MDickie

MDickie been around making games for a long time. If you've been on YouTube over the years, you may have seen Cr1t1kal's video on "The You Testament" or maybe Vargskeleton aka Joel's little series about "Hard Times." Hell, you may have seen Dan and Alex here go over Wrestling Revolution 3D. In each of these videos, you see the coin flip chaos in MDickie's systems, the combat and what each game does right, wrong, an/or very wrong, and the sheer madness that can unfold. Its good for people like me who appreciate jank and making you're own fun along the way. As the title suggest, I've made a lot of fun for myself with this title and I do think it's a shame people are over looking it. I say that, but I understand why. MDickie is a bit bitter his games been ignored by mainstream (whatever the fuck that means) game sites ignore his title despite reaching millions of downloads when he port his games on to Android. As someone whose also made things that most places wouldn't fart in the direction of, I understand wanting to say "Fuck the critics." It's a great rallying cry for your fanbase.

As the name suggestion, this is a wrestling game. You can start a new career or pick up an ongoing career. You wrestle and earn titles. You can sign contracts. You meet other wrestlers and form friendships or rivalries. This all sounds basic because it is. "Training, exhibition, and career are the only options you have in the game. What MDickie does right is focus on his strengths and two of them are customization and move sets. Both of these are ridiculous in choices and are a blast to fuck around with. Wanna make all your moves German Suplex Releases? Go for it! Your submission matches maybe a bit harder to finish now but at least you can throw people out of the ring no matter what position your at. I'm no wrestling expert but theres a ton of moves to create the wrestler of your N64 dreams.

My personal way to play this game is to go into the editor and change a lot of them up. Did you know wrestling has a lot of old, white dudes? Me neither, so I went in and made a lot of them tall, short, red, blue, brightest white, blackest black, and purple for good measure. I also added more women into the mix cus seriously, most of these women divisions pass the belt to the same two women in the league. That's the beauty of this game. You can fuck with it however you want and there's reset options to restore everything back to the normal roster if you want a clean slate again.

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Since what feels like forever, we have been talking about separating the art from the artist. I won't get into the nitty gritty of it all, but I've always been of the mind that "the artist is in the art." To simply remove them just so you can enjoy a piece of work guilt free feels wrong. I think you have to look at the whole situation and ask yourself how did it affect the art and go from there. Everyone is different thus we will all have different boundaries.

Why do I bring this up? Because it would feel wrong not to bring up some of Wrestling Empire's worrying elements. To start, here's this screen cap:

I'm less concern about my fake wrestler getting called out and more worried about that wording. People who came out in the #metoo movement weren't suddenly remembering these things, MDickie. These were people living with these pains for years and ashamed, embarrassed, and afraid to share. Terry Cruise is a prime example of this. He showed us that even people we would consider untouchable are very much vulnerable. When he came out with it, he got a lot of praise and support but still there were people who still looked down and publicly shamed him like 50 Cent and whatever that one shitty day time talk show host is to their millions of fans.

The language I see in some of these other slides also paint him in less flattering light depending on where you sit. He takes jabs at liberals and uses terms like "thought police" and such, things that I only see a certain group use. I won't get into that, but it just paints an ugly picture of MDickie to me. At best, I think he maybe worded the #metoo slide bad and the jabs go both ways. The only time an "Union Event" fails is if you let it fail. I'm sure people who hates unions email him everyday about this. You get negative reactions if you choose "the red one" option during the interview sections. The point is, when you enter this particular field of commentary, you're not gonna make everyone happy and hey, thats ok! If that's your vision, sure fucking go for it. Just don't cry when people bring up points or problems with said commentary. As artist, we should

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Where does that leave us? I got that #metoo slide around the 100th hour of my playthrough and it honestly through all momentum out of the window. It was the straw that broke the top rope for me after seeing headline after headline of "wrong opinions" and "cancel culture" such for hours. It made me go "Ok, this is harmless" to "Wow, thats fucking shitty." Again, maybe he just worded it wrong and doesn't think people are suddenly remembering "Oh, yeah that one time I was abused or something." But everything else around it does paint it like that to which I say is a fucking shame. MDickie has made a great wrestling game that should fill the niche for us who aren't into Fire Pro and think the WWE games have always been trash.

MDickie has yet again put out a game that is proudly MDickie in and out and to remove him from the art is honestly sacrilege. MDickie opinions and thoughts are very well in this game and you have to come to a point where you ask yourself is it ok to keep interacting with the art. At around 105 hours in, I think I decided to retire from the squared circle.