030 · TAG TEAM MATCH M.U.S.C.L.E
Kinnikuman and company belly splash onto the NES in the second tag team wrestling game to be released in October of '86. Is it any better than Tag Team Wrestling? FIND OUT! For more NEStalgia as well as show notes and articles head over to www.NEStalgiacast.com
M.U.S.C.L.E. stands for "Most Unusually Small Creatures Lurking Everywhere," even though the characters are hulking wrestlers in the Japanese manga and only became tiny eraser-style figurines in America. It is another Bandai-published, Tose-developed game and our second wrestling game in three weeks. The best thing we can say is that it is better than Tag Team Wrestling, and Joe pointed out that a paper cut was also great by comparison.
What it gets right
- Energy on the scoreboard. There are no pins. You drain the other team's energy balls, and the count shifts back and forth like a tug of war, so a beating early on does not knock you out of the match. We liked that it sits on a scoreboard in the scene, not a bar at the top.
- The power ball. When one shows up and you jump up to grab it, your wrestler goes wild, and trying each character's special was a highlight of the game. One throws hammers, Geronimo throws tomahawks, one reaches across the ring, and one throws a guy up and piledrives him. Sam said he liked that different characters finally exist, which we had not seen before.
- Moves we can actually do. No more punching and pressing B seven times to reach a good one. Attack from behind for a small suplex, or bounce off the ropes.
- The cast and the manual. The select screen only shows heads, so we quizzed ourselves on names from the manual: Muscle Man, Robin Mask, Ashraman, Terry Man, Geronimo, Buffalo Man and Warsman, who has bear claws. Terry Man's bulldogging headlock sent us off on a story about a bulldog named Caesar.
Where it falls apart
- Whoever gets the power-up wins. You can wear someone down, but the power-up is what decides things, and it felt like the guy handing it out aimed it at the computer.
- Cheese. Lure the opponent to the ropes, bounce off, hit him, repeat. We were not sure if that is fun or just exploiting the AI.
- Down to one energy. You are too slow to jump or get back to your corner to tag in, so you are not dead but about to be.
- Two directions only. Sprites face left or right, and you cannot attack from above or below, which makes the second dimension of movement pointless except for dodging.
- Little variety. Apart from the specials, they play alike, which wastes the personalities from the manga.
- The strobing ring. Once the ropes are electrified, the whole mat flashes white and it is hard to keep track of your fighter. We joked it would not have been released after the Pokemon episode that caused seizures.
The bottom line
Skip it. In the Essential Games List segment Joe said no, because the cool ideas were left undeveloped. Sean called it a vast improvement over the last wrestling game but still not essential. Sam called it pretty basic and shallow, and Mike agreed and said he is not looking forward to the NES's other wrestling games. All four of us voted it off the list. We never tried two-player, which might help.
Written from our conversation in this episode.
Auto-generated transcript. Each paragraph starts with its timestamp. Speakers are not identified.
Muscle, Tag Team Match, Team up for a rough and tumble match!
And welcome to NEStalgia, a chronological exploration of every NES game released in North America. I'm Mike. I'm Joe. I'm Sean. And I'm Sam. Guys, how we doing? Excellent, Michael, thank you. Great. I just wanted to make sure Sean was still alive. I'm here. Good. Sean is here. His soul has not been crushed yet, but maybe Muscle, M-U-S-C-L-E, otherwise known for standing for the most unusually small creatures lurking everywhere. No. Is that really what it stands for? Yes, it is. This game's better. Usually small creatures lurking everywhere. So they're canonically small.
Yes. Because they are. No, they're actually, but they are canonically gigantic strong men because they come from a manga. A, like, 13 year long manga called Kiddy Koomin, I think, or something like that. But they're not small on that. Yeah. They're not small there, but when did they get small? When they came to America, they only came as little figurines. Yeah, little, like, eraser guys.
Yeah, I guess they're just erasers. We're glossing over the fact that they're also not lurking everywhere. There's like six of them. They're like, alright, we got L-E in the end that we gotta figure out. So everyone is talking right now. Let's get a little more focused for a second. So I know I was trying to drop a bombshell there, but I'm sure some people at home who clicked on the play episode for this and have played this game before know that it came from a very famous Japanese manga anime series that also came to America during, it was on Foxbox, if anybody remembers that.
For Kids Entertainment, the same people that licensed, like, Pokemon over to America, they bought this and said, hey, this'll, kids will love this. And so they brought that over and it even was on Cartoon Network and Toonami, remember, with Tom? Oh, wow. Tom from Toonami. And it was on there and it's basically like a show where a bunch of different guys wrestle each other and they're all wrestling for, you know, probably some belt or something. I didn't want to go too deep in. I watched an episode of the show.
