey. It is not commentary he offers, but rather stale chestnuts like "What goaltending!" and "Robin Hood and his merry men are up to it again", phrases respectively overused for great saves and turnovers in the previous Gretzky games. Graphically, Olympic Hockey retains Gretzky's jejune color palette, bright reds and yellows and greens, all atop bluish ice. Natural ice has a bluish hue, yes, but hockey ice is white, Midway, and it is painted as such. The teams, as you might imagine, are truly slapdash, their uniforms not corresponding to actual IIHF (International Ice Hockey Federation) logos of the time but instead consisting simply of the flag of the nation in question pasted over the attendant colors. The Canadian team even has white pants, an unprecedented uniform choice in men's hockey.

What would Gretzky have to do

To don to Kazakh greenish-blue?

Olympic Hockey Nagano ‘98 is not entirely devoid of merit. It features, for instance, an option for trading players, which may seem odd for a game in which players represent their countries of origin. Here, Midway did come through with an innovation, renaming "trades" as "defections." Now, instead of selecting the players you wish to trade, you select the country you wish to “defect” from, and then the nation to which you wish to "apply for asylum". This makes for some interesting ludo-narrative scenarios. What would Wayne Gretzky, a national icon of near demi-god status in the Great White North, have to do to have to defect from Canada and apply for asylum in some place like Kazakhstan? One would assume it would involve at least a #MeToo-related transgression, or more realistically some kind of pedophilia, perhaps. In this way, Olympic Hockey Nagano ‘98 raises some intriguing hypothetical questions.

Speculations about Wayne Gretzky's sexual proclivities are not enough to save Olympic Hockey Nagano ‘98, however, for the game fails on too many other levels. Midway tried to exploit the 1998 Nagano Olympics, but they wound up failing even in the art of exploitation. The fundamental maxim of exploitation is that you can judge a book (or a movie, or a video game) by its cover. Instead of gracing the cover with a Gretzky or a Hull—hockey standouts from the two countries representing the most viable markets for the game—Midway instead decided to go with a generic Russian goaltender for its box art. Sorry Midway, but that Cyrillic script written on that goalie's jersey—the authentic Russia jersey, I might add—branded your game as a write-off right from the get-go.

Evil Dead: Fistful of Boomstick

Ash Williams, the matchless main character of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy, never lacked for what the Spanish call duende. The renowned schlock-trouper Bruce Campbell played him brash and loud and yet blunderous, imbuing the character with a charm and magnetism that proves inexhaustible through repeated screenings of the films.

Could this charisma transfer from the cinema to the home console? What would it be like to take control of Campbell’s bumbling, iron-jawed quipster and maneuver him through the over-the-top gore and pandemonium wreaked so wantonly by the Deadites? Would it make for that peak horror experience—that sublime feeling of appalling delight—which the French call frisson? The developer/publisher combo of Heavy Iron Studios and THQ apparently thought so, releasing Evil Dead: Hail to the King for PlayStation and Dreamcast in the year 2000. Set in and around the archetypal cabin from the first two movies, the game took the survival-horror approach, complete with pre-rendered backdrops as per Resident Evil, and it did not impress.

The venerable Bruce Campbell 

THQ, as indefatigable as Ash himself, took another crack at the Evil Dead license, with VIS Entertainment assuming development duties for this second attempt. Evil Dead: A Fistful of Boomstick, released in 2003, shifted from survival horror to hack-and-slash, a genre hypothetically better-suited for the series' carnage and comedic stylings. Things look and sound promising from the outset. We are greeted by Bruce Campbell's familiar bluster, its cadence somehow both smooth and nervy, overtop some sleek graphics to boot, at least in the cut-scenes. The in-game graphics, however, rely on thick, cartoony character models that seem more befitting of, say, Backyard Wrestling: Don’t Try This At Home. The plot is not unforgivable, as it involves the infamous Necronomicon tape from the movies getting played on the airwaves of long-suffering Dearborn, Michigan, subsequently unleashing the dead upon the town. The enemy horde shambles around like zombies, however, giving said dead a vibe that is less Raimi and more Romero. The gamer may never get a good look at the enemy, however, as the camera is atrocious, swinging wildly about. You'll feel empowered, albeit briefly, by the fact you can fire your eponymous boomstick over your shoulder to get the dead slinking up behind you. Ash's chainsaw is also alluring, but once the enemies converge, you've got limited time and limited maneuvering. Maladroit though he may occasionally be, Ash could still wreak unequivocal havoc with the chainsaw in the movies, and we should expect nothing less, since the chainsaw is actually a part of his body. Be that as it may, the game has no sense of chainsaw, or what the Germans call kettensägen. You will die quickly, and you will die often. As such, A Fistful of Boomstick quickly becomes repetitive, restart after restart returning you to the same old waves of enemies, thereby establishing that the slapstick magnetism of Ash-cum-Campbell is indeed exhaustible, at least in terms of gaming.

