Flashback Friday: WCW/nWo Revenge

With the release of the WWE Network, I have been watching A LOT of wrestling. More specifically, a lot of older wrestling, like mid-to-late 80's wrestling. I consider the late 80's - early 90's era of wrestling to be the "larger than life" period. Back then, we thought it was real and the characters were these huge icons that we really got behind or genuinely despised.

Then the hey-day of wrestling happened. As a teenager in the late 90's - early 00's, I have vivid memories of flipping back and forth between Monday Nitro and Raw and getting overwhelmed by the male soap opera that is professional wrestling. It is in this era that my favorite wrestling video game came into existence: WCW/nWo Revenge for the N64.

Raven be all like "Whatever".

The cover picture, might I add, is great. It depicts all the main factions in WCW at this time: Hogan with the nWo Black & White, Kevin Nash with the Wolfpack, Raven with his Flock, and Goldberg with the WCW side, then smoke in the background cause hey, it's the late 90's, that's what we do.

WCW/nWo Revenge was released in North America in October 1998 and used the famous AKI engine; the same engine used in games such as WCW vs nWo World Tour, Wrestlemania 2000, and WWF No Mercy. Which is to say, THE premier wrestling engine.

Sharpshooter and the Scorpion Death Lock....it's the same move ok?

Revenge was a direct sequel to World Tour and added new features, such as instant replay, new animations, new moves, and the ability to steal your opponents taunt.

It also, for the first time, introduced real arenas, such as Monday Nitro, Bash at the Beach, Souled Out, SuperBrawl, etc. This was a big deal and helped the game feel more real. 

Not to mention the robust roster of characters. There were around 63 characters that comprised of the nWo Black and White, nWo Wolfpack, Raven's Flock, and WCW factions. Let's throw in a 1/2 in the form of Wrath, who was an unfinished character who you could access via a cheat code. It's fun to play as him since he is pretty much a busted character as far as animations are concerned.

Free 4 All!...See? Cause there are 4.

Revenge also planted the seed that would become the now-famous Create-a-Wrestler feature. It was very limited here in that you could only change the current roster's nicknames, clothes, and clothes colors, but it was still a cool way of customizing the game as you saw fit. You wanna make DDP a member of the Wolfpack and have him wear the nWo black and red colors? You can do that.

Side note: DDP was and still is the MAN and WWF/WWE severely underused him. Also, Randy Orton's RKO would not exist without DDP's Diamond Cutter. 

Side side note: DDP Yoga is really good, you should try it.

The game modes were simple: one vs one, two vs two, handicap matches, championship ladders (not actual ladders, just match after match until you eventually faced the champion) where you could face the heavyweight champ, the U.S. Champion, the Tag Team Champs, or the Cruiserweight champ, and, my personal favorite mode, Battle Royal.

Battle Royal was my favorite mode because I would always crank up the number of wrestlers to 40 and turn off the "over the top" rule so we could take the fight outside the ring and use the various weapons to just beat the shit out of everyone. Of course, there could only be 4 wrestlers in the ring at once, so it would take a while to get through it, but that game was so fun that it didn't matter.

Bang!

I still have my original copy of Revenge and I would slam this into my N64 any day. Wrestling games have changed dramatically since the days of the AKI engine, and while WWE 2k14 is still a fun game, I guess I was the right age at the right time for a game like WCW/nWo Revenge; my favorite wrestling game of all time.

Now I must get back to my DDP Yoga. Bang!