You can call THIS, the New World Order of Wrestling, brother
Let’s go back to July 7, 1996.
It’s time for WCW’s Bash at the Beach, an annual pay-per-view that will be headlined by the biggest match in the company’s history. Sting, Lex Luger and the Macho Man Randy Savage are set to defend the company’s honor against the unlikeliest of invaders. WWF stars Razor Ramon and Diesel, now going by their real names, Scott Hall and Kevin Nash, have been terrorizing WCW for months (remember, there was barely an internet, we had no idea these two were under contract to WCW when Hall jumped the barricade unannounced on Monday Nitro, especially those of us who had just turned 8). Now called “the Outsiders,” the duo had been teasing a mystery partner for weeks. Those of us who watched both promotions speculated on which WWF-er would show up next: Brett Hart? Mr. Perfect? The Undertaker? Who knew?
The match looked like it was going to go the way of the good guys at first. For one, the Outsiders’ mystery partner didn’t bother to show up. Even when Luger had to be removed from the match after a “neck injury,” it looked like the Stinger and the Macho Man were in control. However, the Outsiders were game to the challenge and more than willing to use underhanded tactics to gain control. They beat down Savage, standing tall in the ring. Just when it looked like they were going to score a cheap win, Hulk Hogan walked out onto the ramp. The hero of boys and girls everywhere, the man who reminded us to take our vitamins and say our prayers every night, the man who had defeated countless villains as bad as or worse than the Outsiders. He entered the ring like a ball of fire, like Hulk Hogan always did, causing the villains to scatter and the fans to cheer. Then, he shattered the world of wrestling fans everywhere.
To the shock of everyone in attendance, he hit his patented leg drop on Savage. He threw the referee from the ring. He high fived Hall and Nash as the fans booed and garbage flew into the ring. If we didn’t believe what we were seeing, a post match interview let us know it was true. Nothing about vitamins and prayers and ‘Murica from the Hulkster here. He told the fans to shut up. He said all the garbage in the ring represented all the people in the stands. He said he and the Outsiders, the New World Order, would destroy everything in their path. And they were going to start with WCW.
That moment shocked even casual wrestling fans. It helped establish WCW as a legitimate contender to Vince McMahon’s WWF (now WWE) and launch pro wrestling back into the mainstream. Mainstream meant merchandise and merchandise meant video games. Wrestling videogames to this point had been pretty underwhelming. Simply put, the chaotic flow of a professional wrestling match is impossible to capture on a 16-bit console. Earlier 32-bit offerings tried and did much better, but games like Power Move Pro Wrestling lacked a WCW or WWF license and games like WCW vs. The World were too complex. It wasn’t until WCW vs NWO: World Tour hit the scene in 1997 that the formula for making these games, and making them well, was introduced.
The controls are simple and were based on the outstanding, Japan-only FirePro Wrestling series. A grapples, B strikes. Hold the button for a strong attack or tap it for a weak attack. You can run the ropes with down c and running into the turnbuckle allows you to climb. Up c exits or enters the ring and left c switches your focus in tag team matches. The control stick taunts and activates special mode once your spirit meter is high enough. The more damage you do to an opponent, the more the meter builds and when its finished, you can activate your finishing move. It’s easy to learn and allows for a lot of different moves for each character. It allows you to just pick up and play without really knowing anything about wrestling or fighting games in general. But it also allows for a level of customization that hadn’t been seen before in wrestling games. You could do so many different things depending on where you were in the ring or what combinations of buttons you push together. It felt like I discovered something new every time I played.
The roster was definitely okay for the time, but I think, and this is kind of strange, that it aged better than many of its contemporaries. WCW was represented by Ric Flair, the Giant, Lex Luger, Sting, The Steiner Brothers, Steven Regal, The Ultimo Dragon, Dean Malenko, Eddy Guerrero, Rey Mysterio and Diamond Dallas Page (Chris Benoit is also there, make of it what you will). The NWO featured Hogan, Hall and Nash, along with Syxx (aka. 123 Kid aka X-Pac aka Sean Waltman aka you get the idea), Buff Bagwell, Scott Norton, The Macho Man (who had switched sides earlier in the year), Eric Bischoff and the fake Sting. That was an ok roster at the time, but I think it’s the additional grapplers that put it over the top and make the game still worth revisiting.
As I got older my tastes changed and I started to gravitate more towards Japanese wrestling. It’s a little less silly and puts more emphasis on athletic ability than what you see in the WWE nowadays. I remember watching highlights of some of these promotions and thinking “I have seen all these people somewhere before.” Well, it turns out they were characters in WCW vs. NWO: World Tour.
