WWF No Mercy

N64, WWF No Mercy (2002) game

My connection to wrestling goes back, in a small way, to Junior School where I distinctly remember the squat, podgy action figures people would bring in, and a friend of mine used to give me his 'swaps' of WWF cards (which I still have to this day!). Seeing those intriguing images of red-faced crazy characters freeze-framed in some act of violent exertion was a window upon a world completely alien to me, and a place I wouldn't visit for years. My contemporaries showed me what it might be like, one particular lad would often perform such wrestling moves on a younger one after Sunday service (the younger never knew when to give up and walk away, getting more and more frustrated and furious!). But it was a good while later, at a New Year's Eve party, that I had my first taste of what it must be to actually experience the pain and power of being a professional wrestler: 'WCW Vs. NWO: Revenge' was the first wrestling game I ever played, and back then I still assumed, as you would, that it was based on reality, so it was with great shock, but a compelling freedom that I took to what must also have been the first ever four-player fighting game I ever played. The graphics were inferior to this game, and the animation would have been a little less varied, but it was a mind-blowing experience and, more to the point, fantastic fun. So I was very pleased when I was able to borrow it, and my Father and I had many happy hours of Royal Rumbles, Tag Teams, etc.

From there I caught the occasional match when Channel 5 used to show WCW on Friday evenings, then the odd Sunday afternoon edition of WWF which was on Channel 4, and I was surprised that the moves of the game were played out just so in real life. Eventually, I don't know at what point, I realised or was told, that, like Father Christmas, these bulky athletes were actually actors and it was all carefully staged entertainment rather than 'serious' sport. My Grandad, I was told, greatly enjoyed watching the wrestling back in the day, so I suppose I had a genetic predisposition to enjoy it, despite never having much interest in sport generally. Yet 'WCW Vs. NWO' was such a freeing experience, and so intuitive that I was soon to buy my own game, having recently bought an N64: early 2001 I got a secondhand copy of 'WWF Wrestlemania 2000' and many more hours of enjoyment were added, mainly with my Father. As well as being one of the most immediate and satisfying gaming experiences, it was also one of the most divisive and upsetting of any game or genre I've ever played - perhaps only shooting games come close in terms of their personal offence quotient, and with those you usually have more targets and certainly a wider playing arena so you can avoid another player, should you have aggrieved, or become aggrieved, with them. Nowhere to run in the squared circle of the wrestling ring, and many arguments resulted from the unfairness of a ring out when a truce had been called, for example, treachery replicated from wrestling's own narrative, and thus in the spirit of the game!

It could get so bad that it was eventually a game we rarely brought out, preferring to stick to safer competitive fare such as 'Mario Kart' and 'Snowboard Kids,' or even 'GoldenEye,' 'The World Is Not Enough' and 'Perfect Dark,' yet it still holds some of the greatest multiplayer moments I've experienced, and few things can be bettered than four humans in the ring. 'WWF 2000' was a significant improvement on the earlier game, which in itself was either the second or third wrestling game from the same developers - a development in graphics, structure and scope had steadily been achieved through the N64's lifetime, and 'WWF No Mercy' was the final, and pinnacle, in the series, building on the simple control interface which cunningly held a large variety of sometimes context-sensitive moves (none of this awkward, memory-intensive combo stuff that often put me off fighting games), and adding in some new animation, modes and an improved sheen to the visuals. I never played 'No Mercy' back then as I suppose I'd had my fill of the genre and I suspected it would be merely more of the same. Wrestling appeared to become more exclusive in those latter years, not really shown on terrestrial TV any more, and I was never moved to purchase one of the GameCube's many wrestling titles as they didn't tend to rate well in reviews, so my interest and knowledge waned.

But then I switched over to digital TV a few short years ago and found that one of the many channels, Challenge, screened something called TNA Impact Wrestling every week. So I started watching regularly, and while, over the years I've become aware of the cyclical nature of the stories, and rarely been overly impressed, in spite of coming to an appreciation of the reality of wrestling (it is real, in that they are real athletes performing real stunts, with real risk and real skill involved, even if the results are predetermined), it's been a nice part of the routine of life to turn the brain off for a couple of hours on a Sunday night before the start of the week. Having gone back through the catalogue of N64 games that I never owned and begun to bid on eBay for those that held any interest, it was inevitable that this game would eventually cross my radar, which is why I bought it, remembering its high review score in N64 Magazine, and the pedigree of its own past. I vaguely remembered there being some issue about it when it was new, something to do with losing data or it was missing something important (like the absent item in 'Space Station Silicon Valley'), another reason I never picked it up at the time. But I've not come across any issues with it, except for the game's partial counter-intuitiveness.

