WCW Nitro

"An old but...uh...yeah, its old at least..."

For some reason I decided to go back and play all of my old Playstation wrestling games (and since I have every PS wrestling game released in America...yes, even the really old ones...) but when I came to this game I remembered it being extremely bad so I went into it expecting the worst thing my poor mind has ever had to endure. I was then quite surprised that it wasn't actually as horrid as I expected.

Maybe its because I played it until I unlocked every secret character when I got it (YES! I AM INSANE!) but I quickly adjusted to the control scheme. Even though the collision detection in the game is awful and most of the moves I could never pull off before I still couldn't pull off, I did pretty damn well with the one or two normal moves left (I think it was a piledriver and suplex...woopy!). The special moves were pretty easy to pull off once I remembered that the finishers can only be pulled off when your opponents health meter is in the red...

Now that I've said every single good feature about the game (oh, there are a bunch of cool rings to wrassle in too) its time to move on too the badness that is WCW Nitro. Badness as in bad, not badass. First lets start with the oh so in-depth commentary. I almost wet myself when I heard Tony Schiavone yell ''PILEDRIVER'' then ''PILEDRIVER'' then ''PILEDRIVER''...I mean, that out does WCW Mayhem any day, its so realistic...wait, no, it was annoying and repetitive.

As I mentioned before, the collision detection is awful, think WWF Attitude with cartoony graphics and less moves (Yes, such a thing is possible). The camera swings around so much I got sea sick, which is something I didn't expect when I was supposed to be in a wrestling ring.

A lot of moves didn't respond at all, and even more did a completely different move for no reason. Its unforgivable that a simple move that involves pushing two buttons at the same time almost never works. Besides that, it takes quite a while just for the character to respond to what you've done. You can literally put in a code for one move then decide you want to do another move and end up doing that move instead without the first move ever happening.

Although the characters look really nice for the PS, their movements aren't realistic at all and the moves are only so-so looking (if not totally inaccurate). The sad thing is that there are 64 wrestlers in all but only 48 special moves to share between all of them making every character basically the same as every other one. Although playing as guys like The Giant is kind of fun for nostalgias sake, to actually play the game all the way while enjoying yourself is just impossible.

Its a good game to have in your collection do to the fact you can buy it for all of five dollars now if you can find it, and it is indeed worth the five dollars. More than that is pushing it but you'll enjoy yourself as long as you have all the cheat codes that you can find all over the place now. Yeah, I only gave it a five, maybe I was too generous but since it is the ONLY PS game (I don't acknowledge the early WWF games as I felt they were more a slap in the face after beating the poorly constructed games) to have endings exclusive to each of the original 16 wrestlers, it has quite a bit of replay value even if the control is awful. Its worth a few plays just to truly understand where 3D wrestling games started and how we've gone so far beyond that. The boundaries are pretty limitless as it stands now, hopefully the new wrestling games to come will finally make that push that everyones been waiting for to be the most fun and in-depth game possible.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 11/03/02, Updated 11/24/02