WWF War Zone (PS1) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
249A playthrough of Acclaim's 1998 wrestling game for the Sony PlayStation, WWF War Zone.
Played through the single-player Challenge mode with The British Bulldog on the default difficulty level.
It's hard to believe that this game is 19 years old now. We got it pretty soon after it came out, and let me tell you - it was frickin' unbelievable! It might not look so hot now, but when War Zone came out, seeing a wrestling game in full 3D was really a big deal - especially one that looked as good as this! The characters were actually close enough to their real-life counterparts that you could tell who they were! Granted, most of them looked pretty hideous with their weird mask faces with odd proportions, but it was far closer than any game had come before it. It also had (again, for the time) a pretty amazing control system. It used simplified fighting game special move inputs to pull off a pretty huge number of moves - this was one of the first times a wrestling game didn't turn into a spamfest of three or four moves after the first couple of matches, since each character had a few dozen strikes, throws, holds, etc. The 3D engine also allowed the animation to flow much more naturally than was possible in the older 2D games, so timing things was way more intuitive than before.
Then we got the roster. Okay, it was a bit on the small side, but most of the important players of the late 90s are here, some of them now since long forgotten. They all have their entrance themes play as they are announced, and best of all, when one challenges you to a grudge match, it's done in some of the most hilariously awful video footage imaginable (most of them are the wrestlers angrily screaming at a camera while clearly reading the cue cards, and many of them look and sound totally wasted in the recordings!) - they were so bad that I actually compiled a video showing them all. See that here: https://youtu.be/EYeAf-AYyiE
My sister and I played this quite regularly until WWF Smackdown came out and we moved on. Between all of the hidden stuff, the selection of moves and smooth controls, the generally mind-blowing presentation, and the introduction of the awesome Create a Character mode, this was a winner. Is still is, really - it's not got the flash of the newer wrestling games, but it's still a helluva lot of fun.
Oh yeah, sorry that the intro video is missing! My original upload had it included, but it got that video blocked outright for copyrighted content.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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