For a long while Acclaim had the World Wrestling Federation license and did nothing but sit on it for the longest while. There were a couple games that were mediocre, but most of the time they had the license, they didn’t do anything with it. It wasn’t until the company went through a “revolution” of sorts and starting producing much better games that they kicked what they had into full effect. Unfortunately for Acclaim, this came almost too late. For it wasn’t long ago that Acclaim ended up losing the WWF license to THQ, who has already released their first game, WWF Wrestlemania 2000.

WWF Attitude is the sequel to last year’s WWF War Zone. Coming almost a year after the original, the game hasn’t had much of a full development cycle, meaning that Attitude isn’t much more than War Zone with some new features. For fans of War Zone this will be no problem at all, but a bit more in the innovation category would have been nice.

Despite WWF Wrestlemania 2000 coming out after Attitude, Attitude has the definite graphical advantage in certain areas over THQ’s first effort. Attitude’s models have a more realistic look to them, and the textures applied to the models definitely look closer to their real life counterparts. For the animation, however, it is a different story. Nearly all of Attitude’s moves seem very stiff and it looks they don’t flow together all that great. Like most sports titles, there is a crowd filling up the background space and boy do they look ugly. Current consoles aren’t fully capable of rendering each individual crowd member, so most developers compensate for this by creating them as a huge sprite-based mess. This isn’t a big deal, however, and chances are that you’ll find yourself engulfed in the gameplay more so than paying attention to smaller graphical details outside the ring.

The WWF’s wrestling line up is ever changing, but Attitude includes all of your favorites, ranging from the beer guzzling “Stone Cold” Steve Austin to - my personal choice - The Rock, who is known for his catch phrase lines ands words like “Know your role, jabroni” and “Layin’ the smackdown!”. As expected, Acclaim has motion captured their famous finishers and you should be able to find them all in the game. A few of them are more difficult to pull off before being knocked out of position than others, but with patience they can all be performed and the payoff is worth it. There are also a set of more generic moves that all have their own button combination. This is one problem: memorization. You wouldn’t think that a wrestling game could have much depth, but Attitude - in a way - does. Problem is, there are so many of them that I found myself remembering a select two or three and using those over and over.

I’m not sure if it was just because I happen to not be so good at Attitude or if it’s the actual game itself, but I found the artificial intelligence difficulty to fluctuate between too easy, average and overly hard more than it should. When I first started the career mode the first bout was simple enough and I was able to easily dispose of my opponent without much trouble, but I entered the second match and got the utter crap beat out of me. I ended up losing the match, and when I was able to take on a rematch I was able to take care of him with absolutely no problems. This happened to me more than once through my travels, and built my frustration meter to astronomical proportions. Another quirk I found with the AI was that they are undeniably stupid. In those cases where the other wrestler was acting incredibly difficult I could just pick up a running start and tap A or B to pull off a flying punch (or kick, in some cases) and have him knocked down. Then it was only a matter of backing up and pulling off the same maneuver a second time.

This happens to be one of those games that if you have a group of friends who love to play multiplayer matches you’ll absolutely love it - in spite of the problems I have already mentioned. There are so many that Acclaim has included that it is almost mind boggling when one thinks about it. A brief list of what you can try out includes First Blood, I Quit, 2 out of 3 falls, Iron Man, Tornado and Hard Core. And that’s not counting the traditional tag team, practice, create-a-player and other modes! Needless to say, if you like what you see you will not get bored quickly.

Speaking of the create-a-player mode, this is probably the most entertaining part of Attitude. Games have implemented create-a-player modes in them, but War Zone was the first title to take to the extremes of customization. With Attitude, the developers kept the winning formula and added more features for the players to tinker around with so that they could create even crazier characters. You can go down and pick out specific noses, eyes, facial expressions, change the colors of all the costumes to exactly what you want and add a multitude of tattoos and subtle touches. There have even been a bunch of original theme songs and taunts that have been created (and some of them are beyond hilarious and make you laugh over and over).

If there is one thing I had to pick that annoyed me the most about WWF War Zone on the Nintendo 64 it would have to be how poorly the music was brought onto the machine. Instead of figuring out how to compress the real music enough to fit onto a normal cartridge, they decided to replicate the music on a three-year-old’s beginners keyboard set. In Attitude, though, the theme music has been brought over successfully, although it sounds a bit muffled.

Something that I thought should have been caught is how overly difficult the 2 on 1 and 3 on 1 matches are. I found myself praying to beat those matches and it seemingly came down to a matter of luck on the grounds of whether or not I would win. Sure, I’d be able to knock down one of the wrestlers enough so that I could get a three count pin on them, but then the other guy would come over and kick me off. Doesn’t seem fair now, does it?