Hulk Hogan, Sgt Slaughter, The Million Dollar Man Ted DeBiase! Talk about a blast from the past! If you were a kid who grew up in the 1980s and early 1990s these would have been the wrestling superheroes and villains you loved to cheer and boo. Also if you were a kid from this time period you will have no doubt been wowed by amazing gameplay and graphics of the LCD video games from Tiger or the Game and Watch games from Nintendo.
So, imagine if you threw the worlds of the World Wrestling Federation together with a Tiger LCD game. What would you get? Well, you’d get something exactly like the subject of today’s discussion. You’d get WWF Superstars!
It’s time to look back at one of the earliest of all WWE video games from the year 1990.
Just looking at this LCD game, which frankly is only about as powerful and capable as a digital watch, the thing is huge! Clearly, it’s design is inspired by the WWF Superstars arcade game which if you didn’t know was the arcade game that came out before the most more famous WWF WrestleFest.
The LCD game is big, but comfortable to hold and is designed almost like a fixed clamshell design. This will have been similar to how players would have held a multiscreen Game and Watch title, and would later hold a Nintendo DS. The device is also built so that if you wanted to you could set it down as a tabletop arcade game and tap the buttons rather than hold it like a handheld.
The front of the game is very much like an arcade cabinet with artwork of the heel wrestlers lined up to the right and the playable Hulk Hogan to the left.
Getting on to the actual game, as that is what we’re here for after all. The game shows a flat colour picture of a WWF ring which is the backdrop to all the action. Then the LCD display shows ink outline style graphics of the wrestlers and head up display.
You play as Hulk Hogan and you cannot move him around the ring…at all. It may look like there is a d-pad to the left, but they are four separated buttons. There is up and down, but these don’t move you character across the ring, but you can climb the top rope. The left button is marked ‘escape’ an the right one as ‘push’. There are two action buttons on the right hand side and they are grab and kick/attack.
For the most part you’ll probably being mashing the kick button against the early opponents, but you can actually get a few different moves done by grabbing you opponent. As well as kicks, you can pull off a suplex, climb the top rope and hit a superfly splash, throw your opponent out the ring, and hit the pin for the one, two, three. But that’s just about it.
At the top of the screen you’ll see how much energy you and your opponent have, and the tougher the opponent you go against you may notice that their energy regenerates back, so you’ll have to pull off bigger moves quickly to take them down.
In terms of different opponents you see a fairly good drawing of the face of each of the heels along the top as you wrestle them. The bad news is that although the character design of Hulk Hogan is reasonable, the artwork of the heels remains the same no matter who you wrestle. This is made instantly noticeable for the fact that your first opponent is Earthquake, who was a four hundred pound plus man. The artwork makes him look like a modern day cruiserweight and he’s not wearing his signature costume. Of all of the opponents you face the character looks most like the Million Dollar Man, so maybe they should have made him the first you wrestle instead of the second, but regardless if it’s the superheavyweight Earthquake, the 6’10” Undertaker or the balding Sgt Slaughter everyone looks the same.
This is because as an LCD game there couldn’t be different designs taking up the same space on the screen, so that is why you only get individual artwork for each of the heels at the top of the screen.
Matches are repetitive and you will find that you have to mash the buttons harder and harder as the game goes on, but there is a strategy to it all. Getting the grapples will allow you to suplex the heels and that sets up your best chance to end the match. You could also go for a count out, but true champions will want to score the pinfall in the centre of the mat…
Despite how basic this game is, I can say that I actually had a blast playing it. I haven’t touched my LCD games collection in god knows how many years, but have really got into them recently. This is one you can effectively finish once you’ve beaten all the opponents, but many are just ones that are based around keeping the game going a long time to get the highest score.
It’s been cool to see certain Tiger LCD games make a modern comeback, but as wrestling games are always limited by the licenses of who makes them, old WWF logos and deals with the wrestlers featured it is very unlikely this game will ever see a re-release. I would say if you want some retro LCD wrestling fun this is definitely a winner.
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