10 Insane Wrestling Game Spin-Offs

The Year is 2000, the beginning of the most popular franchise for wrestling games started; WWF Smackdown! on PS1. But Yukes, the company that made the engine released not just one but two budget titles exclusively for Japan during 1999 and 2000. Simple 1500 is just that, costing 1500 yen to buy the game new (15$/£10). Crazier still is the sequel includes barbed wire deathmatches.

Match type customisation in general was way ahead of it's time, allowing you to choose the type of ropes (be it barbed wire, electric barb wire, or even no ropes) to even changing the matting to either softer mats or unforgiving concrete. Also included is inferno matches where you can make a girl scream to death after being thrown out of the ring by a male wrestler. This could be the real reason WWE doesn't allow men vs woman matches any more.

Gameplay is exactly the same as the early WWF Smackdown titles, with all the familiar animations, such as the suplex, the low blow and DDT all featuring for nostalgic effect. If you can afford to get a Japanese PS3, this is certainly a title to use backward compatibility on, and is still fairly cheap for a wrestling game collection. The early Yukes engine makes this a very easy to pick up and play, and after mere minutes you will become an expert with the controls. It also features barbed wire baseball bats which did not feature prominently until years later.