It was, it was interesting. It's kind of like, it's like a mix between Dragon Ball Z and like something, something, I don't know, like something really funny and loose, like Looney Tunes. You know, it's like a mix between those two. Okay. Where there's gags and there's, and it's not that, and yeah, it doesn't take itself that seriously.
There is gas involved. Goofs and gaffs. Yeah, did you, wait, did you mean gas? I said gaffs. Yeah, one of them, gaffs is like one of them actually attacks by like farting. Wow. Yeah. Very, very mature, Michael. Well, it's not me. It's the Japanese making the games. Speaking of making the games, this is another Bandai Toes Tose game. So Bandai takes all the credit and Tose says, hey, we're in the corner over here. We might've made that game. Yeah, we might've made that whole game.
So, Muscle, if you guys remember about like two weeks ago, we played tag team wrestling. Is this better, Joe? Well, all right, let me give you my initial reaction. My initial reaction was that I was optimistic because literally seconds before I started playing it, I had finished playing tag team wrestling. And I was like, oh, this game's better. But then I also, minutes after I played tag team wrestling, I got a paper cut and I was like, oh, this paper cut's great compared to tag team wrestling. So it's, I was optimistic. I was like, oh, like, I feel like I'm controlling things. Looks like there's a few other moves you can do.
And overall, that kind of fell flat. Like it was better than tag team wrestling, but I think that trips a lot of people up. Right. Like, right. Like it is better than tag team wrestling. That doesn't mean it's, it's even a good game. Right. There's not, you don't, you know, when the bar is so low, right, it doesn't matter. It doesn't mean that this is good. It just means that this is acceptable. I wouldn't even say it's acceptable. Thank you, Sean, for chiming in. What do you got? This, I mean, this game plays better than tag team, as we keep saying, only in that it plays at all. Um, you have a modicum of control over your character, as in the previous game that we played. We felt like we hardly controlled the character.
Um, and it feels a little bit more fair, even though, uh, within this game, really the only way to win is to wait for a random power up to find, to find its way onto the screen and then to jump up and grab that. And I mean, it is possible to just through a war of attrition, beat your opponent, but it's really just waiting for that power up. Yeah. I think, I think that's the biggest issue I have with it was that, I mean, you can wail on each other as much as you can, but whoever gets the power up the most just wins. Yeah, but in a way, the power up is kind of like the steel chair.
Sure. You know, it's like, it's like all of a sudden the steel chair has come out and. It's the smash ball. That was one thing we didn't talk about in tag team wrestling, because I'm sure nobody got to it, but there is an opportunity for a steel chair to show outside. Oh yeah. It was used on me over and over. This is not a tag team wrestling, uh, episode though, even though this is also a tag team game. But I just, I just had to mention that real fast.
One thing about the objective of this game that makes it different than tag team wrestling is that you don't pin. It's just based on like energy. Yeah. Energy. So you want to get them down to zero and like, and I like how it kind of shifts. So it's not like you each start with five energy balls and like you could be down to two, but if you start doing a lot of like good stuff, you gain them back.
So it is kind of more of like a tug of war than just like a, I'm out. I got beat up early. So now I'm like out of this fight. And I thought it was kind of cool with the energy that, uh, that it was actually like organically in the scene. It wasn't like a, it wasn't like a health bar at the top of your screen. It was like on a scoreboard in the scene. That would like, right.
Right. That is cool. The thing that bugged me about the energy is if once you get down to one, you really can't do anything and you can't go back to your corner. Your guy is like really slow. You can't jump and you can't go back to your corner fast enough to tag your, tag your teammate. Don't you think that's kind of cool though? It's cool. Like stamina into the game as a thought. I would, I would say that cool is overstatement, but yeah, it's like, it's cool, but it's frustrating. Cause it's like, Oh, well I'm not dead, but I'm about to be dead.
Right. And these guys are supposed to be like superheroes. So it is kind of weird that they're like, yeah, so easily defeated. But I think we do need to, because we didn't really talk about it too much. We got to talk about that combat guys. I mean, this time we're not hitting a punch and then pressing B, uh, like seven times to get to the good moves. There's some pretty cool stuff that's going on in terms of attacks. We got, if you go from behind and attack them, you'll do like a little suplex, throw them over and you can do a bouncing off the ropes. That was my go to.
