304 · Tecmo World Wrestling
In Tecmo World Wrestling, you select from 10 fictional wrestlers and compete against the others for the coveted Tecmo World Wrestling Title. When your match begins you'll find you've got all the moves of the pros. You can run, climb to the top ropes, climb outside the ring, pick up your opponent, throw them over the ropes, pin them, and escape from a pin yourself.
Tecmo World Wrestling is probably the best-looking wrestling game we have played on the NES, and it feels like wrestling even when we couldn't say what we were doing. We wanted to give it a fair shot, but the novelty ran out after about one match.
What works
- It looks and feels the part. Nine wrestlers with real personalities, an announcer, and ropes to climb for an elbow drop. It has the early DNA of the THQ wrestling games.
- Names you can change. Every wrestler can be renamed, and the names stick after a match. We tried every wrestler in two-player and ended up with silly names all around.
- Energy bars that tell a story. The two meters rise and fall with the match, so a comeback is possible and it doesn't play like a flat first-to-zero health bar. Pro wrestling does not end in a knockout, and this feels closer to that.
- A big grapple list. Knee lifts, brainbusters, body slams, headlocks, piledrivers, plus moves unique to each wrestler.
- A secret final opponent. Win the world title and you face Blue King, the Manic Warrior, who was teased in the manual's epilogue. We wished the manual had held that back, and that we could play as him afterward.
What doesn't
- Grappling is a coin flip. Once you clench, any direction plus A or B does something, and about 40 to 50 percent of the time it works for you. Punches and kicks barely matter, since the opponent just grabs you. With no feedback on why a move landed or failed, we never learned the system.
- Training that trains nothing. After a loss you mash A through 15 push-ups for a point of strength, but all three exercises are the same minigame and do the same thing. We wanted different stats and a real tradeoff.
- An announcer you cannot read. Tom Talker's commentary scrolls by too fast to follow in the middle of a match, and since it is text, it can't hint at your next move. We joked that it needs a third person reading it aloud.
- A manual with a mystery. Some moves in the manual are marked with a triangle that is never explained, and the manual keeps calling the D-pad a "control cross."
- Long matches. The limit is seven minutes and a match runs at least four.
Beyond the game
In two-player, a pink and blue meter swings back and forth in the middle of the screen, and hitting a move while yours is full gives you the advantage. We figured that is probably running invisibly in single player too, and showing it would have helped.
The bottom line
Skip it. We all voted no. We called it better than other NES wrestling games, which says more about the others, and the best one so far is still Pro Wrestling, with its unplayable final boss Great Puma. After the first match you've had your fill, and we weren't looking for more of this in 2023.
Written from our conversation in this episode.
- It’s your call from the opening bell to the final pin
- NES Longplay
- Manual
- I forget, you guys like wrestling or not?
- The back of the box “it’s your call” a reference to the sort of “Career” mode you have over the wrestler you choose
- Can even change the name, but that feels wrong when they have flair
- Do you guys change the name of RPG characters with names?
- Choose the exercise you want to do to get stronger.
- Clearly they are working out more than the 15 push ups I do in the game right? Or is Vince McMahon pushing steroids in this league too?
- No matter what you choose it’s just MASH THE A BUTTON
- Only appears again if you lose (neat way to keep the balance for players having difficulty)
- Then we get to the fighting
- Can even change the name, but that feels wrong when they have flair
- FIGHTING
- You can punch and kick, but the real intricacy comes from the grappling.
- So much situational grappling and it creates many outcomes for the match.
- Could freshen up gameplay or make it very frustrating for those who can’t learn the system
- The manual does not spell this out well
- MOVES COMMON TO ALL WRESTLERS
- SPECIAL TECHNIQUES
- What does the triangle mean?
- Where do you guys fall on the whole button combos in fighting games?
- Seems like with SF6 the scene is moving toward simplicity. Visual flair kinda started a long time ago, now it’s about making sure everyone can experience it.
- Matches take a few minutes. The game gives you 7 and it could very well take 7, but at least 4.
- in-game commentary
- by “Tom Talker”
- A bit fast and reactive
- Who is the coolest wrestler in this game?