All told, A Fistful of Boomstick is more than a little appalling, and not in a delightful way. Not even Ash's endless jests (including intermittent 4th wall-breakers) can save it. Nonetheless, those most dedicated to the series will still feel compelled to buy it and put it on their Halloween playlists, as they are, inexorably, what the English call neckbeards.

WCW/NWO Revenge

From 1996 to mid-1998, Ted Turner’s World Championship Wrestling (WCW) was the preeminent sports entertainment company in North America. For this brief period, WCW surpassed even Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Federation (WWF, now known as WWE), which had to that point been to pro wrestling what Kleenex is to tissue paper. The Atlanta-based WCW proved that its southern-inflected style of wrestling could hold its own on a national and even worldwide stage, and for a two year period, its flagship program Nitro outpaced WWF’s Monday Night Raw in ratings. Curiously enough, WCW’s success was largely predicated on WWF aesthetic elements. For instance, the NWO, a dissenting faction within WCW around which a number of ratings-friendly storylines developed, consisted for the most part of ex-WWF stars. These included Scott Hall (nee Razor Ramon), Kevin Nash (nee Diesel), and, most extraordinarily, an evil version of Hulk Hogan, the man who had, in his benevolent 80s iteration, defined the WWF. All of these personages assumed characters identical or in counterpoint to their WWF iterations, and WCW reaped the profits, as many fans naively thought, at least for a time, that the WWF was legitimately invading WCW.

But despite these liberal appropriations, WCW still had its own unique aesthetic, and it is in part for this reason that WCW video games from 1997 and 1998 also rated better than those of the WWF. WWF released the multiplatform offerings Raw is War (1998) and Attitude (1999) through license-loving publisher Acclaim, with gameplay based on button commands resembling those of versus fighters. Down-forwarding did little to capture the ebb and flow of the grappling and counter-grappling around which pro wrestling is structured, and while Acclaim’s WWF games had good graphics, they played choppily. WCW, by contrast, borrowed its engine from AKI’s Virtual Pro Wrestling 64, one of the premiere wrestling games from Japan. This system, based on weak and strong grapples, captured the balletic fluidity of professional wrestling, and made for a game that was highly playable, even for the wrestling non-enthusiast. The first game to fully utilize this engine stateside, 1997’s WCW vs. NWO World Tour for the N64, played exquisitely, though it suffered from blocky, clip-happy graphics and an overly Japanese feel. Many of the characters were renamed wrestlers from Japanese promotions like FMW.  This was a boon for the hard-core puroresu fan (who could now see FMW legend Hayabusa take on Sting), though it came at the expense of the WCW characters, who also feel like reskins of Japanese guys, with inauthentic looks and move-sets. Chris Benoit, for instance, comes off as a generic jobber. Ric Flair looks less like the Nature Boy we know and love and more like Donald Trump in a Speedo. Scott Hall’s trademark Outsider’s Edge, meanwhile, finishes in a sit-out pin, which wrestling fans will recognize immediately as anathema. WCW/NWO Revenge, its 1998 sequel, rectified these issues, depicting the WCW aesthetic in fine form.

WCW/NWO Revenge embodies everything WCW was at its peak. On account of having deep-pocketed Ted Turner as its owner, WCW didn’t have to spare any expenses on its confines, and so its sets were expansive, colorful and multifarious in a way that the relatively claustrophobic WWF environs were not. Available from the outset in Revenge is the galvanized metal set from Monday Nitro, as well as the sets from WCW’s themed pay-per-views. These include the summery Bash at the Beach set, complete with a wharf-like boardwalk leading to the ring, and the October staple Halloween Havoc, with its eerie green aura and headstones at the top of the entryway. Along with these sets, you also get over-elaborate costumes to match. While late 80s and early 90s WWF set the bar for outlandish gimmick characters, WCW took this even farther all throughout the duration of the 90s. Thus, Revenge contains the pinnacle (or perhaps the nadir) of these experiments—namely Glacier and Mortis, part of an attempt on WCW’s part to facsimile the Mortal Kombat vibe and transfer it to a WCW ring. Glacier, a purported martial arts expert, is basically an unmasked Sub-Zero who looks not unlike Vanilla Ice, and Mortis, meanwhile, is a zombie-styled striker with a skull mask of near-Tom Savini quality. To fit with this fighting game feel, Revenge adds a combo system whereby certain grapple commands initiate an opportunity to chain together strikes, a feature which would appear in the Japanese release Virtual Pro Wrestling 2 but would not carry forward to future American AKI wrestling games.

La Parka vs. Mortis: WCW loved its skeleton men.

