Video Description
Fear not the man who has made one thousand hacks once, but the man who has made the same hack one thousand times.
The time has come to formally announce the existence of the second of my WCW/nWo Revenge hacks: Virtual Pro Wrestling Salvo.
I am not sure where exactly to begin with this one, as there is a lot going on here. Firstly, this isn’t inherently meant to replace WCW/nWo REVENJI. A large part of that hack was the translation, and while some early versions of ideas that appear there also appear in Salvo, I think the two are quite clearly different. Secondly, and this is important: there is no theme to this hack. Everything I put in here is just stuff I wanted to see. Why is Ministry Taker in WCW in 1998? Why is Kane from late 2000 in WCW in 1998? All of it is personal preference.
Additionally, I would advise, when this gets released, to play this on console. Any hacks done on Revenge result in a slower framerate for matches with more than 3 people on screen.
Before I get into why I’ve decided to create this hack, perhaps an overview of what’s changed is in order:
- 8 new wrestlers now join the roster, with literally none of the original roster being lost in the process (including managers – even DRIVER is still in the intro). These are nWo Sting, Ric Flair, Stone Cold, HBK, Undertaker, Kane, Mitsuharu Misawa, and Vader. These come at the expense of the lost managers like Ted “Debisas”, as well as the ability to play as Disco Inferno and La Parka in the Cruiserweight championship mode. While I have no issues with their not being playable, as they’re well over the weight limit, you can still face them in that mode if you’re still craving their presence, you just can’t play as them there (you can still use them literally everywhere else).
- It’s not demonstrated in this video, but running specials are going to be a thing in this hack. The WWF people all use theirs from WWF No Mercy, so someone like Shawn Michaels will use a running neckbreaker for his front running special, for example. I will not be giving everyone their running grapples back as I would have to comb through literally every moveset, make changes, and then import them back. It’s not worth the time. However, if a wrestler did have a running grapple to begin with that was dummied out, e.g. Bret Hart or DDP, the final version of this hack will restore that functionality for those wrestlers only.
- EWF and DAW, as in REVENJI, are no more. Instead, EWF is AJPW, and DAW becomes the ‘freelancer’ stable. Everyone has been recostumed accordingly, and generally speaking, they keep the same colors as they did when they were their fictional selves (e.g. Kawada has a bunch of funny colors for P2, P3, and P4).
- I should have mentioned it earlier, but Wrath has been restored. In learning how to design movesets for this game, fixing his moveset became a very simple task, so now you get to enjoy him in all his glory, costume and all.
- Some characters have ‘alternates’ for P2 and P4. This means that people like Scott Norton and Bret Hart now only have one head, but, in turn, means that Jumbo Tsuruta shares a slot with Stan Hansen, Bruiser Brody, and Terry Gordy; Kobashi shares a slot with Akiyama; Glacier shares a slot with Hiroshi Hase; and Wrath shares a slot with Road Warrior Hawk. If the logic of the latter two doesn’t make sense to you, here’s a bit of trivia: everyone’s movesets from VPW64 exist in WCW/nWo World Tour, but are unfinished and inaccessible without hacking. The only exceptions to this are Hiroshi Hase and Wrath who, you guessed it, were replaced by Glacier and Wrath respectively.
- I identified a number of Move IDs that go unused and will employ some of them to bring back taunts and certain moves for the WWF folks. You can see the Stunner used in this video (Vader steals it).
- Extremely minor attire fixes, like Hogan’s foot no longer showing up with a green streak, Scott Hall having just elbow pads, Bret Hart having wrist tape and elbow pads, and maybe a few other adjustments I made to taste.
- Just a point of note: not every costume is a reference to something. Sometimes I just thought a costume looked funny and/or cool. Green Ranger Undertaker was one such example. Black mask Kane has never been a thing, but I wanted to give people the option of a Kane mask without restricting them to the red and black palette.
That about covers it. It is not my intention to fundamentally change Revenge. A lot of what I try to do with hacks like SUMMIT and La Fin Du Tour is restore things from the game that are buried that the layman wouldn’t have access to/know existed in the first place. Similarly, I want to showcase the latest in terms of what we can do as a community.