- The "Earl of Doom" Blue King is an unplayable boss character in Tecmo World Wrestling for the NES, After the player wins the world title, a cinematic cutscene begins where Blue King appears to challenge the player to one final showdown. If the player defeats Blue King, he beats the game.
- The character is reminiscent of Great Puma, the final boss of Pro Wrestling, in that he is an unplayable character and can use any special move from any character in the game.
- Sequels and Spinoffs
- EGL
- Next week -
- NEStalgia Byte -
Auto-generated transcript. Each paragraph starts with its timestamp. Speakers are not identified.
Tecmo World Wrestling, it's your call from the opening bell to the final pin.
And welcome to NEStalgia, a chronological exploration of every NES game released in North America. I'm Mike. I'm Sean. And I'm Joe. I forget. You guys like wrestling or not? I like stories about wrestling. I don't like wrestling. I mean, yeah, not really. When I was a kid, I was a WWF fan back in those days, but that was it. When did you fall off, Joe? What do you remember? Like, who was the world champion at the time? I mean, I don't remember really a lot of details. It was really, I was very young. My older brother was into it. But like, I remember, you know, Stone Cold, I remember Triple H, you know, Undertaker, Kane. He's the commissioner now, right? Triple H? Yeah.
He like runs things behind the scenes now. He doesn't. I mean, he still makes appearances on the show, but he doesn't wrestle. No, yeah. I thought, I figured that was the case. Yeah. No, because you know, sometimes they have commissioners, right? That like, aren't don't have any actual official capacity, but they act like commissioners on the show. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So he's the Gary Bettman of the WWE. Yeah, that's happened a few times. And it's like, that guy is not the actual Gary Bettman. They're just the acting Gary Bettman.
Anyway, all that to say, it doesn't really matter whether you guys like wrestling or not. I just thought it would be good to remind people because it turns out a lot of people, there's a lot of crossover. A lot of people who like wrestling like this podcast. And so we kind of owe them a good episode here, guys. Okay. So the back of the box, it's your call from the opening bell to the final pin. It's your call, a reference to the sort of career mode you have over the wrestler you choose in this game. You are greeted with the nine wrestlers. And it's not immediately apparent to me, at least, that there were seven others. I just saw the two and thought, like, what, I can't choose between these two?
But there's like a weird system of, like, start means, pressing start means that you're choosing your character, not A. So that was kind of surprising. But anyway, that's not the point. Once you pick your character, you can even change the name of the wrestler to be your name or a different name or Hulk Hogan.
Whatever you want. That can be who the wrestler's name is. But would you guys dare to change the name? Like, they're giving you. It's a cool official name. It's not like, hey, this is Rick. No, there's too much already differentiating these guys and making them their own, like, character. I mean, it's not that there's, like, a story or anything. But they have enough of a persona that it, like, I don't need to customize that unless you're going to give me more to customize.
Yeah, I mean, I don't mind the option, you know, just to name your character. But yeah, you're right. And it's not like, it's not, they're not like empty slates for you to put your personality on. They clearly have, like, their own intended characters. Right. And so, Joe, you know, I agree. It's great to have the option just for shenanigans or whatever. There's the option in every RPG to also change the name of those characters. But don't tell me that you changed Crono's name to be Joe instead because you were playing.
No, I never do that. But I thought that you did that. Maybe not in Crono Trigger, but in some early Final Fantasy games. Final Fantasy 2, for example. I don't remember, no, I don't remember if Final Fantasy 2 gives you official names. Like, Final Fantasy 1 doesn't give you official names. Yeah, Final Fantasy 2, you have official names, don't you? I will say that, you know, I'm guilty of the first time I played Final Fantasy 7 changing Cloud's name to Sean.
So, you get it. You get me. That's funny. No, I mean, like, it's fine because, like, I think, Sean, I think what you were trying to say is, at what age are we talking about doing that? Yeah, when I was a kid. Yeah, you were a young kid. Now, there are rules.
Just like in life. Like, you know, you grew up and you found out that you can't change the name of these Final Fantasy characters, no matter what they tell you. Yeah, just, like, I feel like it speaks to, like, some underlying problem if you change your, if you, like, if you're making, uh, uh, is that even an option in the newest Final Fantasy? I don't even think it is. Joe, you played it. No, I don't think you can. Yeah, probably because there's voice acting, right? Yeah. Like, if, but if you were a 32 to 33 year old man changing it to Joe, that'd be kind of weird. I kind of judge you.
