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Post by Phil Parent on Aug 25, 2018 2:51:07 GMT
When I was a little kid, I always had the most fun making stuff in games over playing them. On the NES my favourites were Excitebike, Wrecking Crew and Battle City off a multicart because I could make my own levels. Another game I loved was Pro Wrestling NES. I played it endlessly with my brother. It was the one of the first NES cart we ever owned, along with Super Mario Bros and WrestleMania, the wrestling game my grandma bought us when we asked for "the wrestling game."
Years passed, and I kept the same mindset. I made rosters for Baseball Stars, Ken Griffey Baseball & Triple Play Gold that I'd loan out to friends. But I hated the wrestling games we had access to, good ol' Pro Wrestling was always the best. The WWF games were very lacking, it was only punch punch kick. The best part of them was the music. No wrestling game that I knew of let me make wrestlers, and DAMN did I ever want to create my own wrestlers.
So one day, I was checking out a gaming magazine, and it had an imports section. The import section always left my jaw on the ground: it's like Japan had all the best stuff. The Neo Geo reviews were INSANE from the POV of a guy that only had NES/SNES/Genesis. But the one that caught my eye that day was a wrestling game on Saturn: Fire Pro Wrestling - 6-Men Scramble. Go back to the late mid 90s and 6MS was the stuff of dreams: You could make your own guys, and back then, it was technologically with the times too.
I didn't have and wouldn't ever have a Saturn. Eventually, I saw FPG listed on the price list of a game shop, I bought it and the rest is story. Had a hell of a time playing a game I couldn't even read. I couldn't create much with it either for the same reason.
Published my first edit on FPC for FPD, a Daijiro Matsui. It's since been lost.
After a while, I left the Fire Pro community (nobody noticed) and went on what was, looking back, a learning excursion in the world of Ryland sims. I made a name for myself there, joined the dev team, did the rosters that came with EWR and eventually worked on TEW 2004 and TEW 2005. I helped designed Wrestling Spirit with him, but I wanted it to be just like Fire Pro but text-based. He chose his own design and that's okay. I left GDS not long after TEW 2005 going back occasionally to update my Venues file.
Came back to Fire Pro, lurked for a while, then became active when FPR came out in Japan. People that knew me knew me because of my work with Ryland, nobody remembered me from my previous Fire Pro work. And then I did the Anthology as it was then for the Japanese version, added KOC characters for the US version and was active on the FPC for a while, then after some time the scene started dying and dying and dying so I left again, hoping against hope that I'd come back someday for a new game.
Went and found a new home at Operation Sports, doing historical rosters for MLB The Show. It was a nice coming full circle type of deal for me and if I was going to end my editor "career" might as well end it working on baseball, that's how it all started... I told the folks there I was with them unless a new Fire Pro came out.
At sometime during the never-ending death of the scene, the FPC board died, only to survive as a FB page ran by Otaku. Eventually, Otaku wanted to give somebody the chance to run the FPC Facebook page and give it the love it deserved, and I went for it. I was the king of a desert where tumbleweeds and emptiness were the norm. I had TWO, count them, TWO content providers on there: David Aaron (DMan) and a young up and coming edit maker who seemingly got lost looking for the Arena named Darrin Hanks (Voodoo). And a couple more people liking stuff. I didn't have anything to do, it was inactive. Buddied up with Ricky (wakigatame) during this time, probably my best online friend. Great guy.
Then it came, World was hinted at then announced and it was like the desert after a downpour, a bunch of stuff came out the ground. So, Hoss and I got organized. I was thinking Twitter, Facebook & a Wiki. He also wanted a new board. I wanted to hook up with the Arena. The wiki never got off the ground, only a few articles exist for it. Since I was gonna do the Twitter deal, I left the Facebook in good hands: Hoss, Otaku, D-Man and good ol' Monitor are in charge there now, along with a few more mods. I lurk.
Pedo Tiger got exposed, the great migration occured and I'm PROUD to have been one of the founding fathers here. Other than owning the domain and handling social media, I do nothing for C!C. I didn't want to run anything, and I told the other guys that, I just wanted the hosting to be stable and safe and with me I know it is.
