My friends and I started our own video game wrestling federation, called Friday Night Fights, or FNF. We would meet up every Friday to do our weekly show, and once a month to do our PPV. We had a crazy fatal 4 way match on SmackDown! that lasted 3 hours…and it was for the Hardcore title. lol! Such good times.
Ultra Pro Wrestling looks like it's going to be Virtual Pro Wrestling III. I can't wait. No cartridge limitations this time around and the customization of Fire Pro added in.
@@ChubbyCox13 I remember when Linda McMahon was in the intro but I couldn't figure out to unlock her until I turned 17 years old in 2017. Years and years I've been trying to unlock her and HO😂😂
Loved No Mercy as a kid I was unlucky and had the cart which reset itself, I would get so angry whenever I chose custom character and heard the default customer wrestler intro music it still goes through me today like nails on a chalk board. I would then proceed to make my character again and jump back into the hardcore championship story mode, I did this way more then I should of, I eventually ended up just going back to playing Wrestlemania 2000 when my older brother told me I should just play that one I would play that one and found out that my brother had customised all the default wrestlers to make them look funny which you see in the intro scene which always made me smile and laugh, good brother right there.
I spent an entire summer break beating every title mode when I was 8. I unlocked everything. Unfortunately, I had a cartridge that had THAT glitch. Erased all my data. I just busted out crying.
Something I love about WWF No Mercy is that you can definitely do intergeneder matches which means I can do a self insert and beat Val Venis mercilessly
The original arcade version of Data East's Tag Team Wrestling wasn't made by Data East... It was made by a little-known arcade developer at the time named Technos. They went on to become famous for making Double Dragon, but it wasn't their last arcade wrestling game: They went on to make Mat Mania in 1985, then some unknown shit that nobody's ever played called WWF Superstars and WWF Wrestlefest. Whatever THOSE were.
I was always a Playstation guy so my go-tos were the Smackdown games, but a couple of my buddies in high school did have N64s and No Mercy and it was always a blast to play. I also remember just last year at NXT No Mercy (which I attended live), the intro video for that show was such a well-done piece of work, using the No Mercy interface to run down the card for the night. Great stuff!
I owned every WCW video game made after World Tour aside from anything that was hand held. I also owned several WWF games up until I stopped watching wrestling. Including a few of the Smackdown games. No Mercy is still one of the wrestling games I remember being the best.
That happened to me! Me & my brother sneakily removed it from the wrapping paper (I think it was for Christmas) a few days early, and snuck back to play it again the next day only to find it wiped, thinking we’d done something wrong, we were mortified on coming to ‘open’ it, and find our data wiped again.
I don't think I'm a wrestling game sort of guy, though admittedly WrestleMania the Arcade Game is probably my favorite, purely because it's a Mortal Kombat shell with wrestlers of the day. It's a shame it didn't catch on and get sequels with new wrestlers and expand upon the roster, it would've been super neat to have an Attitude Era roster the size of Mortal Kombat Trilogy.
I got the game during the first run of production, which meant I had the one with the save-deleting bug. Can still remember my confusion when, during story mode, my CAW came out in just his pants and default hair, etc. When I realised what had happened, I bought a Rumble Pak so that I could save all my CAWs and upload them every time the bug hit. Why the game has endured has a lot to do with how simple the controls were while also allowing a complexity rarely seen in other non-AKI wrestling games, particularly the same multitude of positionally contextual variances each character could employ. The roster also helps a great deal, as did the creation suite, which was top-notch. Additionally, you must also factor in a little bit of "rose-tinted spectacles" and nostalgia, that feeling of playing it back then. I believe that's why a lot of people were excited for the AEW game as it appears to be a throwback to that AKI-engine style of gameplay with a modern graphical sheen... and then, post release, we realised that while there were elements of that, the developers didn't seem to go for anything beyond that, so the AEW game was ridiculously shallow after only an hour or two of play-time. No Mercy built on what the previous AKI N64 games had done, perfected the formula, and was at that sweet point where the graphics had reached "good enough" status and gameplay above all else was the experience the developers strived for.
WCWvNWO Revenge was my JAM growing up with my mates and I. So much so, we always joke about the likes of Dake Ken, Kim Chee and Brickowski with loving nostalgia. And I recently join a Basketball team and got Brickowski on the back of my jersey!