Beyond these superficialities, you also get an expansive roster of WCW and NWO talent, which remains the most enduring appeal of this game. This lineup includes both iterations of the NWO, the Hogan-led black-and-white and the Nash-led red-and-black (a.k.a. the Wolfpac). You also get WCW’s truly original success stories, most notably the singular Goldberg, known for his inordinately long unbeaten streak which led him to the WCW World Title and, at the time of the game’s release, was still two months from its end. As could be expected, he’s virtually unbeatable in this game. WCW was also unique in its championing of cruiserweight talent, providing ample TV time to showcase Mexican, Japanese and American light heavyweights. Luchadores like Rey Mysterio, Psychosis, Juventud Guerrera, and the chair-wielding, skeleton-masked La Parka are all on the cartridge, allowing the retro gamer to revisit these fast-paced, acrobatic matches that set apart WCW’s skill-based pro wrestling from WWF’s story-based sports entertainment. Among other WCW-built superstars available in the game are the incomparable Sting (in face-paint styled after Brandon Lee in The Crow) and the lovable yogi-to-be Diamond Dallas Page (along with his valet/yogini Kimberly).

The laundry-list of talent doesn’t end there. If an appearance in an AKI wrestling games is taken as the standard of millennial-era wrestling celebrity, then there are more than a few who make their only such appearance Revenge. These include beloved multi-time WCW champion Booker T and his Harlem Heat tag partner/brother Stevie Ray, grungy former ECW champion Raven and his "Flock" of gothic tagalongs, 80s WWF mainstay motor-mouth Rowdy Roddy Piper, and Canadian legend Bret Hart. You even get classically insipid gimmick characters like the Disco Inferno. For many of these legends (or legendary flops), Revenge represents their most playable video game rendering. Undeniably, WCW had loads of talent, and though its booking staff may have under-utilized many of the above names, Revenge offers gamers the opportunity to match them up in dream bouts WCW’s bookers apparently never could have imagined.

Ultimately, massive mismanagement proved to be the demise of WCW. As WWF grew more compelling with McMahon intensifying his futile assaults on the irrepressible Steve Austin, WCW became more madcap and aimless, and lost much of its talent base to its rival. Eventually, even AKI switched over to the WWF, and soon it was WWF talent benefitting from that fluid, grapple-based engine. EA quickly swooped up the WCW license, only to make the abysmal WCW Mayhem and its nigh unplayable sequel WCW Backstage Assault. Could this have been another factor in WCW’s demise? Truth be told, more than a few gamers were drawn to WWF and WCW through the games, and became wrestling fans on that account. That WWF had the pick-up-and-play AKI grappling system at the core of WWF Wrestlemania 2000 and WWF No Mercy may very well have facilitated a smooth transition into wrestling fandom for some. Either way, by the start of 2001, wrestling fans had sided with the WWF, and had tuned out WCW. In March of 2001, WCW folded, bought out by none other than Vince McMahon.

In its interactive capacity, a video game is, to some extent, a text that is never finished. WCW Revenge, then, stands as a living record of World Championship Wrestling. The game epitomizes a crucial historical moment in a promotion that was soon to die out. In that sense, this game is an artifact of a lost institution, an enduring landmark of a unique professional wrestling micro-culture. Unlike, say, a text from an ancient civilization, we can actually interact with this record—even alter it, in fact, and update it, to some extent, given the costume and name editor—at least in the realm of play. If nothing else, WCW was a lot of possibilities, many of which didn’t go anywhere. Revenge retains these possibilities for posterity, and so is chock-full of what-ifs which you can realize every time you fire up the game. For this reason, your correspondent recommends you pick up a copy of WCW Revenge if you haven’t already. And if you already do own a copy, pick up a second. On one cartridge, update the names and costumes; on the other, keep the names and costumes at their default setting. This way, you can enjoy WCW for everything it was at its pinnacle, and also for everything its many mainstays became.

Fire Pro Wrestling W

Fire Pro Wrestling W is the finest wrestling video game ever made. Some may make the case that AKI's Virtual Pro Wrestling 2 (or its North American equivalents, most notably WWF No Mercy) should hold that title, and others may vainly plead that WWE '13 or the later analog-grappling entries in the Smackdown vs. Raw series are contenders, but the games in those series are handily eclipsed by the precise gameplay and thoroughgoing customization that the Fire Pro series offers. Spike Chunsoft's Fire Pro Wrestling World (hereafter FPW) surpasses 2007's Fire Pro Wrestling Returns (hereafter FPR) in both control and creation options, and so it deserves to assume the mantle of wrestling's G.O.A.T.

The timing-based gameplay of the Fire Pro series, while tough to pick up and play, has always allowed for more meticulous match development than AKI's intuitive albeit mash-heavy weak/strong grappling system and the WWE 2K series’ ever-gimmicky approach, which annually reduces a wrestling match to a concatenation of mini-games. Pulling off a move successfully is never an accident in Fire Pro, nor does it feel like a boon born out of blunt-force button-mashing skills. This tried-and-true gameplay holds up in FPW, which proceeds even more seamlessly than in FPR. And don't let the world 'wrestling' in its title sell the game short: FPW, like its predecessors, contains solid MMA and kickboxing modes (along with respective ground-grappling and clinching systems), taking the game well beyond pro wrestling and into the sphere of virtually any kind of fight you can imagine. From boxing to street-fighting, you can do it all in style in FPW. Hell, FPW even has gravity-defying anime-styled moves inspired by Ultimate Muscle, if that suits your fancy.

