#fpwarena

My modding & Fire Pro history. I've had more fun editing games than I've had fun actually playing them my whole life. When I was a kid, I loved Wrecking Crew, I loved Excitebike, I loved Baseball Stars... I loved Battle City which I had on a multi-cart. Why? Because I could make my own levels, and my own teams, and then play them. One peculiar exception to that was Pro Wrestling. Me and my brother played that game so much, and even as a child, the difference between Pro Wrestling, the WWF games and other non-licensed games was very evident, Pro Wrestling was so much better. My first distributed mod was renaming all the players in Ken Griffey Baseball for the SNES and lending out the cartridge to my friends. 1994-95. Griffey Baseball and Triple Play Baseball Gold Edition on Genesis were my modding fun for a long time. I bought Fire Pro Wrestling G from a shop that sold by mail that advertised in a magazine after I saw a review for it in the Import section. I don't remember the name of it, but I remember the page having a bright yellow background with black lettering, it was like a huge listing with prices. Loved it. Modded it for myself so much. I still have those files. In the late 90's / early 2000's, I started modding text sims. After doing the rosters for Promotion Wars, and helping it being more popular than the much inferior Extreme Warfare Deluxe, I showed what kind of whore I was and jumped sides and did the rosters for Extreme Warfare Revenge, the game ostensibly created to be a Promotion Wars killer. And that it did, killed it deader than the dodo. I was put in charge of keeping EWR updated for a couple years. While I was doing that, Fire Pro D came out and I imported it and the Japanese Dreamcast and released a very small pack starring Montreal wrestlers, including what must have been the very first Kevin Steen edit. It's now lost. Played it so much. Hated that controller. Then came the most awesome year of my life. 2004. I met my wife. Extreme Warfare went commercial and became Total Extreme Wrestling, so my work on it was now actual work. Created TEW's storyline & angles system. And Fire Pro R came out. Preordered it. Loved it. Did the Anthology. Won Modder Of The Year in 2004. Got into a fight with Adam Ryland over the direction of Wrestling Spirit. Left GDS in 2006. Kept the Anthology going until Agetec blessed us with the American port then I ported my save in 2007. Compiled a database of Fire Pro data which will be very useful in like 90 days. Made the Pro Wrestling Simulators Hall Of Fame in 2012. Started doing a 1994 mod, resonating my Griffey Baseball mod, for the MLB The Show series on Operation Sports in 2014. Was the most downloaded classic roster in 2015. I was thinking this was going to be my last mod before I retired and concentrated on my career as a college teacher. But no. I had to say goodbye to my friends on Operation Sports to be able to announce that... The RaveX Anthology will be coming out for Fire Pro World. 2017. I want to keep going until 2020 and then retire. I'll have been modding for 25 years, then. My hands are already a fucking wreck from typing and inputting so much stuff. One last hurrah as an old man trying to keep pace with the younger and better modders.

1997.  I stumbled upon Fire Pro S on the Internet and thought it was just too good to be true. My wrestling game at that time was WWF Raw for SNES with a roster of like 12 wrestlers.  The only match I really enjoyed was the Royal Rumble.   Then, I find a game that has better graphics and a roster of hundreds of wrestlers?  There weren't many things that I just *had* to have as a kid/teenager, but this was one of them.  I *had* to own this game. There were a few stumblingblocks, such as it being a Japanese import, and the fact that I didn't even own a Sega Saturn.  At 17 years old, I didn't have that kind of money laying around, but my parents saw how much I wanted it and decided to help me get it.  Picked up the last Sega Saturn at a Wal-Mart in Rolla, Missouri and ordered the conversion box and game online.   Finally, the game arrived and it was beyond anything I could have imagined in a wrestling game.  I became addicted to simming matches long before I realized that there were other people who enjoyed the same thing.  I kept track of all my match results and win/loss records in a notebook.   Back then you could only store 16 edits on the console, so I picked up formulas made by Mysterios Kagura from the pre-FPC Fire Pro community and had Owen Hart, Lex Luger, Nation of Domination, Sid and several others.   I'll never feel that way about a wrestling game again, not even Fire Pro, because I'm spoiled now.

I got SFPWXP in 1996. It was the summer between 8th and 9th grade. My go to wrestling game at this time was TNM, which, for the youngins, was a Qbasic (at that point), text-based, circuit simulator that might be the only wrestling game to have more lasting appeal than Fire Pro to me. I used SFPWXP to create wrestlers used in my circuit (it was the first non-text wrestling game with a create a wrestler that I ever played) and then sim my "big" cards because it was all nice and visual. Then I'd book the matches to end the same way at the same time in TNM to create the connection between the two. The only major Fire Pro game I haven't played is Six Man Scramble because I never owned a Saturn. I've sort of grown tired of Fire Pro as of late though. I just feel like I've done all there is to do.

