I would like to introduce both of you to the wonders of Virtual Pro Wrestling and VPW2, Japan-only games using the same engine. VPW2 tops No Mercy IMO, if for nothing else than by the sheer breadth of the roster. It's just a shame that out of the box so many wrestlers needed so much tweaking to get around the lack of licensing. But the fact that it was possible to "fix" everyone was fantastic.
If you're familiar with the English versions, navigating the menus in Japanese isn't bad. The whole roster can be edited, and part of that is being able to change the names to romaji/English. I believe there's a patch available to take care of most if not all of that. Let me see if I saved the post where someone else told me about it.
Back in the day I did all of those edits by hand on the physical cart. I still have the cart... one day I'll boot it up again in the hope that the battery hasn't died.
Awesome. I appreciate that. I'll pray to the battery gods that your cart still has all your save data on it. Most of my carts are still good. A couple Gameboy carts no longer hold save data, but otherwise all good. Someday I am going to look into replacing those batteries.
Def Jam 2: Fight for NY was basically a wrestling game, but with rappers instead. Still had the same mechanics as those wrestling games where you couldn't only lock onto one enemy at a time, and cliches lead to wrestling moves. But everything was pretty well polished and the finishing moves were straight up insane violence.