Fire Pro Wrestling World boasts sharper, sleeker graphics. Note the Bam Bam Bigelow 

lookalike in the front row of the audience. Note also the bored girlfriend seated behind him.

Moreover, Fire Pro has always outpaced the aforementioned wrestling series with regard to its create-a-wrestler feature. This is truly saying something, given the admirable level of customization in the 2K and AKI games. FPW takes creation even further. Instead of just 2 or 3 layers of accessorizing per body part as per FPR, there are now as many as 9 in FPW. The permutations and combinations are practically limitless. There are far more parts available, too, including skirts and body hair, the former allowing you to make your girlish girl that much girlier, the latter making your man's man that much more masculine. Put the two together and you might just make a Scotsman. There are also dozens of new moves, including the pole-shift flowsion, Bray Wyatt's Sister Abigail and a more accurate rendering of John Cena’s Attitude Adjustment. Whatever your creative goals, in FPW you can fashion any wrestler from any era and give him or her an ultraprecise moveset, even detailing in head-bending depth the timing and frequency of move usage via the game's logic editor. Now you can make a spot-on Cena, spamming AA attempts in the late stages of his matches, something the licensed WWE games still cannot (or perhaps will not) do with much exactitude. Also, the process of searching through the thousands of moves is much more streamlined than in previous games, as FPW’s edit mode now sorts maneuvers by type. The new moves and outfit options alone make FPW worth buying, as does all the available save space afforded by the PS4. While FPR had a generous 500 slots for custom characters, the PS4's hard-drive means there really is no conceivable limit to the number of wrestlers, cage-fighters and kickboxers you can create. Moreover, the online network allows you to share creations with the most effete wrestling aficionados around the world (and then have them harshly judged thereby).

FPW also has the benefit of being licensed by the top promotion on the planet today, New Japan Pro Wrestling. Sorry WWE diehards, but New Japan has equal or greater talent, and unlike Vince McMahon's booking staff, it actually uses its roster to its fullest potential. The masters of New Japan's hard-hitting “strong style”—that is, strike-heavy wrestling with kicks and slaps that land harder and realer than in any other squared-circle worldwide—are all here. You may be tempted to dismiss names like Hiroshi Tanahashi, Kazuchika Okada and Kenny Omega, but if so, you are willfully impoverishing your wrestling fandom. These wrestlers, in their mastery of the strong style, consistently put a compelling, physically intensive product in the ring, giving NJPW a “big-fight feel” that WWE can barely muster for a WrestleMania main-event. The new "Fighting Road" mode, a single-player campaign in which wrestlers climb their way up the ranks of NJPW, offers gamers a taste of this intensity. This mode should also appeal to traditionalist video game fans, who may have been disappointed by the admirable but exceedingly niche "Match Maker" mode from FPR, which simulated working as a pro wrestling booker rather than as a pro-wrestler proper.

Even if FPW is the best wrestling game ever, it is still not perfect. Many of the minor issues of FPR and other entries in the series remain unsolved in the Day One version of FPW. There is still, for example, no fighting outside the ring in the landmine death match, a feature that was enabled in the Japan-only Dreamcast release Fire Pro Wrestling Z but conspicuously absent in FPR. Moreover, there is still no falls-count-anywhere option, which could previously be found in Fire Pro Wrestling for the Gameboy Advance. These sorts of exclusions are inconsequential, though, and will only irk hardcore wrestling pedants. Perhaps more seriously, not a lot has been added in terms of bells and whistles, at least out of the Day One box. To the contrary, some features have actually been lost. FPW has fewer background songs, rings, and venues than FPR. The venues that have returned have changed, and not always for the better. The "Dojo", for instance, is just an unpeopled hall-of-mirrors matrix of wrestling rings, quite unlike the more intimate warehouse-style workout room bearing the same name in FPR. More strikingly, there are only two federations available from the outset: the licensed NJPW, of course, as well as Spike's fictional standby SWA, the wrestlers of which are half-baked, uber-generic characters such as the Maple-leaf masked "Canadian Sensation" Allen Hawkins. This is a marked change from FPR, which featured near-identical stand-ins for wrestlers from every major Japanese promotion, as well as some American talent, too. While the "Canadian Sensation" has signature moves borrowed from famous countrymen, including the Sharpshooter and the Crippler Crossface, he's still no Blood Love, FPR's none-too-subtle Bret Hart clone. Correspondingly, FPW only offers two referees to start with: NJPW legend Red Shoes Unno and some dude by the name of "Mr. Judgement". The paucity of rings, wrestlers and refs is cosmetic, though, and can be rectified in due time by the player's creativity.