But, like, yeah, I mean, I do it in Pokemon, but again, that's, like, a blank slate. No, yeah. It's supposed to be you. Or, like, a game, you know, I mean, I haven't ever done it in Final Fantasy VIII, but, like, if I were playing, like, with friends for, like, the, the, the millionth time, and I'm just, like, goofing around and, like, not having a serious playthrough, I would change the name. Right, which is great that it's there. I agree. I'm not, I guess I'm just saying you wouldn't dare actually change these names. And I guarantee you, the three of us, in our limited time playing Tecmo World Wrestling, we did not change the names. Is that correct to assume? That is correct to assume. Okay. That is not correct on my end. Wow, you made it Joe?
No, I didn't make it Joe, but we, I played two-player again, actually, before I even played one player. So we were just naming our, we tried every wrestler, and we just, each time we picked one, we would just name it something silly. And then the funny thing is, is after you're done with that match, and you go to pick a new wrestler, the name of the wrestler you already named stays. So, like, by the end, all six or whatever wrestlers all had these goofy, weird names. I love it. Okay. As you can to gain, like, one point of strength.
And clearly, these guys are doing a lot more working out than just the 15 push-ups I do in the game, right? Because maybe, I don't know, maybe Vince McMahon's pushing steroids in this league, too. But 15 push-ups is not enough. Like, I thought they were really gonna, like, mash the A button and watch these guys hulk out. But they barely do anything. It's the equivalent of, like, the panic exercise that I do, and I'm like, oh, I shouldn't have eaten that. Like, this is really bad. And that's what's kind of happening here.
Yeah. I wish, though, that, like... Like, I think it's a cool idea. I just wish that it was more than just increasing your strength. I don't want there to be... I don't want it to be like, oh, no, you have to... you have to do 10,000 push-ups to increase... Like, the amount there is fine.
My complaint is that, like, it's just all three exercises are the same minigame and they all do the same thing. yes no I think I am 100% on the same page as you that they could have made it so that even if you just choose any of the three right like so push-ups obviously would increase strength but don't even change that you mash the a button is like the thing you do it would be ideal if
they made like one was a timing thing and you have to make sure you hit a when it crosses this threshold or whatever but even if it was just mash the a button it should have had like different stats so there's like a trade-off of like I want to do my strength or my grappling or my speed you know like are those the three things I can work on but instead it's just now you're stronger
of course this only really matters anyway if you lose matches because that's the only way you'll see it again if you win the match you don't go on to exercise so that's a pretty neat way to balance for players who are having difficulty with the game of just like well yeah you didn't win the match but now you can gain an extra strength point or whatever in our little mini game here right the reason that I wanted it to be like not all just mash the a button is because like it's too I don't know does it get harder as you're going to higher levels or is it always the same amount of like a presses to get to the next level because it's not even a challenging amount of ape buttons though right
like it's not it's not a challenging amount of presses and that's what I was saying I wasn't arguing that the amount of presses you have to do should increase like you should have to do 1,000 push-ups I'm saying animation wise we should see our guy doing crazy feats not just doing 15 push-ups oh well sure sure but I I just mean that like the the amount of presses is I don't I
don't think you could be trying to to get a level up and fail like you know what I mean like it's just it's too easy to do that really if you if you you know peel back a coat of paint like all you're really doing is selecting the stat you want to increase fine but like I don't know I guess I wanted it to be a little more of a challenge to be like to get the next step otherwise like just give me a screen
where I where I allocate my point to the stat this is also something that you see for like 20 seconds then you play the game right we've talked about it longer than it happens and again you don't see it again unless you lose so um you know how much does it really matter it's a kind of inconsequential uh so as Sean mentioned once you do all that then you get into the fighting so that's obviously why people play this game they want to wrestle other people and we've played a few wrestling games before and they've all had interesting ways to deal with uh how do you how do you make a wrestling video game where all you have is four directions and two buttons and so uh with this one what they decided to
do is that like yeah you can punch and kick uh from you know if you're at like a distance or whatever but the real intricacy comes when you grapple your opponent or I think in the manual they refer to it as clenching yeah which is I feel like more of a boxing thing right right and and so maybe it's a weird translation thing or whatever so I'm gonna say grappling and when you're in the grapple it's kind of like you and the opponent are both hoping that your input goes through and that you're the one who's