I found, Oh, go ahead. Thanks. I found that the easiest way to get someone was to wait for them to kind of start swinging at you, lure them over to the corner as they're like right after they swing, jump into it and then just wail them, you know? Yeah. Cause you cover the most ground that way also. Cause I feel, I felt like even though the controllers, the controls were kind of tight, I wouldn't say super tight. Uh, no, they were, yeah, they definitely weren't the best. Yeah. But I mean, I could, it, they made sense and you can move relatively fast enough. Uh, you still don't have a pretty, like you don't have a good reach. No. Um, and also bounce off stuff a lot. The lack of sprites.
Um, really you can only look in two directions, even if you're moving up and down. Yeah. You're always just going to be facing left or right. So I don't even know if you can engage with each other. If you try to attack from the top or bottom, you cannot. I can confirm that you cannot, you have to attack from the side. Yeah. And that, that, that is pretty jank. Yeah. Um, but if there's one thing I'll say in defense of that, it's that I'm not sure. I think that like having an up and down attack as well, like, like a way to attack that way would have just complicated this game a little more than it was worth doing. So in that case though, why would you even introduce the ability to move in that second dimension?
Why don't you just move back and forth? I guess to, I guess for avoiding. To avoiding and to try and get the power up first. I liked, I liked the ability to avoid because if they get that power ball, you only, your only option is to run because the other character just goes insane. And I, that was probably my favorite part of the game was getting the power ball and trying out with each character, seeing like what crazy moves they do. One guy like throws hammers.
Yeah. You know, or like tomahawks. Yeah. Like tomahawks. Another one will just like be able to like reach really far over and attack. And then like, there was one that I did that like, he like threw the guy up in the air and like pile drive them down. I thought that was pretty cool that they programmed like different moves for each character.
Because it was really just the special moves that had like a wide variety. There were some differences in the regular moves, like the jump. But nothing really notable. Yeah. Which I think was a big miss on like the, having all these unique characters and having really only one difference between each other. Especially, yeah. Especially if like these characters are part of a manga where like their personalities matter and they're all like well-known characters.
Like they should have had more unique differences between them because that's what's going to make later games like Street Fighter 2 big hits is that like every character plays differently. Whereas this, it's like, no, I mean, everybody pretty much plays the same and who's better at punching who, you know, in a sideways match. Yeah. So, so speaking of the characters though, I'd like to play a little bit, a little game.
Okay. I'm ready. So we have eight characters. I'm going to read off their names. And I want you guys to just try and think of what that's supposed to be describing. Can we like look at a picture of them? No. I don't even know if I, no, no, no, no. I don't even see the names. I don't know if I've seen all the characters. Right. That's what I'm saying. I want to see what you can do. What do you think it's describing at all? Oh, I gotcha. I thought you meant to. Well, let's start off with, let's start off with Muscle Man.
Okay. He's got to be the guy in the box. Yeah. He's the guy in the box. Right. He's got the like fin. Yes. On the box. He's got like a fin on his head. Yeah. And you can also see. He's got a goatee, right? See, that's what it looks like. It looks like just like a dude with a goatee and maybe a little bit of like a Mr. T mohawk going. But no, that's the fin. Oh, and he's just got a circular part of his face. Interesting. Then there's Robin mask. Robin mask. Does he have a bird mask? No. Is he the green guy?
I can't tell what color he is. Okay. It looks like he's wearing like an old, I'm sorry, a middle ages, like a knight. Oh, he's the black and gray guy. Sure. Yeah. He's the black and gray guy who has like no face. Yeah. And he looks like he has a really bad haircut. Yeah. Then there's Ashraman.
What? Ashraman? Ashram. Ashraman. You got me. Is he the red guy? He's, it looks like it's just a dude with. What are you watching these photos in black and white? This is the, this is from the manual. Oh, from the manual. I'm looking at the manual right now. Okay. So what is he, what is his like key descriptor? It looks like he's wearing a crown. Okay. Um, and you don't even remember him. Yeah. He was kind of forgettable, I guess. Uh, how about Terry man?
Terry man. That's just a guy. They should have put these names. They only let you select the heads. I know. You know, like they should have put the names next to the characters. I would have known who they were. So Terry man was just like a blonde dude. Oh yeah. He's like the guy who just looks like a normal human. Yeah. And his, his, his main attack. He looks like Hulk Hogan. You know, the bulldogging headlock. For some reason he reminded me of a, I don't know if anyone remembers the guy in Die Hard that should have died a million times. The blonde haired bad guy. Oh yeah. Yeah.
