MeekinOnMovies on “Wrestling Revolution Pro”

Wrestling Revolution (Pro)
IOS / Android
Price: 4.99 (IOS)

Do
me a favor, hop in your brain Delorean and let me take you back in
time. Oh, you don’t *have* a brain Delorean? That’s okay, you can borrow
mine. We’re traveling back to the early 2000s; The internet has
exploded, parents are just about over that whole “violence in music”
deal, and pro wrestling is the hip thing. Stone Cold, The Rock, and
Triple H are household names – hell, Mankind had a New York Times No 1.
Best Seller. Wrestling was so popular in the 2000s that an entire
cottage industry of wrestling games sprang up in the span of a few short
months.

Hardcore
wrestling fans have always yearned for something that took us backstage, let us
control the inner workings of a largely staged sport. They wanted to
book the matches, settle the feuds, win the ratings war – not just
compete in ring. And by and large, their demands were answered by a
dedicated group of indie developers. The PC game Extreme Warfare Revenge
took gamers inside the workings of a promotion – tasking you with
booking matches and feuds, managing contracts, and fighting for TV
ratings, sort of like Championship Manager: Pro Wrestling Edition.
It was incredibly complex, and exciting in it’s own special way –  but
required a lot of attention to detail, and a lack of actual wrestling game play made it a niche product for those of us who *really* wanted to
run our own pro-wrestling promotion, backstage politics and all. There
were a few other games in this genre, but nothing held a candle to EWR.  

While
it was (relatively) easy to find a text-based wrestling simulator to
satiate your inner Ed Ferrara (who I met a few times – nice guy!), if
you wanted an actual wrestling *game* your options were pretty limited
outside of the available WWE Smackdown and WWE Wrestlemania / No Mercy games of the time. A select few took to importing the Japanese Fire Pro Wrestling
series of games for their PSXes, a 2D grappler with mechanics based
more on timing and skill, as opposed to the button mashing of it’s
American counterparts. But still, the pickings were slim for those of us
who wanted the management and the mayhem.

Enter
Mat Dickie and his Federation Online – a combination of the
management mechanics of Extreme Warfare Revenge, with enough game play to
keep things enthralling through multiple play-throughs. The free game
featured a small roster of notable and not-so notable characters,
including Bret Hart, Triple H, The Rock, Stone Cold, and some folks from
a local Indie promotion in Europe. The game was intoxicating. You could
play out a match, a card, or a month of shows in a single sitting and
not get bored. The management wasn’t as deep as EWR, and the game-play wasn’t as good as in No Mercy; but regardless, the game was greater than the sum of it’s parts – due in part to it’s charming audio visual design.

Unlike
other games made by a team of developers, everything in Federation
Online was 100% Mat’s. The graphics, sound effects, music, coding,
moves, game-play, and menus were all him (though initially the graphics
were heavily modified sprites from Super Fire Pro Wrestling X from the
SNES). Playing an Mdickie game (and it’s sequels) almost felt like
watching a movie from an indie director – little things about the way’s
characters taunted or moved, the pained noise a wrestler would make when
tapping out, the way the universe has featured an ever growing list of
both fictional and real wrestlers that have evolved over the better part
of a decade (Jimmy Ciera is John Cena, Triple H is Treble 8, etc etc)
immerses you in a world that had (and has) no right enthralling you such
as it does.

Eventually Dickie upgraded the game (with dozens of new wrestlers and moves) and sold it’s sequel in two versions, Federation Wrestling and Federation Booker. Federation Wrestling
saw you tasked with creating a wrestler and working your way up the
food chain through a series of matches. You’d be responsible for signing
your contract, dealing with backstage politics, and ultimately becoming
the champion of your chosen promotion. Federation Booker
made you the president of a promotion and challenged you to book
exciting shows, sign popular wrestlers and keep them happy, make money,
and most incredibly, *have good matches*.

Pro
wrestling is ultimately a game of entertainment, not a sport of
competition, and it was baffling to me that this was the first game (Outside of EWR) to
include match quality ratings as the marker for success. Federation Booker
finally stumbled upon the very thing wrestling gamers had wanted all
along; Challenge and gratification. Wrestling in a brutal contest to eek out a few
more rating points became a battle of wills against the stamina and
limitations of your chosen wrestlers. Do you put a frail Ric Flair (or
rather, Perry Class) through a table to send ratings through the roof,
or do you have a sub-par match in order to save his health for the
upcoming all-important Pay-Per-View?

The
goal was to earn money and win the ratings war. Good matches netted
more cash, and more cash netted the ability to sign more popular
wrestlers which in turn increased ratings. Couple this with a variety of
match types, insane weaponry, and backstage drama, deaths, and feuds,
you had yourself a hyper-stylized version of what every wrestling fan
probably wants in a management sim, coupled with completely serviceable game-play.  

Unfortunately
not a lot of people wanted to pay for it. While never released, the
sales numbers were low, and in an era before “indie games” were a thing,
the asking price of 14.99 was a bit too much for most fans.  

Eventually
Mat Dickie went on to make a series of interesting and experimental
games including the prison simulation “Hard Time” and Jerry Springer parody
“The Mdickie Show” (which eventually served as the basis for his 3D
wrestling engine), a duo of management games: Popscene and Popcorn,
before finding God, writing a book about sports, and releasing The You! Testament which put you in the shoes of a biblical prophet.