The game pads its roster with two fictitious promotions, Dead or Alive Wrestling and the Independent Union. I didn’t know it at the time, but these were analogous to Frontier Martial Arts Wrestling and Michinoku Pro, two popular Japanese promotions. The wrestlers had their names switched, but their moves were all there. It was really cool to go back to this years later and get a chance to play as Hayabusa, Great Sauske and Genichiro Tenryu (I’m sorry, I mean Hannibal, Black Ninja and Sumo Jo). This was mostly a function of the game being heavily based on Japan’s FirePro Wrestling titles, although not everyone from those games made the cut. Also, fun fact, TAKA Michinoku, who is known as Black Belt in WCW Vs. NWO, was under contract to the WWF when this game came out, so he essentially appeared in a WCW game while under contract to its hated rival. Weird.
The game features a few different modes, including a tournament, league and battle royale. Some of these modes were a bit confusing to western audiences (leagues and tournaments are much more prevalent in Japanese wrestling) but they were fun nonetheless. The bulk of the single player experience comes from the championship modes, where you can chase singles or tag titles from each promotion. These allow you to unlock wrestlers, with DDP, Savage, Wrath and, of all people, Glacier as hidden characters. Winning all the titles will unlock Whole World Wrestling, which features challengers from all the promotions. Winning titles there unlocks the final two secret characters, Black Widow and Joe Bruiser (Manami Toyota and Muhammad Ali respectively). It does get a little old wrestling match after match, but it offers plenty to do.
The best thing about it though was the multiplayer. Up to four people could take control of a grappler, whether it be in 4 way matches or 2 vs. 2 in tag team matches. It was an absolute blast, even for non-wrestling fans. Because the controls were so simple, anyone could pick this up and play it and have a good time. None of my friends growing up were wrestling fans, but we still played plenty of this game. A lot of young fans grow up dreaming of being world heavyweight champion. But my brother and I always wanted to be Tag Team Champions. We were always fans of true brother tag teams for obvious reasons and being able to chase the tag straps with the Steiners was one of our favorite things to do. Everything was seamless and while selecting the right opponent could be difficult at times, it was so easy to use.
The game isn’t without flaws. The character models weren’t great, even for the time. You could only use special moves from a front or rear grapple, so a lot of wrestlers did not have their finishers as actual specials. Guerrero’s frog splash, Malenko’s Texas Cloverleaf and Sting’s scorpion deathlock all come to mind. This was mostly remedied by having them elsewhere in the move set, but it still wasn’t the same. It was very clear that they ripped a lot of the shell of this game straight from FirePro, the menu visuals all scream “Japanese Wrestling.” You also see a picture of someone holding a trophy when they win a championship, a common occurrence in the land of the rising sun but not really a part of western wrestling culture.
World Tour is incredibly balanced, almost to its detriment. There is little to differentiate the bigger wrestlers from smaller ones other than a few moves and capabilities. The cruiserweights can dive out of or into the ring, while the heavyweights can’t, which makes sense. But their grapples don’t function any different. It’s almost comical to watch Rey Mysterio, who is two inches shorter and weighs 20 lbs less than I do, body slam the Giant, who is seven feet tall and weighs well over 400 lbs.
The biggest thing here is the roster of WCW and NWO guys. I won’t say it’s bad, but it wasn’t optimal either. Why Eric Bischoff and fake Sting needed to be playable is beyond me. Even though they weren’t members for very long and weren’t very important, I would have rather seen Mr. Wallstreet (Mike Rotunda, IRS, Etc.) or Big Bubba Rodgers. WCW’s roster is better, but still missing some people. It would have been nice to see Harlem Heat or the Faces of Fear and its strange that they included Wrath and Glacier without including Mortis. He was largely retired by 1997, but I was a bit surprised to not see Arn Anderson. I really would have liked to see Chris Jericho in there, but he probably didn’t warrant an inclusion at this point in his career. I can’t fault them, but I always find it a bit uncomfortable to go back to old wrestling games and see Chris Benoit.
As you could tell, I could drone on about this game forever. It set the standard for wrestling games for this generation, as just about any successful title aped its formula. Some titles tried to mix it up, but those often resulted in complete disaster (WCW Nitro) or unnecessary complexity (WWF WarZone). WCW would eventually go the way of the Dodo. The NWO storyline would be bled dry again and again and the promotion would sell itself out, becoming WWF-lite. But for a few years it was the hottest ticket in wrestling, producing some truly classic moments. WCW vs. NWO: World Tour may not be a picture perfect wrestling sim, but it’s a great, fun game that anyone can enjoy.