That was amazing! Hits you right in the nostalgias. I enjoyed the historical overview and industry talk as well. I still have my 64 and Virtual Pro Wrestling 2! We played many hours of No Mercy in our college dorm room!
Despite having never played the game, I loved this deep dive! Massive credit for still making the content so approachable and huge kudos also to Andrew for the edit on this
I still have that black NM cartridge to this day. And while it enraged me that the game file just resetted, I still consider it to be one of the best wrestling games. The WWF Backlash sequel would have combined the Virtual Pro Wrestling elements with NM. But with the Game Cube now a thing, it was dropped out, never to be heard again... Now Hyperfocus Games is having its hands on a NM tribute and has the potential to have it become its spiritual successor, in Ultra Pro Wrestling (something AEW Fight Forever, a game that wants people to mainly play their mini games, Stadium Stampede and only with their roster because the creation suite is so limited that even EA of all company have better options...) has failed to do so. The demo is coming out on PC very soon (the third quarter window is their aim) with a console release some year(s) after. While they have a nice roster of original characters already (coming from the mind of drawer Hal Haney) they also have a plethora of IRL past and present wrestlers on board (Demolition, The British Bulldogs, Matt Cardona, Hayabusa, Bull Nakano and more), as Free Agent DLCs. They also have OVW on board, as Promotion DLC, at the moment. The game won't be intended to be a yearly release, but rather, it's gonna be constantly updated with game options and modes. Maybe if the game is popular enough, they could have a chat with you, to have David Lockett in (alongside a European promotion or two and a couple of wrestlers on board)👀
One of the most legendary games of all time. TBH part of the reason is the fact it captures the time frame of 2000 WWF which is a very beloved year in the WWE's history (my personal favorite), the other reason is because for years to come, we kept getting wrestling games that couldn't top it. Imagine playing stinkers like RAW 2, Wrestlemania 21 or SvR 08 over No Mercy! No Mercy easily clears games like those. However, I think ages ago Yuke's made it a mission to top all the North American Wrestling games, taking elements that weren't present in the main series and filling in the blanks. Most WWE games (not 2K15 or 2K20) in the last 10 years (plus Fire Pro Wrestling World) I'd play any day over No Mercy.
My friends and I mainly used strikes and grapples so we made custom versions of wrestlers called “supers” that had maxed out head/body/arms stats with 1s in legs and flying. Lol. The supers ended up dominating survival mode, I will say.
I never got no mercy. I had war zone and thats where my love of wrestling games came from, then went to WrestleMania 2000. I skipped no mercy for some reason. After that I saved all my chore money every year for the smackdown vs raws until I got a Xbox 360, then I moved on to gta4 until I got the ring of death. I stepped away from gaming until my brother gave me his PS3 and the very last wrestling game I ever bought or played was WWE 2k with the special flip cover with Daniel Bryan. I havent played another wrestling game ever since. Growing up I didn't think games would get so expensive but adult me said "nah we got bills now my boy" 😂
i had 2 primary CAW's 1 was called Ruckus- 7ft 400lbs Kane's basic move set but did Shooting Stars like Kidman, Dragon Sleepers and Spears. Ruckus looked like Shield Era Roman Reigns. 2nd was as realistic a clone of myself as i could. 6ft 4, 400lms, pudgy body, etc, but a full-on arsenal of high flying moves - my fave was hit a shooting star from top of the ladder in the ring onto my opponent on the announce desk. Geez i love No Mercy.
Half entrances have nothing to do with space saving. It was because they didn't have time to finish them and they were very buggy when they were under crunch, so the ring walk was cut to save dev time. The animations are all still on the cart and functional, just buggy. If they cut entrance length to save space for other stuff then they failed bc the content is still in the cartridge just unused. Not the only dropped content in the game that still on cart. -Source: I'm a WWF No Mercy modder known for arena retexturing and hacking since 2007. Former member of The No Mercy Zone forum, and former lead admin at No Mercy Modstation, circa 2009
Just finished. Couldn't have said it better myself. Perfect Mini History of the game and AKI. I hear David Lockett has watched it 4 times. Ps I swear you say "Mean Cliff" when you're with Best Friend Jeffrey 😂
@aporkpiepizza I love em both. I wish Revenge had more match types like No Mercy has, but nothing gets me more pumped than the opening music on Revenge after the Rumble Pak detected screen.
