Dateline : 8th February 2012

 

That old lycra fetish is coming out again. Time to strap on the spandex, do up the laces and posedown for WWF Wrestlemania on the Amiga……..

 

It's an impressive looking box, just a shame the contents suck

Back in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s the popularity of WWF Wrestling in the UK was quite amazing. The advent of satellite and cable TV had brought this stuff into our homes and it was a world apart from what the traditional Saturday afternoon ITV wrestling had been. As the popularity increased it was inevitable that a computer game would come from it and, as such, Ocean gave us WWF Wrestlemania. Yes, there had been many wrestling games before and most of them sucked but would this one be any different?

 

You could chose from playing as either Hulk Hogan, Ultimate Warrior or, specifically for British fans, as the British Bulldog. The idea was to fight through 5 rounds before being crowned champion, defeating such bullies as Warlord, Mountie and Sergeant Slaughter. Once you did that you became champ. And that is pretty much all there is to it. You waggled the stick when grappling to get the jump on your opponent and you also were able to pull off the actual finishing moves from the ring, which adds to the realism of the game.

 

The graphics are pretty impresive, but the ring is massive and therefore everything is out of proportion

 

There are some really fine aspects to this game when you load it up. The presentation is pretty good, everything looks really big and colourful and options and settings are really easy to get through. The wrestlers look like their real life counterparts, are very well drawn and look massive. The ring is huge with the odd chair strategically placed outside – if you have ever seen WWF wrestling then you will know the significance of that. The controls are basic but functional and whilst waggling a joystick can be very tiring this is not a waggler of Hyper Sports levels. However, it is not all good news – the ring is far too big compared to the main wrestler sprites, there has been no attempt to incorporate all the official ring tunes (even the old NES WWF games did that), a lot of the moves are pretty basic but the biggest issue is it is just too damn easy. It is possible to play right through in 2 sittings maximum and that just isn’t enough to keep you occupied.

 

WWF Wrestlemania was the first proper stab at doing a wrestling game for the home computer market and I would file it under A Good Effort, but it does have some major flaws that means it cannot really be recommended.

 

Unlike here, there is not enough of a knockout blow in this game to make it worth your while playing through it