As we’ve seen throughout this story so far, British people love sports games. As a fan of both football and Formula 1, I have the outside context to bring to a large proportion of the sports games to have reached #1. Which makes a lot of difference to how they come across. There are also a lot of games which lean on other outside contexts, say movies, but games based on other pieces of fiction tend to provide enough narrative within the game to stand alone a bit more easily.
Somewhere in the middle that brings us to the biggest group of games that I’m coming to as an outsider and playing shorn of context and resonance: wrestling games. Listening to wrestling podcaster Jo Graham talk on another podcast about the subject recently made clear just how big a part all the interlocking mythology and history plays to enjoying it. But as I played WWF Warzone I was familiar with a few of the names (I don’t quite just mean The Rock) and not much else.
WWF Warzone doesn’t make much of an effort to introduce newcomers, either. Wrestlers are presented with less, not more back story than the average fighting game. The approach for the menus of setting everything in a mechanised warehouse, with packed away wrestlers bursting out of crates, makes for a nice image but is also a bit too accurate for how they’re treated. Commentators can repeat the same couple of lines at the start of every match about Triple H being arrogant and thinking he’s better than others, but compared even to the more basic WWF Wrestlemania of Amiga days, there isn’t a lot of chance for personality to come through.
Never mind, though, we can build our own context instead, thanks to some impressive customisation features. I remember doing so when playing with neighbours on one of this game’s successors and it was a great time. There are lots of options for match types with added cages or weapons, but more importantly there is the chance to create your own wrestler and give them tight golden trunks, a theme tune, etc.. WWF Warzone doesn’t have all personalisation options for fighting that would later come in (you have to just use an existing wrestler’s complete move set) but the chance to customise a fetching look is impressively comprehensive, as a quick perusal of randomly generated wrestlers shows.
Comprehensive, that is, on most things. There is an option for gender, and if you pick it it opens up a menu, and that menu is a list with one option: male. It’s one of the most confronting things I’ve come across in any game to date. The reason turns out to be that if you can complete the extensive campaign mode with one of a couple of specific characters, you can unlock a female option for that menu. Which I only know because I could look it up online, and doesn’t really make things any better. Women are in the game to be earned as a reward only.
Customisation out of the way, I went about the challenge mode and the actual wrestling at the heart of the game. That is where Warzone puts on a much stronger front. Each contest is longer and less straightforward than the 1v1 fighting games I’ve played to date, and the game has some beautiful ways of drawing out the matches and complicating strategy. There is an energy bar for each fighter, but it’s not just a matter of wearing it down. It gets replenished when it runs out but changes colour, moving progressively from green to red. It also gets superseded at various points by a series of interacting bars for stun, hold and pain.
If you wear your opponent out enough you get them into stun for some free hits, for instance, and hopefully can do enough damage to take them into the next colour. The result plays out somewhat like a game of tennis, where you slowly build advantage but have to get past a certain point to convert it into a permanent gain, and this continues along on different scales, with advantages steadily building but with the possibility of it all being swept away always present. Though tennis doesn’t have the possibility of pinning your opponent for an instant win. The resultant matches are involving on the immediate dramatic level and the longer term tactical level, and it lets some strong narratives emerge within the frame of a match, even if the wider narrative is lacking.
I can’t tell you whether those narratives feel true to the real-life wrestlers and the wrestling being represented. Or whether it served well as a generator of endless variations on the actual thing like World Cup 98. I can’t feel the game’s strengths to the same extent as the weaknesses. This game really isn’t for me. But I can see that it holds some interesting tools which could, should, have meant being able to do justice to its topic for those it was for.