So, let’s get to it. But wouldn’t you rather play?:
WCW vs. NWO: Revenge
World Tour’s direct sequel added a lot of things that were considered upgrades at the time. A bigger roster, unique entrance ramps, entrances and create a wrestler. It also had improved graphics. However, these “improvements” are actually to the game’s detriment when you play it today. The entrances are long, drawn out and slow the pace of play. They also don’t look particularly great, though they can be skipped. The create mode is laughably shallow, it almost wasn’t even worth including, and the championship mode is agonizingly long. I will say the roster is bigger and has more WCW stars, but honestly I would rather play as Jinesi Shinzaki than Lodi or Reese. It was nice to have Jericho this time around and by this point Goldberg had risen to full blown star status, but that wasn’t enough to push it past its predecessor. I also feel like the A.I. is unnecessarily brutal. Revenge is still a great game and just barely missed the 10s, but I still like World Tour better.
WWF No Mercy or WWF WrestleMania 2000
These two WWF games use the same game engine as the WCW titles and add other features, like entrance music. My reason for preferring the other games is simple: I was never a WWF fan. I, flameshield up, never really liked the attitude era. I can’t deny Steve Austin was cool, but I always found the Rock to be obnoxious and I absolutely HATED D-Generation X. I wasn’t about any of the Ministry of Darkness stuff either. There was almost no wrestling, just 2 hours of faux satanic worship, fart jokes and dudes pointing to their crotches. These games are still okay, but I never really had an interest in playing as anyone in them.
WWF Smackdown/Smackdown vs. Raw/2K
I certainly like the more recent titles (except the last 2K, just ew), but you can’t deny they are just not accessible to non wrestling fans. Also, I always found the controls to be loose and floaty. I do appreciate the story modes and I absolutely love the GM mode in SDVR 2006, but I always hated when these games put ridiculous stipulations on your matches that made them more frustrating than fun. I feel like they have never been able to balance the A.I. in these games, you either smash the computer with ease or it counters literally everything you do. That said, I have to give them credit for their create modes, back when I had more free time I used to spend hours create wrestlers. At one point I think my brother and I created an entire promotion. That said, the meat of the game is what happens between the ropes and while I like the engine, I still prefer the old N64 games.
Let’s go back to July 7, 1996.
It’s time for WCW’s Bash at the Beach, an annual pay-per-view that will be headlined by the biggest match in the company’s history. Sting, Lex Luger and the Macho Man Randy Savage are set to defend the company’s honor against the unlikeliest of invaders. WWF stars Razor Ramon and Diesel, now going by their real names, Scott Hall and Kevin Nash, have been terrorizing WCW for months (remember, there was barely an internet, we had no idea these two were under contract to WCW when Hall jumped the barricade unannounced on Monday Nitro, especially those of us who had just turned 8). Now called “the Outsiders,” the duo had been teasing a mystery partner for weeks. Those of us who watched both promotions speculated on which WWF-er would show up next: Brett Hart? Mr. Perfect? The Undertaker? Who knew?
The match looked like it was going to go the way of the good guys at first. For one, the Outsiders’ mystery partner didn’t bother to show up. Even when Luger had to be removed from the match after a “neck injury,” it looked like the Stinger and the Macho Man were in control. However, the Outsiders were game to the challenge and more than willing to use underhanded tactics to gain control. They beat down Savage, standing tall in the ring. Just when it looked like they were going to score a cheap win, Hulk Hogan walked out onto the ramp. The hero of boys and girls everywhere, the man who reminded us to take our vitamins and say our prayers every night, the man who had defeated countless villains as bad as or worse than the Outsiders. He entered the ring like a ball of fire, like Hulk Hogan always did, causing the villains to scatter and the fans to cheer. Then, he shattered the world of wrestling fans everywhere.
To the shock of everyone in attendance, he hit his patented leg drop on Savage. He threw the referee from the ring. He high fived Hall and Nash as the fans booed and garbage flew into the ring. If we didn’t believe what we were seeing, a post match interview let us know it was true. Nothing about vitamins and prayers and ‘Murica from the Hulkster here. He told the fans to shut up. He said all the garbage in the ring represented all the people in the stands. He said he and the Outsiders, the New World Order, would destroy everything in their path. And they were going to start with WCW.