Wait, wait, what was the name of that attack? The bulldogging headlock. Yeah. Because bulldogs give the worst headlocks. I hate it when I get through that. I had a, I had my aunt. It was a bull. She is a bulldog breeder and, um, she had a lot of bulldogs and one of them for the longest time, his name was Caesar. And he was like kept in the basement in the back. Cause he was just like one son of a bitch, you know, like he was just really bad. I mean, he was, if you think about it, he was a son of a, you know, yeah. Anyway. Uh, but it was like, that was scary that they like, you was off limits or whatever. And I didn't understand that his name was Caesar. Cause I'm like three years old. I thought his name was seizure.
Oh wow. He was a vicious dog that was just going to come and attack me. That's a pretty good name for a dog. And so bulldogs to this day, I still associate with seizure. Hmm. Like, so maybe the bulldog headlock would, you know, that would definitely terrify. That's very Terry man of him. Yeah. Then there's Geronimo.
That's the, that's the one that throws the tomahawks. Yes. Oh wow. Okay. He does look like a, I looked this up in the manual. Stereotypical, uh, American Indian. I thought he played the best if I'm being honest. I thought that that was like a cool and unique thing. He had the, yes, that's the tomahawk technique. Um, I think, I don't even know if there are any other, uh, like, he threw them.
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I don't know about any other projectiles. No, I, I don't think anybody else in the game even has. Yeah. Like you have to, to use your special. It, it's dependent on a couple on like a situation for each character. Like for one person, you have to be behind them and press a button. And for someone else, you have to be in front of them and press a button. So I feel like some characters are just going to be inherently better because your computer opponent is going to be looking at you more often. Yeah. But isn't that kind of like how in later fighting games, like, you know, you have to know a
specific input combo to like, do a cool move. Like it's not everybody has the same final move. Yeah. You have, you have to then like learn your character, get good at your character and how to fight against the others. But that's the only difference between your character and everything else is that, oh, well I'm just going to face you. So that way you can't use your special. No, totally. There's not enough variety in the game. Like I think that, I think, I think that's clear. Yeah. But I do, I am liking these little touches. Oh yeah. Yeah. Little touches are cute. So next is a Larmond man.
Larmond man. I would like give you an idea what to, so the actual. Is he the guy who looks like, he looks like, um, like a demon, right? He's got like horns. No, that's Buffalo man. That was my go to.
That's my go to. This character, the character design is actually much more unique than the name. I don't know what a Larmond is, but it's a, it looks like a Kung Fu master with a, like a Fu Manchu mustache. Okay. Oh, okay. That guy. I think I do know that guy. Yeah. Why his name is Larmond? Not sure. Maybe that's his last name. Then there is Buffalo man. Buffalo man. Yes. Can I add something about Buffalo man? Okay. So on the game FAQ board, Imperials is this, is the username. He writes on the board, which has a shocking four posts on the muscle board.
Okay. It has Buffalo man is the man. And then in parentheses, unlike the bills or the savers. Oh, I don't know why that was necessary, but. Um, it's just weird. He just like calls it out for no good reason. Like he's speaking to Sean. Okay. And, uh, that he, he writes in the comments, surpassed only by the legendary wars man. Yeah. Wars man. I'm not really sure what, what happened here.
Two faced guy. No, I don't know. I mean, it's just like a guy, uh, darker complexion, uh, wearing a weird black helmet. And it looks like a midriff bearing top. Um, I don't know what wars man, is that just supposed to be war man? Is he a, is he a war man? No, more than one war.
Yeah. He's maybe more luck. I don't. Yeah. I think like, I think these are all, I wonder if these are official translations and then we're actually carried over into when, cause I mean the anime that came over in America for Fox box, that's like 2003, you know, that's like way later. So like, did they, did they keep these names or did they just abandon them? I don't know. No one's going to like war man. Yeah. It has to be wars man. And his, he's got bear claws. Okay. I'm not really sure what that's about. That's pretty sick. Yeah. Pretty sick, nasty.
Does anybody have anything else I want to talk about about this game? Like that was a fun game that we played just now. Maybe a little more fun than the actual game. The actual game. Yeah. I mean, I didn't play two player in it. I feel like maybe that could be a little more fun. What would be, what would make them more fun? Just out of curiosity and saying that it wouldn't be.
For one thing, I feel like the ref or whoever the guy was that was handing out the power ups would favor the computer more than me. That's like a mini version of muscle man, right? Yeah. It's like his little friend or something. And it felt like what you're saying. It felt like he was like throwing the power. The power was like being aimed at the opponent. For sure. I felt like that.
Yeah. And so I don't know how that would play out in two player. I don't know if it would favor one person over the other or what, but I don't know. I think it might be a little more fun to not play against an annoying computer in this, but that's, that's kind of. Okay. It's definitely a jank folder though. You think so? I think like, there's no way I would, I would actually try in a game like this because it just seems so random.