There is perhaps no cosmetic issue more enduring for the Fire Pro series than its visuals. Some will stridently lament FPW’s graphics, a perennial bugbear for the series' detractors. Sure, the characters are sprite-based and not polygonal, but in FPW, the classic models benefit from the PS4's HD, which has made them less pixelated and therefore much snazzier. The NJPW guys look particularly spiffy, capturing the essence of their real-life strong-style equivalents in a workable, cartoonish form. To those people for whom graphics remain a nagging concern, your correspondent would suggest that you just might be throwing out the baby with the bathwater here, and in the process denying yourself the best experience of wrestling available in video gaming. And honestly, are the bland, lifeless graphics from the 2K WWE series preferable? At least the Fire Pro guys are well-drawn.

Although FPW's graphical style, like its features, may be sparse, the Fire Pro series is now sleeker than ever before. This slick, streamlined Fire Pro is ready to carry the torch of video game pro wrestling well into the next decade, until we are graced with a PS6 version. With FPW, the Fire Pro series retains the title of Best Wrestling Game, primarily because it empowers you to make it the best wrestling game ever, and to keep improving it with the evolution of not only wrestling, but of the imagination itself.

Deadly Arts

It's easy to pass off Konami's 1998 release Deadly Arts (referred to in Japan and Europe by the more convoluted title G.A.S.P!! Fighters' NEXTream) as just another lackluster N64 3D fighting game, to be filed away in the dustbin of gaming history with forgotten titles like Dual Heroes, Dark Rift, Flying Dragon, and many, many more. Indeed, in terms of game play, Deadly Arts does little to stand out, and suffers from the same floaty controls that plagued many of the aforementioned titles. Deadly Arts does, however, distinguish itself by way of its aesthetic. It is, for instance, very Japanese, which is perhaps best indexed by the fact that its default female create-a-character is a school girl.

This create-a-character mode was truly revolutionary for a fighting game made in 1998, and it singlehandedly prevents the retro gamer from giving Deadly Arts a summary dismissal. Even at present, create-a-character modes are few and far between in fighting games, and compared to those found in later versus brawlers, Deadly Arts' costuming options are not lacking. Although the much-vaunted Fighter Maker (1999) is far more robust in terms of maneuvers (and the ability to animate moves), there is no customization of the character models themselves. In 2006's Mortal Kombat Armageddon, most of the costumes and parts thereof have to be unlocked. This is not the case in Deadly Arts, as all apparel is available from the outset. Relative to create-a-character modes in other genres—RPGs and wrestling games, to name a few—the outfit options are limited, but there's still enough to forge a copacetic character. I was able to quickly fashion a sassy dominatrix with a pert black-licorice bob-cut and alabaster skin who looked like she could kick some serious ass, and sexily at that. Her ass-kicking capabilities were much easier imagined than actualized, though, as one has to slog through an inordinate number of tedious tilts in order to earn moves for a newly-minted character. Due to the created character's initially limited moveset, Deadly Arts proves to be more enjoyable with non-created characters—and by "more enjoyable" I mean as fun as any other cookie-cutter N64 3D fighter.

Deadly Arts also deserves some praise for its presentation, which adequately speaks to the "art" referenced in its title. The game manages to capture an urban, punky sensibility due in large part to its youthful, rave-ready characters who, on the whole, give off a bit of a Fighting Vipers vibe. While the graphics aren't anything to rave about, Deadly Arts manages to set its scenes swimmingly with some nifty backgrounds: apart from the inner cityscapes of brick and graffiti, we get pastoral countryside as well, with one stage depicting snow falling among bamboo shoots in proximity to a Shinto temple gate. Characters can interact with these backgrounds, and an adroit suplex can cause cages to fall and brick walls to collapse. All of this is captured from astute, adaptive camera angles that shift with the action, for the most part non-annoyingly. The piece-de-resistance of the Deadly Arts atmosphere is the soundtrack, with dance, dubstep and breakbeat offerings sizzling on spider legs throughout the action, turning the combat into a rough and rivalrous sort of dance. The music brims with percussive tintinnabulations, thorough and well-wrought, with even the venerable, ubiquitous break from the Winstons' "Amen Brother" garnering a cursory interpolation in one of the mixes.

Alas, an enduring soundtrack is not enough to save a mediocre game. Aside from its soundscape and its creation mode, Deadly Arts has little to offer beyond any other N64 versus fighter. For the old-school gamer desperate to create-a-fighter, playing through Mortal Kombat Armageddon is a much better use of time. And if time isn't an issue, then making the painstaking efforts to actually animate moves frame-by-frame in Fighter Maker is a far more satisfying endeavor than blindly learning them in Deadly Arts.

