Wrestling again? I don’t understand my own blog sometimes.
What’s with the registered trademarks in this title? Are “tag” and “team” registered separately? That seems weird. In any case, Data East released a few big hits in the 80s, including Burgertime and Bad Dudes, as well as a ton of classic pinball machines. They also released Tag Team Wrestling, which is neither a hit nor a classic.
Other wrestling games of the era focused on one-on-one matches, so in that sense I guess this is an “innovative” release. There are just two teams to choose from, though, and neither of them are especially interesting. However, iit turns out one of them inspired something with a much larger cultural impact than the game itself. Specifically, one of them is named the Strong Bads:
If nothing else (and to be clear, in many ways there really is nothing else), we have Tag Team Wrestling to thank for inspiring a major part of my early adulthood. I don’t know if the game is ever shouted out by the Homestar Runner folks, but there is Strong Bad Email in which the sender seemingly confused Strong Bad with this week’s game:
Due to a lack of different buttons, Tag Team Wrestling has a rather…unique approach to having varied attacks. To perform a certain type of move, you first have to approach the opponent and press ‘A’ to lock in an attack. From there, you then have to press ‘B’ a specific number of times to locate the move you want to make (it’s as if you’re scrolling through a little menu of attacks), and then you press ‘A’ to do it. Then you just sit back for a second and watch the move happen, then repeat. That’s pretty much it.
This is pretty weird! It’s also really, really terrible. While I definitely give the game credit for finding a way to have a bunch of different moves, a lot of them are quite similar, assuming you can even pull them off at all. That first step of just starting an attack is surprisingly finicky, and a lot of times the AI will just beat you to the literal punch. If you do ever get a hit in, you don’t have a ton of time to select an attack, so you may not get to do the one you want.
The NES version of Tag Team Wrestling is simplified quite a bit from the original, which has more details and special moves. Those additional moves include, for some reason, one known as the “Rabbit Killer.” It presumably looks like something like this:
Like all legendary wrestling moves, this one is inspired by the works of John Steinbeck.
I can’t stress how dull and disappointing it is that, when playing against the game’s AI, you are always the same team and always playing against the same opponent. It’s the worst. Big (or even medium-sized) rosters of goofy, varied characters is a big part of what makes wrestling games interesting. Just look at this character select screen from a recent WWE title:
Good lord. Tag Team, by contrast, has virtually zero variety. Save for a single special attack that’s difficult to pull off, the characters are pretty much all the same. On top of that, the single player mode tasks you with defeating that same opponent literally dozens of times. Imagine if Super Mario Bros. had just one level, which contained just one enemy, and it was extremely difficult to jump properly. That’s what this experience is like.
In the event that you somehow enjoy what little this game has to offer, the good news is that you’ll get to it for hours on end. If that’s the case, I guess I’m happy for you.
Tag Team Wrestling is a dumb pile of garbage, and there’s really only one appropriate way to deal with it.
Next week’s game is several games in one, and none of them are wrestling! It’s literally everything I ever wanted this week.