When I write about games on this site, I like to have at least some level of proficiency at them, if not outright finish them, before I gather my thoughts. This isn’t necessarily something I do to brag (“check out how fuckin’ skilled I am”), but rather, to make sure I’ve seen everything, or close to everything, a game has to offer. This is a time where I have to make an exception. I’m not proficient, skilled, or even remotely good at this game; I can’t even finish the first match. That being said, despite a severe lack of any progress being made, I still have some thoughts to share that have nothing to do with mechanics this time around.
Appoooh! The Wrestling Game (“Appoooh” being the word “Up” as pronounced with a Japanese accent) is a pro wrestling game made by Sega in 1984. It’s a pretty basic game: you pick a legally distinct version of one of several popular wrestlers from the 1980s Japanese scene, then you wrestle the rest of the cast one after another ad infinitum. That’s it. The difficulty of the game itself comes from the fact that any resource, English or otherwise, telling you how to actually play are virtually nonexistent. Appoooh is something I’ve booted up in MAME every once in a while dating all the way back to the early 2000s, and I still have no fucking clue. Would I like to know how to kick out of pin attempts? Yeah! It would be cool to have a match where I either don’t get my ass kicked the whole time, or spend the whole match dominating until my opponent gets a single grab on me and I am seemingly body slammed directly onto a glue trap.
The thing about Appoooh, and why I keep coming back to it struggling to learn how to actually play, is how it looks. A friend of mine described Appoooh as looking like outsider art, and he was right. There is an art style to Appoooh that is so different to other wrestling games, and probably other games as a whole. Wrestler proportions are exaggerated to a degree even beyond the standard “Super Deformed” style. Giant Baba is appropriately tall and lanky. Antonio Inoki’s chin is prominent, making him look like a Moai head. Stan Hansen’s hands are permanently locked into throwing up the Texas Longhorns. Hulk Hogan still looks fucking gross. Abdullah the Butcher is the most adorable looking thing you’ll ever see in your life, despite how extremely not adorable he looks in real life. Everyone, even the referee, runs around with their arms up in the air as if they’re going for a hug. Animation is almost non-existent; sprites for running up and down mirrored, which is fine, as it’s not like there was a lot of storage space back then. But what makes it funny is that the shading on the sprites becomes mirrored, so characters rapidly glisten from one side of their body to another. It is so delightfully low-budget and amateurish that I can’t help but love it.
Looking at the characters, looking at the garish use of color (just look at that ring!), the limited use of sound, the way everyone moves around, Appoooh is an extremely rare form of style, bordering on abstraction; it’s like asking Osamu Sato to do the art for a wrestling game. The great thing about this is that Appoooh does not look this way because of technical limitations. This came out the same as two other Sega arcade games: Flicky, and Spatter. Both games, while a bit lo-fi, do look nice with a great use of color, particularly in the case of Spatter, and have catchy music that goes more than 10-20 seconds. Appoooh is Appoooh by choice. This game’s existence is a conscious decision, and I love that.
Appoooh! The Wrestling Game is a (as of now) complete mystery to play, and yet that hasn’t stopped me from loading up the ROM every once in a great while just to admire it. This is the real end goal of things like MAME and digital preservation: so that freak weirdos like me can look at incredibly obscure, unpopular stuff like this and appreciate it in our own ways. That’s what’s called “art.”
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