WrestleMania is this weekend (at the time of this writing), figured Retro Reboot would take a break from Vince's product to look at an offering from the company that almost put him out of business in the late 90's.

While WWF was heavily on in our household throughout the late 80's growing up, my brother and I regularly dabbled in WCW Saturday Night in the early 90's, especially when some familiar names started to jump ship like the British Bulldog and Sid Vicious (who was apparently back and forth between companies over the years). In fact, we saw the famous Shockmaster's blunder debut when it happened. As far as video games go, I only played WCW Wrestling for the NES. It was interesting, if not a little ahead of its time. In 1996, there was WCW vs The World, the first WCW game for the PlayStation and one of the early 3D wrestling games, and its gameplay was pretty good for the era. 

The next WCW game would be named after the flagship show Monday Nitro in 1998. It had actually been finished and was ready to ship, but WCW Vs. The World was still a commercial success throughout the year, so Nitro was delayed. This one would be developed by Inland Productions and featured a completely different gameplay philosophy, opting for a more arcadey style as opposed to the more technically sound Vs. The World, which was produced by Japanese company The Man Breeze, or AKI Corporation. Nitro was released for the PlayStation and Nintendo 64, and is probably more famous for its FMV pre-match rants. I'm a sucker for full-motion video sequences, so that caters to me greatly, even if a lot of the lines are really really cheesy.

I'll probably never stop saying it, games from this period have aged the absolute worst, so I try to be lenient when talking about them. and with wrestling games, I always felt impressed by a well done presentation and complete package before the visuals really bug me.

Nitro honestly spends so much time with the camera pulled away from the character models, it can convincingly make the character models look a little less polished than they are. The textures look pretty decent if you can rig the camera to get a better view of them, character models like Scott Hall are rather impressive. The playfield is fully rendered in 3D, but a lot of the background appears pretty choppy.

Speaking of the camera, it constantly swivels about and zooms away form the action in a mildly disorienting manner. I will give a lot of props to the various venues. Whether it's nWo Souled Out or Slamboree, the stages, ring decorations, and even a big screen that displays the action, the presentation does win points there. Wrestler entrances are missing, which is a little too bad, considering the WWF Warzone was making strides in emulating the pro wrestling experience. 

Nitro's music is well done, I think any time I hear the mid 90's Nitro theme, I'm having a good day. The in-match OST is mostly a smattering of indistinguishable heavy guitar chords, mostly to serve as harmless noise. it isn't bad, just not too memorable. Some of the audio during the little rant videos sound either rushed or leveled poorly, Hollywood Hogan sounds like he's being recorded exclusively with the audio picked up on a camera phone, while Lex Luger's audio is so base rich, it makes me think he swallowed the lapel mic. There isn't a lot of play-by-play commentary in the game, at least nothing in depth. Mostly Tony Schiavone and Bobby Heenan shouting moves in barely audible dialog that feel more drowned out than anything.

As far as the controls go, this game feels impossible to play by today's standards to the point that I'm not sure how we played it back then. Each wrestler has a move list with some unique inputs, which sounds easy on paper. But Nitro has some core fundamental problems, given how absolutely clunky this game's movement is. So there's no lockup or jockeying for leverage, you just have to be in the general grabbing vicinity and hope you get your input in before your opponent. Some are easy enough to grasp, like a hip toss is left + Square, but it can get a little awkward to remember if the direction inverts depending of which way you're facing.

Then there's strange button combinations like pressing Up, triangle twice, and "X" to do Hogan's leg drop. I'm all for trying to create specialized inputs to give special moves a degree of personality, but when it feels like I'm trying to teach Morse code to a seal, the game is going overboard. More often than not, I found myself spamming powerbombs until the health bar was depleted. If I screwed up the finisher (which happened more often than I remember, there was a 30% the CPU would get up, destroy me, and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. 

Nitro is also packed with one of the most bizarre roster of hidden characters I can think of, at least since NBA Jam. With its starting roster of 16 WCW stars (Hollywood Hogan, Ric Flair, Sting, Lex Luger, Alex Wright, Randy "Macho Man" Savage, Dean Malenko, Eddie Guerrero, Chris Benoit, Giant, The Outsiders Kevin Nash and Scott Hall, Harlem Heat, Diamond Dallas Page, and Syxx), there were also two more rows of unlockables that included Konnan, "Surfer" Sting, red and yellow Hulk-A-Mania Hogan, classic Randy Savage before The Madness, Jaqueline, WCW referee Randy "Pee Wee" Anderson, and then a bunch of staffers from THQ and evil snowmen, dinosaurs, ''Annie Mae", a blotchy anime girl, giant skeletons, and bears. It's safe to assume that video game programmers really had a lot of fun developing games back then before horrendous crunch periods keep them from adding inside jokes among the crew just to amuse themselves or their families who played the game.

WCW Nitro does not really hold up well, and I won't hold it against it. A lot of wrestling games were really trying to figure out how to make this genre more robust for game development, and a signature formula hasn't been coined yet. This was right on the cusp of the popularity of the SmackDown games from THQ, so seeing several companies throw their hat in with experiments like this is commendable. but the draconian controls really do kill this one. Stick to WCW/nWo Revenge if you wish to take a swing at some WCW action. Or just play Fire Pro Wrestling World.