5. "WWF No Mercy" (N64) 2000
There's nothing I can really say about WWF No Mercy that hasn't been said hundreds of times before. In short, it was at the time the best wrestling game that had been released and it is arguable to this day if it has ever been bettered. No Mercy took everything that Wrestlemania had done so well and built upon it masterfully. Gameplay stayed mostly the same, as it was almost as good as it could be to begin with. The popular strong and weak grapple that made Wrestlemania 2000 so good made a return in No Mercy, with some slight tweaks to improve upon it even more. Even more wrestlers meant even more genuine signature moves and finishers as seen on WWE TV. It did however have somewhat of a rocky beginning. Upon release, some versions of No Mercy had a frustrating bug that would delete the users game saves without warning. Eventually a fix was released and players with faulty cartridges were able to bring them back in return for a fixed copy of the game. Create a Wrestler mode was given even more focus with even more moves and customizable body parts. Again, each wrestler had 4 attires that could be altered, allowing for various eras of each wrestler, and a number of custom wrestlers. Graphics were improved over Wrestlemania 2000 with everything getting a new lick of paint and making the presentation even better. For the first time on N64, the game featured new match types like Ladder matches, and allowed for moves through the announce table (and pool tables where you could find them.) It allowed for a lot of fighting outside the ring, with extensive backstage areas that were also used well in the career mode. Along with the impressiveness of the general gameplay and customization, the career mode is really where No Mercy stood out. Each WWF title got its own unique branching storyline, which got more complex the more important the title. The branching aspect of the story meant that it encouraged multiple playthroughs in order to attain 100% in each story. It also meant figuring out which matches you had to win or lose in order to move onto different aspects of the story, which gave the mode incredible depth and for the first time in a game, felt like a true representation of the WWF TV Product. It also for the first time featured re-enactments of familiar storylines straight from WWF TV. For example, in the WWF Title storyline, players could re-enact the famous feud between Mick Foley and HHH that was one of the biggest storylines at the time. In another nice touch, money earned in Career mode could be spent in the new "Smackdown Mall" section, making acquiring unlockables more streamlined, in stark contrast to Smackdown 2. These ranged from new wrestlers to attires, arenas, moves and more. No Mercy is still highly regarded as one of the best wrestling games of all time and currently holds a Metacritic score of 89. Over the years the game has stayed alive in the form of many mods that have been released over time, ranging from updated WWE rosters to packs that recreate other popular companies like Ring of Honor and TNA. In the ring No Mercy was a fantastic game, and the amount of additional content made the game a pleasure to revisit over and over. Sure, the AI isn't perfect and some of the later stages of career mode can take frustratingly long to complete, but on the whole, No Mercy was the complete WWF package. Sometimes, certain games are remembered as being better than they were due to nostalgia giving people rose tinted glasses. No Mercy however, is one of the games from that era that certainly holds up to the present day. Is it still the best ever WWF game? That's probably down to personal preference, but the simple fact is that it is up there with the best of all time. It would prove to be the defining wrestling game of that generation of consoles, with the PS2, Gamecube and Xbox quickly coming on the horizon.