| paleface [sys=PCCD; cat=Wrestling; loc=JPN] |
| | | References added: 81, 331
"Woman's Dream Bout doesn't stack up to later Fire Pros, but the sprites are cute."
The title's full literal translation is something like (babelfishing and googling) "Wrestling Universe - Fire Pro Woman - Longed for Dream Super Woman Great War - All Women vs. JWP." Now that's a mouthful.
What you have in short is Fire Pro, the early kind by Human with full character sprites, rather than the segmented style of the later Spike games (Fire Prowrestling Z, for instance, entry 331), with all female fighters, six-button controller support, four-player support, and an edit mode. Arcade Card required.
There are earlier Fire Pro games on PCE but none of them impressed me at all on quick demo play--they don't seem to support controllers with more than two buttons, which takes away a lot of the possibilities in the classic Fire Pro fighting system, and well they look pretty darn ugly.
Woman's Dream Bout looks better, and you can tell in particular that they were careful to get in some heaving breast animations in those cute sprites. The funny thing is that the sprites look nothing like the digitized character portraits of these real female wrestlers... and I'm sorry to say that for the most part that's probably a good thing (please don't let them catch me or I'm a dead man).
You can do two on two matches with a multitap, co-op tag matches, 5-on-5 elimination tournaments, bracket-style tournaments, and all kinds of things in between. I hope you can play four player with all players in the ring at once but I haven't had a chance to try that yet.
Edit mode looks nearly comparable to modern Fire Pros in terms of being able to set the character's moves and logic, but as far as visual customization goes you can only pick from the pre-existing full character sprites. Aw. I'm not sure how many characters you can store on the PCE's internal memory.
Fighting itself is pretty similar to the more recent Fire Pro's I've played. I haven't found a "breath" button, and there don't seem to be as many actions available to perform on a downed adversary (pin, strike, submission, but maybe only one or two variants per strike and submission), but you've still got the selection of grapples with button press + direction, in a variety of strength types, and also Irish Whip moves, post moves, and so forth. Am I any good at those? Well no, but it's nice to know they're there.
Significantly lacking is any kind of single-player story or adventure mode. By yourself you really just do one-off bouts, or I suppose you could set yourself up in a tournement vs various CPU opponents. But it would have been nice to have some kind of main "Fighting Road" style thing like Fire Pro's G (see entry 81), D and Z.
So there you go. The menu art and character sprites look nice, and the digitized portraits are a hoot. You probably don't need this if you have a later Fire Pro since you could whip up all these characters in the later Edit Modes, but it's kind of fun to have a reasonably full-featured Fire Pro on PCE--and those sprites are cuter than the segmented females in the later games. :p |
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