What’s Your Fire Pro Story, captain howdy?
It was early 2002 and I was working night shift at a job, I would occasionally google pics of wrestlers or wrestling video game characters to send to my friend working night shift with me. I kept seeing pics from a 2-D sprite based wrestling game that I thought looked great. I was seeing wrestlers I had never seen in a game before and they all looked accurate. I was doing research and found out the pics were from a Japanese wrestling game called Fire Pro Wrestling, and there was a Game Boy Advance version in the US. I tried that on emulator and decided to take the next step, so after some research I ordered a Dreamcast, the 'game codes' disc to bypass region, and then ordered the Fire Pro game from Japan. I was also lucky enough to find and order the transfer device to be able to download other players edits and use them. I didn't participate as much in the website/community in those days and after a year or so of fun with the game and entertaining my friends, there wasn't much I could do with having to travel and carry all the equipment with me to houses to set up so we could play. I found the Fire Pro Club in early 2005 I believe, and there had been a new FP game released (FPR). There was also a board member creating a patch to display the game in english ('Iamjoe' I think was his name). This re-sparked my interest in Fire Pro and it was off to the races again, downloading member packs and this time trying to get in on the action by making the "rest of the rest" edit pack where I tried my hand at guys like Papa Shango, Adam Bomb and other lesser wrestlers that were not seeing the light of day by the quality edit makers on the site. With some constructive feedback I learned how to better make edits and made some great board friends, I would say the most generous being orogchigeese! goose was ever helpful in any way that was needed, and also friendly and what I would call one of the bright spots of the FP community. When the US version of FPR hit I started playing with it even more and discovered that by changing the flesh color gradients I could make the edits look like they were '16-bit' sprites, and that kicked off my '16-Bit Mania' tribute to old arcade and console wrestling games. So 10 years later I still stop in from time to time, and I still have my PS2 that's only used for FPR. The game does not get as much play as it used too but it's still going strong. I need to eventually find out how to transfer all of my cards to the PS3 before my PS2 croaks for good lol.
by captain howdy