Saturday Night Slam Masters

"Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting!"

I can't believe that I just used a Nickelback lyric for a tagline. I'm losing my touch.

Released in 1994, Saturday Night Slam Masters made a rather quiet debut on the SNES to very little fanfare, despite it being one of the best wrestling games of the 16-Bit era.

GAMEPLAY

Capcom's no stranger to fighting games, so it's no surprise that SNSM is heavily based around, well, fighting. It's sorta' like Street Fighter, only the players can also move up and down instead of just sidescrolling. With that aside, it plays out like any other WWF SNES title, except that the cruiserweight characters can execute running dives over the top rope. Which makes sense, as Japan's wrestling focus in the mid-90s was much more heavily centered on in-ring action than the WWF's "Sports Entertainment." Also, a player can increase his power and endurance by taunting alot- an eerie precursor to today's wrestling sims it's scary (And it even has the laser light show that NWA-TNA uses! Holy Nostradamus, Batman!). Much like Street Fighter, the players have health bars: If you've got some health left, you can resist submission moves and kick out of pins. If you've got no life left, your character becomes heavily winded and significantly slower to get back up and harder to stay up, and unable to resist submissions or kick out of pins. Essentially- once you're out of life, you're pretty much done for. Except if the other guy's out of life too, then it's anyone's ballgame. Too bad you can't unlock the last two characters as playable ones without cheating. Boo-urns.

CONTROLS

While gameplay borrows a bit from columns A and B, the controls are pretty straightforward: Y is attack, B is jump, and A is pin. Simple, huh? While you really can't do fancy stuff with jump alone (aside from jumping backwards or forwards), Y does all sorts of stuff. Tapping Y is your basic strike attack, while holding Y close to an opponent enters you in grapple mode. In grapple mode, you can choose to Irish whip your opponent into the ropes by holding the direction you want to whip them and press Y again, or you can do a total of 6 (3 front and 3 back) grapple move by simply hitting Y again while holing either up, down, or just pressing Y again. Some grapples turns into a pinning move, others turn into a submission, and others just do some damage. Very easy to learn, however some special moves are near impossible to pull off. Such is the case where you need to input a rotating sequence on the D-pad, which is very easy to do in arcades with a joystick, but hit-or-miss (usually miss) with a D-pad. Oh well. It's the thought that counts, right?

GRAPHICS

Tons of eye candy, even for the outdated 16-Bit systems. The only gripe I have about them is in the character selection screen, where for instance "El Stingray" has his name abruptly cut short as if by some sprite cropping mishap which renames him "Stingr." Hm. At least the chick in the front row is hot.

SOUND

SNSM sure uses the SNES' sound system to full capacity. At the start of every match, a digitized (although staticy) voice announces the location (Los Angeles, Germany, etc), counts along with pin attempts, and even says "Winner!" to the victor. Remember kids, this was way before voice acting in video games was even heard of, much less even possible to do on a constant in-game basis. Music, eh. Nothing memorable.

MULTIPLAYER

You can choose to do a simple 1-on-1 with a friend or CPU, or enter a tag-team battle royale, where it's you and a pal versus 2 CPUs, or if you've got the double controller adapter, you can do a 2-on-2 with 3 or 4 friends. Unfortunately, slowdown heavily plagues the Multiplayer option. Oh well.

OTHER STUFF

All the characters are in some way takeoffs of real-life wrestlers, mostly Japanese ones. Great Oni (My fav char) is based off The Great Muta (or Keji Mutoh, whichever suits you best), Alexander the Grater is based off Big Van Vader (With that massive helmet thing that Vader used to wear), Stingray is probably either Rey Mysterio Jr or Hayabusa (Though that's arguable amongst the real die-hard fans, and Stingray doesn't land on his head half time time), Scorpion is most likley one of the Black Tigers (Eddie Gurerro was the second Tiger!), Jumbo is kinda' a cross between Stan Hansen and Road Warrior Hawk, Titanic Tim (billed as 7'9" in the game!) is likley Giant Gonzalez (A legitimate 7'6"!), Rasta is probably Bruiser Brody, and Gunloc looks an awful lot like Lex Luger. <obscure joke>Better not give Rasta a knife!</obscure joke> And Biff? Um, he's Zangief's pal, apparently. Hm.

OVERALL: 9/10

If you're a big wrestling/fighting game fan and you're looking for another addition to your SNES library, you'd be a fool to pass this diamond in the rough up. Thumbs way the heck up.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 07/06/05