I still document the games as new stuff is still discovered decades later (This is the true spirit of the Fire Pro Club, it was never about being an elite clique, it was about loving the game, documenting it and making it accessible. That's the spirit of Hoss, Kagura and Icemaster!) and my Anthology is still an active project. I have very little interest in doing anything else but canon ports, maybe a project using them. Like that league deal that I wasted everybody's time with, that would be good. I still maintain that I don't see myself editing games when I'm 40. I'll be 37 next month.
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Post by turrible666 on Aug 25, 2018 2:56:35 GMT
Probably 1999-ish, I got turned on to SFPWXP by a guy I knew from an IRC heavy metal chatroom, with him touching a little on the create-a-wrestler mode and how crazy it was that a game had everybody in it, but mostly making fun of how the Fake Ric Flair was named "Dick Slender." I found multiple versions of the ROM (including the weird English translated one where they kinda gave up on the wrestler names, so Atsushi Onita was called "Mars" and someone else was randomly renamed Dude Love.) and I just went completely apeshit on that thing and started making everyone I could think of, even if some missing moves meant that Scott Hall used that weird spinning backslide thing and Triple H used the Tiger Driver '91. I think I had at least six different saves, with one each for WWF, WCW, and ECW, one for oddball nonsense like The Incredible Hulk, and a catch-all for wrestlers from various non-major promotions that would show up on the one bootleg-ass local channel, like NWA Mississippi. I think watching that bizarrely-long block of wrestling that would come on Saturday afternoons/nights (seriously, it was about six hours) and making the people I saw on an old SNES game was how I spent most of my Saturday nights in 1999, instead of talking to girls or whatever. (And I think I still have all of these on my old hard drive, in case anyone really needs edits of Big Don Brodie or "Pitbull" Bob Serio) And yes, when a guy would switch promotions, I'd absolutely use SFHack to move them to the proper save file.
After that, I moved on to the Gameboy Advance versions, and I'm not gonna lie, I used emulators, even when the games were new. (Look, I was making like $6.25 an hour, and the chances that I'd be able to scrape together enough money for a Gameboy were only slightly better than me jumping flat-footed to the moon.) Anyway, I continued to make a whole bunch of edits, (including Big Bird Machine, who was the first edit I made on both Fire Pro Returns and World) and went to great lengths to make sure that Michinoku Pro and FMW always crushed the WWE in Management of Ring mode. There was an extremely brief period of getting to play a bootlegged copy of Fire Pro G on my brother's modded Playstation, but then, his fat ass cat knocked it off a shelf and broke it, something he blames me for to this day. (The cat possibly embodying nature's wrath against the pirating of video games? I dunno.)
Anyway, eventually Fire Pro Returns came out, and I was super-pumped, because I actually had a working Playstation 2 and could actually play a Fire Pro game legally, paying for it and everything. (I was making over nine dollars an hour by this point, you guys.) And I'm not gonna lie, it was kind of a letdown. Actually playing the matches was still better than any other previous game, but there just wasn't much of a reason to do so. I had been spoiled by Final Fire Pro, so Match Maker mode was a bummer, and somewhere in the jump from GBA graphics to graphics meant for a full-sized TV, I became absolutely awful at making edits. Like if a wrestler didn't have a pre-made head, they'd come out looking like some twisted, mutant version of themselves, screaming for me to kill them. (not really, but also yeah, really)
Then, in 2016, I got really super-hardcore back into Fire Pro Returns, (including making an almost passable He-Man edit and one of Bray Wyatt that looked like a Darkest Timeline version of Al from Home Improvement) so of course, my Playstation 2 (which had passed through at least two other people before it got to me, and was allegedly originally a Walmart demo system in 2000, which makes me super-worried that the guy who knew a guy who knew my brother may have stolen it - THIS POST IS FILLED WITH CRIME) finally died, leaving me Fire Pro-less, and like a week later I saw the first mentions of Fire Pro Wrestling World. So what I'm saying is that in my despair over the dead PS2, I probably willed all of this to happen through a misuse of some sort of devil-magic that I'll never be able to properly harness for good. Yeah.
