It's new to me: Wrecking Crew '98

This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

In 1984, Nintendo released VS. Wrecking Crew for, as you might have already surmised, their arcade VS System. It was designed with two players in mind, a little less puzzle-based and with more competitive angles thrown in than its Famicom and NES successor, Wrecking Crew, which would release on both platforms in 1985 as a single-player game, a launch title for the latter. One of what would eventually be the 30 black box games, which were made up of existing Famicom titles and arcade conversions that helped boost the number of NES games available at launch and beyond.

Wrecking Crew hasn’t necessarily been lost to time, but it rarely gets much attention from Nintendo these days. It’s been on all three versions of their Virtual Console services, sure, and was given as a free download to “Nintendo 3DS Ambassadors,” aka some early adopters of the handheld, but it was never the kind of success that, say, Donkey Kong was, so it’s been mostly relegated to the occasional nod to the company’s past. There’s a Wrecking Crew stage in Super Smash Bros. Wii U and its Switch successor, Ultimate, and Mario’s rival from the game, Spike, was part of the real-world portion of 2023’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie. As for sequels or revisiting the actual game beyond this kind of surface level stuff, though, Wrecking Crew has lived almost entirely in the mid-80s where it originated.

There’s one major exception, however, but it was a Japanese exclusive for over two decades. Wrecking Crew ‘98 is a sequel that once again shifts the gameplay a bit, leaning even harder into the action puzzle elements to account for the kind of puzzle experiences that were created in video games between 1985 and this game’s development, but marrying them to the competitive spirit of the original VS. release. In that way, it shares something, at least philosophically, with the fantastic Donkey Kong ‘94. That game began looking like you were playing a Game Boy port of the original Donkey Kong, before quickly expanding into something else entirely: something bigger, something grander, something flat-out better, that expanded the idea of what Donkey Kong even was or could be, utilizing the expansion of platformers in both scope and complexity in the decade-plus after Donkey Kong first arrived.

Wrecking Crew ‘98 does something similar in comparison to its own origin point, except here, it’s by integrating the action puzzle elements of the original with the rise of the match three, falling block-style puzzle game that had absolutely dominated the scene in the years since Wrecking Crew first released nearly a decade-and-a-half prior. Maybe not coincidentally, the developer Pax Softnica worked on both Donkey Kong ‘94 and Wrecking Crew ‘98, alongside Nintendo EAD and R&D1, respectively.

Whereas Wrecking Crew on the NES was about trying to destroy everything you could destroy before you collided with the enemies that were chasing you around the stage, Wrecking Crew ‘98 is a competitive 1v1 experience that also incorporates that kind of gameplay into its story mode. Wrecking Crew featured 100 stages of block-breaking goodness and increasing difficulty and complexity: Wrecking Crew ‘98 was not designed with the same kind of arcade-minded audience used to that sort of thing, and instead was built with those who played the various Tetris games, Puyo Puyo, Columns, and so on, and their expectations, considered. In the game’s single-player story mode, you face off against various cronies of Bowser’s, some of whom are his usual allies like a Koopa Troopa, and other times are just the same kind of foes Mario faced down in Wrecking Crew 13-14 years earlier, now under Bowser’s employ. The reasoning? All of their building is blocking out the sun, harming the plants, and it’s having a real effect on Mario considering the plants in this world have faces and facial expressions. Defeat Bowser’s workers in an action puzzle showdown, and move on to the next, until you make your way to the big dude and his very breakable castle.

Wrecking Crew had very strict rules about movement. If you fell off of a platform, that’s fine, but you couldn’t fall and then float left or right: you would fall straight down, and various puzzle solutions were based around you working around that limitation. Wrecking Crew ‘98 disposed of that, making movement much more fluid and freeform: you’re still limited in terms of what Mario can do, but you can jump and then redirect yourself, you can fall and float in a direction as you descend, and you can slam bricks with your hammer in mid-air. Which all means that it feels much more dynamic than its predecessor, in ways that you can use to stave off defeat with some well-timed jumps and well-placed hammer blows.

It also gives Wrecking Crew ‘98 a wildly different feel than the games it’s borrowing from: Tetris, Puyo Puyo, whatever, doesn’t matter, none of those puzzlers have you able to literally bounce around the play area like this, able to manipulate pieces at will. The synthesis of everything Wrecking Crew had been before this game with the most popular form of puzzle game that arrived afterward made for something unique from either of its inspirations. That it released in 1998, when Nintendo of America was already deep into the next-gen N64, explains why it never came to the SNES and remained in Japan on the Super Famicom, but everything after that is a complete mystery. Wrecking Crew ‘98 deserved a larger audience than it got, but it took until it was added to the Nintendo Switch Online service for it to get that audience, which, in all likelihood, is not actually going to bother playing it when better-known titles are sitting on that service. At least weirdos like myself who had plans to emulate Wrecking Crew ‘98 before its stateside arrival were excited about it showing up, I guess.