Lastly, this hack does not happen without freem or Melonbread. I take things a certain distance because of the foundation freem set, and I get to take it even further because Melonbread’s such a dope research partner.
Comments & Replies
This looks great! Having a WWF roster is a nice bonus. Im also looking forward to the newly added running grapples. If I had one little critique, it would be Sting and Bogus Sting having the exact same head and face but other than that this is too sweet! Can’t wait for the release.
I think that’s fair, but that being said, I’m going to leave it as I found it. nWo Sting is the final lost character to be discovered in Revenge, so I don’t want to change things about him after only just discovering he exists, unless it’s something like Wrath’s boston crab. Like Wrath, his head (polygon + textures), moveset, body type, and the scale/height of his model were still in the game, but unlike Wrath, his ID2 was removed, so there’s no name or any other kind of profile data. No costume either.
On a related note, I ran out of space in the description, but Wrath’s moveset is totally fixed for the first time (my previous attempt wasn’t exactly perfect). nWo Sting’s moveset, meanwhile, is perfectly fine, and happens to be different from regular Sting’s. The way to look at nWo Sting is probably less as nWo Sting and more ‘97 Sting, as his params select members from both nWo as rivals (as in, prior to the Wolfpac existing), and his moveset is based off Sting’s World Tour moveset.
Wow! I knew Flair and Wrath were removed but I never heard that the fake Sting was going to be apart of this game! Was he just leftovers from World Tour you think? Or do you think he was scheduled to be included but was cut?
To be fair, I only found this out two weeks ago, but never really made a mention of it outside of one of the hacking Discords I’m in, mostly because I don’t think discovering nWo Sting was going to set the world alight, haha.
In World Tour, nWo Sting isn’t much more than a Sting clone. He has a different ID4, different costume and head data, but he has the exact same parameter definition, which means that as far as the game is concerned, he has the same brain and moves as Sting does. In other words, he has no params or moveset of his own in the World Tour filetable, so if you were to replace Sting’s moves for example, you’d replace his too.
The fact that he has his own params and moveset in Revenge seem to suggest that he was going to be his own person properly this time, but was subsequently cut at a point in time where he and Sting still had the same params and moves (different files, but probably the same data given his rivals are still the nWo).
Was there anything on Warrior, found anywhere in the files? Nice work.
Nope. No evidence whatsoever to suggest he was ever going to be in the game. What follows is a long explanation, but if you’re interested, read on…
freem was the first to actually identify all the unused ID4s, but the story they tell supports my conclusion: there are 7 unused ID4s for the “WCW” section, 2 unused ID4s for the “nWo” section (which is structured as the nWo was pre-Wolfpac), and then another ID4 for the “Blood Runs Cold” section that sits between the Cruiserweights and the Flock. For the WCW folks, only ID “0006” sits in the area with ‘main eventers’, with Sting, Giant Lex Luger, and Rick Steiner coming before it, and Roddy Piper following it. You could argue that this would have been for the Warrior, but in World Tour, Rick Steiner’s ID4 came before Ric Flair’s, which was “0106”. The “00” in Revenge and corresponds to the “01” in World Tour (both are for WCW), so it’s almost certainly Flair’s old ID4 before he was removed from the game. In Salvo, I didn’t just trade Flair for the “Manager” version of Eric Bischoff, but I also physically gave Flair his ID4 back, which no one else would have noticed, but it’s a source of great joy for me to know he’s back in his proper slot.
Awesome share. Any idea on how to fix the frame rate issue ? I think it is fixed in WWF NO MERCY by Retro Randy Price with his NO Mercy Plus rom hack. I wonder if you can take a look at it.
I’m not entirely sure. Revenge is kind of funny in that the second I changed something in the ROM, it immediately reacted with the framerate issue. I had previously assumed it was because of the way I created REVENJI, which was a lot more ‘brute force’, but no, turns out the game just doesn’t like when you modify things in it. As for Randy, he’s doing his own thing and is super busy on not only NM+, but Backlash and other tools that are pushing No Mercy beyond its limits. If he chooses to look into Revenge someday, that’d be great, but I don’t think it’s on his radar.