Kusoge Sunday - Tag Team Wrestling

Tag Team Wrestling began life in Japanese arcades under the title The Big Pro Wrestling! It was ported to the Famicom as Tag Team Pro Wrestling, and finally brought to the NES by Data East as Tag Team Wrestling in 1986. Released months before Nintendo’s landmark Pro Wrestling, the game innovated in two major ways. First, it featured tag team matches, something rarely seen in wrestling video games. Second, its control scheme was unlike any wrestling game before or since.

Innovation, however, isn’t necessarily a good thing. While it did beat better games to the punch in featuring tag team matches, Tag Team Wrestling’s gameplay is hilariously bad. In most wrestling games, moves are executed from a grapple, while running, or from the top rope. On machines with only two or three buttons, this limits the number of moves, but it works. Tag Team Wrestling tried to offer a larger moveset, but did so in a way that makes it feel nothing like a wrestling match.

Here’s how it works. You start by trying to land a strike on your opponent. If you’re successful, you're presented with a menu of moves you can execute, and three seconds to scroll through it. This mechanic is, to put it plainly, a disaster. Many move names have been reduced to baffling English abbreviations, and some haven't even been translated. It’s barely possible to scroll to the end of the list in three seconds, let alone make sense of choices like “B BRIK” and “TECCHU”.

With experience, you can get the hang of navigating the move menu, but you can’t do anything to mitigate the game’s other mechanic. Remember how Hulk Hogan used to delight audiences by appearing to become invulnerable while making a spectacular comeback? Well, that happens in Tag Team Wrestling, as well, only it’s the heel team who do it. Supposedly, this is a consequence of avoiding contact with your opponent for too long, but it never works that way. More often than not, he’ll just go invincible any time you start winning, ensuring that only luck can carry you to victory.

Maybe the awfulness of the gameplay could be rationalized if Tag Team Wrestling excelled elsewhere, but it doesn’t. Character animation is extremely limited. No move consists of more than two frames of animation. Flying moves and falls consist of the sprites being rotated to give the illusion of jumping or laying down. The only aspect of the game that is even passable is the audio. The music which plays during matches is nice and urgent, if repetitive, and there’s even (bad) digitized voice for the wrestlers’ grunts and the referee’s three count. It hardly salvages the game, but it’s something.

Despite all this, I would kind of recommend giving Tag Team Wrestling a shot. Sure, the game is a barely playable mess, but it does have one endearing quality. Your current ranking is always displayed on screen, and watching it move one step closer to the top rank in your current tier with each victory can be addicting. It’s like an MMO in that sense, always dangling another carrot in front of you. Sometimes that's all it takes to hook you, even if the the only reward the game has to offer is yet another frustrating battle with The Strong Bads.

It's Not Wrong To Pay $3

This weekend, indie developer Tale of Tales is having a pay-what-you-want sale on a bundle of three of its spookier games: The Path, The Graveyard, and Fatale. The minimum payment is $3, but those who pay at least $50 will receive an undisclosed bonus. After the success of the Humble Indie Bundle back in May, we shouldn’t be surprised to see another developer take a chance on the pay-what-you-want model. We also shouldn’t be surprised that giving Tale of Tales money is being treated by some as a moral imperative.

“There is some motivation to pay more than the minimum (beyond it being pretty crass to lowball an indie like that)...” says Joystiq’s JC Fletcher, in his post on the sale. Apparently we have different definitions of “lowball.” If someone says “I’ll take $3” and you give them $3, you’re not lowballing them, even if they make pained faces as you hand over the money.

But is it crass to pay the least that someone asks? Not in this case. These pay-what-you-want sales are a calculated risk. If the number of people who were curious about a game but not curious enough to pay full price for it is high enough, then the developer makes money through volume. If not, well, no business venture is a sure thing. Hopefully Tale of Tales arrived at the $3 minimum after careful deliberation. If not, so much the worse for them.

Still, even if it really is crass to pay the minimum asking price, what does the fact that Tale of Tales is an indie developer have to do with it? They’re people trying to make a living by making games, just like, for example, the people at Pandemic, Realtime Worlds, and Krome. Despite the support of major publishers, the above studios had to close down when people didn't want to buy the games they made at the price for which they were sold.

Fletcher’s reasoning (which, to be fair, is in no way unique to him), is really just the flipside of that employed by pirates who say that it’s all right to steal games released by major publishers. They have the money, so they can absorb the loss. Indie developers, on the other hand, are seen as perpetually scraping by, and therefore entitled to more support than those developers who have tried to find a measure of security by working with big publishers.

The indie entitlement narrative may be benevolent, but that doesn’t make it rational. Indie developers are no more or less entitled to money than any other developer. All of them are human beings trying to make a living by doing something they love. What’s really crass is to suggest that one deserves special treatment simply because they’re more in line with some obscure idea of cool, and not because they do especially good work.

I’m going to buy the Tale of Tales bundle, and I’m going to pay more than $3 for it. But it’s not because I think indie developers are a privileged class of people who are entitled to my financial support. Rather, I’m going to do it because I think Tale of Tales is making a type of game that needs to be made, and I want to support their vision. Anyone who disagrees, or simply isn’t sure, can pay less, even $3, and sleep well at night.