MRC: Multi-Racing Championship

MRC is an abbreviation of “Multi Racing Championship,” but it might as well stand for “Minimalist Racing Champion-ship.” The presentation and features of this little-known N64 racer are minimal, to say the least—most glaringly, there are only three tracks in the entire game. Now, with that being said, the tracks are fairly long and multifarious, spanning craggy mountainsides and European cityscapes, and each one is chock-full of shortcuts insuring that no two laps ever have to be taken in the same way. Part of the fun of MRC is in exploration, trying every track in all possible permutations and combinations of avenues, lanes and off-road terrains, seeing which one yields the shortest lap time. It’s absolutely necessary that you find these alternative routes to shave off the seconds, as every lap is moderated by way of timed checkpoints, which are anything but forgiving. In MRC, as in life, you’ll fail many times before you find your proper path. Thankfully, there are ten different automobiles available, ranging from standard sportsters to off-road vehicles, with which you may traverse this trio of tracks in trial and error. In essence, MRC is about making your own replay value. MRC’s tracks are like the body of a long-term lover, in that you have to be willing to familiarize yourself with every twist, turn and sinuous curve in order to keep things exciting. With MRC as with love, if you put in the hard work with what you’ve been given, you might just be rewarded maximally for your efforts.

NHL 2K5

Hockey in the 1980s was better than it is now. You had a sport led by matchless, unequivocal superstars, most obviously Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux, each of whom put up previously unheard-of numbers, the former eclipsing the 200-points mark four times, and the latter falling just a point short in 1988-89. Gretzky and Lemieux took full advantage of play that was more wide-open and freewheeling than today's restrictive defensive style would ever allow. Teams were content to win 7-5 rather than 2-1, and even unknowns like Blaine Stoughton and Al Secord and Rick Kehoe had 50-goal seasons. Hell, Dennis Maruk, whoever that is, netted 60 in 1981-82. In short, the goal-mouths were well-fed. As a consequence, the eighties were the Dark Age of Goaltending, as goalies still wore reasonable amounts of padding along with sight-hindering yet aesthetically haunting plastic-molded masks (think Friday the 13th). The NHL still carried teams based in exotic locales like Hartford and Quebec City, and they all seemed to have endearing, unrivalled logos (the whale-fin W and the igloo-ish thing shaped like a lower-case “n”, respectively). And if you're Canadian, then all throughout the eighties you saw teams from your country in the Cup Finals virtually every year. In fact, a Canadian team won the cup six times in the decade; at present, it looks as if a Canadian team may never win the Stanley Cup again. In the nineties, Sunbelt markets and American capital took over the national sport of the great white north, and as a cold symbolic reminder, advertising now clutters the boards in every arena—boards which were, in the eighties, snow white save for the puck-marks etched thereupon.

Sega's ESPN NHL 2K5 allows you to relive this most glorious decade in hockey history, among others. Unlike its contemporaneous competitor, EA's NHL series, 2K5 includes “classic” teams—namely Stanley Cup champions from select years and other notable teams such as the finalists they defeated. Now you can play as the irrepressible 92 Penguins, the dynastic 82 Islanders, and the unstoppable 84 Oilers, possibly the greatest team of all time. Most of these teams are unlockable by way of points earned through in-game achievements, but some are available right out of the box. Other than the players who were still active at the game’s release, like the indomitable Mark Messier, most players on these classic teams have numbers and positions filling in for their names. However, NHL 2K5 contains a robust player-editor wherein you can rename players. Virtually any name that has ever appeared on the back of an NHL jersey is recognized by the game's audio, so you can hear many a legendary appellation announced after a goal-scoring play. In a dazzling deke around licensing legalities, these names include “Gretzky”, so you can even have the Great One leading your 84 Oilers back to the Stanley Cup. The player model doesn't really resemble Gretz, but the dominant playing style certainly does, and you're almost guaranteed at least a two-point performance every time he suits up. Adjust his hair to mullet-length (an option the player editor affords you) and he passes. Mullets aren't the only mark of authenticity. For added retro effect, there's even a “historical” rink which features boards sans advertising and the old pre-Meggnet 3-shaped nets that prevailed in the NHL before 1985. Think of NHL 2K5 as NHL 84.

Even though 2K5 is over a decade old, it is still highly playable, holding up against even NHL 18's overelaborate analog stickhandling system. 2K5 relies on what is essentially a two-button system—”pass” and “shoot”—and in this way allows for a much simpler, more gratifying experience, attaining to the action-based feel of NHL 94, the standard by which hockey video games are judged. Ironically, 2K5 does NHL 94 better than EA ever did in its many attempts to put “retro” modes in recent NHL games. Between the classic style and the classic teams, NHL 2K5 is like a time machine, taking you back to better days when hockey and hockey video games were actually entertaining. And as a bonus, you can even have the 1970s experience, playing with the helmetless heroes of the Boston Bruins and the notorious Philadelphia Flyers, better known as the Broad Street Bullies on account of their unfettered pugnacity.

Unfortunately, the roller derby-esque (if not Rollerball-esque) atmosphere of seventies hockey does not shine through quite as brightly in 2K5, owing to the game's lackluster fighting engine. While fights happen in abundance (almost as many as in the original NHL Hockey), it gets tiresome watching two players square off to throw non-impactful, meekly-animated jabs at one another. Fights in 2K5 lack all the stick-and-move (-and-don't-slip) strategies of hockey fighting, which are much better-captured by its overdog competitor, NHL 2005. This is really the only thing NHL 2005 does better than 2K5. To most people's tastes, NHL 2005 probably has the advantage in graphics, too, as the 2K5 player models tend to look like generic Neanderthals. This peccadillo, however, also works with the old-time hockey aesthetic—indeed, weren't hockey players of the past more than a bit troglodytic? Apart from that, announcer Gary Thorne's used-car salesman voice may wear a bit thin in terms of commentary, but you can always turn him off. Do that and you're left with a near-perfect, timeless hockey classic.

