WCW World Champion Wrestling

Nichibutsu/Pony Canyon/FCI, 1989

It’s no lie to say that I was a bit of a kook for pro wrestling as a kid, and even today I sometimes listen to podcasts and “shoot” interviews featuring the sport’s old hands and classic geniuses; sometimes I will cue up a playlist of Jim Cornette’s colorful and profanity-laced rantings just to entertain myself while I’m about my daily tasks. I remember the WCW NES game becoming available – I first knew of it from a DC Comics ad in early 1990 – and I remember being… okay with it.

WCW features a popular spread of the promotion’s wrestlers from the late 80s, including the Road Warriors, Lex Luger, and The Man Himself, Nature Boy Ric Flair. WCW has a pretty cool feature that a lot of its contemporaries didn’t: each wrestler has a unique move set, and you assign four moves to the four directional buttons before each match. This not only lets you mix things up to keep the game from getting too boring, it also allows for a little bit of strategy if you decide that you want to get that in-depth with this shit.

Sting and Michael P.S. Hayes perform a gratuitous and elaborate sex act, right before your very eyes.

The real drawbacks are that the controls do take some getting used to, heavily overshadowed by the typical Pony Canyon graphical laziness. It’s saved by some really good in-game music and surprisingly clear digitized voices.

I give WCW a 5 out of 10. I’d say check it out if you’re into old school pro wrestling, but be ready to take a few minutes to settle in and just enjoy the nostalgia while you’re at it.

The Three Stooges

Incredible Technologies/Beam Software, 1989

This is another one of those games where they tried desperately to lash a group of mini games into one cohesive product. I hazard to say that Three Stooges isn’t entirely bad, it’s just… well, let me try something new and be polite. I, for one, think this game is kind of shitty. There may be people out there who like it, or even love it. I haven’t met any.

The story is noble enough, a blue collar drama wherein Larry, Moe, and Curly aim to help the orphanage stay afloat despite the efforts of a Snidely Whiplash-style “evil banker.” The trio go into action, making money for the tots in a variety of fittingly absurd ways. Pie throwing and cracker eating contests, moonlighting as doctors and waiters, the Stooges are broad in their vision when it comes to making dough. My favorite so far has to be the hospital job; no HMO will cover the high-speed lunacy of the gurney race. The “contest” themed gigs play a lot like parts of LJN’s Back to the Future, which is not a compliment. It’s more of an accusation.

One of the many classic moments where I have no fucking idea what’s going on, but I’m doing my best anyway.

This is a port of a 1987 computer game so I’ll pull my punches a little bit. The graphics are actually pretty good for what we’re dealing with, and even the usually lousy “realistic” close-ups of familiar characters are very on-point. The sound is absolute dog shit, however. Dinky, repetitive music loops, badly garbled voice samples… I believe the audio was where they cut corners when updating this game from its original format. Compared to, say, Ironsword: Wizards & Warriors II, the sound is absolutely piss-poor.

The Three Stooges gets a 5 out of 10 for effort, because while the sound drives me fucking nuts, a couple of these sub-games are actually pretty fun to play and I think the spirit of the source material carries through fairly well.

Super Spike V’Ball

Technos Japan, 1989

I am normally pretty wish-washy on sports games, especially on early consoles like the NES. The RBI series and Blades of Steel are exemplary games for the system, but most of the rest of the NES sports games amount to convoluted crap as far as I’m concerned. I was happy to find another exception to that rule in Super Spike.

My stupid ass didn’t have too much trouble figuring out how to serve and keep the ball in play, and I felt very much like the challenge level was scaled appropriately. I felt like Super Spike was giving me a chance to learn the ropes before violently strangling me with them.

Ball-bashing Chad action at its finest.

One look at the game in action will remind you of Double Dragon I and II for the NES; decently-defined sprites and appropriately intense sound effects mark this as Technos work through and through. The game plays pretty smoothly and the action gets intense. The music is hit or miss, but when it’s good it’s on par with any of the ballsy tracks from the NES version of Double Dragon II.

Super Spike gets a 7 out of 10. I was pleasantly surprised by it, well-entertained, and found it to be another solid piece of work by Technos Japan.

Be sure to keep an eye out for the finale of this round of reviews on the 28^th. Perhaps after this, we will move on to another system we’ve neglected so far. If you have any suggestions, feel free to email me or hit me up on the Facebook page. I’ve got to sweep the cutting room floor now, so goodbye until then, and stay retro!

