Hardly the masters of slam
Written: Sep 24 '04
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Haggar!its great on 4-Player!
Cons: Controls!its boring on single player!
The Bottom Line: SNSM is a good game that had Capcom worked on the controls could have been a very good game. Wrestling fans and Streetfighter/Final Fight lovers will be interested.
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| flash-hammer's Full Review: Saturday Night Slam Masters for Super Nintendo |
Without a doubt the forgotten game in Capcom's 'Fight' saga, which takes in it's Streetfighter and Final Fight series, a little part of Capcom's portfolio that could also be said to take in it's Rival Schools games, Saturday Night Slam Masters was a minor hit in the arcades, and stands out amongst all of their other fighting games for one reason.
It's a wrestling game.
Now this is a fact that will put put near enough everyone of the game. Non-wreslting fans will react with an "eww wrestling" type response, and Wrestling fans will probably baulk at the fact it doesn't sport a WWF/WCW style licence.
Should these people pass it up, they will be unfortuneate, because Slam Masters is possibly the best Wrestling game pre-THQ/AKI N64 wrestling titles.
I remember actually playing this game quite a bit in the arcades while on holiday in Italy one year. I was well into wrestling at the time, I was very young, and the game just appealed to me in a way very few other arcade games did. The arcade version of this stands side by side with the Wrestlemania game that was never ported to a console as the best arcade wrestling game ever.
As I say, the game is a wrestling game, the idea is to beat all of your opponents and win the title in single player mode, or to take on a friend in multiplayer mode, or better yet, several friends, providing you have a multitap, in battle royale mode.
Where the game fits in with Capcom's other titles, is that it features Mike Haggar, the mayor and main character of the Final Fight series as a playable wrestler. Slam Masters is set prior to Final Fight, and we even see his daughter Jessica in his winpose. On a side note, a Russian wrestler also namechecks Streetfighter 2's Zangief.
The basic gameplay is pretty decent, if nothing sparkling. You can strike your opponent, grapple with them, which leads to better moves, climb the turnbuckle, run off the ropes, get a weapon from outside and in a first for Wrestling games, even jump.
Each character has a fairly large amount of moves at his disposal, and they even sport unique finishers, Haggar of course finishes foes with a spinning piledriver.
The game utilizes a nice feature in the rage of each character. If you are continually hit, you will go red with rage, making your attacks stronger and your attempts to counter grapples more likely to work. The same also happens if you connect with a lot of moves, making you pumped up. While this only lasts a few seconds, you can see it as a prelude to AKI's Spirit Meter in their N64 games.
On thing that did annoy me is that the characters can be pinned pretty easily on any amount of energy, and if your energy bar, which is far too short, is totally depleted, you aren't kicking out. This means most matches turn to slugfests that last barely a minute.
The controls in the game look like this:
Y:Strike
B:Jump
A:Pin
Running is performed by double tapping a direction, and grappling by pressing forward and strike when right next to the opponent.
I have no response problems, but what exactly Capcom were thinking only using 3 buttons for a fairly complex game has to be questioned. Trying to grapple using these controls is horrible, why didn't they just set it to X? why not use L or R to run? why make the game control worse than it easily could have?
This is the one thing that really did spoil the game for me, because the game has spot on collision detection, and had the potential to be an incredibly fun Arcade wrestling game. But they decided to botch up the controls, making which brought it down to just an enjoyable arcade wrestler.
With a separate grapple button, the game would have been so much better. It may even have recieved full marks, because for the time, the amount of moves on offer in a wrestling game can't be equalled, but for some reason, Capcom decided to ensure that it would be difficult to pull a number of them off.
Super moves are performed by getting into a grapple and performing a Streetfighter style button/D-Pad combination movement. For the most part they are pretty simple to learn.
Graphically, the game is actually really quite good. Haggar's sprite seems to be the one from Final Fight 2 or 3, and they are all of a pretty high standard. While all of the rings look the same, the crowd are well detailed, and the game is generally pretty pleasing on the eyes.
The character design in the game is pretty cliched, but at the same time the cast is made up of really quite likeable characters. As well as Haggar, we have Alexander the Grater , who bears more than a little resemblance to former WCW star Big Van Vader, right down to large helmet and portly physique, Biff Slamkovich, a Russian wonderkid, El Stingray, a masked luchador, The Great Oni a Kabuki wannabe, Gunloc, Biff's American rival, and I read somewhere was something to do with Guile, King Rasta Mon, a hulking brawler from the Dominican Republic, Titanic Tim, a giant of a Britain, who calls Streetfighter's Birdie a friend, he reminded me of early 90s WCW wrestler El Gigante and the two bosses Jumbo Jack a portly bloke, and the martial arts master The Scorpion.
There are also two more hidden wrestlers in the game, but you must play through championship more than once in a row to find them.
Like I say, the characters aren't exactly groundbreaking, but a lot of the time you can see hints of real wrestlers in them, and they make for a colourful cast. Im not actually sure if you can play as Jumbo Jack or the Scorpion, but I would imagine so, because I remember using the Scorpion in both the Sega version of the game, which I played years ago, and on the arcade game, which I player many years ago.
The sound in the game is passable, but nothing more. Each wrestler does have their own intro music, some of which is really cool, and the sound effects of the crowd, the bell and the referee are comptetant, but there isn't anything sonic to sell the game on.
On the whole as a single player experience, Slam Masters is fairly enjoyable for wrestling fans, but it won't exactly set your world on fire. With a better grappling system and a harder difficulty, the game may have chalked up a higher single player value, but as it is its average.
The game does really come to life on multiplayer, and the 4-player battle royale's almost single handedly earned this game a 4th star. While 2-player is moderately enjoyable, it doesn't really go any further than single player in terms of enjoyment. But when there are 4 of you crammed into the ring, things do become pretty fun, in fact some of the most fun I have had with the Snes on 4-Player, up until now the Multitap has been used almost exclusively for Super Mario Kart.
To be honest, you really have to be a fan of both Capcom's characters and Wrestling, and sport 3 similar friends and a Snes multitap to really want to get anything out of Saturday Night Slam Masters, but if you do fulfill those conditions, and you enjoy retro games, then this is definitely worth a look. Had Capcom given us better controls and made it a bit more difficult, things that would have improved the game greatly, this could easily have been a 4 star, given how fun 4 player already is, pushing 5. But controls are one of the most important parts of a game.
I also have to wonder why Zangief wasn't put in the game. Streetfighter 2 and all things related were huge at the time, so why not include the wrestler from the biggest game in the world? that would surely have earned this game far more attention.
In the end, I feel 3 stars and recommended is an adequate score for Slam Masters. The sad thing is that I really wanted to enjoy the game a lot more, but limited single player thrills and the horrid controls ensured this would never be a classic, no matter how much fun 4 player was.
If you like SF/Final Fight, the game is probably worth owning for the novelty if nothing else, while it won't displace either of those carts from your Snes for long, it does make for a nice little multiplayer game if you are packing a multitap.
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Streetfighter Alpha 2 for Sega Saturn
Streetfighter Alpha 2 for PlayStation
Recommended:
Yes
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