I'm referring to the belts you can win: I played through each belt and was surprised to find that on winning it I had only completed a small percentage. So I played through again, picking the same wrestler as before and found I could then defend that belt for a slightly different route to the end. But then, in spite of winning every match, I came to the end and, though my completion percentage had increased, it was still well under fifty percent! So what was going on? I played through yet again to make sure I had completed every match correctly, and it took me a while to realise, despite reading the message at the end, that you need to complete ALL the paths to the end, that this meant I'd have to lose some matches, win others differently, and generally plug away again and again through the same scenarios to increase my percentage! It seemed like a good way to increase the game's lifespan until I felt I'd hit a wall and tried every different combination of winning and losing I could find and still only reached 94%. Originally I'd planned to get 100% on every belt, but that experience with the Hardcore belt just brought home to me the repetitiveness of the game, and as much as I enjoyed it, I couldn't play through the same matches continually: like the sport itself, it was too confining, too cyclical for me to stay interested.

If the game had been a little better designed in the interface of the menu, allowing me to see which Chapters I'd won or lost, to hover over each stage and work out where I could go from there, I would have felt more encouraged to play on, but the single player experience had always been very much secondary to the group anarchy which always remained the main draw, so I ultimately had to abandon the game before I'd got the full satisfaction out of it. It's partly my fault for not persevering, after all, it's an old game, and old games tend to have aspects of their design that could be improved. But when it comes to the actual gameplay it was as good, if not better, than ever, that's the annoyance: I'd much rather have had a fully featured career mode to battle through over hours and hours than the more open-ended attack on each belt, and that's what's missing as compared with 'WWF 2000.' Don't misunderstand, this is clearly the better game, featuring new and better animation (I love that weight now plays a part - the biggest wrestlers are sometimes too much of a struggle to lift!), along with improvements in what's been before (the better grip you now have on weapons allows you to do a lot more without fear you'll drop it, as well as the ability to recreate the feel of a match where you can go round the outside of the ring and fling weapons into it, ready to cause maximum damage as your opponent lies stunned), and enhancements in size and scope (you can run out the back to the car park, bar and other locations!).

There's also a good size of roster, with many of the old favourites still available (as you'd expect since the game was released only a year or two after the previous one), as well as some new ones - I picked Tazz as my Hardcore champion simply because I'd come to know him as the commentator in TNA. It's been more fun watching TNA over the years because of the recognition I had of many of the wrestlers they featured (the Hardys, Hulk Hogan, Al Snow, D'Lo Brown, Scott Steiner, Sting, Devon Dudley, to name a few), and it's fun to see the symbiosis the game and reality have had, with Earl Hebner very familiar to me now as one of the referees -  he's in the game, but I wouldn't have known who he was back when it first came out. There's even a whole new game type to enjoy in the Ladder Match, a kind of reverse Cage Match where you have to place a stepladder and knock your opponent into submission enough so that you have time to climb to the top and grab the winning briefcase. The character models remain pleasingly ropey in places, but it's part of the charm for me that you sometimes see someone's head through the body of another, or shoulders that look like they've been stuck on like Action Man's plastic appendages. The faces are definitely more detailed, and the movement is very realistic, which is what matters most, and while having more areas to explore beyond the ring is little more than a gimmick it does take the gaming experience closer to the TV equivalent.

It's just that nagging irritation that the main body of the game, winning the belts, is too much of a technical exercise for its stubborn insistence on repetition without the slightest hint on how you're supposed to get a different outcome. It becomes trial and boring error. It also annoyed me that the game allows a match to proceed even if you've passed the point of being able to win - for example, if you missed the instruction that you're supposed to draw blood before pinning, you'll fail to win and the computer will let it happen. It does encourage you to stay focused and concentrate on the text you see between matches, and it's more realistic in that the computer isn't providing you, the professional wrestler, with handholding, you need to take it seriously, like a job. But it is still a bit frustrating! There's also a little lowering of the tone in the banter and promos between matches. Maybe this is closer to what the actual thing was like, but I didn't appreciate some of that.

So as much as I acknowledge this as the definitive wrestling title, and I would have given it four stars (for the memory of amazing multiplayer matches in its genetic ancestry, as I reflect my original enjoyment in the score, as much as what it means to me now), I have to knock off one for the unfairness in its trial and error approach to challenge. I haven't even mentioned such things as the Create-A-Wrestler mode which every game of this type has as standard, because although I spent hours crafting characters on '2000,' I didn't have the patience to get into it here. The shop where you can spend hard-earned dollars to unlock wrestlers, moves, costumes and weapons, is a nice idea, but the game has to encourage you to play for the enjoyment first, the bonus items second. With recent news that Challenge will be dropping Impact Wrestling in 2017, it seems my association with the sport is about to go on another hiatus, but who knows, maybe in the next few years I'll get a Nintendo Switch and play a fantastic new grappling title that ignites my interest all over again, and the legacy of vast fun these old N64 titles left will return me to the ring like a retired wrestler that feels the pull of the limelight once more?

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