WWE Archives » MiscRave

Practice French with WWE’s Maryse Mizanin Ouellet

04/06/201801/29/2021 Luigi Kawasaki

I can’t say I normally do a tribute article about a random celebrity I don’t really know and that didn’t make the WWE Top Diva list but in theme of Wrestlemania Weekend it seemed appropriate to dedicate today’s #FrenchFriday post to Maryse Mizanin Ouellet. Maryse performed on WWE and being a French Canadian constantly used her French in random skits and even her entrance theme featured a French song whose lyrics you’ll find below. So yeah, let’s use this Professional Wrestling athlete as a way to practice French through her random antics and finding out a bit more of her wrestling career.

Her gimmick seems to be that she will use French from time to time to communicate which causes comfusion and leads to entertaining skits. Here you can see a compilation of some of her backstage segments and other times she used French and trying to understand what she says can either be somewhat easy or extremely difficult depending on the segment as sometimes it’s meant to be somewhat understood using simple sentences and at other times it’s only meant to be confusing so she’ll try to speak quickly.

WCW vs NWO World Tour & WCW/NWO Revenge intros on the Nintendo 64

04/02/201701/11/2021 Luigi Kawasaki

Gaming Again

By the time the Nintendo 64 was on its way out EB Games / Gamestop or whatever it was called back then was putting a bunch of Nintendo 64 games on clearance. I was used to paying 50 to 60 dollars per game so when I was able to get games for a few bucks at most I got as many as I could. Many games that I wanted but found it hard to get the money or justify the cost like Jet Force Jemini and Hey You Pikachu were bought. But I also spent some money on a bunch of WCW games, by then I really wasn’t as much into wrestling anymore and I had never been a huge fan of WCW but they were the cheapest games there since they basically classified as annual sports games so I got them all.

I was surprised to find that two of them were exactly the same as the WWF games I used to love. I then found out that before they had the WWF license they made games with the WCW one. These games being released years before WWF No Mercy the gameplay is far from polished as the games eventually became, you can immediately see all the improvements the sequels made as they feel rough. Nevertheless it’s definitely the same gameplay that you loved even if it had yet to reach their best version. What really made them cool to play after playing the superior sequels was that you could finally play as the WCW roster without having to go to create a wrestler mode and make your WCW wrestlers on CAW in the WWF AKI games.

WWF Wrestlemania 2000 & WWF No Mercy intros on the Nintendo 64

04/01/201701/11/2021 Luigi Kawasaki

Let's get physical

When I became a wrestling fan as a kid one of the first things I wanted was a video game were I could play as my favorite wrestlers and beat up the heels who were against them. In those preview kiosks that Nintendo had in the 90s I was able to preview two different games; WWF Attitude and WWF Wrestlemania 2000 both for the Nintendo 64. I debated for days as to which one to get based on the videos and screen shots I had seen. I eventually decided to wait for Wrestlemanis 2000 and boy did I make the correct decision as the Acclaim game is not seen in a favorable way while AKI wrestling games are still highly regarded even today.

The gameplay was great and while many features that the Playstation version of the games that I really wanted were missing from the Nintendo 64 versions like the full titantrons and special gimmick matches like Hell in a Cell, I did not care. The storylines of the game instead of featuring a fun or creative one mostly botched up the main wrestling storyline of the year which I never liked that didn’t stop me from finishing story mode. The grappling system was just so much fun and even though you could cheat the AI by spamming the taunt button you can argue the AI cheated on the more difficult settings. It didnt matter the game was a lot of fun and I spent hours playing them. I’m not here to review a game however but I’ll talk about the introductions their WWE games had since they’re definitely memorable.

WWE Crush Hour on the original WWE Network

03/26/201701/08/2021 Luigi Kawasaki

Secret Movie

In 2003 THQ decided to release a vehicle combat game using the license of WWE on the PS2/X-Box/Gamecube. Why they would ever do that is a question that we may never know. This wasn’t during the attitude era when wrestling was a hot product for them to try to spin-off the license into other genres but at a time when even wrestling games themselves weren’t selling what they used to just a few years back. This was also released a few years after Twisted Metal Black which defined the genre for that generation of consoles.

None of this stopped them from releasing it and well it didn’t quite fare well in the reviews department but maybe it was just a pet project of the WWE, after all they do like to experiment with different things. While there isn’t much information on any of this, the amount of details in some things seem a little odd if it had just been a cheap cash-in, which it is but that’s beside the point.

What is Kaiju Big Battel?

03/19/201701/08/2021 Luigi Kawasaki

FVN News

Fox Mulder was right all along and now there are tons of giant monsters running around the world
that can create havoc around cities if left unchecked. Luckily we have an organization that can take care of this problem. Kaiju Big Battel gets the giant monsters in a wrestling ring to set their differences aside and avoid further destruction.

You won’t find a giant waffle wrestling in a ring and doing somersaults in the WWE but here any fan of giant monsters, Japanese culture and wrestling fans can enjoy the show. It’s not everywhere that you get to see a piece of a building being used as a steel chair to hit their opponents with, it really is something special and one of a kind.

A fun watch from time to time. To learn more about the history of Kaiju Big Battel see the video below.

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Remembering ECW on TNN

03/18/201701/08/2021 Luigi Kawasaki

Let's get physical

I discovered ECW Wrestling on TNN shortly after it started airing by pure chance and I was completely fascinated, unlike WCW which used to bore me to tears, here we had a show that actually offered something different and yet still entertaining even if the production was a much lower quality. You could tell that this was something unique that couldn’t be replicated and so I watched. A large part of it was indeed the intro which is legendary in its own right and any fan can easily recognize it as the ECW theme.

The intro just oozed of awesome as it felt dark, extreme, dirty and not your typical wrestling promotion. Even if it was indeed on a cable channel you felt like this was underground stuff. The music set up the mood perfectly as did the logo with barbed wire. It’s odd that the music is rather slow yet it feels really heavy and unlike say WWF intros which have quick cuts of action scenes here many of them were rather slow things and yet you could feel that they meant more as you actually felt the impact of the moves or events they tried to show off.

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Remembering WWF Raw is War 1999

03/11/201701/08/2021 Luigi Kawasaki

Video Classic

Last week I talked about WWF Smackdown!’s intro and general memories so I thought this week I’d do the same for WWF Raw is War.

I started watching Raw is War in 1999 and there was nothing like it and I was glued to it every Monday night. I remember that the show finished after my normal bedtime which was 10 but Raw always finished at odd times like 10:05 or 10:08 more or less and I used to feel like I was doing something bad by staying up so late. But I had to, How else would I know if a bloodied Stone Cold would get his revenge after they interfered in his WWF title match which just happened to have happened at exactly at 10:00. Those last few minutes were necessary to get a much needed conclusion to the events we’d just seen.