You can plays one-on-one...OR tag team? That's pretty deep for this system...but it's actually pretty good past that point. Read on!
The year was 1988. Mattel Electronics was shut down and in its place was INTV Corporation. Even though the Intellivision had fallen out of favor along with Atari and Colecovision after the crash, INTV Corp. still released games for the system until 1991, with a very small output of only a few games a year. Nintendo's Famicom (later the Nintendo Entertainment System) was the big man on campus, and the Sega Mega Drive (known in America as the Genesis) was about to steal the NES's thunder.
Meanwhile, in real life, wrestling was becoming less and less territorialized compared to the old days. The National Wrestling Alliance, or NWA, had been around for years, but the World Wrestling Federation (later WWE) had broken from it and started buying out other independent regional federations to make the first worldwide federation. Jim Cornette Promotions was about to be bought by Ted Turner and Turner Broadcasting, and become what is now known as World Championship Wrestling.
Up until this point, there actually was a wrestling game on a popular system: Microleague Wrestling for the Commodore 64 and Atari ST. Even though it was an official WWF product, the game was more of a turn-based strategy game. There were other games on the market at the same time, but there were no likenesses of any popular wrestlers in any of them (WrestleMania for the NES wouldn't be in existence for at least another year). Even worse, you were stuck with either one-on-one matches or tag team matches. There was no choice.
Body Slam! was one of the games from that time that was just a work of pure fiction. There's no name for the federation and all the characters are fictional. However, you can choose to do a one-on-one or tag team match at the beginning of the game. About time!
You pick which controller is either human or computer, then pick the skill level. The higher the skill level you pick, the more moves you can use. After that, you choose who gets to fight each other. In case of a tag match, you choose the first team first, followed by the second team.
The characters don't all fight exactly the same. Some wrestlers have more energy and can take more punishment, while some wrestlers are stronger than others. Despite the graphical limitations causing all the characters to look the same, the developers did make each character a different color as well as give them some sort of face decoration to make it easier to tell them all apart. Doctor Pain wears a surgical mask over his nose and mouth, while Sheik of Slam wears a Muslim headdress on his head. I think whoever did the graphics was a big Iron Sheik fan. You have twelve characters in all, and they all have different stats.
Height (Ht) allows you to cause more damage with your throws, Weight (Wt) makes you faster or slower and dictate the power of your aerial attacks, Coordination (Co) allows you to take control during a grapple, Ego (Eg) dictates how likely you are to taunt after a successful throw, and Strength (St) dictates the power of your blows.
You then get to choose your wrestler's or tag team's moves and map out which buttons do what moves. Choose carefully, as some moves such as Possum Roll and Duck & Cover let you avoid attacks, and Mega Leap and Flying Sit Drop (the leg drop move, obviously) are aerial attacks. You get to choose up to nine moves in all out of a maximum of 26. That's even better than the World Championship Wrestling video game for the NES released back in 1990, which only allowed you up to four grapple moves out of a possible eight or nine that were mapped to one of directions on the D-Pad.
Certain moves can only be done while grappling, while running, or while on the top turnbuckle. You'll have to vary your moves a lot and put certain moves on a certain row of the number keys to make it easier to use them when you need to and remember where they are. Choosing your moveset carefully and mapping your moveset to buttons you can remember are both critical in this game.
The wrestlers enter the ring, and the game begins. Unlike real wrestling, you have a few timed rounds in which to win like in old-school European wrestling, and you also see a ring girl (something you don't see in wrestling today). You can review your moves here before it switches to the gameplay screen in case you've forgotten your moveset.
You have four minutes to do as much damage to your opponent as possible. The timer is in the center of the ring, while the corners of the ring have the health bars. The one on the left is for the left controller, while the one on the right is for the right controller. As you successfully perform moves, your opponents energy starts dropping towards zero. Of course, the same can happen to you unless you're ready for your opponent's tactics and know what the opponent is able to perform move-wise. After four minutes, the round ends and the next round begins.
The numbers up top are used for the pin attempts, the top rope moves as well as for count-outs. You can knock the opponent out of the ring and beat him up outside of the ring for more damage as well as an attempted count-out victory. If a wrestler doesn't get out of the ring by the count of 20, he loses. As long as either player is outside the ring, the count continues until both players are in the ring. Also, you lose the match if you stand on the ropes for more than five seconds.
There is a button used for running in case you'd like to perform clotheslines and powerful running kicks. If you want to bounce off the ropes and run in the opposite direction, you can do that too.
Some of these moves are pretty unrealistic - you can punch or kick somebody all the way to the ropes or straight out of the ring. I'm pretty sure even Goldberg couldn't do that.
When both competitors walk into each other, they tie-up (grapple each other), it's either man for himself. Mash buttons 1 through 9 to use the grapple moves you've assigned to any of the numbers, and remember your move set to fight your way to victory!
Whenever you get the opponent down successfully, there's a chance your character will also taunt to get a little bit of energy back. Of course this leaves you open to attack, so you have to be careful when you use it.
Move names show up at the bottom when a move is performed. When the left player does a move, it's in green. If it's the right player, it's in blue.
In the tag team mode, you can go to the corner and press 0 to tag. For the left player, it's the lower-left corner. For the right player, it's the upper-right corner. Go to the respective corner and you'll switch wrestlers out, even though the game only shows one person from each time at any given time.
CLEAR allows you to picked up a downed opponent, while ENTER allows you to go for the pin. Your opponent will be stunned when picked up, giving you a second or two to get a free attack in. Also, there are no rope breaks in this game, so you can pin somebody anywhere and not get in trouble for it. If you get pinned, move the Control Disk repeatedly. That's your only hope. The side keys also let you escape a pin, but you'll lose stamina as a result.
Is this a good game? Believe it or not, the game allows you to choose between singles and tag matches. Considering that other games for home consoles during the mid-to-late 1980s didn't allow you to do that, that's a big deal. This game let you pick from a wide variety of moves, and unlike the WCW game for NES, you're not limited to just grapple throws and submissions; you basically get to choose how you do everything as top rope moves, punches, kicks, and defensive maneuvers that you have are all dictated by you.
I have a couple of gripes for a game that pushes the Intellivision to the max, though. One, there aren't any submissions, so the matches can only be won by pinfall or count-out. Finishers also don't exist either, so unless you're pretending your character is Hulk Hogan or Randy Savage, you're out of luck. Also, there's no way to employ any heel tactics such as foreign objects or manager interference, so this is a fair fight all the way. The only way to unleash your inner heel is to use the Possum Roll if you've got it assigned to your move set.
As I said before, the ability to voluntary take action in tag team matches is a nice touch, but even then you and your friend can't be on the same team. Instead, you're forced to fight against each other. At least you can choose between two game modes, but still...
Also, be prepared to use all the buttons on your controller...even the side buttons. This game will give the controllers a work out, and even potentially break them after a while. Thankfully, the game is available on the PlayStation 2 compilation Intellivision Lives, which makes this a moot point, especially when you know how to use the controller on that version.
Anyway, despite the system and controller limitations, this game blows away some of the games from the other systems of the time and is well worth playing. There is probably no other game on the system that has this much depth to it, and with depth comes a good amount of replay value. If you see this game sitting at a yard sale or flea market somewhere, don't pass this up.
Special thanks to IntellivisionLives.com for this recreation of the manual. This really helped out a lot when it came to figuring which button did what!
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