Star Wars: Masters of Teräs Käsi

In the wake of 2017's The Last Jedi, there arose among devotees of the series a grassroots internet movement to ban the film from the Star Wars canon. Efforts of these noble neckbeards aside, the movie still does the Star Wars universe justice, furthering (and finishing) a few vital character arcs. Thus, The Last Jedi must be respected. There are, however, several Star Wars offerings that do not further any arc or furnish any sort of earnest entertainment, and as such do not deserve respect. If anything, they deserve to be stricken from any and all canons to which they may pertain. One is the notorious Life Day special, which can only be enjoyed by those in whom the force of irony is particularly strong. Another is Masters of Teräs Käsi for PlayStation, which can't be enjoyed by anyone of sound mind.

A pivotal element of this blog's journalistic philosophy is what your correspondent lovingly likes to think of as "turd-polishing"—that is, taking a game widely considered bad and then showing the reader perspectives from which it might in some sense be appreciated. That approach is not foolproof, though, largely on account of games like Masters of Teräs Käsi. Teräs Käsi is the worst Star Wars video game of all time, and it also ranks among the most terrible fighting games of its none-too-hallowed era.

The thought of a Star Wars fighting game sounds intriguing, no? In the mid- to late-90s, generic fighting games were a dime a dozen, and so you might assume that a game benefitting from a Star Wars license would, if nothing else, stand out. After all, most fighting games, no matter their era, are at least somewhat playable by virtue of their simple, Manichean objectives and manageably-sized environs. Apparently, the bona fide marketing mavens at LucasArts intuited as much, and so they shoehorned Star Wars into the tournament fighting milieu by inventing an ancient martial art known as “Teräs Käsi.” In playing the game, however, the distinguishing principles of Teräs Käsi are unclear, as the move-sets are so boilerplate that you can easily convince yourself you're playing any other uninspired fighting game of the era. In effect, the Star Wars license only makes Teräs Käsi’s fundamental lack of imagination that much more obvious.

Masters of Teräs Käsi’s graphics are not atrocious, but beyond the visuals, key canonical cues are unconvincingly executed. Star Wars games—and the movies, for that matter—succeed principally on how well they deliver the basal sensory aggregates of the series: that is, the sounds and images that have come to condition the average fan’s experience of the brand. The Last Jedi had these crucial perceptual adjuncts, as did the unequivocal stinker that was the Phantom Menace. After the usual horn-blaring clarion call-to-prayer and the familiar yellow text crawling up the screen, though, Masters of Teräs Käsi does little to reassure the player that they are participating in the larger Star Wars cosmos. Sure, we see an AT-AT in the background of one stage, but where are the squalls from its massive leg joints? And sure, Boba Fett's roguish Kiwi accent is sufficiently muffled by his helmet, but it's hard to persuade yourself you're playing as the galaxy's most bad-ass bounty hunter when you fire up his jetpack only to fly straight out of the ring and then lose via ring-out.

Beating Teräs Käsi is no simple feat, and it's hard to make much progress through the various stages even on the easiest setting. It's one of those games where you find yourself asking: is it really that challenging or is the control just that bad? But even in terms of difficulty there are inconsistencies. If you play as Chewbacca, for instance, whose rangy limbs afford him excellent reach, you can beat opponents by pretty much just spamming kicks. Even Darth Vader, light saber and all, eventually falls to the mighty front-kicks from Chewie's long, hirsute dancer's legs. Evidently, the lost art of Teräs Käsi is built on a foundation of cheap, repetitive kicking.

Only the most hardcore Star Wars packrats should consider picking up Masters of Teräs Käsi—we're talking people who meet the DSM-V's diagnostic criteria for hoarding. This unpolishable turd will surely match the overall decor of the cluttered, festering hovels in which such people dwell. If you absolutely must play a Star Wars fighting game, check out Star Gladiator for PS1. It's a Capcom 3D-fighter that rips off Star Wars so shamelessly it's almost artful, featuring an obvious Wookiee-styled space Sasquatch and even a Darth Vader lookalike as the final boss. And if using the real Darth Vader and Yoda to kick the midi-chlorians out of Soul Calibur characters is fighting enough for you, then fire up Soul Calibur 4. Now if only we could kick the midi-chlorians out of the actual Star Wars canon...

NHL 13

NHL 13 is a triumph for feminism.

