Book Report – The Death of WCW

Wrestling.

I started watching wrestling during the 80s. At some point, my sister and I discovered that on the UHF channel they’d show wrestling pretty much all day on Saturdays. There’d be WWF and NWA to bookend things, but in the middle, you got all sorts of regional wrestling shows with people that my dad recognized but neither of us had any clue. We watched the goofiness of GLOW (well before it became a Netflix tv show). We’d absorb it. We’d cheer for our favorites.

And we had no idea that it wasn’t real.

Then I didn’t watch it for many years, only to pick it back up in the mid-90s when I heard that Hulk Hogan had turned bad guy and the NWO (New World Order) was running roughshod over WCW (which I later understood to be basically the successor to those NWA shows I’d watched as a kid. Every week I tuned in.

And then I stopped again. I’m not sure if I grew tired of it or just faded out with it. Once in a while, I’d flip it on and see who was wrestling. I watched the last episode of WCW when WWE bought them. I watched handfuls of episodes of TNA Wrestling. And even watched WWE.

A couple of years ago I started back up (much to my wife’s chagrin). My nephew has tons of the figures and at the beach, we watched an episode of RAW (WWE’s flagship show). It was over.

Luckily, I knew it wasn’t “real” anymore, but I still like to watch.

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The Death of WCW by R.D. Reynolds & Bryan Alvarez is a history lesson and a cautionary tale. It is about making all the correct decisions for a short amount of time and then having it all come crashing down around you.

You see, in the 80s, the WWF was king. Everyone knew Hulk Hogan and Wrestlemania and Andre the Giant. They had a cartoon. Andre was in one of my favorite movies (The Princess Bride for those keeping score). But in the 90s WCW had a run where they took over and all people wanted to see was the NWO.

The book goes into the history leading up to this revolution. It talks about WCW’s roots within the regional wrestling business. How Ted Turner’s TBS Superstation made him want wrestling programming. And how with a few signings of talent from the WWF (Hogan, Kevin Nash, and Scott Hall), WCW became number one.

It walks you through the weeks. And as it did, I began to remember many of the matches talked about. One of the great things about wrestling is this ability to connect to your childhood through the championships and through the wrestlers who span the decades. Each backstage glimpse revealed answers to questions I’d long-since forgotten about.

If I had one complaint about the book it would be that towards the end you could almost cut and paste the words on the pages. WCW did this stupid thing and made this stupid decision and then doubled down on that dumb thing… but that’s not really the book’s fault. Those were the decisions being made by whoever might have been in charge at that particular time. I mostly found myself thinking (even though I know the ending… it’s right there in the title) “Surely they are going to learn from this mistake, right?”

They didn’t.

And like a train wreck, you can’t look away and you want to keep reading if only to find out the next dumb decision.

Wrestling might be fake, but the decisions being made were very real indeed. If you are a fan of wrestling now or then, it is an eye-opening read to be sure.

 

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John McGuire has co-written, along with his wife, two Kindle Worlds novellas set in the world of Veronica Mars: Theft & Therapy and There’s Something About Mac.

He is also the creator/author of the steampunk comic The Gilded Age. The Trade paperback collecting the first 4 issues is finally back from the printers! If you would like to purchase a copy, go here!

Want to read the first issue for free? Click here! Already read it and eager for more?

Click here to join John’s mailing list.

His other prose appears in The Dark That Follows, Hollow EmpireBeyond the Gate, and Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows.

He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com

NES Games Left Off The Classic

Check out John McGuire’s The Gilded Age steampunk graphic novel on Kickstarter!

 

Every year there is the IT toy/thing. Most years I am far too out of it to even know what the THING could be. However, given that I do occasionally partake in that odd thing we call video gaming, I knew what at least one of the THINGS were going to be this year:

nes-classic

NES Classic.

I gave it a go when Amazon first put them up on their website, and like most people I could never get through as every other person on the planet apparently wanted one of these consoles. I did my one attempt and figured I’d pick one up in February after the craze died down and the supply caught up with the demand.

Yet, I’m lucky in the friends I have. In particular, my old college roommate is a machine when it comes to getting these sold out items in a way that makes my head spin. So imagine my surprise when he had a gift for me this Christmas.

In the days before I had an original Nintendo, I often would hope for rain when hanging out with my buddy who lived down the street, as that would finally allow me to play these video games everyone else was talking about. Of course, scrolling through this set of games, those old memories flooded back. Various codes, long since buried to time, popped into my head again. Later when I was in college someone on the hall had a Nintendo which still worked (some decade later) and many rounds of RBI Baseball or Tecmo Bowl were played into the late hours.