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Post by Spunk on Aug 25, 2018 7:36:47 GMT
I first heard about Fire Pro around 1996, from reading about it on RSPW (how many of you remember Usenet???) and the like. When 6MS came out, there was a fair amount of online hype. One of the American video game magazines did a one page review of it, and praised it highly, though it erroneously said it was releasing on the Sony Playstation and not the Sega Saturn! I didn't own a Saturn at the time, but a couple months later, bought one at Target when the system was on clearance, for about $80. Ordered 6MS the next day, along with some kind of converter/adapter thingy that plugged into the back of the system. Happily been playing Fire Pro games ever since. I believe the only console release I've not owned since then was Fire Pro Z and the Game Boy versions. Oh yeah. I remember RSPW and I loved fucking Usenet in the 90's. It was the only place where I could talk to other diehard Guns N' Roses fans who didn't hate Axl Rose and learn about weird, Japanese pro wrestling. I heard about it through RSPW and grabbed a ROM of it for an SNES emulator. It blew my mind because it has a way to create your own wrestler in it. The game play made little sense to me at the time, the graphics were weird and whatever, but I could CREATE. MY. OWN. WRESTLERS. Oh yeah, and Sabu was in it. Then in 96 I remember RVD's website was hyping up him being in 6 Man Scramble on the Saturn, but I didn't have a Saturn. What did I do? Well, naturally, I worked out a convoluted trade with a friend of mine for all of my old baseball cards that I bought but never had interest in, but became a habit, along with my comic books and a few SNES and Genesis games that I never played anyway. My friend never played his Saturn, so he thought he was making out. Imported 6MS, which felt fucking monumental at the time, then realized I needed to find a way to play it, which meant getting my dad involved. There was a lot of cursing, a lot of "you traded those games I bought you away?!?!" and other stuff, but it worked out, eventually. Played it a lot, then my Saturn died. Saw that Fire Pro D came out on Dreamcast and that was really it for me. What went from a thing I thought was super cool but could never really sink my teeth into became an obsession. I joined a weird league on GameFAQs that was in a way a spiritual predecessor to the old "people pack" on here, until the guy running it flipped out and left. Somehow I was left in charge of it, so I renamed it to Pro-Wrestling WILD and I was running an e-fed. Great. That e-fed went on for a long time, was home to a lot of the vets who are either here or were here, like Jason Blackhart, Geese, Fat Dave and a whole slew of others. We switched to Z, which... meh.... Switched to Returns, which was good, but then life happened and everyone was sorta drifting away. World came out and here I am, somehow I've made a living as a writer and somehow started an even stranger league in SCFL that I spend entirely too much time on for a person with a wife, two kids and a whole lot of shit going on. |
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Post by sofia on Aug 25, 2018 7:53:54 GMT
1996. 1997? Something like that. I was a little kid on the internet, I found a program called TNM that ran in DOS. It was a text-based wrestling simulator. While checking out its creator's homepage, I saw mention of Super Fire Pro Wrestling X Premium as being sort of the gold standard of wrestling games. I didn't recognize some of the names Oliver Copp dropped, but I saw him mention guys like Chris Benoit and Jushin Liger looking and playing as close to real life as anyone else had ever come. Recognizing them from watching WCW, I went about hunting the game down to run on my aginc PC, and then on my dad's computer - he was the only one with a PC that had the horsepower to run the SNES emulators of the time. I had no idea what I was doing, both without a translation and with one, but I thought it was absolutely amazing.
I had a Saturn from 1997 onward, having apparently not paid attention to Bernie Stolar saying that his own company's console was a lost cause. Sometime after discovering XP, I found out that there was a new Fire Pro game with better graphics, more guys, and it was on Saturn to boot! Finally a reason to own this thing other than Virtua Fighter, Darkstalkers 2, and NiGHTS. It took me a long time of trying to convince my mom and dad to go on the internet and order the game and a converter pak from some import site, but they eventually relented... oh, a year and a half and one divorce later. I ended up getting 6MS on my birthday in 1998, obsessively running back and forth between the living room where the Saturn was hooked up and my room with my desktop to rename every single wrestler and add all the latest versions of the rosters of WWF and WCW to the game with templates. I guess I was hooked for real from there! It also helped introduce me to All Japan Pro Wrestling, which I had known nothing about prior; and got me into the hunt for (grainy, low res) videos of matches from both it and NJPW, which I was more familiar with from watching WCW back in the 90s.
