WWF Wrestlemania (PC) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
145A playthrough of Ocean's 1991 wrestling game for PCs running Dos, WWF Wrestlemania.
Played through as Hulk Hogan, "The Hulkster."
There has been plenty said over the years of the console pro-wrestling games, but what of their far lesser known, PC-only peers?
WWF Wrestlemania was released for just about every 80s PC platform under the sun, but this sits among the best of them alongside the Amiga 500 version.
It looks a lot like the arcade WWF Superstars game, but it's quite a different beast. It looks and sounds great by 1991 standards (and unlike most of the other YouTube uploads of this game, I am playing using the Adlib sound instead of the MIDI option. This means that the sound effects now sound like sound effects - you no longer hear wind-chimes when someone hits the mat, and the music is now all FM synth rather than cheesy sounding wavetable music.
For me personally, the biggest draw of this game was the roster. For as small as it is, it's pretty awesome: you can play as Hulk Hogan, The Ultimate Warrior, or The British Bulldog, and on your path to becoming the WWF champion, you fight against Mr. Perfect, The Warlord, Ted DiBiase (The Million Dollar Man), The Mountie, and the title bout is against Sargent Slaughter. They're all great, but I was super-excited for the inclusion of The Warlord. If I'm not mistaken, this is the only WWF game that he was ever included as a character in!
The gameplay is better than you might expect for an arcade-style PC game in 1991, though it's a fair amount simpler than the SNES WWF games that would follow it the next year. Adopting the same control scheme as all of the other PC versions, this one gives you the four directional controls and a single fire button. It sounds limiting, but the designers did a pretty good job of intuitively mapping a number of moves across simple combinations of button presses. The moveset is pretty limited, but it is indeed a huge step up from, for example, WWF Wrestlemania on the NES. Much of the gameplay revolves around the grappling mechanic that requires you to manically alternate hitting left and right to build your power bar - if you fill this gauge first, you'll perform your super move. If not, well, get ready to feel the pain. The game is overall pretty easy when playing against the CPU, but makes for some great 2-player match ups.
The presentation is also really impressive by 1991 standards. The characters are large and immediately recognizable, there are some really nice digitized photo stills, the music is pretty good (at least in Adlib mode - I really dislike the midi music in this one), and even though it bears no impact on gameplay, the inclusion of pre-fight insult slinging is a pretty cool touch that makes it feel a bit more like the old TV broadcasts.
If you're an old-school WWF fan, you'll probably really enjoy this one. If you were raised on the newer, 3D WWE games, you might wonder what the fuss this game received when it was new was all about. It's a neat throwback that's especially fun with a friend, but it does tend to highlight just how far games have come in the past 25 years.
Oh, and for anyone that wants to run this in Dosbox - keep the machine speed low. If you want to be able to react in time to do much of anything, keep the CPU cycle count below 2000 (comparable to a mid-range 286). Otherwise, you'll never be able to react in time to the computer's moves. Also, don't bother with the Daum version of Dosbox - you'll get some nasty glitches at the bottom using that build. The vanilla Dosbox is the way to go - take it from me and save yourself a couple of hours of trying to figure out why it isn't working properly.
_____
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
NintendoComplete (http://www.nintendocomplete.com/) punches you in the face with in-depth reviews, screenshot archives, and music from classic 8-bit NES games!
Visit for the latest updates!
http://www.facebook.com/pages/NintendoComplete/540091756006560
https://twitter.com/nes_complete