Fire Pro's journey through Early Access continues with new update
Mods, MP3's and S-1, oh my!
Given the writer's predilection for Fire Pro Wrestling World, it should come as no surprise to learn that Retronauts will be giving you as much Fire Pro news as possible throughout its journey to full release. Just yesterday, Spike released a pretty well-sized update to the PC wrestling game including two features that fans have been clamouring for -- the ability to give edited wrestlers custom MP3's for their entrance music, and a brand new match type: S-1 rules.
S-1 is a match type that's made for strikers; there's no running allowed, no pinfalls and no submissions -- just nothing but hard hits. Essentially a recreation of the rules for the Japanese fighting promotion K-1, S-1 matches are hard hitting and often over quickly as martial artists who favour strikes get big damage bonuses, and CRITICAL!'s are common. It's certainly fun to mess around with if you want to stick Semmy Schilt against Jerome Le Banner, or have a better time with your Bruce Lee edit than you normally would in the regular Gruesome cage.
That's all well and good, but the addition of custom MP3's is a big deal, and something that people have been seriously jonesing for since the game's release -- it's a future that used to be enjoyed in WWE's Smackdown vs Raw games until it was taken out, but now it's back here and all of your real-life wrestlers can come out to their proper theme songs! There is one small catch, mind you; first off, obviously wrestlers you download can't just have a copy of their theme song chucked in too -- something to do with the vaguaries of copyright, I believe -- and in order to add a song to a wrestler you're going to have to essentially make a duplicate of that wrestler, add the MP3 in, then stick them in your team...naturally this is kind of a pain if you're me and you've got 500 grapplers or so kicking around, although it's to be expected as custom music is a grey area and it's good that it's here at all, in all honesty.
However, there is a solution to all of that rigmarole, and it lies in FPW's modding community -- you can download Carlzilla's Mod Suite, which already features the option to add theme music onto downloaded wrestlers, along with plenty of other features -- more blood stains in the ring, more match options, regenerating light tubes, all sorts! That's not the only mod out there too -- another favourite of mine is FirePromotion, which allows you to easily set up a show for a promotion, lay out all of the matches, and handily saves all the results for you. These mods and more are all available on the FPWArena, and Spike Chunsoft have no issues with modders doing their thing.
There is still a ways to go with this game; the UI undoubtedly needs a hell of a lot of work, it still takes far too long to go through a promotion's worth of wrestlers, and there's still lots to be done with the gameplay itself as well as meeting the demands of the people. While it seems as though highly requested additions such as the Ladder match might not be possible due to the way that the game's engine works, the team are looking at including a proper timed Battle Royal mode, a la the Royal Rumble and presumably with a maximum of eight wrestlers in the ring at any one time. There is still no set date for the game to come out on Early Access, but director Tomoyuki Matsumoto has said that the absolute latest they can stay there is Next Spring, so presumably it will be sometime around then and a PS4 version will follow shortly thereafter. In any case, for a somewhat intoxicated Chet Chetterfield, this is Kim Catamaran saying goodbye from the latest installment of Fire Pro Regional Wrestling. See you next update!
