Let’s Play Tag Team Wrestling! I didn’t play a lot of wrestling games as a kid. In fact, outside of this one, I’m not sure I played ANY wrestling games as a kid. I guess that makes this the de facto best wrestling game I’ve ever played. Maybe I should keep that in mind whenever I proclaim this as being my favorite (which I frequently do).
Let’s Play Tag Team Wrestling:
I assume this is where the whole “Strong Bad” thing came from, the name of the titular character in those internet videos from back in the day. The “Strong Bads” and the “Ricky Fighters” two randomly, seemingly poorly translated names for the good and bad wrestling teams you could choose from.
It’s a pretty simple game, but a lot of its fun came from its simplicity. The goal is to beat up the other guy to get their health as close to zero as possible before pinning them, not to mention before they escape to the corner to tag their partner.
That’s what made the game unique, the ability to tag your teammate (whether that was player 2 or you playing as a fresh dude) to get them in with a fresh set of health, ready to flip the tables on your hopefully weakened opponent before they get to their partner to tag.
The neat thing was that your teammate slowly regained health when they weren’t being used, so you could outlast your opponent that way if you did it effectively enough.
Different moves were easy enough to toggle through and select once you had someone in a grab, and the more spectacular and damaging moves required faster reflexes to get to, but they were very satisfying if you were able to get them off.
If you hit a guy too close to the side of the ring, you’d both be flung out where you could generally smack them in the head with a waiting chair or even better pull the wonderfully satisfying cheap move of knocking them down just before the 10 second out of the ring time limit was up, returning to the ring safely yourself before time expired for an instant win. This was a nice move to heavily lean on in the later matches when your opponents became more and more difficult to pin though conventional means.
The further you went through the game, the bigger the digital trophies you got as you got closer and closer to the final championship, which always provided a ton of incentive for me to keep playing and see how far I could get.