The most important thing about Survivor Series 1987 was what went on behind the scenes. And no, I don’t mean interesting backstage stories about performers. I’m talking business and finance. About six months after the third Wrestlemania, Survivor Series seems almost destined to be a big deal in terms of a wrestling event. Vince McMahon wasn’t the only person to think this, as rival organization NWA had the exact same day (November 26, 1987, Thanksgiving Day) picked for its biggest event of the year, Starrcade. That PPV name should sound familiar to casual 90’s wrestling fans.

Vince McMahon threatened cable companies by telling them that he wouldn’t allow them to broadcast Wrestlemania IV if they attempted to air Starrcade. Cable companies largely complied, as Wrestlemania had a more widespread, casual draw than any other wrestling promotion at the time. As a result of the low profits for Starrcade, NWA unified several territories and was bought by Ted Turner, forming the WCW. WCW would keep the Starrcade name and lineage, and for several years in the 90’s gave the WWE weekly panic attacks.

I’ll just say it. Survivor Series 1987 is responsible for the Monday Night Wars and the Attitude Era. Let’s do a match by match breakdown.

As far as judging by today’s standards is concerned, the PPV is very frontloaded. The first match five-on-five elimination tag match, which is in many ways the Survivor Series standard. The team of faces (good guys) included Randy Savage, Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat, and Jake “The Snake” Roberts. That’s really the holy trinity of 80’s wrestlers. Savage was untouchable on the microphone, Steamboat was an incredible in-ring performer, and Roberts understands in-ring storytelling in a truly uncanny way. The team of heels (bad guys) had a lot of mostly forgettable wrestlers to modern casual fans, but the Honkey Tonk Man is significant. He currently has the longest running Intercontinental Championship reign, a belt that he won off of Steamboat and held during this match. When he was outnumbered three to one by the end of the match, he just walked away and allowed himself to be counted out. He wasn’t the greatest in-ring performer of his time, and his style certainly hasn’t aged well, but he did have a knack for drawing some serious heel heat, with the end of this match being one of the best examples during his title reign.

Next was the women’s five-on-five elimination match. Women’s wrestling in the 80’s isn’t as drastically different from women’s wrestling in 2016 as men’s wrestling is. It wasn’t given the opportunity in the 90’s to evolve and gain the respect that it now commands today. This is largely the fault of WWE and their predisposition toward swimsuit models instead of skilled workers. Luckily, this has since become an antiquated notion, barring a few exceptions, and women’s wrestling today is the best that it has ever been. The Jumping Bomb Angels steal the show here, displaying tremendous in-ring skill. And the worst worker in the match is easily the Fabulous Moolah. The fact that Moolah is arguably the evilest wrestler not named Chris Benoit aside, Moolah was at her worst in this match, and she was never particularly good. If you have a stomach for the horrible ways people can treat one another, check out Moolah’s Wikipedia page, but don’t say that I sent you.

If you were watching Survivor Series 1987 and thought, “Gee, these five-on-five matches are great, but they aren’t quite confusing enough.” Good news for you, as the next match was a ten-on-ten elimination tag team match. All of the best spots in this match come from wrestlers connected in some way to the Hart family. Big surprise there. Bret Hart and Jim Neidhart were on one side of the match while Davey Boy Smith (most widely known as the British Bulldog) and the Dynamite Kid were on the opposing side. This match also saw the debut of Demolition, who will always hold the award for worst costumes on any wrestling team. The match is weak. I mean, it’s just a serious drag to try to get through. Do you need to vacuum your apartment, and also maybe run to the store to pick up some eggs, and then maybe cook the eggs but drop them on the floor, and then begrudgingly cook more eggs, eat those eggs, and do all of your dishes? If so, you’ll still have about ten minutes of this obnoxious mess of a half hour wrestling match to suffer through. It is the worst match on the card and one of the worst in Survivor Series history.

The final match wasn’t awful. It wasn’t as great as the first match was, but it’s also important to remember that novelty attractions were a bigger deal than talented wrestlers in the 1980’s. This is another five-on-five elimination tag match, with Hulk Hogan and Bam Bam Bigelow being some of the most notable members of the face team. Hogan wasn’t pinned, of course. Shenanigans led to him being counted out because the Hulkster doesn’t job, brother. The heel team’s biggest deals, no pun intended, were Andre the Giant, King Kong Bundy, and Rick Rude. Andre wound up being the final man standing in a surprisingly entertaining match. Part of what makes this match work is that the crowd is absolutely insane overseeing the sheer amount of star power in the ring at the time. After the match, Hogan hit Andre with his championship belt to be the last man standing in the ring because the 80’s.

Overall, Survivor Series 1987 is important more than its good, but it’s worth watching as an interesting look at what wrestling was in the 80’s, and especially to see what got over with the crowd before flippy lucha things.