Somehow I ended up learning Japanese bit by bit thru playing Fire Pro D, and I ended up carrying on some of the movelist footwork that Chan and Kilroy started for Z and Returns; as well as King of Colosseum 2. Not that I'm fluent at all. I was involved in an FPD-based e-fed called Pro Wrestling SHAFT for a good while, and stuck around for its short-lived reboot in Fire Pro Z and somewhat longer lasting revival in FPR. I never really had the same long-lasting relationships that other guys had -- I didn't really get to know JB, OrochiGeese, and the like until much more recently, but still I tried keeping in touch with all the PWS guys for something like 15+ years.
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Post by Guacamole Anderson on Aug 25, 2018 13:13:23 GMT
I graduated from college in 1994...I had pretty much stopped following wrestling completely by that point. Then I heard about a promotion called ECW and got hold of a tape of their TV show. Which eventually made me aware of the Japanese scene, which led to more tapes and so forth.
Anyway...in 1997, I learned of Six Man Scramble, which featured some of the ECW guys I loved, like RVD and Sabu. I ordered it, along with the converter cartridge, from NCSX. Then I had to find a Sega Saturn, which was no easy task. I finally found one - the last one - on the bottom shelf at a Wal-Mart in a dicey part of town. As fate would have it, the day my copy of 6MS arrived, we got a record snowstorm - 20 inches. I was stuck in my apartment for four days, and just did Victory Road the whole time.
I've owned every major release of Fire Pro since then, with the exception of G (can't remember why, but it was probably $$$ related).
I never really got into making my own edits until World, but it's become incredibly fulfilling for me.
Love this series!
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Post by invader3k on Aug 25, 2018 14:00:10 GMT
1996. 1997? Something like that. I was a little kid on the internet, I found a program called TNM that ran in DOS. It was a text-based wrestling simulator. While checking out its creator's homepage, I saw mention of Super Fire Pro Wrestling X Premium as being sort of the gold standard of wrestling games. I didn't recognize some of the names Oliver Copp dropped, but I saw him mention guys like Chris Benoit and Jushin Liger looking and playing as close to real life as anyone else had ever come. Recognizing them from watching WCW, I went about hunting the game down to run on my aginc PC, and then on my dad's computer - he was the only one with a PC that had the horsepower to run the SNES emulators of the time. I had no idea what I was doing, both without a translation and with one, but I thought it was absolutely amazing. Oh man, I played the heck out of TNM back in the day, too. I loved running the huge battle royals and stuff. |
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Post by ligerbear on Aug 25, 2018 20:29:55 GMT
had always heard about the series or scene random images in old egms and such growing up. when i was in college in 2000 i looked further into the series once i came upon a random bit of info saying there was 100+ characters and i was like how is that even possible? i so downloaded roms of super fire pro wrestling x premium and fire pro A. i was incredibly confused on how to play. the fact the gameplay wasnt accessible just got me further hooked. every time i learned how to pull off a new strike or running move just made me more engrossed. Though features were "basic" since aside from deathmatches there were no crazy gimmicks i realized each mode was a great amount of fun and terribly addicting. Running leagues, tournaments, mma matches it was all thoroughly engrossing. hell even watching cpu vs cpu got my eye and i was like what the hell!? got super into MOTW and because of the series i ditched a lot of classes. got even more addicted as the series encouraged my exploration of puroresu and the history of prowrestling. sfpwxp, fpwA, FFPW, then i imported fpz, fpr(japanese and english,) koc red+green, koc2. Absolutely love the franchise. i had hoped for years that at minimum a final version for pc just so it could be modded and kept alive forever. i adore this series. really wish i had a timer logging how many hours ive spent completely across the whole series. im around 200 hrs for world and thats only cause ive been playing with restraint waiting for the real updates and quality of life stuff to come through.
i predominately play around 90% of my matches but i do love simming matches between my edits for certain title belts, and leagues. the gameplay is so addicting
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Post by Phil Parent on Aug 25, 2018 21:49:57 GMT
I see so many of you played TNM. That's the one I never, ever did anything for. I did try it though.
