Another week goes by for this WCW ROM hack project.

After a lot of linear progress, I jumped around the roster a bit, starting on NJPW and NWA wrestlers. To offer a quick preview of the progress, I uploaded a YouTube Short highlighting several of the new designs.

I started off this week with one goal – Blue/Black/Yellow ring ropes. I didn’t want to field future comments of “why are the ropes insert color here“, so it was a number one priority for this ROM hack’s aesthetic.  After a few tests, I successful coding hacked in to give me the right colors across all instances – intro video, entrance, wrestling, championship. He’s a screenshot from an early Luger & Sting vs. Steiner Brothers demo match.

I was tempted to start faces and roster setup early, but kept plugging through the ring attires. As I have most of the WCW wrestlers complete (except some major challenges such as Rick Rude), I decided to work on the NJPW stable.

Muta received three attires. Due to color restraints, I was unable to add his 4-point star on the Attire 1’s wrist band, but feel that they are good enough.

I was a little bummed out about not being able to fit any text on Masahiro Chono’s tights. I tried JAPAN, but it would not fit. There were enough references to assure me that no text would be okay. As a consolation, I added an alt from his 1990 year.

Next was an attire for Fujinami (he didn’t wear many variations) and then Scott Norton. While he’s an expendable name in this specific era/roster, I thought it would be fun to have him manhandle Vader like those early NJPW days. Here’s a comparison.

Funks were next. Three attires for Terry – 1) From his iconic “I Quit” match with flair, 2) The classic blue/white stripe style, and 3) a trunks variant. Two for Dory, both trunks variants. And the final NWA legend this week was Ole Anderson so players can recreate the Minnesota Wrecking Crew and expand on early Horsemen matches.

The last attire this week was the most challenging of the entire project. So challenging, I was considering replacing his slot with Norman the Lunatic or Van Hammer. After some drawing, I was able to get two version of PN News. Working with 4 primary colors within 16 colors, plus shading… and proper connecting over a distorted fat model. I think it took all my AKI power to get it to look right. (Except the YO BABY Font… “Comic Sans” style wouldn’t work). Anyways, with some proper color changing, you can get some realistic variants.

Next week, I’m not sure where to go. I still have 7 default slots remaining, plus 6 that are being removed due to timelines. I want to populate the attires + faces before I start recoding the roster and animating moves, so I guess I’ll keep adding attires until I run out of space.

There are a lot of meetings next week and Christmas is coming on quickly, so updates might get smaller, but there will be continuous progress on this ROM hack. Thanks for tuning in.