Remember Saturday afternoons sat in front of the telly, watching big, hulking
hairy fellas flinging each other round a (square) ring pretending to hurt each
other? Corky gets in the ring to see if Ocean have caught the thrills of the
hammiest sport in the world!
Oh the joys of wrestling! The blood, the sweat, the tears... the brightly coloured
underpants! Fun for all the familt, to be sure! What a tragedy when they went and
axed if from ITV. So unless you've got satellite TV (and let's face it, only forty-five
people have!), your only chance to see those beefy brutes battling it out is in
World Wrestling Federation, the game.
Your goal in WWF is to win the Wrestlemania Belt, a tough task indeed as you'll
have to compete against five of the meanest, obscenest wrestlers around. There's
Mr Perfect, who's into showing off just a bit whilst performing his Perfect Plex
manoeuvre.
The Warlord is rather nifty at Full Nelsons, the Million Dollar Man certainly
works for his money with the odd Back Breaker or three.
The Mountie enjoys dishing out Drop Headlocks (ouch!) and Sergeant Slaughter
is sure to give you the hump with his Camel Clutch!
You have at your disposal the notorious Hulk Hogan, decked out in yellow panties,
the Ultimate Warrior, who knows all there is to know about giving his opponnets a
good old Gorilla Press, and British Bulldog, whose fetish lies in Power Slamming!
Choose one of the three and get ready to slog your guts out in a big way. But
before you commence with biffing and bashing, there's a two-player practice mode,
just to toughen you up a bit - and by golly you're gonna need it!
Each wrestler has a strength indicator, displayed at the side of the screen.
This determines how quickly he can recover from being knocked to the floor, or how
fast he can throw off the lump of lard who's pinning him down!
Each match lasts a maximum of five minutes and can be won by pinning your opponent
to the canvas for three seconds. That's not as easy as it sounds: unless your opponent
has had his energy reduced to zero he'll be able to shrug you off by hammering the
fire button.
You can execute a varied array of moves with combinations of fire and a direction.
Each individual wrestler has his own aforementioned special move, along with the
usual punch, kick and drop kick manoeuvres. Whilst running, you can carry out the
Flying Knee or Flying Kick strategy.
If things are getting a little hectic in the ring, you can climb the posts and
perform tricky leaps from there, or leave the ring and bettle it put on the floor -
but don't take too long, after twenty seconds you're disqualified.
Whilst things are hotting up in the ring various icons appear in the lower part
of the screen. The finger icon instructs you to press the fire button as quickly as
you can to ensure your wrestler gets up in time. The joystick icon appears when
you're haveing a good old grapple.
Waggle the stick at great speed to increase your grapple strength (shown by a
rising bar at the side of the icon). The first player to reach maximum grapple
performs his own special move on his opponent.
If there's not an outright winner at the end of five minutes, the match is
declared a draw and your challenge for Belt is over. If on the other hand you manage
to show the world what you're made of, it's on to wrestle another hulking hero.
Extra large torso, extra large ego, extra large panties!
After playing WWF on several machines I can honestly declate the Commodore
version is the best I've seen to date. The characters are really quite large, well
detailed, nicely animated and flicker free. There's not much to look at on screen
apart from the ring and the wrestlers, but a least things are tidy and you can see
what's going on.
Sound isn't quite so impressive, after a decent intro tune you're reduced to
spot FX once in the ring. Playability is high though, the various moves are fairly
challenging and keep you on your toes. It's not just a case of waggling the joystick,
pressing the fire button and hoping for the best.
The manoeuvres can be executed really well with a bit of patience. I especially
like climbing the ropes for superjumps, but watch out for getting caught in endless
grapples. Umpteen times I've had someone half-dead only for them to come back, trap
me in a corner and execute grapple after grapple.
Once they're so close to being eliminated they really get their blood up and there's
no way you can waggle to victory in grapple, not unless you're prepared to reduce your
hands to raw flesh! But this means you can't rely on one simple move to be victorious.
I enjoyed WWF, it brings the animal out in ya! There was a hell of a lot of
gruntin! and groanin! going on in ZZAP! Towers when this arrived in the office and
that's before we'd even got the game out of the box! A must for grapple fans
everywhere!
