Other people's dreams are almost never interesting, so I have until the end of this sentence to capture your attention: I once dreamed that I bareknuckle boxed Kid Rock in the crow's nest of a pirate ship to be crowned king of the Maple Leaf meat packing company. Sadly, this article isn't about that dream. My other dreams, the ones that don't involve fisticuffs and ham, very often involve me discovering sequels to my favorite books, movies, games, etc. There's something incredibly appealing to my subconscious about the belief that the things I enjoy, rather than being finite, are limitlessly expansive; a similar desire, I think, underlies most fan fiction (also like fan fiction, I often have dreams in which Rupert Giles initiates young Xander Harris into manhood in the hot, dusty stacks of the Sunnydale High library).

Imagine my surprise when, while poking around the dark, forbidden corners of the Interwebs (GameFAQS.com), I discovered Ring of Destruction: Slam Masters 2 (in Japan, Super Muscle Bomber - The International Blowout), the sequel to Saturday Night Slam Masters (Japan: Muscle Bomber Duo - The Body Explosion *). This game had remained unknown to me for over a decade and a half, and thoughts of spreading the news to all my Slam Masters-loving friends immediately sprang to mind. But alas, dear brethren, I have some heavy, heavy news: as a sequel to SNSM, this game is squirrel dick.

My primary gripe with Ring of Destruction is that it's a fighting game in the style of Street Fighter 2, not a wresting game. While it seems unfair to criticize a game for not being what it isn't meant to be, let's take a look at what gets lost in the translation between genres: Ring of Destruction has no moves off the top rope **, no tag team mode, no fun ring introductions, no pins/submissions, no brawling outside the ring, no foreign objects, no moves on downed fighters, and only two grappling moves + a special slam per wrestler. That's a lot of stuff from the original to be missing in a sequel. Remnants of wrestling include Irish whips, bouncing off the ropes when performing a dash attack, and backdropping a dashing opponent, in addition to the aforementioned three grappling moves per wrestler.

Cartoony as the roster in SNSM was, Ring of Destruction's additions are even stranger. There's the delightfully-named army dude Rip Saber, who fights with a shovel and grenades; The Black Widow, whose ending reveals her to be a woman-in-disguise with Chun Li-calibre thighs; Victor Ortega, the guy who appears in the intro/conclusion of the first Slam Masters (sporting a magnificent codpiece this time around); and my favorite, The Wraith, a kind of goofy middle ground between WWF's Undertaker and ECW's Zombie, except with red elf-shoes and a face made of snakes. They're a fun bunch, though Saber and Wraith are definitely designed with Street Fighter-style gameplay in mind.

Adding to the extra-cartoony flavour of the game are the new special moves, including a bunch of projectile attacks for the original cast, and the fact that your opponents are driven through the ring when you finish them off with a special slam. The game could benefit a lot from Jim Ross's announcing: "Biff Slamkovich has been piledriven through the ring! As God is my witness, he's broken in half!"; "How do you learn how to get blown up by a grenade, smart guy?"; "The Wraith's face is biting a mudhole in Oni's ass and walking it dry! Will someone stop the damn match, etc."

It's not a bad game, per se; the action is fast, it's fairly challenging, and the emphasis on dashing and grappling sets it apart from other fighters of its era. All in all, I enjoyed playing Slam Masters 2, but a large part of my enjoyment came from its similarities to the original Slam Masters, which can't help but remind me of the fact that this is not the kind of sequel I would have most liked to see. Like my dreams, it blends childish nostalgia with a tantilizing glimpse at something just beyond reach, and makes me wonder what could have been had Capcom decided to make a proper wrestling-based sequel to SNSM.

That's kind of a serious conclusion to a review of a dumb old wrasslin' game, so here's a bunch of dancin' Mike Haggars:

* I initially intended to make up funny titles for the Japanese releases of these games, but nothing I could come up with was quite as insane as "Muscle Bomber Duo - The Body Explosion" so I had to leave well enough alone. [top]

** Since I'm relegating failed jokes to the bottom of the page, I should point out that a comparison to Bill Watts' 1992 tenure in WCW would be fitting, albeit a bit too obvious for gentlemen of discerning taste. [top]