First Impressions: A flashback to when rasslin’ was full of talentless buffoons – but with personality!
Even with the downturn lately in the wrestling business, wrestling video games remain extremely popular. The WWF has 2 huge games hitting next-generation consoles this fall; WWF Raw for Microsoft Xbox, and WWF Smackdown: Just Bring It for PlayStation 2. However, there is one other wrestling game hitting shelves this fall, and it’s a doozy for old-school rasslin’ fans. That game is Legends of Wrestling, and from the looks of things, it is shaping up to be quite a title for the fall.
The publishers, Acclaim, promise this will not be along the lines of the sloppily made WWF Attitude/ECW Hardcore Revolution games. Acclaim Studios Salt Lake (the developers) have created an engine similar to Smackdown’s pick up and play system, assuring there will be more emphasis on having fun with the game, than memorizing the asinine amount of button presses just to perform a suplex.
Legends of Wrestling will feature 40 old-time wrestlers (and a few current legends); from Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka, King Kong Bundy, Jerry “The King” Lawler, Legion of Doom/Road Warriors, Rob Van Dam (odd since he is a part of the WWF/WCW/ECW alliance), Bret “The Hitman” Hart, and the recently signed (and spokesman) Hulk Hogan. The mixing in of Hogan is a huge coup for Acclaim – how can you have a wrestling legends game without the man who made it popular in the first place? Unfortunately, Andre The Giant is not apart of LoW.
The game will feature most of the usual modes of play for a wrestling game; one-on-one or tag team exhibition matches, multiplayer modes, goofy gimmick matches as well. But the big draw is the career mode. In this, you pick a wrestler, and if it’s the tag career mode, a partner, and go on your way trying to capture all the biggest championships around the globe. It’s unsure how it will work, but I’d assume it will contain many feuds and gimmick matches, just like Smackdown did with SD2 on PlayStation.
As usual for Acclaim, the legendary create-a-wrestler mode is included, and is just as deep as it ever was. One knock against the old Acclaim WWF games was how it was more fun to sit around and make wrestlers, but the game was so bad you didn’t want to actually use them in the game. Hopefully that won’t be the case here, but the CAW should still let you have hours of fun creating whatever kind of freaked out monsters your sick little minds can muster.
Something new is the Create-A-Stencil mode. With this, you somewhat “edit” existing wrestlers, adding tattoos, jewelry, or whatever else you decide to accessorize your wrestler with. Sounds quite interesting, it will be cool to see how it all turns out.
Thankfully the visuals are looking up to PlayStation 2 par. Each wrestler is modeled exactly like the real-life counterpart. Not as of now thankfully, but when they were in their primes (i.e. Hogan probably has 3 locks of hair, instead of the 2 he has currently). Some of the larger wrestlers like Kamala (wait... he’s a LEGEND? Uh…) and Bundy are so huge they look like giant clumps of mass, which is kind of strange, but then again the looked like giant clumps of mass in real life too. From the looks, Legends of Wrestling will indeed be easy on the eyes. There’s even a referee in the ring!