I'm surprised nobody mentionned EWR/TEW as a gateway to Fire Pro.
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Post by The Ferg 94 on Aug 25, 2018 22:54:10 GMT
I'm very much a newcomer to the Fire Pro series as a whole. The first time I saw Fire Pro Wrestling was FPW Returns when I saw some YouTube videos of it back in 2013-14. It seemed pretty good to me but I didn't have a PS2 (in terms of consoles, I'm mainly an Xbox guy). So I continued playing the WWE series and even some Wrestling Revolution now and then.
Fast forward to WWE 2K18's launch and to be honest that went fine, at least for me, apart from one thing - 2Kayfabe (one of the 2K forum guys) told us we would be able to create intergender stables, but refused to clarify about Universe Mode, which is what the original question was about. Turns out we couldn't until a patch "fixed" that. I put "fixed" in quotes because I think it may have been deliberate and only when called out for the lie did 2K fix it. That may sound insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but after this I had a feeling that 2K was going down a path I didn't like.
Then the whole Star Wars Battlefront 2 loot box controversy happened and right in the middle of that Take Two said they wanted microtransactions in all their games, so if that happens that'll make every 2K game a no-buy for me. And then 2K released a patch that broke critical parts of the core gameplay. These bugs, which include the AI mistiming Irish Whip rebounds and the top rope and corners randomly not working (as in you couldn't send your opponent into them - they'd just sort of bounce off), still exist in the game and 2K refuse to fix it, which is quite insulting to me, especially since I paid for the Deluxe Edition. I cancelled it initially over the Season Pass giving less content for the same money, but ended up re-preordering it. Looking back, I should've left it cancelled.
Before the patch, however, I learned that Fire Pro Wrestling World was coming to the PC via Steam. I ended up getting it just before Early Access ended. I started learning how to play it, then I started making edits. I was just about overwhelmed by the amount of customization there is. Soon after playing a fair bit of Fire Pro and creating edits for it (mainly ports of my WWE 2K CAWs), I was pretty much hooked. I don't see myself going back to WWE 2K any time soon if MTs are the path they're taking, and even then it'll take a lot for them to get my trust back.
The short version: I lost trust in 2K, then I lost patience with 2K, then I lost interest in 2K. And I wanted an alternative. So I got Fire Pro Wrestling World and now the only time I go back to 2K18 is when I want to load a CAW to port into FPWW.
I'd been playing WWE games for 11 years only for 2K to lie to me, then spit in my face. I'd had enough and I honestly think that without Fire Pro Wrestling World I'd have lost interest in wrestling games due to 2K's greed and disrespect. So I'm glad and thankful that Fire Pro Wrestling World exists and is as good as it is.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Aug 26, 2018 4:43:40 GMT
I see so many of you played TNM. That's the one I never, ever did anything for. I did try it though. I'm surprised nobody mentionned EWR/TEW as a gateway to Fire Pro.
EWR/TEW was always junk compared to TNM to me...so it was the opposite for me, I tried EWR and TEW but never got into it so I just went back to TNM.