lucky enough to perform the move but inside there rather than like the odd approaches we've seen of like menuing uh your choice of like what you're gonna do uh this one chose the like you know series of inputs and not necessarily like okay street fighter 2 style like do a quarter hook on the you know counterclockwise and then press the b button it's not like that it's just a direction and and a button so theoretically even if you don't know what you're doing right even if you don't know the exact thing to do a body slam you might just luck into it because once you get into the grapple
just hit any direction and either the a or the b button and something will happen and maybe it'll happen for you or maybe it'll happen for the opponent couldn't ever quite tell why I was getting my that's the thing that's the thing right there you can button mash all you want um and you'll probably 40 to 50 percent of the time do something um but there's just not enough feedback here for me to know like okay why did I lose that was that because I timed it wrong was because this particular grapple uh arrangement like what I did just won't work um I could definitely have used some some like actual
feedback aside from uh aside from just like having it happen to me yeah I'm glad you guys said that because uh first of all what you're describing is the way that I generally play any fighting or wrestling game uh so it took me a while to realize that that was happening because I just thought like yeah I'm just being my normal idiot self when I play this just mashing buttons and hoping things happen and after a while I was like okay I gotta really try and like figure out what's doing what and it it didn't really change anything for me I still felt like I didn't know what was going on so wasn't sure if it was just me
and I to be fair to the game you know there is in the in the manual a whole bunch of combos and stuff you can do and even specific to the particular character so my question isn't like you know oh how do they communicate pulling off the moves like that's fine right like if I do the input for body slam I might pull it off there's just as Sean was mentioning it's not even it could be a luck thing or it could be a like well if you're the guy who grabs and you put in the input fast enough then you'll perform the move or you have a better chance of performing the move it's not communicated to the
player and so that's what kind of becomes the weird part of the entire wrestling match because the punching and kicking gets you almost nowhere like you're not going to do a lot of damage your opponents not looking to make this a a boxing or kickboxing match right they're mostly going to do grapples too so you're just kind of running into this situation where most of the time you get into these you know uh hugging matches and hope that you're the guy who slams the opponent yeah because even when so firstly I think that it definitely takes precedence like if you're trying to strike you're trying to like throw punches as he's approaching you like yeah you might hit him once or twice but
his input is going to I forgot the actual word for it it's going to take like precedence and he's just going to grapple you as soon as you land that hit like there's no way to defend against one and I guess like in a wrestling game like yeah you're going to want to grapple regardless but I think I've even initiated grapples and it's the same animation I think whether you're the one to initiate or not and then still like it's kind of a coin flip whether in the next couple frames you're going to be flipped over his head or vice versa it's very it's very hard to to gauge but I'm really just reiterating what we've just been saying that's fine no I can I can move on from here because you know there's so many
possibilities of what can happen in that in that grapple right there's just a list them off knee lift brain buster body slam headlock backdrop pile driver and then there's specific ones for the characters too so there's so many different inputs that can happen all that to say that that could create a very fresh gameplay experience where you know you're not always just doing suplexes non-stop or whatever and that can get boring or it could create a very frustrating system for those who
uh you know seem to be me and Sean here can't learn the system and can't figure out why these things are happening and so if we feel kind of powerless over the many choices we have like I don't know is the body slam stronger than the backdrop or am I just doing this all for flair yeah I feel like it's a game that like you'd have to spend a lot more time with to really familiarize yourself with that stuff like it just in the you know in this past week as I've been playing around with it I just don't think I
had enough time to like figure out um you know what works best I mean I figured out some things and how to do certain things and other times they don't always work but I just never know like what's my best move what's the best way to play this and uh I'm I guess the question then becomes like is this a game that uh is worth giving that amount of time so like that's you know it turns into that I did appreciate like obviously the moment to moment like input and feedback situation is a problem but uh taking a step back and more like the the holistic view of the game and like how
