WCW Mayhem: Breakdown

Back in the day (Ah, feel the oldness flow through you) when the Monday Night Wars were in full force, we actually got choice in our wrestling games. It was great having the competition of the companies and have the battle continue into video games.  The year is 1999 and this is before all the WWF fans got treated to the likes of WWF No Mercy and WWF SmackDown!. The game every WWF fan I knew clamored around was WWF Attitude and they would go on and on about how awesome it was and how it stood above every other game in all it's glory.

Pictured: Glory.

Even the ECW fans got Playstation games, but they were also made from the same mind shattering awfulness that was Attitudes engine. Plus it came out in 2000, it's 1999 in this flashback, so ECW fans can suck it.

Us WCW fans however, had been spoiled for choice for good video games for years. WCW/nWo Revenge was one of the best wrestling games period.

FOR LIFE!

WCW vs nWo: World Tour and WCW vs the World (Former is N64, latter is Playstation) were both solid games and WCW Nitro and WCW/nWo Thunder were not as bad as first remembered.

So the hype machine for WCW Mayhem was in motion and people, myself included were getting caught up in it.

Think I just got hyped for the game again.

Backstage brawls? Good looking entrances? All 12 WCW PPVS?! A roster of 60! Wow, there is no way this could ever go wrong, could it?

Yes.

It sucks.

No really it sucks. I've wrestled with this game for too long. Part of me refuses to accept that the only (Maybe/probably wrong) wrestling game to have my three heroes - Sting, Bret Hart and Raven - in it and suck so hard. I'll flat out say that this game did more damage to me as a WCW fan than 'The finger-poke of doom' ever did.

Feel your pain DDP

From the stiff slow controls to the weird way the wrestlers hold out their arms while standing, everything feels rushed and just plain strange. The moves while smoother and easier to perform than some games, get repetitive fast and you will soon get into the monotonousness routine that repeats nearly every match. 

The entrances are short but I do pop to hear the classic Four Horseman theme or the Wolfpac theme. The roster is really impressive in it's size (Ernst the Cat vs Horace Hogan puts asses on seats) and it is great to have all the favourites but they all share the same move sets and similar entrances. It's Midway re-skinning Scorpion all over again.

The create-a-wrestler mode is probably the strongest aspect of the game. It was heavily touted and shown off and yes it is perhaps very underwhelming and limited in retrospect but it still is fine for it's time.

Punk got nothing on Bobby Blaze

I had WCW Mayhem for N64 so we never got the backstage elements included. In all honesty though, I never even noticed they were cut. 

Overall, the graphics are quite good, the create-a-wrestler mode is fun and the roster is impressively big.

Everything thing else, the repetition, stiff controls and weird animation all contribute to the rushed feeling of this very sloppy game. Might be 13 years too late, but I'd avoid this game if I were you.

KRS