Wrestle Mania The Arcade Game - Sega Genesis

I'm not really sure what to say about a wrestling game that takes you about 45 minutes to beat so I'll give you a little look into my formative years when I thought wrestling was better then The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and G.I. Joe combined.

Wrestling even today still holds some pretty fond memories for me. I still remember going to my cousins house and renting the Wrestle Mania from that year (probably about 1990) and watching it and loving every minute of it. I remember the action figures, I remember watching it on TV, I still have The Ultimate Warriors autograph somewhere, I remember being absolutely obsessed with the WWF. From the about the time I was eight to maybe the time I was eleven or so I loved wrestling. Hulk Hogan, The Ultimate Warrior, Randy Macho Man Savage, Jake The Snake Roberts, Earthquake, Andre the Giant, etc. For me that was the heyday of wrestling. Since then Hulk Hogan has essentially become a parody of himself, The Ultimate Warrior is a crazy right wing religious guy who seems about one step away from joining a militia, Randy Savage has... I don't know, faded into obscurity? Jake The Snake may now be homeless and smoking crack considering the shape he was in during Beyond the Mat, Earthquake has been dead now for a couple years as has Andre the Giant has been dead even longer. My point being is that this is the last time I actually kept up in any sort of fashion with wrestling. To me it was one of those things that I loved as a kid but have absolutely no interest in watching now or even by the time I was thirteen. So how do I rate a game based on that?

Wrestle Mania The Arcade Game was released in 1995, this is about two to three years after I had stopped watching wrestling. I actually recognize some of the wrestlers featured in the game though. The Undertaker, Bret Hit Man Hart, Shawn Michaels, Lex Lugar and Bam Bam Bigalow are all names I recognize. Though except for The Undertaker and Bret Hart I don't think I know any of them past there names, I never really watched them wrestle. So I decided to play the game as The Undertaker. I actually quite liked him when I was young.

You never appear to wrestle one on one in this game. It's alway one on two, one on three, and so on. You're always the one. You would think this would make for a rather difficult game, but really it doesn't. For the most part if you're attacking one of your opponents the other guy isn't really attacking you. Sure they sometimes will hit you in the back of the head, but for the most part they seem to wait their turn. Not sure if this is intentional or not, but it is what it is.

Most of the game can be beaten by using the kick button, the first couple of matches I had I just got a guy in a corner and kicked him into submission, found the second guy and did the same. You could probably beat the entire game this way, but what fun would that be? So I decided to break out the combo moves... and that's when I ran into the problems.

Apparently at some point Sega released a six button controller, this game talks about using it. The problem is that I have the three button controller. So to run? You have to hit A and C... considering there's a B in between those buttons that gets a little awkward. You're having to do two button combos and after a while it just gets annoying I would go back to kicking my opponents. I'm sure with a six button controller it would be a lot easier, but I don't have one.

The graphics are decent for a wrestling game, the sound is sometimes good and sometimes makes me want to shove a pencil into my ears. Overall the game is just kind of average. I'm sure it was fun in the arcade, but I'm not really sure it transfered over to the home game.

With a six button controller and perhaps a second player this game would be decent, but not anything to write home about. Without those two things it's 45 minutes of mashing the C button and kicking Bam Bam Biglow in the balls over an over.

Squid.