those inputs correlate to your winning or losing a match I did appreciate that in uh you giving or receiving punishment the the two life bars that you see I guess I don't know if they're life bars or energy bars or momentum or it kind of acts as a proxy for momentum because as you're uh taking damage their little energy is going up too so like it gives it that kind of uh it gives it the flexibility to make it sort of a back and forth match it's just you need to know how to do those things in order to take advantage of that gameplay element but Sean that's a great point about the way that the uh we'll call
them energy uh systems work because they are they do refuel and come down and they they you know they basically are dependent on how the match is going and so it does create a bit a bit more of a wrestling story uh I'm not trying to get uh poetic here with it but like it does create a little more story than just a flat hp meter where like okay just first one to get down to zero because that's that's not how things work there aren't really knockouts in in the wwe or you know back then in the wcw wwf
there you know that's not a common thing to happen you don't usually just beat the guy until he can't breathe usually you know it's like you you know you kind of like are down for a little bit then you come back up and then usually there's like a a moment where the tides turn and then you pull off the finisher and the crowd gets all amped and you do the pinfall right it's like there needs there needs to be a little bit of that here to communicate that and so all that to say everything that we've been talking about with the grappling
system and just the confusing controls the game actually as a wrestling game I think presentationally and control wise feels like a wrestling game it kind of feels similar even though I don't feel like I know what I'm doing it feels similar to those um thq wrestling games from the um you know mid 90s early 2000s that uh everybody seems to love so much it kind of has the early dna of that stuff I think you're right and I I was probably just as bad at those as I am here um I'm a little bit better now um but what I really like presentationally is like that you've even got the uh the announcer at the bottom there
like it's moving way too fast to be able to read anything unless you're watching somebody play this game um but it's got everything you'd think of like an announcer would say like or be like it's kind of like a 70 year old grandma with a blue blouse and a white uh collar she's got like that very faded blonde hair that's a little too thin but you know you know that she was very attractive uh maybe 40 50 years ago um and you got a lot more internal lore for for this announcer than I did what what do you mean I just mean that uh I just can't believe I've been so blind until you can describe it
in-game commentary provided by Tom Talker that was the best name yeah the best name they could come up with not Phyllis on the spot uh and you're right I added my notes here a bit fast uh but really I mean very fast because as somebody who was trying to just you know keep an eye on my opponent I don't think I heard anything this guy said like and obviously he's not talking uh voice so it's not heard I don't think
I read which is even worse right if if he was talking if it was audio you'd hear it and be like oh maybe he's giving me like a tip on like what would be the next best move like oh don't let him get you in a headlock and it's like cool I'm gonna put him in a headlock right but that's not even what's happening instead it's just uh an amazing uh you know display of presentation right yeah there's a lot of lines written for this yeah yeah a lot of lines but it's almost like if if you know if we played a
baseball game right where there was commentary the whole time you'd be focusing on your pitching and fielding not on the commentary yeah right and it's funny because in baseball it seems a little more possible that you could read because like maybe they'd be saying something you know in between pitches or something but like in this game like you know there's really not a moment where you you you can look away so so it's even harder and I I decided that like the best way to incorporate that is if
you're you're playing two-player uh you need to have a third person to read the commentary in their commentator voice and they can just they can read it to you um but like yeah there's no world in which I'm like yeah I'm going to try and read these fast-moving comments about what I'm doing uh rather than look at what I'm doing this game would have been a perfect candidate for uh the intellivision's
intellivoice if only the nes had something similar the intellivoice was a peripheral that you actually plugged into your intellivision and then plugged the cartridge into that and it would create um like a voice synthesizer for the game so that games even that came out beforehand they didn't require the intellivoice they could add voice to those games and so that would be pretty cool if there was like it could add you know via this peripheral the voice for the commentator so that I could actually hear what he's trying to tell me but he's not trying to tell you anything cool he's not trying to give you tips he's not your manager right he's not in your corner um I feel like we need a little bit maybe
of that too yeah I mean when I think about a career mode in a wrestling game I'm thinking of like the ridiculous storylines that you'd see in regular wrestling where like over the course of uh several matches like you've got rivalries and stuff and that's not really something that I think the nes can even do so that's why I wouldn't have really called this a career mode um it would be more of like a like just a a campaign I don't know the nes can totally do um sports dramatic commentary on games because we played for nostalgia bites uh captain Tsubasa 2 and that was like that's soccer to the extreme but Joe uh sorry Sean I wanted to say that you know there is a little bit not
