Saturday Night Slam Masters (SNES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete

A playthough of Capcom's 1994 wrestling game for the Super NES, Saturday Night Slam Masters.

This video shows two complete plays of the game (including title defense rounds):

1:47 "Single Match" (one-on-one) mode played through as The Great Oni on the 8-star difficulty level.

36:35 "'Team' Battle Royale" (two-on-two) mode played through as Mike Haggar with The Scorpion as the CPU-controller partner on the 6-star difficulty level.

The best ending is shown, which of course includes the hilarious Game Over song with all of the funky voice samples.

Saturday Night Slam Masters, or Muscle Bomber: The Body Explosion as it was called in Japan (so much more dramatic of a name!), was a wrestling game that had way more bombast than just about any other wrestling game before it, including the excellent WWF Super Stars game released by Technos a few years earlier.

I played a ton of the SNES version of Slam Masters as a kid, and it was an excellent conversion - it was easily the least compromised adaptation on the home platforms, though the Genesis and FM Towns versions were also well made.

I loved that the home game included the Battle Royale mode - there are few multiplayer experiences as intense on the SNES game as when four friends get together with a multitap and hash it out, Slam Masters style.

All of the characters from the arcade are faithfully represented, including everyone's favorite pro-wrestling mayor from Metro City (even his daughter, Jessica , gets a cameo!), and the move to the SNES does little to blunt Tetsuo Hara's awesome character designs: unlike the arcade version, his actual artwork is used in the game on the console ports. For those of you who don't know, he was the artist behind the Fist of the North Star manga.

The graphics are excellent here - I actually prefer them over the graphics in the Street Fighter II games - and the large character sprites move fluidly across the screen, even in Battle Royale mode. It's quite impressive that they pulled that off without any slowdown, though I suspect that is largely due to with how heavily pillarboxed the playing field is: between them, the black bars that occupy the top and the bottom of the screen consume about a quarter of the screen's vertical resolution.

Note: Everything in this video is presented in its original aspect ratio. The fight scenes appear to be so wide because I cropped the black bars from the original 4:3 image and scaled it to fit the height of the video frame. The proportions are accurate (which is why it doesn't quite stretch to the sides of the screen), and I thought that this bit of editing made for a more enjoyable show without compromising the fidelity with which I'm attempting to represent the source material. I hope you agree.

The gameplay is on par with the coin-op original, too, and probably equals the SF2 ports in how well the arcade game is reproduced. All of the moves, grapples, and random flourishes are intact and just as effective as ever.

The graphics and gameplay, paired with the heavily reverbed rock beats and the stiff but fair challenge made Saturday Night Slam Masters quite a following back in the early 90s, and it's still more than different enough from just about any other game out there to make it worth playing now. This easily trounces any of the WWF-branded efforts from the 16-bit era, and it really was a prime example of what made Capcom such a superstar developer in their prime.

If you'd like to see my playthroughs of the other versions, you can find them here:

Arcade version:
   • Saturday Night Slam Masters (Arcade) ...  

Genesis version:
   • Saturday Night Slam Masters (Genesis)...  

Sorry if you're looking for the FM Towns' port. I havent recorded that one.

*This is a brand new playthrough to replace my original SNES recording from 2014. This one is now a proper 720p60, and unlike my original upload, this also features both game modes.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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