| paleface [sys=GBA; cat=Wrestling; reg=NA] |
| | | References added: 81, 331
"Fire Pro Wrestling 2 on GBA compares pretty well to the PlayStation Fire Pro games."
Surprisingly satisfying wrestler on the handheld, and certainly the most approachable Fire Pro I've ever played--also the only domestic one that I've played.
Recent Fire Pro games haven't been about the graphics at all, which is good because the ring colors here are garish and the wrestlers quite pixelated. And the sound sucks too, for instance when someone shakes a pin, this blood-curdling shrieking sound spears out of the speaker and straight in to your brain. Why, I can't say.
But fortunately it plays well, really well. The wrestlers move smoothly and with impressive speed, snapping off turnbuckle leaps and Irish Whips like nobody's business. All the attack buttons of the console Fire Pros are here, though you have to press both A and B to get the strong attack. But somehow this makes the controls feel easier to manage, as you really only have to remember two buttons most of the time.
As far as modes go, you don't have quite the wide variety of, say the PS2's "Fire Pro Z" (see entry 331), and you can't have as many wrestlers in the ring at once (I think the max might be four, but that's a guess). To save CPU, in fact, the ref doesn't even appear in the ring, just in still images that pop up on the side when needed.
In fact, aside from the Edit mode, where you can build a wrestler to your detailed specifications on true Fire Pro tradition, and practice modes, and I suppose multiplayer (no idea), you really only have Ironman Mode. But I like Ironman Mode.
See, in previous Fire Pros, you generally started out with tons and tons of wrestlers, and maybe some kind of little mode where you could take one of them through a few battles, but that was pretty much it as far as any kind of linear gameplay went. Now Fire Pro G, say, has some nice story arcs to play through in that manner, but they're still rather limited in scope.
In Fire Pro 2, on the other hand, you start out with only about ten of two hundred total wrestlers available, and you have to play through Ironman Mode tournament style to unlock the other wrestlers--by defeating them in the ring, naturally. This is nice and simple and something I can understand and get in to.
True believers cry foul about the US release by Bam! since it came with Ironman Mode instead of the Japanese version's much more in-depth business-simulation-style "Management of Ring" mode, where you're in charge of managing a whole wrestling organization or something, and I guess that's a shame, but I can't relate to the loss because I haven't seen it and couldn't understand it even if I had, what with it being all in Japanese.
So anyway, for wrestling simpletons such as myself, Fire Pro 2 is good stuff. |
|
|
| | | | Come to think of it, the person getting submitted in that last shot may have been a woman. Well anyway, it's still a terrible thing to do. |
|
|
| | |
