Rating: Good WCW Vs. NWO: World Tour is a game that I came very, very close to buying, but chose not to in the end due to the fact that the difficulty level still isn't quite right. At first, the game is 100% awesome. Unlike WCW Vs. The World, which had a couple boring WCW wrestlers and dozens of non-existent Japanese and Mexican wrestlers from fictional federations, WCW Vs. NWO has 24 of the world's most under-worked and over-paid has-beens from WCW (or the NWO, same thing). While I still don't like WCW as much as the WWF and I never will, it's still nice to be able to play as real wrestlers instead of fictional "international superstars," and playing as the Wolf Pack (Hall, Nash, and Syxx) does feel extremely cool. Like WCW Vs. The World, WCW Vs. NWO has a great control system that lets you perform dozens of moves using the same few buttons, plus special signature movies when your Spirit Meter reaches the maximum level. The menus and options are also great, letting you adjust everything from the time limit to whether submissions are on or off. You can even grab foreign objects like chairs from the crowd and beat your opponent to a pulp with them, although you can't bring them into the ring. Sometimes if you beat up your opponent bad enough, they start bleeding (and I mean bleeding bad, although the blood seems to be stuck to their face as opposed to flowing like Shawn Michaels at Badd Blood or Steve Austin at Wrestlemania 13). One of the game's best new features is the tag team mode, which can be played from anywhere between one to four players in an exhibition match or a full-fledged league or tournament. One really nice option they added to tag team action is the option to play Survivor Series-style where both members of the team have to be pinned in order for them to lose. You can also do one-on-one leagues, with up to eight wrestlers in a league. Everybody wrestles everybody once, earning three points for a win and one point for a tie, and then whoever has the most points at the end is the winner of the league. You can watch or skip computer- controlled match-ups, and you can even have entire leagues made up of just computer opponents, with the winner getting the "title shot" at "your belt." All in the mind, though, since there are no actual championships in the game. One of the most hectic new modes is the Battle Royal, where four wrestlers duke it out until only one is left standing. All four wrestlers can be controlled by human opponents if you so choose, or it can just be you against three computer opponents if you want. One gripe I have with the tag team and battle royal modes are that the camera has a bizarre insistance on having all four wrestlers on the screen at once, even if they're eliminated from the match and/or computer-controlled. This causes the camera to pan out a lot, making the wrestlers in the ring look too small. The League Challenge mode seems like a good idea as to climb the ladder of success by beating everybody in a league, but you also have to choose a wrestler from that same league, and NWO guys against NWO guys just doesn't feel right. Elsewhere, the graphics aren't much better than WCW Vs. The World, but they're still very good. The main menu music is cool, but why didn't they include the awesome NWO theme music? For some reason there is still horrible music playing during the actual wrestling, though, although you can turn it off at the options menu (thank God). The game requires a Controller Pak to save, but this isn't that big of a flaw since there's really nothing to save unless you want to save in the middle of a league and finish later or something like that. All the analog joystick does is control signature moves and taunts (you move around with the d-pad), and this takes some getting used to since N64 games are usually controlled with the 3D joystick. However, it eventually feels natural once you get used to it. The biggest problem with the game, the one that prevented from buying it and prevents me from recommending that you buy it without a rental first, is that the difficulty levels are still a little out of whack. Normal is too easy and Hard is too hard. This isn't near to the extent of how bad this was in WCW Vs. The World (where it ran rampant and made the game barely enjoyable at all), but it's still bad enough to make the game get old after a couple days of play. WCW Vs. NWO: World Tour is a very good wrestling game chock full of features and solid control, but until THQ can get the difficulty level right, I think I'll pass.
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