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Post by sofia on Aug 26, 2018 5:34:30 GMT
I see so many of you played TNM. That's the one I never, ever did anything for. I did try it though. I'm surprised nobody mentionned EWR/TEW as a gateway to Fire Pro. EWR was neat, but I always saw it more as a business side simulator rather than one for simulating the actual wrestling matches themselves. |
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Post by dylan on Aug 26, 2018 5:54:38 GMT
I think it was around 2007 or early 2008 when I saw screenshots of fire pro for the first time. If I had to guess, I was looking up No Mercy mods (I'd drool over hacks since I didn't know about emulators, I was 10) and fire pro somehow showed up. After looking more into it, seeing that it had guys I could never even dream of having in a WWE game like AJ Styles and Petey Williams, plus legends like The Outsiders, Sabu, Sting, Bam Bam, etc, plus having all these extra parts to make pretty much anyone you wanted was enough to interest me. I remember going to Babbages in the mall and seeing it in a bin for $20 and I had to sell my mom on the game since she thought it looked cheesy and didn't want to buy it for me, but she eventually did. I went home and started the game up, and gave up within the hour because it didn't come with a manual so I didn't even know how to play. A few months after giving up, I decided to give it another try, and after some trial and error and reading through Bill Wood's guide I got the hang of it. I don't really know how to explain how I felt playing those first few times. It's like it had this weird allure to it that I didn't understand, since it was this weird foreign game I knew nothing about, with hundreds of wrestlers I knew nothing about at the time. I stayed up late one night and renamed the whole roster after printing a guide, and experimenting with wrestlers I thought looked cool led me to actually looking them up and learning more about Japanese wrestling. I eventually found Lordworm's site full of templates, and spent hours upon hours remaking edits and building my dream roster, but that changed when I finally got an AR Max around 2013 lol. I was eventually able to get my friends into the game, and to this day me and my best friend still occasionally play, but that'll become more frequent once Tuesday rolls around and we can share play world on PS4...
It's weird to think how one game could keep my interest for a decade. Despite whatever game WWE would put out, I'd always find myself drifting back to fire pro and its infinite magic, and its even weirder to think I almost gave up on it all those years ago. This game really is the thing that got me even more into wrestling than I already was as a child, it exposed me to so much outside of just WWE and TNA, and that's crazy to think of looking back.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 26, 2018 14:40:47 GMT
After growing up a big wrestling fan in the mid to late 90s watching WWF and WCW every week, importing ECW pay per views, FMW compilations and early Big Japan Pro Wrestling events. After WCW and ECW closed my love of watching wrestling died.
However, despite me not watching any wrestling at all, I have always continued to play wrestling video games, as I'll be honest they are and will still be my guilty pleasure for years to come. I find them fun.
Anyway, I discovered Fire Pro 9 years ago around the time of my 1st daughter being born. I figured I needed a game to play that was easy to play during night time feeds, so I had a look and discovered Returns. A quick Google search and I found a copy on an Italian website for £40.
At first I was in awe of the size of the roster, with my knowledge of Puroresu only going as far as FMW and Big Japan. So I had to research who everyone was, which was no worry to me as I like to read anyway.
Around that time I discovered a community at the Fire Pro Club and I joined, didn't post much as I used it to find out more about the game and series in general.
Nine years later and I'm still pottering about looking into new ideas for my edits. And with the PS4 release I can finally chip in with the community as I will be putting forward an edit into the Star of the Jar tournament, which I'm looking forward too.
Despite my life getting busier with a 60 hour working week, a wife, playing pool/snooker, two daughters and a lot of Bass Guitar studies I will always try to find time for Fire Pro and this community.
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Post by Eddie Lukin on Aug 26, 2018 15:23:15 GMT
In 1996 or 1997 or so, a friend of mine brought over a small magazine about cool new websites. It might have been an insert in Gamepro or something. One site they talked about was, I believe, prowrestling.com, which was one of those NEWZ sites which was like the Observer through 15 rounds of Telephone.
Through that I learned about efeds; I think there was a site called e-wrestling.com or something like that which you could pay to be a member. From reading about efeds, I learned about TNM7.
I bought a copy of TNM7 and had a lot of fun with it. The TNM authors site had a video game review section. He had reviews of all the import games of the day such as Virtual Pro Wrestling 64 and...Fire Pro X Premium.
I don’t remember if I had discovered emulation by this point, or if this is how I learned about it, but I got in deep. I would play hours of Fire Pro every day, while checking out all the emulation scene news. I found some of the Fire Pro animation sites of the day and I’ve followed the scene since, though I was never on the newsgroups or mailing lists or however the early days of the Fire Pro Club existed.
