Bill Bodkin (Editor-in-Chief): I’ve never been good at video games…ever. My button mashing is the stuff of legend. The frustration levels I reached playing Super Mario 2 is the stuff that terrifies children while they sleep. Hell, I couldn’t even beat games with Game Genie attached! But, there’s one game that I both love and am good at — N64’s Wrestlemania 2000. First and foremost, this is the greatest pro wrestling game of all-time. The engine for the wrestling move set is so simple, that I am still perplexed as to why they never duplicated it in latter incarnations of WWE games. Looking back at it now, the graphics are kinda clunky, but the fun is literally endless. And, if you’re like me, all the fun came from your Create-A-Wrestlers where you could import the most ludicrous move set into any character. My character, who bore an absurd likeness to me, was modeled after Mick Foley’s Cactus Jack character — that’s if Cactus Jack could do a Shooting Star press, had a tumbling clothesline and a military press into an Ace Crusher finish. BANG BANG! My friend Pat and I would be spend hours on end in matches — Royal Rumbles, cage matches, hardcore matches, you name it. Our encounters would be endless, but not as endless as when we’d tag team and eviscerate everyone from the teams of Michael Hayes and Jim Ross to The Rock and Steve Austin. Wrestlemania 2000 is a game I can play forever and I’d buy an N64 to play it today if I could.