necessarily of a career mode or even like anything too big but there is a rivalry between all the wrestlers and the secret wrestler uh the blue king the manic warrior uh yes who I did see this in the manual he's teased at the end of the manual as an epilogue it's like it's like here's how you play the game here's how you operate your wrestler here's some bios on all the wrestlers and there's this epilogue his name is blue king the manic warrior rumor has it that he came in 11th place and was disqualified from the preliminary matches yet there is something mysterious about him well if he came in 11th place he can't be that good right but anyway uh yeah he the blue king is an unplayable character
that you will fight at the end of the game after you win the world title and so there's a little bit of story there but more like story between the manual and the game like not not story that was ever implied inside the game so it's kind of like I think it's just cool on its own right like you don't need that tease in the manual just have him show up at the end of the game like well wasn't expecting that that's true I would I think that that would add to the yeah that's that's the storyline there you're ruining it by telling us about it in the manual yeah I think in the manual you need to have like the hint to it like in your story of this wrestling uh league you know just mention somehow like
you know only 10 people qualified not like that that guy who you know couldn't couldn't hack it the blue king you know or something like that and you're like oh my god it's the blue king
you sound like a guy who wrote manuals before uh Joe um you know this character is also reminiscent of uh the final boss of pro wrestling great puma who um was also an unplayable character uh that we um that you don't get to play as afterwards and he's the final boss of that game so is tecmo wrestling just stealing from pro wrestling pro wrestling seems to be the higher regarded game in the
nes wrestling game pantheon but to get back to uh just the you know the blue king and the uh mystery of it all and everything it reminded me a little bit of the super smash brothers like when you unlock a new character and it just shows their silhouette and everything it's kind of cool like you're like oh this person's in the game like you know you just didn't know back then like but blue king is a
nobody like it should have been they should have just licensed someone's likeliness mario right right or or a real wrestler you know just like a real wrestler shows up at the end i think about uh sorry if this is a spoiler for people uh but the punch out game that came out on the wii had donkey kong as the final boss like the final final boss instead of mike tyson right and that's kind of cool
because you might be thinking like who's it gonna be right like who it's not mike tyson anymore so who could it possibly be and then you're shocked to find out it's donkey kong right like that's insane but blue king is like who from what franchise i never heard of this guy and then why can't i play as him after i beat him like i can't unlock him that's not cool that's the real question there yeah
so who is the coolest wrestler in the game now that it's not blue king kind of like the british guy he's got a cool vibe to him um and the that was the only other guy i wrestled as aside from the american dr gildo that i just kept saying in my head dr guido um but dr gildo looks nothing like an american though either right like what he's wearing like a like a leopard mask and everything i don't i don't identify that as an american so you're saying anyone that wears leopard masks can't be american i'm just saying a lot of these other ones are a little more like tapped into their region
stereotypical right and and meanwhile the american guy like isn't just like where's the hulk hogan real american of this game you know i know i'm saying hulk hogan a lot but it is like 1990s where's the ultimate warrior huge yeah exactly where's the ultimate warrior of this game who's the closest that we get to the ultimate warrior in this game barely anybody why are like three of these guys just
people right uh akira dragon jackie lee and uh pat gordon literally just look like regular people aren't most wrestlers just people though yeah but i'm saying you know i okay point taken you are correct um but where's the personality in that oh you're right but but no you're right actually sean don't tell me no you're right no you're right and here's why i'm looking at this as like you know with the
hindsight of 30 40 years of wrestling but at the time yeah it was more like people you know wrestlers were like ricky the dragon steamboat and they just looked normal right like they didn't dragon i can see that you had to have made that normal people like ricky the dragon steamboat oh my god you guys don't know ricky the dragon steamboat that's crazy no i get the best match of all time
at wrestlemania 3 against macho man oh well macho man macho man is macho man actually you're saying that that's less crazy of a nickname for a wrestler no no i i let you the dragon he's probably the i say yeah it is less crazy actually because macho man it's like okay i'm a wrestler i'll be macho and i'm a man so like that's my nickname well i just have no idea where i mean the dragon i guess
