It’s probably not cool to find these “Pick Me” rants funny in 2021, but I don’t care: Kevin Nash going beyond WCW Saturday Night promo by acting like a lush, “Hey man, it’s Alex Wright!”, and DDP’s incredulity about the fact you’re considering someone else, make for a solid rush of harmless nostalgia from when this game was a woefully overpriced 10th birthday present. The World (the forgotten stepchild in the Virtual Pro Wrestling series). This is a terrible approximation of arcade wrestling games, a sharp, unfairly taken left turn from the promise of 1996’s WCW vs. I played more than a few of them this year in between watching old wrestling and what I watch to perform my duties as FanFyte Editor. Still, a year without a gaudy, mainstream wrestling game is not a year without wrestling games.
I don’t think it’s a bad thing to have a year without a wrestling game - 2K’s offerings are as bland as they are broken, offering nothing like an intuitive and fun to play experience, let alone something that feels like it understands how to map the physicality and narrative progression of a wrestling match to a control pad, so why bother? Unless we’re looking at AEW Casino and AEW Elite GM as full-fledged wrestling games, 2021’s default wrestling game of the year was Retrosoft Studio’s RetroMania Wrestling, a classic arcade game evoking the beloved WWF WrestleFest coin-0p that I did not play on account of its roster not appealing to me beyond the Road Warriors and Zack Sabre Jr.