The SBP Archives - Your less than frequent dose of SBP!

Way back in the early 1990s, there was a convenience store/arcade across the street from my high school called "The Pantry" which was frequented during lunch and after school. (I never skipped class to play video games...hardly). Anyway, one coin-sucking machine that ate up a lot of my time was Exciting Hour, a video game which, at the time, was the standard for pro-wrestling games. Your character took on a variety of blatant stereotyped characters, including "Insane Worrier", "Coco Savege", "The Piranhia" and "Blues Bloody". Those typos were included with the game.

The old tricks stil work on the X-box: throwing your opponent into the ropes and allowing them to collide with you, you then rise and piledrive your opponent to the mat. Lather, rinse, repeat. And of course your finisher was always a trifecta of knee drops or 360 splashes off the top rope. If you take the time to look at the fans in the crowd, yup, you can see Darth Vaders on opposite sides of the ring.

After you manage to win the title match, you defend your belt against the same opponents over and over. The old games usually have this fault, in that they never really seemed to have an ending of some kind. And for some reason they never offered a two-player version, which is weird because it would have been lots of fun. But sometimes, that's how it rolls.

It's also weird how games with 2D graphics and basic control options can still be more entertaining then some of the more complex games they release today. It has a high fun factor, and that's what a lot of games seem to miss these days.

I love this old school stuff.