WWF Gets Attitude With a Body Slam

WWF Attitude, the latest wrestler from Acclaim being developed by the WWF WarZone team, is coming to the PlayStation this May and the Nintendo 64 this June - and surprisingly, Acclaim is saying that there will be little to no discernible differences between the two - speech included.

As you might expect, Attitude sports a number of big name wrestlers, from Stone Cold to the Undertaker to the Rock to D-Generation X; there will be 41 in total. The remainder of the wrestlers - another 15 - will be jobbers, or as one Acclaim representative put it - "the guys who come in to get their faces smashed." These wrestlers will be completely fictional, some even with voices and sounds recorded by Acclaim internal staff. But each of the jobbers will, like the big-name wrestlers, have his own sound, textures, and entrances.

The create-a-player function has been expanded - players now have separate eyes, noses, and mouths to choose from, in addition to height, weight, and similar, more common, features. Not to mention that you can choose gender, taunts, body type, strength, endurance, costume, and entrance.

Unlike WarZone, weapons in Attitude will be available at all times: You have the option to turn them on or off in any of the matches, so at any stage you can grab a chair or table and swing with all your might. And you can fight in the aisles on the way to the dressing rooms as well as in the ring. Altogether, you'll have 400 moves at your disposal, including the signature moves attached to each wrestler. And you'll be able to choose moves for a created player, save them, and truck them on over to your friends' houses for play.

New arenas - you'll remember there was only the one in WarZone - are being created as well, and the game will have 19 modes of play. (All new arenas are fictional.) Special matches include lumberjack, king of the ring, survivor series, and royal rumble.

Jerry "The King" Lawler and Shane McMahon will do the play-by-play commentary, and most impressively, Acclaim says that the Nintendo version of the game will have as much speech as the PlayStation. Super compression, plus the plan to use a bigger cart (hopefully, one representative said, a 32-meg cart) are what allow for the Nintendo speech.