Within that period of time he released 3D versions of Federation Online and Federation Booker, the
latter of which introduced the ability to switch between competitors
with the tab key – again underlining the point that the game was about
having the best match – not winning. These games weren’t perfect, but
introduced amputation, flaming ropes, barbed wire, and glass panes into
the Mdickie verse.

Now,
for all my gushing, these games were not without their flaws.
Graphically, while charming, the 3D modeling was somewhat rudimentary,
and to call the clipping and collision detection serviceable would be
generous. There weren’t a *ton* of moves, so a lot of wrestlers felt
samey – though the ability to powerbomb / suplex / belly to belly
someone over the top rope to the outside was always exciting. The
management aspects were solid, but a lot of the backstage stuff ended up
feeling hollow or lacking in resolution – but for a game with limitless
replay value, and a virtual wrestling economy that could continue on
for years, the game’s ambition more than made up for it’s (many)
significant flaws. The 3D versions, alas, sold poorly as well.

Mat
took a long break after that, made all the games he’d previously
charged for free (Seriously, go download and play Booking Remix Right
The Fuck Now) and I thought I’d never see him take on the world of Pro
Wrestling again.

I was wrong.

Available
this instant on your IOS (4.99) and Android devices is “Wrestling
Revolution Pro” – A career focused mobile version of “Federation
Wrestling” featuring a fairly unique art-style, all sorts of chaos, and a
pretty enthralling career mode, too.

The
game world is broken up into a few different promotions: Maple Leaf
Wrestling, Strong Style Wrestling, All American Wrestling, Federation
Online, Lucha Libre Pro, and Wrestling School; which is where you’ll
start out. After winning a few matches and learning the ropes, you’ll
eventually be signed by a larger promotion for a meager sum, and have to
work your way up that food chain.

And
it’s a *lot* of work, too. The game’s A.I is pretty brain-dead, and
since you’re wrestling to win, versus wrestling to have a good match, it
can be annoying getting your opponent to follow you up a ladder stacked
on two tables in the ring so you can power-bomb him through them. Thus a
lot of early matches can be a little bit of a slog to get through – but
when you get the opportunity to wrestle for a title or wrestle for a
number one contendership, all that hard work puts a great deal of
pressure on you to win, and it makes the title match all the more
exciting. There are also increased difficulty levels to play with, so if
the game is no challenge *at all* you can crank that up.

In
terms of control, you have two options: One is a buttonless
point-and-drag interface which is probably the most confusing thing I’ve
ever seen, and the other is a virtual button style control scheme that
works *far* better than I expected it too, both on an iPhone and iPad.
There’s no “Counter” system in play, nor is it properly explained what
buttons you hit to kick out of a pin, but mashing them all seems to work
relatively splendidly.
Graphically
the game is punk-rock through and through. Tons of options, attention
to detail, but rough around the edges. Wrestlers don’t so much climb up
ladders as they levitate to the top of them. Some moves look a little
weird thanks to the 2D perspective, and occasionally it’s hard to tell
who a specific wrestler is supposed to be. But after you become
accustomed to the game engine’s limitations, you can actually start to
have a lot of fun with it.

For
example, during my playthrough I was in a “Loser Leaves” match against
“Brook Lazer” for the World Championship of Strong Style Wrestling. This
was my first title shot, and internally I wanted to do some crazy ass
things. I started by stacking the ring steps on a table, and putting a
ladder on top of it. The plan was for the finale I wanted to give Lesnar
a belly to belly off the ladder and out of the ring, then pin him. He
countered and powerbombed me through all the hardware, leaving me a
broken and bleeding mess on the ring canvas. And he pinned me,
1…2…3. It. Was. Awesome.

To
ape a phrase from Game Trailer’s Grand Theft Auto retrospectives,
“Mdickie’s Wrestling Revolution Pro” is a game you can play – and play
with. You can have a perfectly serviceable time wrestling your
opponents, winning matches, and not getting too outlandish. Or,
alternatively, you can beat Roddy Piper within an inch of his life using
a Guitar and Christmas tree. The game encourages the latter. Throughout
the career mode you’ll encounter all sorts of matches, from “No Rope”
sumo-matches, to Steel Cage bouts, to “Tables and Hockey Sticks” matches
that allow you to embrace your inner Cam Neeley. While the objective is
to win the match, half the fun is seeing what kind of crazy ish you can
get away with on your way there.

Ultimately,
I happily paid for Wrestling Revolution Pro – sight unseen – because I
have gotten literally hundreds of hours of enjoyment out of Mat Dickie’s
previous wrestling efforts, and 4.99 didn’t seem too high a price to
pay. I’m not (and still am not) a fan of the “Career” side of things –
I’d rather book matches and try and earn snowflakes, versus win the
title myself. If you consider yourself a wrestling fan, and haven’t
tried the Mdickie brand of games, you’re seriously missing out – it’s
seriously my contention these are some of the best wrestling games of
all time. 

(Paul can be found on Twitter at @MeekinOnMovies, and on Facebook at “MeekinOnMovies”)