So here’s the basic premise: you’re trying to keep blocks falling from the sky from piling up to the point of reaching the top of your screen. You do this by breaking individual blocks, by creating matches of three of the same color block and up, and by hitting bombs with your hammer that then explode and take out other surrounding blocks. A match of three is good for you, but a match of four or more is, in addition to being good for you, bad for your opponent, who is also attempting to keep the blocks from piling so high that they lose. You can wipe out the colored blocks and make them anonymous gray ones again with certain matches and combos, you can summon annoying foes that’ll get in the way and hamper progress, you can send over steel blocks that can only be destroyed by explosives instead of hammers: you can be extremely aggravating to your opponent, if you can manage to score larger matches and combos, and you’ll need to be if you plan on surviving any of the story mode beyond the first couple of match-ups.

Instead of specific ladders (that were sometimes destructible) to climb up like in Wrecking Crew, in ‘98, you’ve got the ability to climb up so long as there’s something to grab onto. The bigger problem is having somewhere to stand after in order to deliver a hammer blow or to jump off of. You always have the ability to, on the left side of the screen, climb a series of switch blocks, which let you move rows from the left to the right, a la Yoshi’s Cookie, in order to better position your blocks to make matches, or just let them fall through gaps to lower the height of your columns. Unlike Yoshi’s Cookie, though, this is just horizontal, not also vertical, movement. Watch the above video to see a little bit of how it all works in action: matches of varying sizes, jumping, jump smashes, climbing, shifting pieces, attacks on your opponent.

There are colored blocks, which take one smash to break, but you’re going to want to try to match these up with others of the same color in order to clear larger spaces at once, while also giving yourself a chance to attack your foe. Gray blocks take two hits to break, the first of which reveals what color block is underneath that surface, converting it into that kind of block. The black steel blocks, as mentioned, require a bomb block to remove. On that subject: One thing that you’ll notice while playing is that there aren’t always enough blocks of the kind you need, or in general, especially if you’ve been playing well and mass-clearing blocks. By pressing the X button, you can deliver an airdrop of blocks to your side of the screen. Why would you want to do this, though, when your goal is to keep blocks from building up? For the same reason you sometimes want to add rows from underneath in Puzzle League: because that’s what’s needed to actually have the pieces you need to make the matches that attack your opponent, or, often even more importantly, allow you to rescue yourself from blocks that otherwise you won’t be able to remove. The bomb blocks only show up mid-stage if you press X, and not every time, either, which means you need to work to have the space to be able to take that risk and hope a bomb shows up.

Wrecking Crew ‘98 first released on the Super Famicom on January 1, 1998, as part of the Nintendo Power download service. If you’re unfamiliar, this was a program for Super Famicom and Game Boy titles that allowed players to purchase a download of a game’s ROM onto a rewritable cartridge, at a discount compared to what a brand new cart would have cost to buy at retail. It was an offshoot of how Satellaview games worked, offered during a time when the Super Famicom was no longer the focal point for Nintendo with the N64 its current-gen system, but served as a way for those who still had a SFC to continue to buy new games for it.

Some of these titles would end up making it to retail on a pre-written cartridge, as well — Wrecking Crew ‘98 was one of them, in fact — but that would come later. The non-Nintendo Power version of ‘98, for instance, released in late-May, five months after it was first available to download. Fire Emblem: Thracia 776, was another late-life Super Famicom title to get this treatment, first releasing via Nintendo Power in September of 1999, then in a more standard format January of the next year: yes, that close to the end of the N64’s lifecycle, new first-party Super Famicom games were still coming out.

Wrecking Crew ‘98 would then show up on the Wii, Wii U, and 3DS Virtual Consoles, but only in Japan. It wasn’t until it released on Nintendo Switch Online earlier in 2024 that it finally showed up outside that one region. It’s not too late for you to experience it, at least, so long as you have the basic NSO subscription and a Switch. It’s absolutely worth your time, and while the menus and story dialogue remain untranslated, you don’t actually need them to experience what Wrecking Crew ‘98 does best, which is some frantic, challenging action puzzle gameplay, whether experienced solo or against a friend.

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