That moment shocked even casual wrestling fans. It helped establish WCW as a legitimate contender to Vince McMahon’s WWF (now WWE) and launch pro wrestling back into the mainstream. Mainstream meant merchandise and merchandise meant video games. Wrestling videogames to this point had been pretty underwhelming. Simply put, the chaotic flow of a professional wrestling match is impossible to capture on a 16-bit console. Earlier 32-bit offerings tried and did much better, but games like Power Move Pro Wrestling lacked a WCW or WWF license and games like WCW vs. The World were too complex. It wasn’t until WCW vs NWO: World Tour hit the scene in 1997 that the formula for making these games, and making them well, was introduced.
The controls are simple and were based on the outstanding, Japan-only FirePro Wrestling series. A grapples, B strikes. Hold the button for a strong attack or tap it for a weak attack. You can run the ropes with down c and running into the turnbuckle allows you to climb. Up c exits or enters the ring and left c switches your focus in tag team matches. The control stick taunts and activates special mode once your spirit meter is high enough. The more damage you do to an opponent, the more the meter builds and when its finished, you can activate your finishing move. It’s easy to learn and allows for a lot of different moves for each character. It allows you to just pick up and play without really knowing anything about wrestling or fighting games in general. But it also allows for a level of customization that hadn’t been seen before in wrestling games. You could do so many different things depending on where you were in the ring or what combinations of buttons you push together. It felt like I discovered something new every time I played.
The roster was definitely okay for the time, but I think, and this is kind of strange, that it aged better than many of its contemporaries. WCW was represented by Ric Flair, the Giant, Lex Luger, Sting, The Steiner Brothers, Steven Regal, The Ultimo Dragon, Dean Malenko, Eddy Guerrero, Rey Mysterio and Diamond Dallas Page (Chris Benoit is also there, make of it what you will). The NWO featured Hogan, Hall and Nash, along with Syxx (aka. 123 Kid aka X-Pac aka Sean Waltman aka you get the idea), Buff Bagwell, Scott Norton, The Macho Man (who had switched sides earlier in the year), Eric Bischoff and the fake Sting. That was an ok roster at the time, but I think it’s the additional grapplers that put it over the top and make the game still worth revisiting.
As I got older my tastes changed and I started to gravitate more towards Japanese wrestling. It’s a little less silly and puts more emphasis on athletic ability than what you see in the WWE nowadays. I remember watching highlights of some of these promotions and thinking “I have seen all these people somewhere before.” Well, it turns out they were characters in WCW vs. NWO: World Tour.
The game pads its roster with two fictitious promotions, Dead or Alive Wrestling and the Independent Union. I didn’t know it at the time, but these were analogous to Frontier Martial Arts Wrestling and Michinoku Pro, two popular Japanese promotions. The wrestlers had their names switched, but their moves were all there. It was really cool to go back to this years later and get a chance to play as Hayabusa, Great Sauske and Genichiro Tenryu (I’m sorry, I mean Hannibal, Black Ninja and Sumo Jo). This was mostly a function of the game being heavily based on Japan’s FirePro Wrestling titles, although not everyone from those games made the cut. Also, fun fact, TAKA Michinoku, who is known as Black Belt in WCW Vs. NWO, was under contract to the WWF when this game came out, so he essentially appeared in a WCW game while under contract to its hated rival. Weird.
The game features a few different modes, including a tournament, league and battle royale. Some of these modes were a bit confusing to western audiences (leagues and tournaments are much more prevalent in Japanese wrestling) but they were fun nonetheless. The bulk of the single player experience comes from the championship modes, where you can chase singles or tag titles from each promotion. These allow you to unlock wrestlers, with DDP, Savage, Wrath and, of all people, Glacier as hidden characters. Winning all the titles will unlock Whole World Wrestling, which features challengers from all the promotions. Winning titles there unlocks the final two secret characters, Black Widow and Joe Bruiser (Manami Toyota and Muhammad Ali respectively). It does get a little old wrestling match after match, but it offers plenty to do.
The best thing about it though was the multiplayer. Up to four people could take control of a grappler, whether it be in 4 way matches or 2 vs. 2 in tag team matches. It was an absolute blast, even for non-wrestling fans. Because the controls were so simple, anyone could pick this up and play it and have a good time. None of my friends growing up were wrestling fans, but we still played plenty of this game. A lot of young fans grow up dreaming of being world heavyweight champion. But my brother and I always wanted to be Tag Team Champions. We were always fans of true brother tag teams for obvious reasons and being able to chase the tag straps with the Steiners was one of our favorite things to do. Everything was seamless and while selecting the right opponent could be difficult at times, it was so easy to use.