Yeah. Cause like I, I do. I agree with the randomness if we're, if I'm just gonna throw that out there. Like I never really, similar to tag team wrestling, how like we weren't certain when our moves were going to connect. I wasn't, there was a lot of times where me and the computer were just like butt stomping around the stage. Like just, just almost as if we were doing like synchronized dancing, you know? I did the thing that Sam was talking about earlier. I would always lure them over to the ropes, jump off the ropes, hit them. And I, I, you could just do that over and over again. Yeah. The thing that it's not, it's not fun. Is that fun or is that just cheesing the air?
But I wasn't having fun and I was like, I want to get through this to see what happens next. So I was like, I don't know if it's like, cause part of me is like, oh, it's not jank. It gets so much better than a tag team wrestling, which I don't know so much as a, but maybe tag team wrestling doesn't even belong in a jank folder. Maybe it just doesn't belong in folders. Yeah. There's a, there's a point when, uh, the ring just starts like strobing.
Oh yeah. I'm glad that you brought that up. Wait, what is that? Okay. So you guys really didn't play that long. Uh, it doesn't take that long to get to the strobe effect thing. It's like, you're having a seizure. Yeah. You can't even focus on your character. It's electrified. And then, yeah, the, yeah, the ropes are electrified, which is crazy. And that's, that's kind of cool that like, but they do it in a weird way though. Like where your opponent, you or your opponent just sticks to the ropes for a little bit because you're being shot.
But why the rest of the ring and arena has to be like strobed out is that's just strange. It's like, this is a very big distraction. The mat is like pure white. It's like, I just, I couldn't tell him what was really good.
I could have been happy with the ropes just like turning yellow. And then the first time I hit it, I'd be like, Oh, they're electrified. I don't need this. I don't need that. Yeah. Fear. I feel like this game, it wouldn't have been released after like anti epilepsy measures going on for the Oregon episode of Pokemon. Yeah. Okay. I think we've done just about all we can do for muscle. So let's move right on into the essential games list.
Joe, how are we feeling about if muscle is an essential game? Yeah. There were some cool concepts in here, like having the several characters, but they just, I don't know, they weren't unique enough and they kind of just let it let like kind of the cool things they put in there go to waste by not really developing it too much more. So in the end, it was kind of boring. So no. Okay. Sean. It's a vast improvement over the last wrestling game, but this is not essential.
Sam. Yep. I, I think it's pretty basic. It's pretty shallow. I like that there's different characters that felt cool. I feel like that's the first thing that the first time we've seen that, but yeah, not essential, not super fun, not fun at all. Okay. Yeah. I think I'll agree that this still isn't that fun. It's, you know, like we, we were having a moment there where we were like, Oh, I really like the super power up and they programmed all these different moves and the characters have personality. It's really not enough. Yeah. And while I'm, you know, Sean has said that this is an improvement over tag team wrestling.
I don't actually know if I'm looking forward to any of the other wrestling games that are going to come out on this. Oh, absolutely not. You know, like, cause I just can't imagine how an, how the NES is going to be able to improve it. I'm ready to be shocked, but I think a lot of them are going to play like this, you know, even if they are like more like, you know, even if WWF, I know WWF has a couple of games and stuff like that.
On NES? Yeah. On NES. And I know that like, you know, it's going to be cool for me to recognize those old school characters and fight with them, but I don't think I'm going to actually enjoy the gameplay part of it. And maybe that's just a problem I have, but I'm throwing this onto the essential, I'm throwing this onto the unessential list. You'll do no such thing. Right. It is not essential because not just because I don't like it, but because it does so many things in a lackluster way that I could think of it being so much better. Even the, even the Atari 2600 style graphics are a little strange, you know? Yeah. It's, it's weird to see on the NES.
And I, you're really not winning me over here and Tose or Tose, you're on a really weird start, but I'm confident you guys could turn this ship around. I don't know why I'm confident, but maybe it's because they're still around today.
And that's all the time we have for this episode of Nostalgia. Join us next time for Ninja Kid and be sure to play it yourself if you can. For more Nostalgia, please subscribe to our podcast wherever you listen and be sure to check out NostalgiaCast.com. That's N-E-S-T-A-L-G-I-A-C-A-S-T dot com. There you'll find links to the show and show notes as well as our other platforms. Thank you so much for your support of Nostalgia. We thank you for spending time with us. I'm Michael Esposito. You can find me on at Esposito Phil on Twitter and I'll talk to you soon.
