#8 WWF Wrestlefest (Arcade - 1991)

What it's about: Pick from WWF stars Hulk Hogan, Ultimate Warrior, Earthquake, Sgt. Slaughter, Jake "The Snake" Roberts, "The Million Dollar Man" Ted Dibiase, Mr. Perfect, Big Bossman, and Smash and Crush of Demolition and challenge for the Legion of Doom's tag belts or go solo and try to win the Royal Rumble. And yes, I remembered the whole roster off the top of my head.

Why it's here: Wrestling games for the NES were pretty terrible back in the late 80's early 90's. Actually, I take that back - there were some great wrestling games (Pro Wrestling and Tecmo World Wrestling). WWF games were uniformly terrible, especially Wresltemania, one of the most dissapointing rentals of my life.

No, for a quality WWF experience you had to go the arcade. There was a previous game, WWF Superstars that came out a few years earlier, but Wrestlefest was a huge step forward - more wrestlers, more moves, more options, and even some low grade announcing ("Mr. Perfect...climbs to the top rope.")

Whoever worked on this did their homework - everyone had almost all of their signature moves (Hogan had the big boot and legdrop, Warrior did the flying tackle, gorilla press, and running splash). Sgt. Slaughter even had his Atomic Noogie~~!!!

The characters were large and detailed, a marked improvement over WWF Superstars. The control scheme was really genius, in my opinion. Remember, this was an arcade game, so things had to be kept simple. You had two buttons to tap when you locked up. If you hit one, you would do a move (and the move varied on how much damage was done) or you threw the guy into the ropes. One button was a punch, the other made you run. After 30 seconds of gameplay you knew what you were doing.

Downsides? For some reason, the computer could taunt and you couldn't. Plus the cage match was lame, as all you could do was ram a guy into the steel. Plus, why wasn't Demolition the final tag team? Who wouldn't rather play as L.O.D.? The game could be cheap as hell, too, but it was an arcade game, and arcade games are designed to seprate you from your quarters.

Personal memories: God, where to start?

I remember the summer of '91 when my friend Andy and I were in the arcade (we went in the morning so we had our choice of games). We planned on beating WWF Superstars by teaming up as Hogan and Warrior, but something got fucked up. He wanted to try again, but I decided to roam along the arcade until I came across Wrestlefest. Needless to say, if we had $500 worth of quarters we would have spent evey last dime that day.

There was the time I demolished three other guys in a trash talk filled Royal Rumble with the Warrior. And the time I sat on a bunch of guys with Earthquake.

The day I downloaded the ROM may have been the happiest of my life. Wrestlefest on my computer, for free? What a world.

By the way, we're not done with wrestling games. Not even close. Sorry.