While the game is little more than a roster update for previous iteration of EA's juggernaut hockey franchise, the game features one new revolutionary roster possibility: the ability to create female players. The female option in the character creation suite logically follows from the game developer's forward thinking efforts to include two renowned real-life women's hockey players—American Angela Ruggiero and Canadian Haley Wickenheiser—as playable characters. Ruggiero is a perennial Team USA standout, and Wickenheiser is a living legend. A four-time winter Olympic gold medalist in ice hockey, Wickenheiser will go down in history as the first woman to score a goal in men's professional hockey. She did so while playing for the Finnish HC Salamat club in 2003. She also went to the Summer Olympics for softball. She's retired from hockey now, and is currently in medical school. What have you done with your life?

Now, faced with all this sheer human will that Wickenheiser embodies, you may be shirking and rationalizing, as people often do when they hear of someone with superior abilities. You may be saying, "well, technically Manon Rheaume was the first woman to play men's hockey, as a goalie in the NHL, no less" just to sort of take Wickenheiser down a peg. But without taking anything away from Rheaume, she played but one period of an exhibition game. While Rheaume was a bit of a sideshow, Wickenheiser had a regular shift.

But Manon Rheaume has left an indelible mark in her own right, at least upon your correspondent. This reviewer must confess that, for whatever reason, all the female players he has created are goalies. Don't think of it as sexism, however—it's far more complicated than that; possibly something to do with the palpable domestic associations of the net, which the goalie "keeps" as if it were a house. Manon Rheaume stands are the archetypal den-mother, the keeper of the net in the fullest sense.

All that being said, the female create-a-player options are limited. While the user may choose from dozens of heads in shaping their male characters, there are only three available for women: pretty blonde with pig-tails, character-nosed brunette with pigtails, and striking woman of African-American descent. Where are redheads? Where are the flowing tresses? The only real modifier is eye-color, and you have a half-dozen or more of those to choose from. It's not really enough, however, to build a team, unless you're content with a preponderance of pig-tailed look-alikes.


While NHL 13 commands high praise for its move toward gender impartiality, the game has all the usual pitfalls of the EA NHL series. It has none of the simplistic, blistering intensity of NHL 94, the remote-past benchmark of the series, as NHL 13 relies on analog-stick shooting, skating and stick-work. This system, while elaborate, relies on improbable feats of stickhandling and reduces a purported hockey “simulation” to a sort of deke-porn mini-game. Play on the equivocal "NHL 94" settings, ostensibly a throwback to the classic game, and your options are limited. The player is left with little control over whether to slap or wrist the puck, as the computer seemingly chooses for you, and stick movement is impoverished. There's not even a turbo button, a staple of EA's 16-bit hockey classics. Since the AI plays defensively, consistently shutting off the interior of its own zone, you'll mostly have to settle for long shots, and games will inevitably turn into defensive struggles, the winner usually determined by lucky goals. But then again, doesn't this sound like an accurate simulation of present-day NHL hockey: vigorously conservative and defensive with winners and losers largely determined by bounces?

The only consolation is that the game includes a version of Wayne Gretzky convincing in both the looks and talent departments who's available right out of the box. In this way, NHL 13 hearkens back to a more compelling NHL of yesteryear. Maybe it’s the promises of a more compelling NHL of the future that makes features like the inclusion of female characters in NHL 13 so appealing. These exemplary women allow us the fantasy that hockey is capable of being changed.

Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 3

Your correspondent wants to be upfront from the outset: he knows nothing about Dragon Ball Z, other than the fact it's patently Japanese and exceedingly popular with children, man-children, and other fans of bright colors and loud sounds. That said, a lack of any prior knowledge of the series or where the game Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 3 fits within its canon will not unfairly bias the appraisal that follows. Even when reviewing Budokai Tenkaichi 3 not as the spawn of a monumental marketing force but rather as a generic fighting game, it still emerges as a must-purchase for versus-fighter fans. Even if you know nothing about the series, the game's specs speak for themselves. Most notably, there 150 playable characters in the game, a record for a fighting game that has yet to be broken, and probably never will be. Seventy-two of these beautifully drawn characters are available right out of the package, ranging from jagged-haired anime brats to viridescent aliens to boldfaced MegaMan clones, their sheer variety enough to make even the Milestone Comics lineup look like it has diversity issues. On top of that epic roster add twenty-odd stages, all of which are lush, sprawling and ecologically diverse. You can fight in forests, in deserts, in outer space, and even underwater. In essence, the available permutations and combinations of scenarios are endless, making BT3 nothing short of candy for the imagination of the fighting-game fan. The gameplay isn't that bad either, as it consists of a little bit of hand-to-hand combat and a lot more throwing of various projectiles (could these be the eponymous dragon testes?) from near or far, more often the latter given the size of the confines. Heedless of gravity, you traverse the nooks and crannies of these massive environments from a dramatic, behind-the-back view, making the game feel like the magisterial Power Stone but in a tight third-person. Anyone who fancies themselves a fan of fighters should track down BT3 without hesitation and bask in its inexhaustible potentialities. But for god's sake, if you're aged thirty or above, don't start watching the show!