I kinda back doored into the Fire Pro community when Fire Pro G came out; I had been in IRC wrestling chats, I started the #fireprog channel on the same IRC server as #wrestling, and enjoyed many years of Fire Pro friends.
In the chat room we shared edits of ourselves with Dex Drive files or templates. As Fire Pro D was announced, I wanted to take it further and create an efed, ran on Fire Pro, with screen shots and written commentary. This became Pro Wrestling SHAFT, which Maikeru mentioned. It ran on and off from 2001 to 2007, but there was a big gap in the middle around Fire Pro Z.
I started losing touch with the group when I started working overnights, and eventually just kinda faded away from the channels as life went on. I became one of the people I would always whine about, just disappearing from the scene. I miss a lot of the people and I’m happy to see lots of them around here.
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LunchBox
JIM MINY
Thermos sold separately
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Post by LunchBox on Aug 26, 2018 23:38:03 GMT
My story starts in the summer of 1998. After having devoured WCW vs The World and then WCW vs nWo World Tour I was becoming big into tape trading and on various message boards and aol chat rooms I kept hearing about Virtual Pro Wrestling 64 and how it had dozens more wrestlers and you could edit them. I became obsessed with trying to get this game. I started digging deeper and kept hearing “VPW64 aint shit on 6MS” and “you can create anyone in Fire Pro” and without so mych as seeing a single screenshot of what Fire Pro was I found IceMaster Frank James Chan’s FAQ and translation and printed it out and started studying it like a textbook. I also started saving money to buy a Saturn, a copy of 6MS and a pro action replay. My parents said no when I finally had the money for the game and converter. So 15 year old me took a tremendous risk and got my western union money order for $115 or whatever it was and mailed it snail mail to Japan. About 40 excruciating days later it arrived.
I was off to the races.
My first edit I made was a Ken Shamrock and started doing victory road to unlock everything.
My first original edit was an amalgamation of Chono, Brody and The Giant I named IronViking. Having no sense of nuance or character design ge was an unbeatable machine when I controlled him. As time went by and I learned people used Fire Pro for simming I tried to sim IronViking. My unbeatable hoss was nothing more than an edit spamming fireballs and powerbombs. All he was good at was getting gassed 5 mins in and eating pins. It made no sense to me at the time and actually turned me off from making original edits and simming for a long time.
From there I was ecstatic to hear about G and then D as they came out. Regrettably by these times I was a broke ass teenager who pirated them, but still loved them.
I lasted picked up FPA to play in between classes in college. From there I fell out of watching pro wrestling for a long time.
I don’t remember how I initially heard of R’s impending US port but I just about lost my shit when I did. I do remember showing up to gamestop to reserve it and they didn’t even have it in their system to preorder. Then a week later they did. Then the dates changed. And changed till one day I guess I did freak out on the cashier, a guy named Bryce I actually ended up becoming friends with years later, since this was fucking gamestop of all places and I was worried they wouldn’t get enough copies for me to get one.
I laugh when I remember him looking me dead in the eye and saying “You are the only dude trying to get this game, trust me. We’re only ordering two, and thats because you reserved one, so by company policy we have to carry a store display copy. Youre good man”
Anyway went balls deep into it, and because I had an OG fat PS3 I played it on that and became active at FPC (as Bartlett) in helping other ps3 players get up and running. The ps3 was great for returns. Better and smoother graphics plus you could swap digital memory cards on the fly. Oh how I loved that game. To wit, when the disc drive finally went on that model, it became then and forever a system to just play returns. The disc is still in that system to this day.
I kept playing returns up until World released on PC and have racked up over 700 hours since. With World I finally discovered the beauty of making all original edits and building my own feds for simming.
I still cant believe we finally got the online live forever Fire Pro we all dreamed of. Loving every minute of it. I have two ps4 copies reserved for release, and it turns out Ill actually be opening one to play with the pc content delay(s). The other one will go to a buddy that had to patiently wait over a year to play while I sent him screencap and video after video of how fun the game is, especially with the mods.
Ive said enough, thanks for reading if you stuck it out this long.
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