WWF In Your House (PSX)

Well, we finally did it. If you've been following the Taste of the New Generation blog, we have finally completed the tumultuous year of 1995. We even did a quick retrospective on it previously. And to celebrate the fresh new year that is 1996, let's look at a wrestling video game from this era. I was going to cover Wrestlemania: The Arcade Game, but I'm devoid of a port at the moment. So instead I'll look at Acclaim's far more weaker sequel, WWF In Your House. Released November 21st, 1996 for the Sony Playstation, Sega Saturn and DOS. We're looking at the PSX port.

Wrestling in the mid-90's, as well executed through my last couple years of blogging, is quite an insane era. Yes, you get your awesome matches and iconic superstars, but for the majority of the era it's still trying to keep a kid-friendly product in a company sorely needed of an adult facelift. And no finer example of that is Wrestlemania: The Arcade Game. A Midway creation that tried to blend WWF wrestling action with Mortal Kombat style fighting gameplay. I mean Undertaker could shoot projectiles for goodness sake. Despite that, the digitized superstars looked solid and the game played quite well. When the game was ported to the consoles via Acclaim they were also solidly handled. Save for the mess of a SNES port.

Around 1995, it seemed Acclaim and Midway had a bit of a falling out. Despite this, Acclaim still tried to ape the digitized character model and make some awful games. The best case being Batman Forever, a horrendous game with bad controls and poor Mortal Kombat-esque gameplay. And since Acclaim still had the rights to publish WWF games, they went to Sculptured Software to make them a new wrestling game. And thus we have In Your House. Perhaps the best example of how badly the WWF (and wrestling games in general) needed a serious facelift,

WWF In Your House features ten of the biggest stars of the time. Bret Hart, Owen Hart, The British Bulldog, Ahmed Johnson, Hunter Hearst Helmsley, The Undertaker, Vader, Goldust and The Ultimate Warrior. Yes, for the uninitiated, Ultimate Warrior returned to the WWF for a brief 1996 run. When I said 1996 was an interesting year, I wasn't blowing smoke.

The game is a 1-4 player fighting game, and offers a ton of modes that mostly just feel the same. we're going to focus on the single player campaigns since that's what I've played with. You control a superstar of your choice as you wrestle through one of three different play modes. Season which pits you against all ten wrestlers in the game, Intercontinental Championship which pits you in a gauntlet of stars that builds up as it goes from one on one, to two on one, to finally the more chaotic 3 on one. And finally there's the WWF championship which is an even harder gauntlet.

Gameplay in itself is your basic fighting game fare as well. You can strike with regular and strong punches and kicks, can run with the R2 button and block with R1. Since it's a wrestling game, many of the moves represent wrestling maneuvers like the pedigree, the german suplex, a powerbomb, an inverse atomic drop and so on. And then there's the really weird stuff like Owen shooting you with a card gun, Bulldog's head turning into a dog, Undertaker whacking you with a literal tombstone, and more. So many more. So, while most players control the same, their variety of moves are at least varied.

Speaking of varied, each character has their own level that represents their superstar. Bret has the famous Hart dungeon, Undertaker has a dungeon of a whole other variety, Hunter has a mansion, Shawn Michaels has a rock club, and Owen Hart has... a building made out of cards. Because he was the "King of Harts", get it?  There are combo moves that you can execute when you fill your combo meter. Double tapping forward and pressing the right button combos will allow you to do super damage to each opponent. Add in white WWF power ups and red WWF power downs that fill the ring and can either give you random perks like health and speed boosts, or lower your speed, health or even make you dizzy.

 And then of course like all Mortal Kombat clones there are finishing moves in the former of the super pin. When you beat an opponent twice second round and pin them, you can quickly tap in a combo that makes your player do a finisher of sorts to your opponent. From Goldust turning his opponent into a statue, Hunter sucking his opponent into his perfume bottle, Bret Hart dropping a giant WWF title belt, Warrior blowing his opponent to bits with lightning, and Vader... well...

Look, just because I write about this era doesn't mean I can really defend it all the time.

So what are the  downsides? A few. Matches can end super quick as health bars feel super low. A good handful of big moves can finish a match in under ten seconds. Graphically the game feels like a massive step down from Wrestlemania the Arcade Game as sprites feel a bit more rough around the edges and are also smaller and blurrier. The AI can be very indecisive as well, sometimes being easy to beat, other times they block all your offense and are super quick to land moves on you, finishing you quick. Don't get me started on the handicap matches. There's commentary from Vince McMahon and Mr. Perfect, but it adds nothing. Plus no music in the game, just bland noises. Plus, you work your way through all this trouble to win a cheap 20 second clip of footage for each wrestler. Ah, early PSX when that was considered  worth the effort.

Overall, WWF In Your House is a relic of a weird time in wrestling. When the WWF was still in a bumpy transition period and fighting games needed a serious facelift. And in an era where you could choose between this or Tekken, it's not hard to see why many people left this game in the dust. Or chose the better built Wrestlemania: The Arcade Game. Despite a lot of issues, like the era it's a part of, I still found some charm in In Your House. If you find it really cheap, I'd say give it a pick up at the very least.