WWE WrestleMania: Steel Cage Challenge (Plug & Play)

WWE WrestleMania: Steel Cage Challenge
Based on: WWF WrestleMania: Steel Cage Challenge Developers: Sculptured Software, Throwback Entertainment Publisher: MSI Entertainment Platforms: Unlicensed NES, VT09, Plug & Play Released internationally: 2018 This game has unused playable characters. This game has unused code. This game has revisional differences.

WWE WrestleMania: Steel Cage Challenge is what happens when your hardware budget leads you to make a new release by taking an ancient NES game and literally hacking the "F" out of it.

Changes

As well as changing all WWF logos to resemble the "Old School" WWE logo used in branding for vintage-themed merch, both Hulk Hogan and The Mountie were removed, and were replaced with The Ultimate Warrior and Razor Ramon respectively.

Hulk's removal is a combination of not wanting the licensing issues regarding "Hulk" and Marvel, as well as him being on the outs with the WWE at the time. The Mountie's removal appears to be because of an agreement between the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the WWF/E not to use the Mountie character in Canada as it was considered defamatory to actual mounties. In both cases, the character portraits are redone (with Warrior’s actually coming from his wrestler select portrait in WWF WrestleMania Challenge), but the actual sprites are just palette swaps.

As well as the changes from the original NES cartridge, there are two known revisions of the plug & play. Unless otherwise specified, any changes here are common to both revisions.

• Revision 1 has a 2017 copyright date, and a code of 092018 on the box (Randy Savage is wearing purple on the box). This contains a 2MB ROM, with the unused 1MB containing a copy of the MSI Ms. Pac-Man. This does not include theme music for the new characters, instead playing the matchup music or random notes.
• Revision 2 has a 2018 copyright date, and a code of 082018 on the box (Randy Savage is wearing green on the box). This contains a 1MB ROM and has the theme music for the new characters. However, there are a number of changes to in-game text that cause corruption to the graphics at times.

Two-player mode is disabled by dummying out the Player vs. Player and Player vs. CPU selection menu and jumping straight to the mode select.

Like the other MSI Entertainment Plug & Plays, a basic controller test exists playing Nice Code music, accessed by holding A + B while turning a console on. This works on both revisions.

Finally, as the Plug & Play unit omits the NES' Select button, there's now no way for the player to gain a "Second Wind" (regaining your entire health back) even though the AI opponents still can.

Copyright

In all revisions, all references to TitanSports, LJN, and Sculptured Software are removed, replaced with WWE Inc. and Throwback Entertainment (the current Acclaim IP holders). However, references to the original Sculptured team and LJN are intact in the end credits.

NES	Revision 1	Revision 2

Announcer Text

Steel Cage Challenge uses the same ASCII text to tilemap routine as much of Sculptured's other NES output. This makes it easy to alter the text as necessary., and as such several redrafts were done over the release schedule.

The table below contains the raw data from the ROM - "&" indicates a new line character, while "$" indicates the end of the entry. Only announcer strings where at least one change has been made between revisions are shown.

Note the strange linefeeds and whitespace in Revision 2 to try to reduce string lengths and add scare quotes to nicknames, causing visible corruption in-game as the spaces are drawn outside of the speech bubbles on occasion.

There is one definitive improvement over the original NES version - the typo of Glasgow as "Glascow" for Roddy Piper is fixed in all revisions.

NES	Revision 1	Revision 2
FROM VENICE BEACH,&CALIFORNIA, WEIGHING&303 POUNDS, THE&IMMORTAL HULK HOGAN! $	FROM PARTS UNKNOWN,&WEIGHING IN AT&280 POUNDS, &THE ULTIMATE WARRIOR!& $	FROM PARTS UNKNOWN,&WEIGHING IN AT&280 POUNDS, &ULTIMATE WARRIOR! & $
FROM DEATH VALLEY,&WEIGHING 328 POUNDS,&THE UNDERTAKER! $	FROM DEATH VALLEY,&WEIGHING 328 POUNDS,&THE UNDERTAKER! $	FROM DEATH VALLEY,&WEIGHING 328 POUNDS,&UNDERTAKER! $
WEIGHING 260 POUNDS,&THE MILLION DOLLAR MAN&TED DIBIASE! $	WEIGHING 260 POUNDS,&THE MILLION DOLLAR MAN&TED DIBIASE! $	WEIGHING 260 POUNDS,&'MILLION DOLLAR MAN' &TED DIBIASE!$
FROM SARASOTA, FLORIDA,&WEIGHING 245 POUNDS,&MACHO MAN RANDY SAVAGE! $	FROM SARASOTA, FLORIDA,&WEIGHING 245 POUNDS,&MACHO MAN RANDY SAVAGE! $	FROM SARASOTA, FLORIDA,&WEIGHING 245 POUNDS,&'MACHO MAN'RANDY SAVAGE$
FROM GLASCOW, SCOTLAND,&WEIGHING 234 POUNDS,&ROWDY RODDY PIPER! $	FROM GLASGOW, SCOTLAND,&WEIGHING 234 POUNDS,&ROWDY RODDY PIPER! $	FROM GLASGOW, SCOTLAND,&WEIGHING 234 POUNDS,&'ROWDY'RODDY PIPER$

Character Names

The Ultimate Warrior, The Undertaker, and The Million Dollar Man Ted Dibiase all had the "The" removed from their names in Revision 2 for spacing reasons. In addition, all nicknames are placed in quotes with spacing adjusted to fit.

This introduces a bug: when Randy Savage wins, the $ character (for end of entry) is used by mistake, resulting in his name being cut off early.

Revision 1	Revision 2
THE ULTIMATE WARRIOR! $	ULTIMATE WARRIOR! $
THE UNDERTAKER! $	UNDERTAKER! $
THE MILLION DOLLAR MAN&TED DIBIASE!$	'MILLION DOLLAR MAN' &TED DIBIASE!$
MACHO MAN RANDY SAVAGE!$	'MACHO MAN'RANDY$SAVAGE!$
ROWDY RODDY PIPER!$	'ROWDY'RODDY PIPER$

Unused Character

"Yourself" remains in-game, but with Ultimate Warrior's portrait and (corrupted) bio, as Warrior is a direct replacement for Hogan's slot.