After I busted open the Classic, well, we might have had to bust out some Tecmo Bowl action that night. You know, for old time’s sake.

Scrolling through the 30 titles, I’d say a quarter were ones I’d never played before (a couple I hadn’t the first clue as to what exactly they were).

It’s kind of like getting a greatest hits record from a band, only to find out they might have missed a couple of obvious choices, and maybe some of the ones included… meh.

The following isn’t to say I’m unsatisfied with the product. I’m certainly not privy to possible legal reasons a game was or wasn’t chosen. But I do think if they ever released more games for it (not sure how that could happen since it doesn’t appear to be expandable), these would shoot to the top of my own “Want List”:

pro-wrestling-star-man

Pro Wrestling

You’re not going to find Hulk Hogan or Sting or Ric Flair in this Pro Wrestling game. No, you’ll have to make due with such characters as King Slender, Giant Panther, Kin Corn Karn, Starman, The Amazon, and a couple of others. Here’s the thing, the game shouldn’t be very good. And at times it does turn a bit into a button smasher. But it has a couple of things going for it:

There is a storyline mode… kinda.

I’m not talking about the current WWE games with your ability to map a course to Wrestlemania. This is defeating 4 or 5 opponents in a row to get your first title, and then needing to defend it 2x against every wrestler in the game. Only then could you square off against the Great Puma in a match where your title and his title were up for grabs.

During this gauntlet, my friend and I would trade off on matches (if only to make sure our fingers didn’t break off!).

But the other reason is that this is a 2 player game, which the Classic only has 6 of (meaning simultaneous play), helping to fill that much-needed gap.

r-b-i-baseball-usa

R.B.I. Baseball

Listen, if you want to spend way too much time and effort on a baseball game, you can get all the MLB 2k16/17/whatever you want. For me, too many nights were spent in my dorm neighbor’s room learning how to strike him out. Adjusting the speeds, steering those late inning pitchers as they labor through the last of the line up.

Unlike Tecmo Bowl, there was no “just play the Raiders” type of glitch in this game (or at least not one we knew about). No, this was just about picking your team (if it was represented) and dueling it out with another person.

A slight caveat to this game, I’ve never actually played the one player version of the game. Since I didn’t own it, I only played against other humans (normally in some elaborate tournament set-up for a bunch of people on the hall).

dragon_warrior

Dragon Warrior

Technically this slot on the Classic is fill admirably (Final Fantasy isn’t a slouch at all, nor are the Zelda games), but in this expansion pack I’m building, there is always room for one more RPG game. Selfishly (well, these are all selfish choices) I’d want to see this game again because I never got to beat the original even though I owned it, worked my way all the way to the very end, and even confronted the last boss (Dragonlord).

You see, when you reach him there is enough time before the big fight for a conversation. In it, Dragonlord offers to split the world with you so that you both rule. Now, I know I’ve been fighting this whole game to save my people from this terrible tragedy. I ALWAYS wear the White Hat…

Yet for some reason I agreed to it. The screen fades to black, everything goes red, and that’s the end of the game.

Considering what a pain it had been to get to him in the first place, I needed to take a break from all the game for a while, and never made it back to answer No.

I need to answer No.

metal-gear-nes-_

Metal Gear

I don’t know much about the actual story of the game. I’m pretty sure you’re a guy, Solid Snake, who needs to blow up a base because the fate of the world is at stake. You needed to be cautious. You needed to sneak around. You needed to be COVERT.

You see, this was a game where you had to take your time dealing with the various levels. This was really the first game where it forced you to play differently than you’ve possibly played before. Brute force wouldn’t get you very far.

And yes, it was frustrating at times when an enemy spotted you just before killing you. It was also sometimes a pain in the ass to reach the other side of a seemingly simple board. Oh, and it helped to know where some of the special equipment was located.

Something about the idea of altering your play style. I think that’s worth another look or two.

Plus, it feels like a proper predecessor to the alarms of the police in the Grand Theft Auto series (with less stealing cars and more saving the world).

 

Honorable mentions: Spy Hunter, Paperboy, Castlevania III, Blades of Steel, and Rygar.

 

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John McGuire

John McGuire is the author of the supernatural thriller The Dark That Follows, the steampunk comic The Gilded Age, and the novella There’s Something About Mac through the Amazon Kindle Worlds program.

His second novel, Hollow Empire, is now complete. The first episode is now FREE!

He also has a short story in the Beyond the Gate anthology, which is free on most platforms!

And has two shorts in the Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows anthology! Check it out!

He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com.