Big Bang Pro Wrestling

Big Bang Pro Wrestling is a wrestling brawler that brings a rather different kind of combat to the Neo Geo Pocket Color than SNK's usual fisticuffs and gunplay. Instead of jumping and projectiles, everything here revolves around grapples, throws, charging into the ring, and fighting for position. Strikes mainly serve to stagger the opponent and open up a chance for a grapple, which drains far more stamina, turning matches into a game of patience and reading your opponent. The ropes and the edge of the ring matter too, since a well-placed throw into a corner or over the ropes can change the whole course of a round.

The roster of wrestlers covers different styles, from heavy powerhouse types to fast technical fighters, and the differences between them are noticeable immediately, especially in grapple range and durability. Besides individual matches, the game also offers a gradual campaign in which wins are collected and further opponents unlocked, and naturally there's two-player combat via link cable, where the psychological game of grapple timing really shines. Visually it sticks to the platform's usual style with squat, expressive characters, though the scene is rendered from a slightly overhead perspective so that the ring and movement within it stay readable.

The game was one of the console's later titles and reached only a handful of players in Europe, so it didn't get much attention at the time. In retrospective overviews of the library it tends to be remembered as a likeable attempt to fill a genre gap, since not many wrestling games were made for handhelds of that era. Today it's interesting mainly for how well the two-button grapple system works, and as a laid-back alternative to the platform's fighting games. It's best played with two people, where every attempted grapple becomes a split-second puzzle. The solo campaign does run out of steam after a while and the mode selection is modest, but the combat fundamentals hold up even after all these years, and within the platform's genre lineup it has no real competition.