Anyone who tells you violence doesn’t solve anything has never watched professional wrestling, which is a never-ending tribute to the problem-solving power of elbow drops and piledrivers. Somebody fills your brand new car with cement? Kick his ass. Somebody videotapes you getting kinky with someone you aren’t supposed to? Kick his ass. Their team thinks they can beat your stable and earn the belt? Kick all their asses! Ass kicking is to professional wrestling as new outfits are to Barbie. While there have been plenty of wrestling games based on the WWF/WWE property, none has been so gleefully wedded to the idea of delivering righteous beat-downs as WWF Wrestlemania: The Arcade Game, and since no piece of Sega hardware is disparaged more vocally than the 32X, that’s the version we’re talking about in this week’s Revenge of the License. You got a problem with that? Meet me out back and we’ll change your mind. Now keep reading before I have to acquaint your head with this chair.

WWF Wrestlemania: The Arcade Game is what happens when a developer like Midway crosses the already outrageous antics showcased in pro wrestling with the physics-defying lunacy of NBA Jam, the “Rules? What rules?” attitude of NFL Blitz, and the button-mashing mayhem of Mortal Kombat. By all rights a concept that awesome shouldn’t even be feasible, yet this game put all its competition in headlocks when it was released to the arcades in 1995. Even people who never watched five minutes of rasslin’ in real life had no problems plunking down a couple quarters to watch The Undertaker hit Shawn Michaels with an uppercut so hard that it knocks him into the rafters.

Damn, that’s satisfying!

Success like that meant it was already a given the game would make the transition to home systems, and it happened so quickly it seems impossible to believe Midway didn’t hand over the code to Acclaim and Sculptured Software as soon as the first arcade cabinets rolled out of the warehouse. WWF Wrestlemania: The Arcade Game hit virtually every home console available in 1995 with releases for the PlaySatation, Saturn, Super Nintendo and Genesis in addition to the 32X. Obviously the Saturn and PlayStation versions are the superior choices here, so why talk about the 32X edition?

Groin kicking: perfectly legal.

Because shut your mouth, that’s why! Being cart-based, there are no load times like the ones that plague the PlayStation and Saturn incarnations (neither version even has an in-game soundtrack, which was supposed to be a great strength of the CD generation). Remember this is 1995 so both were first-gen titles for their respective systems and don’t play as smoothly as  later games in their libraries. And while the SNES and Genesis editions also run smoothly and feature no load times, both find themselves failing to know their role.

Pre-match hype.

On the Super Nintendo, the graphics are bright, the sound is clear, and the controls are tight but somehow the system which manged to handle twenty-five different characters in Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 struggled so badly with eight here that the developers flat-out cut Bam Bam Bigelow and Yokozuna from the roster, leaving gamers only six superstars. Can I get a “Hell No!”? Over on the Mega Drive front, the graphics are muddy and the sound (as is typical of third-party Genesis developers) leaves much to be desired, but at least all eight jobbers can take part in the slobberknocker ultimate melee at the conclusion of a World Championship run. The 32X version features sharper graphics and better audio than the 16-bit versions, with the full roster present and accounted for, and the complete soundtrack–the match is over almost before it started. The only thing it’s missing are the ending screens from the arcade version–an odd thing to leave out, but if you’re playing a wrestling game for the endings, you need to go home and rethink your life.

Like Bam Bam’s doing here.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say WWF Wrestlemania: The Arcade Game is a reason to own a 32X, but if you’re looking for the most authentic port of the arcade game, it’s your best choice by far as long as you’ve got a six-button controller. It’s fun smashing the AI, it’s even more enjoyable to destroy your friends, and it’s the most fun of all when you demolish them in a wrestling game by slamming them in the head with a granite tombstone or shocking them with a giant joy buzzer.

Pictured: FUN!

Too often licensed games are so focused on the nitty-gritty details of making sure character sprites are just right, or that every bad guy from the television show makes it into the game that developers leave out the fun. WWF Wrestlemania: The Arcade Game takes exactly the opposite approach by starting off with the fun, and then adding wrestlers and special features until you reach a point where it’s so ridiculous that even having Yokozuna butt-stomp you to death is no reason to quit playing.

What, you thought I was kidding?

Sure it’s a small (and by now seriously dated) roster. Sure the arcade endings are missing. Sure it feels nothing like Attitude or Smackdown. That doesn’t matter. What matters is if you turn it off and think to yourself, “Man, that was fun!” And on that front, the 32X version will make your candy-ass tap out each and every single time. Enjoy the ad:

Michael Crisman

In 1979, Michael Crisman was mauled by a radioactive Gorgar pinball machine. After the wounds healed, doctors discovered his DNA had been re-coded. No longer fully human, Michael requires regular infusions of video games in order to continue living among you. If you see him, he can see you. Make no sudden moves, but instead bribe him with old issues of computer and video game magazines or a mint-in-box copy of Dragon Warrior IV.


If he made you laugh, drop a tip in his jar at http://paypal.me/modernzorker


(If he didn't make you laugh, donate to cure his compulsion to bang keyboards by sending an absurdly huge amount of money to his tip jar instead. That'll show him!)