

Caged octagon Ultimate Fighting bouts, plus six other modes.Technical wrestling from the biggest name in Japanese Pro Wrestling.Will gamers adjust to its unique style of play before giving up? It's worth a try, and here's a hint that should help: don't mash the buttons! But is this series, which stresses technical skills over flash and button-mashing frenzy, almost overkill for the average gamer? We're jumping into this series pretty late, and we're hitting the ground running full-on. For the first time in its run, an American publisher has picked up what's been acclaimed as the best and most true-to-life wrestling franchise in gaming. It's time to unlearn and step up to Fire Pro Wrestling. Instead, it took me half a match of wailing on the B button with a frustrating nothing going on in my favor before I remembered, "No, no - Firepro, not Smackdown." And watching others get mopped about the handheld ring, I get the feeling that there's going to be a lot of gamers in that same boat. You'd think that reviewers, who play games for a living, wouldn't need such hand-holding, that they would wisely recall the prior games of this series' long-running canon and (after carefully reading the manual) approach the game from the proper angles. Here's how different Fire Pro Wrestling is from your average Hulkamaniac's wrestling game: included with our Review copy of the game was a " Fire Pro Wrestling Helpful Hints" pamphlet that very subtly and very repeatedly stated that this game is not a button masher.