is his last name steamboat i mean he hits like a steamboat the the common saying yeah sorry i i'm being i feel like i'm being way too uh unknowledgeable for the people listening i'm gonna stop talking i you know it's funny though joe i never thought about that but joe i never thought that steamboat was his last name like i just thought that that was just another cool word to be thrown in i mean i'm assuming it's not i was just kidding i'm assuming it's part of his nickname right or his stage
name well his real name is like richard henry blood senior so um blood is his real name you're stuck with that richard blood richard blood um yeah apparently that's his that's his uh real name but that's like cheating you can't go on wikipedia and look at these people's real names that's that's against k-5 right isn't hulk hogan's real name isn't hulk hogan is it like bob hogan it's like terry terry bolea or something like that bolea bradshaw no no but terry right like come on that's not that's no hulk that's scary terry when you think of terry right you're thinking of a woman i don't know terry mclaurin scary terry all right that's two that's one person sorry oh okay nevermind
did either of you guys try the multiplayer at all because it's it's a little different oddly what changed uh so when you're playing multiplayer it works mostly the same as as normal i mean you just you just start a match you each pick a character it's not a campaign mode or anything you just face one-on-one but there's a bar in the middle that isn't there in the regular game that the left side has a pink bar and the right side has a blue bar and it is constantly very quickly going back and forth or the blue bar fills up all the way then the pink bar pushes it all the way back and then back and forth back and forth back and forth i mean like the animation cycle's got to be like one second maybe two seconds at most so it's happening really quickly
um and apparently if you are doing attacks when your bar is full you will have the advantage over your opponent and vice versa also your defense will be higher but it's happening so fast that like you can try but it's like you have to first of all time your button press to that and also be in the position to do the move uh or to you know be in a grapple and time your button press it's hard to do but uh i just thought it was interesting because it's not necessarily something that needs to be in two-player or can't be in single player no that yeah that's what i would be thinking that there's two versions they're giving you more information for two player when otherwise you'd be on even ground
not knowing where this meter is yeah uh and i feel like that for a single player that would help i mean even if it was like too fast to time perfectly i think that at least having that as a uh as an indicator of like oh you did that wrong um and you could probably do that a bit better i think that would make me less frustrated with this game yeah i mean it does make i hadn't even thought about the fact that that is probably running in the background invisibly in the regular game it's probably i'm sure they didn't change the mechanics of the game so yeah why not just give you that information and with that we'll move on to the essential games list oh come on what a segue i couldn't think of anything
and the way you said it was so like so businessy right right that's why i did that because i was like i have no flair before i vote for tecmo world wrestling here i just wanted to say one other thing that i was going to say when we kept talking about the grappling for 15 minutes but then sean
politely uh politely uh moved us in a good direction is that the manual for the for like the combos of how to pull off these moves whether you're uh in the grapple or who you are playing as the the manual has this weird thing where it shows you the d-pad and it shows you the um you know the direction you're supposed to put it in and then it has the plus sign so i get it i'm supposed to hit the direction plus the a button okay that all makes sense and everything then for some of them there's like a triangle next to the a button oh yeah and it never says what the triangle is and i kept scanning the manual over and over again what's the triangle mean what does it mean what does it mean
and then i found at the bottom of the moves list it says that the triangle techniques may change to upside down triangle techniques depending on the physical strength at the time what the heck does that mean right that doesn't that still doesn't explain what it operating the controller is what it says it says do up on the d-pad plus a triangle like no there's no triangle button i'm not sure what they were saying there i'm not happy about this and uh for that reason no no i'm joking um you know another thing though they keep referring in the manual they keep referring to it as the control
cross not the directional yeah that did notice that too the control cross okay anyway on to the voting time tecmo world wrestling is presentationally pretty great by nes wrestling games probably um on par with the best we've seen so far and control wise you know we we have some issues with the grappling and stuff but like you can wrestle in this game and feel like you're wrestling so it's not like it's so hard right it's not like a you know it's not street fighter level combos and stuff so you're doing okay from a gameplay standpoint but i feel like it's just still the it's still running through the same issue that a lot of fighting games on or even just like games that have the same level over and over again