The game isn’t without flaws. The character models weren’t great, even for the time. You could only use special moves from a front or rear grapple, so a lot of wrestlers did not have their finishers as actual specials. Guerrero’s frog splash, Malenko’s Texas Cloverleaf and Sting’s scorpion deathlock all come to mind. This was mostly remedied by having them elsewhere in the move set, but it still wasn’t the same. It was very clear that they ripped a lot of the shell of this game straight from FirePro, the menu visuals all scream “Japanese Wrestling.” You also see a picture of someone holding a trophy when they win a championship, a common occurrence in the land of the rising sun but not really a part of western wrestling culture.
World Tour is incredibly balanced, almost to its detriment. There is little to differentiate the bigger wrestlers from smaller ones other than a few moves and capabilities. The cruiserweights can dive out of or into the ring, while the heavyweights can’t, which makes sense. But their grapples don’t function any different. It’s almost comical to watch Rey Mysterio, who is two inches shorter and weighs 20 lbs less than I do, body slam the Giant, who is seven feet tall and weighs well over 400 lbs.
The biggest thing here is the roster of WCW and NWO guys. I won’t say it’s bad, but it wasn’t optimal either. Why Eric Bischoff and fake Sting needed to be playable is beyond me. Even though they weren’t members for very long and weren’t very important, I would have rather seen Mr. Wallstreet (Mike Rotunda, IRS, Etc.) or Big Bubba Rodgers. WCW’s roster is better, but still missing some people. It would have been nice to see Harlem Heat or the Faces of Fear and its strange that they included Wrath and Glacier without including Mortis. He was largely retired by 1997, but I was a bit surprised to not see Arn Anderson. I really would have liked to see Chris Jericho in there, but he probably didn’t warrant an inclusion at this point in his career. I can’t fault them, but I always find it a bit uncomfortable to go back to old wrestling games and see Chris Benoit.
As you could tell, I could drone on about this game forever. It set the standard for wrestling games for this generation, as just about any successful title aped its formula. Some titles tried to mix it up, but those often resulted in complete disaster (WCW Nitro) or unnecessary complexity (WWF WarZone). WCW would eventually go the way of the Dodo. The NWO storyline would be bled dry again and again and the promotion would sell itself out, becoming WWF-lite. But for a few years it was the hottest ticket in wrestling, producing some truly classic moments. WCW vs. NWO: World Tour may not be a picture perfect wrestling sim, but it’s a great, fun game that anyone can enjoy.
So, let’s get to it. But wouldn’t you rather play?:
WCW vs. NWO: Revenge
World Tour’s direct sequel added a lot of things that were considered upgrades at the time. A bigger roster, unique entrance ramps, entrances and create a wrestler. It also had improved graphics. However, these “improvements” are actually to the game’s detriment when you play it today. The entrances are long, drawn out and slow the pace of play. They also don’t look particularly great, though they can be skipped. The create mode is laughably shallow, it almost wasn’t even worth including, and the championship mode is agonizingly long. I will say the roster is bigger and has more WCW stars, but honestly I would rather play as Jinesi Shinzaki than Lodi or Reese. It was nice to have Jericho this time around and by this point Goldberg had risen to full blown star status, but that wasn’t enough to push it past its predecessor. I also feel like the A.I. is unnecessarily brutal. Revenge is still a great game and just barely missed the 10s, but I still like World Tour better.
WWF No Mercy or WWF WrestleMania 2000
These two WWF games use the same game engine as the WCW titles and add other features, like entrance music. My reason for preferring the other games is simple: I was never a WWF fan. I, flameshield up, never really liked the attitude era. I can’t deny Steve Austin was cool, but I always found the Rock to be obnoxious and I absolutely HATED D-Generation X. I wasn’t about any of the Ministry of Darkness stuff either. There was almost no wrestling, just 2 hours of faux satanic worship, fart jokes and dudes pointing to their crotches. These games are still okay, but I never really had an interest in playing as anyone in them.
WWF Smackdown/Smackdown vs. Raw/2K
I certainly like the more recent titles (except the last 2K, just ew), but you can’t deny they are just not accessible to non wrestling fans. Also, I always found the controls to be loose and floaty. I do appreciate the story modes and I absolutely love the GM mode in SDVR 2006, but I always hated when these games put ridiculous stipulations on your matches that made them more frustrating than fun. I feel like they have never been able to balance the A.I. in these games, you either smash the computer with ease or it counters literally everything you do. That said, I have to give them credit for their create modes, back when I had more free time I used to spend hours create wrestlers. At one point I think my brother and I created an entire promotion. That said, the meat of the game is what happens between the ropes and while I like the engine, I still prefer the old N64 games.
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