Original Release: LJN, 1993, NES / Game Boy
A basic wrestling title that was released late in the life of the NES.
WWF: King of the Ring (NES, LJN, 1993)
Where to Buy: eBay
How to Emulate: coming soon!
Review by: C. M0use
LJN appeared content to just churn out a clone of Steel Cage Challenge with slightly larger sprites for the NES’s final wrestling title, but instead of the Steel Cage you got your King of the Ring mode instead.
Like Steel Cage, the game sucks. The gameplay is clumsy and choppy as shit and just terrible. There are still no special moves or finishers. The character portraits and sprites still look like an amateur joke. The only question here is, does the King of the Ring mode do anything at all to redeem the whole affair?
And the answer is no, no it does not. And why should it? If you’re not familiar, King of the Ring is basically just a giant tournament with the penultimate matches onward held at a Pay-Per-View event. So the only thing that differentiates it from a standard tournament is that wrestlers compete in those last matches back-to-back at the PPV instead of spaced out over X nights or whatever. I guess you could maybe parlay this into something interesting in video games somehow, but this game just sets it up as a stock tournament, no real difference from the generic tournament modes of a million other games.
LJN could once in a while put out an interesting licensed game. It might be an interesting concept with botched execution, but nonetheless something of an effort, like Friday the 13th and Jaws for example. This is not one of those games. This is pure pump-and-dump, we-don’t-give-a-shit garbage trying to turn a buck solely off the license.
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