Triangle X Squared O

These days, video games based on pro wrestling are, for the most part, going for a simulation style. The WWE 2K series is the biggest in the industry and it's trying its hardest to recreate what you see on television every Monday and Thursday. And that's fine! They (for the most part) do a pretty good job with what they're trying to accomplish. But it wasn't always like this. We used to have games like WWE All Stars, where over the top, cartoonish versions of our favorite current and classic WWE Superstars would fly 30 feet in the air when executing a maneuver. Before that, we had WWE WrestleMania XIX, with a story mode that's... Oh man, we'll jump into that somewhere down the line.

In the early 2000s, you couldn't walk 2 feet without bumping into a new WWE video game. With the SmackDown! series running on the PlayStation, RAW holding things down on the Xbox, and WrestleMania keeping the GameCube side of things covered, everyone had a little something of their own. This installment of Triangle X Squared O: The Wrestling Games Retrospective Series is going to zoom in on the latter, DanDans. The Nintendo GameCube may not have set the world on fire in the sales department, but I'll be damned if that little guy didn't play host to some fantastic games in its time. 2003's WWE WrestleMania XIX picks up where it's predecessor left off, improving in every way, and solidifying the GameCube as a great place to be for wrestling fans.

ECW! ECW! ECW! Man, do you remember the time? The time when the Philadelphia based Extreme Championship Wrestling was the underground, hardcore, blood soaked wrestling promotion that you always heard whispers about in the hallway? "I can't watch ECW, I'm not allowed... ECW is real." The rumors about what ECW was and represented were absolutely out of control, that's the kind of power this company had on the underground scene. But you know what this show is about. Triangle X Squared O is the Wrestling Game Retrospective Series, after all. So on this third episode of Season 2, we're (balcony) diving into the video games... of ECW. Let's get to it!

The AKI Corporation were once known for delivering the greatest wrestling games of all time. For those of us here in the US, those games all came under one banner: World Championship Wrestling. The video games of WCW were simply a cut above those of their main competitor, the World Wrestling Federation, and that's putting it nicely. Many fans wondered what might happen if AKI had, like so many people in the field of entertainment they covered, had jumped ship. What might WCW/nWo Revenge look like if it were a WWF game instead?

The Simpsons are iconic, right? One could even consider them 'immortal,' having established their legendary footprint all the way back in 1989. Over the decades of weekly television, across which The Simpsons have produced more than 700 episodes, the legacy has grown exponentially. From TV to film, from action figures to t-shirts, from posters to video games, there's no stopping The Simpsons. Of those video games, though, not all were created equal. Titles like Road Rage or Hit And Run have stood the test of time, where others like Simpsons Skateboarding have... not. And with as low down as Skateboarding is, it doesn't hold a candle to Simpsons Wrestling.

Professional wrestling has changed. Back in 1993, icons like Bret Hart, Shawn Michaels, Sting and Vader were on top of the world, running both the WWF and WCW. When one of these athletes got a hold of you and locked in their finishing move, it was lights out. These days, that's no longer the case. A DDT or a powerbomb doesn't get the job done. Hell, a front flip piledriver on the concrete floor doesn't get the job done. Here in 2021, everything is double backflips, two counts, and endless finishers without an end in sight. You know what's funny, though... This sort of high octane, over the top action DID exist in 1993.