#7 Fire Pro D (Dreamcast)

What it's about: More wrestling! Only this one was made in Japan by a Japanese company (Spike) for a Japanese audience, and unsurprisingly, focuses on the various Japanese companies (although due to loose Japan copyright rules, there are quite a few Americans in the game)

Why it's here: As I alluded to in the previous post, making a good wrestling game is hard. With football or baseball games, it's not hard to match up the mechanics of what happens on the field to video game controls. But how do you present a fake sport as an actual athletic contest? As the legion of truly shitty wrestling games will tell you, it ain’t easy. Well, the Fire Pro series, which has remained largely unchanged since the early 90's, gets it right. The grapple system is easy to pick up, and built in a way to make a match more authentic (you have to start with lower impact moves and build your way up to bigger moves). There's a ton of wrestlers, moves, arenas, and match types. There was also a program for a while where Spike would create new moves and put them on the internet, so you could download them. An amazing cool deal that helped keep the game up to date.

Downsides? Yeah, the 2-D graphics are a little outdated these days, but it does allow you to fit more wrestlers on the screen in the form of 8-man tags and battle royals. It's also in Japanese, but it was made for Japan, so I can't really ding it for that. The storyline mode is just "you have to beat everyone else," but that's still fun.

Personal Memories: Buying a Dreamcast just to play this game (granted, the system was only $50 at the time). Spending most of the winter of 2001 playing this game. Finally beating Dynamite Kid after about 8 tries.

I actually have Fire Pro Returns for the PS2, but since it just came out it didn't feel right putting it on the list right now. Maybe in a few years.

Next: we hit the national pastime...