Great for mindless fun, or a laugh.
User Rating: 5.6 | WCW vs. nWo: World Tour N64
Despite this game now being 8 years old, my friends and I still pick it up on occasion because it's great asinine multiplayer fun. While being skilled at playing against human opponents will get you only so far in this game, it still makes for some good 'ol entertainment. Gameplay- In a word: buggy. My friends and I have adopted the phrase "Gotta love them bugs". You will turn off knockouts, and still be able to win by knocking out your opponent. You will break up a submission, and a few seconds later the game will announce a player has lost by submission. Collision detection is horrible; arms go through heads, bodies lay directly on top of one another, punches and kicks will be way off and still land, etc. Reversals are completely sporadic, and only in rare and very precisely-timed circumstances can you intentionally get one. A player with low "spirit" will all of a sudden get continuous reversals, while a player who nearly has a special all of a sudden will not get a single one. Having no sort of health meter makes it difficult to gauge how injured your opponent is- you usually have to base it on how long they stay down when they are knocked down. Thus, a large majority of this game is getting the "feel" of the timing, and what sort of damage you are doing. Some of the more powerful moves are fairly gratifying to pull off, especially when they result in a knockout. However their obsession over the powerbomb pin (or variation thereof) makes most of the specials lackluster. Some characters who in real wrestling do not have powerbomb pins as signature moves, have them in this game. The infamous powerbomb pin, an ordinarily powerful move, gets turned into a pointless finisher (as mentioned below), thus totally negating the point of attempting to pull it off in the first place. Graphics- Basing this on the time the game was released (obviously not current day), the graphics are OK but could've been better. Again a major issue is some of the clipping and poor collision detection that occurs which just drags the graphic quality way down. The crowd looks awful and doesn't even resemble a crowd really, and if you had never seen a wrestling match before, you may not even know what the crowd was supposed to be. There is little to no variation in the environments, basically the only thing that ever changes is the rings themselves, and there are really only 4 different ones. Each character has different outfits, but those are usually just slight color variations. Difficulty- Against human opponents, winning is about 70% skill, 30% luck. As mentioned earlier, with the spontaneous reversal patterns a fairly inexperienced player can give a seasoned vet a run for his or her money, possibly even win. Against computer opponents, this game is pretty darn easy, even on the hard settings. CPU opponents will sometimes do moves for no rhyme or reason, or when they are in the position to pull off a powerful move, they will do a weak one, a taunt, or sometimes nothing at all. The key is to learn this games many timing issues (for example, you cannot do a strong or weak attack, or grapple for that matter, while your opponent is getting up. If you time it just right, you can get a strong move in, at a moment where it is still too early for them to attempt to block, but they are no longer in the "recovering" process). Pins are completely pointless in this game. No matter how tired you are, or how many specials someone just did on your character, you can get out of a pin without even getting a one count. Only knockout and submission moves are truly effective. Depending on the character, some are easier to knock opponents out with, others are easier to make the opponent submit with. Roster- At the time of its release this game had a pretty impressive roster. There are a handful of other characters- some real, and some fictional- which can be unlocked in the single-player mode. The character pictures are hand-drawn though, and not always that great. For example, Macho Man looks like a bum, and Diamond Dallas Page just looks...stupid. The fictional characters have some interesting...design and names to boot. Most of their moves are nothing unique, and one character even has people's specials as regular short-grapple moves. Quite a few fictional's specials are either one extreme or another- pointless and weak, or downright bizarre yet powerful. And let's not forget, quite a few of them have the good 'ol powerbomb pin. Music- AWFUL. About 3 or 4 different songs comprise the soundtrack, and they all sound like hair band music that’s a decade or more old. I hope you like crappy guitar riffs, cause there's plenty to go around. The games sound effects are also not that great, some of the punches sound like a baseball bat, and some of the reversals sound like a ball hitting a catcher’s mitt. Also, characters make random strange grunts when performing their grappling moves. All in all, if you want to get together and play a good old multiplayer game and have a laugh at the same time, this game is good for just that. It is not too competitive, because so many problems plague the gameplay that it's hard to determine if a win was truly based on a players skill. But, all things aside still to this day I enjoy playing it with friends.