1999, checking out Gamespot of all places one day, an editor their had done a mini preview on a upcoming Japanese wrestling game called Fire Pro Wrestling G. I don't think I had ever heard anybody gush over a non WWF wrestling game.... ever. Now as an aside, I had briefly heard of Fire Pro back in 1997 when my cousin had a copy of X Premium emulated on his laptop and completely hyped it as 'the' game every wrestling fan should have. He showed it to me and I was 'meh', bearing in mind WCW vs NWO World Tour had just come out and we had (for the time) an astounding 3d wrestling game. I was sort of done with the 2d age. Also, I didn't even know at the time wrestling in Japan was not only a thing, but also treated as a sport. So this gamespot editor seemed to be familiar with the Fire Pro series and hyped me on it with some key notes: Simulation gameplay, hundreds of wrestlers, a creation suite allowing dozens of wrestlers to be created with over 500 moves available, exploding ring death matches, and what really hyped me; current WWF and WCW rosters together in one game. HAD TO HAVE IT!!!! New it was only in Japanese so I made my very first foray over to a little place called Gamefaqs where I was told I would be able to find translations and a how to guide on how to get my PS system modded to play Japanese games. Bought a Game Wizard, which I still have and it amazingly still works to this day. I was terrified of modding my reasonably new PS console and a Game Wizard simply plugged into the systems I/O port. I remember ordering my copy from The Rage and had no credit card so I had to use a money order. I still remember getting a money order for $125 (I got the express shipping) and still remember the cashier looking at me kinda weird when I needed to have it made out to The Rage. When the game first arrived and I popped it in, I admit, I did not like it. Couldn't get the grappling down for the life of me, constantly had trouble navigating the menu's and really didn't understand the concept of building a match with small moves and working up to bigger moves. That idea was completely foreign to me coming from the world of WWF games. Eventually, something just clicked. I did the training dojo (tutorial mode) from the career mode in the game and I started being able to land strikes and win grapples. It got to the point where I would have the game running all day. When I wasn't actually playing, to stop for dinner breaks, I was simming matches which I found just as entertaining as playing. I had no interest in the Japanese rosters at the time. Had no idea who any of these people were and had never even seen a Japanese wrestling match. So I started simming random Japanese guys and when I saw someone with a moveset I kinda liked I would end up doing a net search on him. Discovered a lot of people had made music videos of Japanese wrestlers, I got into Japanese wrestling, first through all these music videos people had made. Ended up buying some VHS compilation tapes and I steadily veered away from the western wrestling. I totally became Mr. Fire Pro after that. All wrestling talk with friends turned to Japanese wrestling and all wrestling game discussion turned to Fire Pro Wrestling. I sold that game on a lot of people back then. When my cousin bought his copy, he also on a whim bought another game with it called AJPW: King's Soul. That game would sit on a shelf for years untouched until King of Colosseum Red came along. Now I thought Fire Pro Wrestling G would be it for me. Along came Fire Pro Wrestling D for the Dreamcast. Well I just couldn't justify buying an entirely new game system just for one game... or could I? But that's another story.

I bought FPW for the GBA and immediately returned it because I had no idea how it worked. Ten years later, I heard about how good FPWR was, and I would sim MMA matches.  I had no idea how to get save packs, so I never got too much into the game. Fast forward to when I discovered this community, and that the PS3 version was available.  I figured out how to do edit packs, and boom.  I have recent;y purchased FPW again, and I am learning how to use it.  Such a big fan of the mobile FP games.

I was late to the FPR hype.I bought FPR when I was in community college. I hadn't bought a wrestling game in years since I had stopped watching the WWE back in 2008. Svr 2007 was the last WWE game I would buy until WWE '13.I think I bought FPR in 2010 when I usually just watched CZW and BJW. I was interested in two things in FPR: the 500 character slots and BJW. I really wanted to play as BJW with Ryuji Ito, Yuko Miyamoto, and others. FPR opened me up to other Japanese promotions that I like to watch now like DDT, K-Dojo, and 666.

I was in high school when I first learned about the game. I had played the GBA ones here and there before but didn't get into it. I was going to a another website at the time when I saw a trailer for FPR. It caught my attention instantly. I saw death matches,match maker and the extensive edit modes. At the time I had started getting into Lucha Libre and Puro. Before that all I knew was WWE,WCW and ECW. To find a game with all the guys I was learning about on it. It made my day. About a month later I learned about FPC through a forum board. Ever since it's US release I've been playing it.

by  Kamen Ranger

My Fire Pro story started with the GBA games as well, back in 8th grade. It was one of those late summer Toys-R-Us gaming runs where all the good stuff was long gone. I bumped into Fire Pro Wrestling Advance in the "not good enough for the shelf" bin among stuff like Shrek, fishing, Olsen Twins, and other abominations. I initially thought it was a Tekken clone, fake Heihachi gracing the cover. Upon closer inspection it read "wrestling", which made me want to throw it down like it was covered in ants. Wrestling games on Nintendo handhelds had been notoriously bad up to that point (ECW Hardcore Revolution on Game Boy Color ). But this one wasn't by Acclaim or THQ, it wasn't WWF, ECW, or WCW, so at the very least it had to be different. I reluctantly gave FPWA a try. Got it home, died repeatedly trying to figure out the controls. But the paper-doll animation style and the logical match pacing grabbed my attention. I became fascinated with all the little systems at play during a match, and soon discovered that I had a degree of control over these systems via CPU Logic. Thus began the addiction. You'll always be one more tweak away from that perfect match. Fire Pro also piqued my interest in what would become my main hobbies. Looking for everyone's real name is how I discovered puroresu and shoot wrestling, of which I became a lifetime fan. The animation style got me interested in spriting and Flash. The thought processes involved with editing CPU Logic eventually got me into coding and game design (and a strange obsession with RNG). I'm still playing Fire Pro fifteen years, several consoles, and dozens of other games later. FPR has pretty much taken over my PS3. And Fire Pro Wrestling 2 has earned a permanent place in my pocket...

...and also my heart, there I said it.

by  Jon Justice