Looks like an impressive move, yes? You can, lamentably, elicit such attacks with simple pad-bashing

With a wrestling licence to die for (or at least spend a fair amount of cash on), WCW Nitro claims to offer an entertaining interpretation of its subject matter. Don’t be fooled…
James Price

Bar the appreciable eccentricities of the salubrious Smash Brothers and a few admirable third-party attempts, the N64 lacks a top-notch fighting game. WCW Nitro, a wrestling title with beat ‘em up mainstays close to its metaphorical heart, occupies the low end of the quality scale.

Relate WCW Nitro’s strengths to a friend, and it sounds rather impressive. It has 64 fighters – each resembling their real life counterparts – and plenty of locations for pad-choreographed rumbles. These are not, however, available from your first game. You have to earn them by winning tournaments, promising a fair amount of longevity. What’s more, there’s a four-player mode during which you can pit newly acquired fighters against each other with a gaggle of mates.

It’s the stuff of heady packaging quotes, yes? Alas, there’s one particular fact you’ll not find on the back of WCW Nitro’s box – that it is, in fact, a workmanlike port of a year-old PlayStation game. Even if that much were true, its identically titled forebear was hardly greeted with open arms by the PS press in 1998. In fact, sub-50 per cent scores acted as revealing conclusions (read: indictments) in the majority of reviews.

Perhaps the greatest challenge that a developer faces while creating a fighting game is imbuing play with a degree of balance and weight. You have to appreciate, as a player, that your choice of move is not arbitrary, and that a move (like a punch or kick) genuinely appears to connect.