run into is that once you've done a match you've kind of had your fill if you're not looking for this and i wasn't necessarily looking for an nes wrestling game in 2023 and so i think even after my first match it wasn't like i experienced everything far from it but i experienced enough to kind of say like now i can say i've played this game for the podcast and obviously i did play more than one match but that's not like that's not a good comment that's definitely not an essential games list comment to say after one bout uh which by the way these matches can go pretty long by what i guess i would
think of for nes standards they give you a seven minute time limit most of you're probably going to use that time but you also it's like even if you don't use all that time it's going to be at least four minutes and is that a problem well no not for that first match maybe not even for that second match but it will get at you eventually the idea of like do i really want to do another match where i'm mostly just hitting buttons with zero feedback and it's going to take me like five minutes just to pin this guy the answer is probably going to be no just throwing it out there and that's also why it's going to be no for the essential games list for me sean yeah i agree that this this is probably
the best looking wrestling game that we've had here and it it's got all of the sort of tertiary things that i would want in an nes wrestling game the ridiculous announcer is is like so good but is really only good if you're like playing for somebody to watch um and you know even though these characters aren't the most uh unique and or the or the most characterized but at least like it's more than just like oh here's blue pants guy and red pants guy it's just the wrestling itself just doesn't make any sense to me like again some of the other stuff in the wrestling itself kind of does like the whole
uh jumping off the ropes to jump off the ropes you can it's pretty easy to get on to the uh to get onto the pylon and to to do like a cool like elbow drop or whatever but the bread and butter actually trying to wrestle is really not working for me so yeah not essential joe yeah a lot of similar thoughts here um i think this is one of the better if if not one of the best wrestling games we've played on the nes which i think if nothing else just kind of speaks to the kind of sorry state of most wrestling games we've played so far because this didn't this was pretty lackluster to me i i i do
think it was like fun for a minute but i agree with both of you like i think that at first uh like after that first match you're kind of like okay i get it i've played it do i want it do i really want to keep going and it's i need more feedback you know so i i i won't i won't drag this on obviously i'm not voting it essential but uh better than other wrestling games somewhat for the record
and we've played a few now i i would say that the best wrestling game was um the pro wrestling game uh that i mentioned earlier with great puma uh that was just a i think that was a nintendo one too so it kind of makes sense that they gave it some extra love since they were handling it for their uh console but that's not to say that wrestling games can't be on the essential games list because
next week we have another wrestling game oh we're gonna be playing wcw wrestling and we're gonna be talking about it again and that one we're gonna actually have to mention people by name and you guys have to know these people because they're um they're real wrestlers oh okay that sounds fun the good news is is that at least it's not another wwf wrestling game is ww so new wrestlers uh i don't know if sting was there at that time um i like 1990 it's a good question they were acquiring a lot of people so i think sting would have been in there by now hell yeah you know i bet you know who else is in there though uh rowdy rowdy piper i was gonna say ricky the dragon steamer
and then just in case you're still interested in other uh episodes of nostalgia they're all free you can go back and listen to them all but if you wanted to get the true wrestling experience and have a pay-per-view well we have a subscription service for that uh it's called patreon.com slash nostalgia and for just five dollars a month uh every month we release one pay-per-view uh and this month is parodious uh parodious get a load of this not even a famicom game not even an nes game we don't even have rules for this anymore right why are we playing this game you'll just have to tune in to find out did did you see the special bonus offer in a manual of this game oh the like this you send a sticker in yeah it says collect the tecmo game
pack id badges for tecmo world wrestling save them when you've collected five total you can stick them in you know the seal whatever mail them and you will receive a special bonus offer it will be a gift you can share with your family and friends yeah i did read that i was wondering if maybe it was like food like they'd send you like some candy with tecmo like on it i don't know it's just so vague and i don't know if there's i wonder if it's googleable at this point yeah i don't know man but we might have to anyone that has that has sent in these little cut out like box top things uh let us know what you got from tecmo and share it we know we know it's a gift you can share you