I had to laugh at your "Beast". I had a blue-haired character named Wildabeast! Mine was more of a zany cruiserweight, so I think that's where the similarities end, but still funny!
Loved this game as a kid! I would always just equip Lita with Throat Thrust 02 and go into the survival mode. I loved to write down everyone I eliminated for pretty much no reason 😅
Speaking of "glitches"in WWE No Mercy, there's a supposed cheat that added a match like the one from the David Arquette WCW movie with the 3 cages. Supposedly it was a steel cage match then you would climb a ladder into a second ring with another steel cage, then climb another ladder into a 3rd ring with a 3rd cage. I never got it to work. 😢
One thing that tends ro go unmentioned is the quality of the story mode, and specifically how often the story will advance whether you win or lose via branching paths.
5:58 I have this game, it's pretty good, more arcadey than the usual firepro, a bit more like Slam Masters but you still have to time the inputs, I feel it gives you more leeway than the standard FP games of the era though.
I have a copy of no mercy with the save glitch. I don't even like to turn it on because i still have created wrestlers on it that me and my dad used to use. He died in 2005 so I don't want to lose them. I am gonna go in and write down each part and move sometime though just in case I ever do lose them.
It’s still a brilliant game and I have so many memories with friends playing this, with a pizza and drinks back in school. Sadly the spiritual sequel turned out to be unplayable and have less than half the features.
I know that the Def Jame games are well received, but in a perfect world AKI somehow would have worked with Acclaim to make the Legends Of Wrestling games worth anything besides their rosters.
I had a glitched copy, I distinctly remember there being a statistics table in the options the first time I played it after opening it on Christmas day. I exited the options menu and when I checked again, the stats table was gone. It wouldn't even return after formatting the cart.
Bought two copies from different stores on release in the UK....neither copy worked. The cart didn't even start. And about 8 of my school friends had the same problem.
A little clarity on the data erasing glitch, Data 2500, and giant weapons. Bought the game day 1 and lost all data multiple times, NEVER just randomly or when turning on the game. This glitch occurred only after >X kb data was saved to the cart. Each wrestler had 4 outfits but you could modify everything (face/ body/ etc) for each slot (premade or custom). Essentially for each wrestler, you could make 4. In this state the game would apparently operate fine until Data 2500 would show up either as a Royal Rumble entrant or to do a run in during a match. You immediately knew something was cooking as "The Dude" as we call him wasn't on the roster and didn't walk or run but rather floated to the ring. I'd dive off the couch to yank the cartridge which kept the total erasure from happening maybe once out of at least 5-6 times. Giant weapons is something I barely see mention of online and never in the manner we consistently achieved the easter egg. To do so, enter a 2 player King of the Ring tag tournament with a created player and The Undertaker. Win the first match and every weapon you get in the second round match should be RIDICULOUSLY big. Please comment if you manage to get some giant weapons using that technique. My memory is Swiss cheese but my friends & I spent SO many hours playing that game I'll never forget those quirks nor the fun had.
No Mercy is obviously the better game, but I have such a soft spot for WWF Warzone. That game literally got me in to wrestling. My mate got it for his birthday and we spent an entire weekend at his dad’s playing it. I’d never even watched wrestling before
he brings up about the cartridge going bad. i thought that had something to do with the n64 design. the power blocks would get hot, and the thing was plugged directly into the system, not like the modern laptop and video game power chords.
I'm a Sony PlayStation mega fan since 1997 and I think WWF SmackDown 2! : Know Your Role is waay better than WWF No Mercy. Metacritic gave SD2 a 90% I'm a 90's kid born in 1985 and I didn't know about Fire Pro Wrestling until the GBA and Britney Spears( I still love her) is what I think about in the late 90's
What if you pick Stevie Richards? N64 was just a bit too before my time i remember smackdown 2 and onwards shut your mouth being a personal favorite. Here comes the pain was a few games ago when I got it but I got shut your mouth that Christmas so i just have more memories with that one. I had about a thousand more Armageddon HIAC matches then WWE ever did.
While Nitro, Thunder and Backstage Assault are all terrible, Mayhem is solid. It's not on the same level as The World, World Tour and Revenge, it is miles ahead of the other three.
