WCW Backstage Assault

Publisher:
Electronic Arts

Release Date:
12-12-2000

Genre:
Sports / Sports - Wrestling

ESRB Rating:
Teen

Description:
You and me. Outside. Now.

Wrestling games on the N64 are as popular as Crimson Tide bumper-stickers in Birmingham, and therein lies the problem: How to bring something new to the world of suplexing studs? The radical answer, from Electronic Arts: Do away with the ring.

More than 50 WCW wrestlers, including women and managers, piledrive their ways through seven environments, each with at least two rooms. Since there's no ring, don't expect a ref to show up. With no spoil-sports in striped shirts around, you're free to use foreign objects to your heart's content.

Each room is packed to the brim with potential weapons. Urinals can be ripped from the wall in the Bathroom, podiums turn into bludgeoning tools in the Media Center, and pay phones make for perfect weapons in the Locker Room. Other potential tools of destruction include 2x4s, water jugs, metal pipes, weights, chairs, VCRs, televisions and even sinks. Fire, smoke, water, steam, electrical sparks and other interactive elements can damage wrestlers and venues alike.

Backstage Assault features more than 800 motion-captured animations, including some 300 reused from last year's WCW Mayhem. The move you'll see most often, though, is when one wrestler cracks another over the head with a trash can or a computer monitor. Each wrestler has quite a few moves at his or her disposal, but with so many weapons lying around, the matches generally consist of constant pipe-swinging.