Purple Steel in the Hour of Chaos
Originally published at Technology Tell.
To say there are a great many things more American and star spangled than professional wrestling is to scoff at what it means to be true red, white, and blue. “But Pro wrestling is actually a European tradition,” you scold, pressing your glasses to your forehead, using severe condescension as adhesive. Well, like tacos and St. Patrick’s Day, American assimilation has only made the sacred art of dropping a man on his head better for the globe at large. It’s not for the Every Man, but now more than ever laymen can get their turn in the squared circle to claim their own slice of glory pie, thanks to video games. Some are poor agents for your ascension, and should be avoided at all costs. Wrassling may be different. At least at first.
Once you decide to give the game a shot, you’d better commit, as the only way to stop a match and return to the main screen is via your sound defeat. If you can manage manipulating your weeble wobble of a wrestler into a position that he can Kermit flail his arms around opponents and throw them back onto the mat head first, then you will find a giggle or two each time. It’s a bit of a challenge, though, as there are only five buttons, two of which control direction, and two others to control the direction of your furious windmilling arms. The last is to jump, which is something I really can’t ever suggest doing, considering how incredibly non-committal the gravity in this game is in it’s relationship with you. Taylor Swift will write a song about it, son.
The act of pulling someone into some contorted stick man slam is also the complete opposite of your goal in Wrassling. It’s less Wrestlemania and more Royal Rumble, your whole goal being to shovel as many men as you can muster out of your ring before someone does the same to you. It’s a sloppy, haphazard experiment in who can out-flap whom, the physics being so random at times that there is no reliable rhyme or reason as to why certain things do and don’t happen. Sometimes, I wrap my twiggy clutches around a fellow and easily toss him over my head. He hurdles swiftly to the floor below, spilled salt for good luck. Sometimes its a laborious effort, the little blue bastard in my hands suddenly becoming my own Andre the Giant.
The trick presented itself in repeated struggles to eliminate more that four people in a row. As the game apparently takes place in a Weather Girls song, there’s always a consistent downpour of men to throw around who will willingly fight among themselves. Interjecting yourself into this micro conflict offers the most amount of chaos, and with it, the most amount of fun. The more people tugging and pulling at a person, the less and less the games physics begins to understand the consequences of its actions.
If you swing your arms wildly at an opponent who is upending another opponent, there’s a great chance you will send both of them flying through the air, Barry Bonds-style. You can attempt to pick up people who are attempting to pick up other people, and you will physically hurt as you watch the game attempt to make sense of the algorithms. Literally leap into a mob of men, spinning your arms with extra fervor and dribbling your enemies off of the mat and into oblivion. Watch as the fabric of logic frays and tears under the weight of your embrace of madness. You stared into the Abyss. It stared back. You leaped in.
If only there were more. Yes, asking for more from a game that is clearly both a distraction and an experiment might be a specific sort of unrealistic entitlement, but if Wrassling wants to be the champion of my bathroom breaks, it will need to try harder. I have fun with the game when I completely disregard the rules, but in a way to add longevity it adds objectives to which one must adhere (a.k.a., rules). Some of these are incredibly hard to follow only because of how random everything gets. For example, there are various objectives that involve eliminating people or bosses—Yokozuna-sized grapplers that cast away the shackles of terrestrial law…while wearing a hat. You gain new hats by achieving these objectives that range in levels of class and hilarity, but they are all subject to the unflinching disarray that everything else is.
A stray flailing from an opponent whose only attack option is stray flails can knock your hat off without any fault to you, save for standing in the ring and trying to do the same thing to him. There’s no way to actively protect your crown, so if you happen to dunk five dudes before it falls off, than lucky is the case they gave you. More often then not, though, you will walk too fast and collide into someone, and it will skitter off into the black beyond. Chaos reigns.
For free, though, it is worthy of at least a couple of minutes of your time. If you try on the crazy suit and like the way it fits, $1.99 will remove the ads and keep developers Colin Lane (Golf is Hard) and Folmer Kelly (#SUPERHYPER) from coming to your office and putting you through your desk.