The Blue Meanie Coming to Ultra Pro Wrestling as a DLC Character - Hardcore Gamer

hardcoregamer.com:

The Blue Meanie is officially coming to Ultra Pro Wrestling as a Free Agent DLC character. During the livestream Q&A, it was revealed that Brian Heffron’s legendary ECW and WWF character will be coming to video game form once again. He was featured in an Aki engine game with WWF WrestleMania 2000 in 1999 and was recently featured in RetroMania Wrestling, which itself was meant as a successor to Wrestlefest while UPW is aiming to be a successor to Aki engine games.

Meanie’s comedy-centric style worked surprisingly well for the Aki games since it had so many different taunting options from the ground, corner, and a variety done while standing – and because his were so elaborate, he was a riot to use in a match like a battle royal and build up momentum to then get a special and moonsault onto enemies quickly to take them out. He’s one of the few people from the original ECW still active at all and was recently in an MLW Battle Riot (basically a Royal Rumble) and was great in that just working the crowd and doing comedy.

He hasn’t been featured in a lot of games officially, but with his more limited moveset and reliance on comedy and body language, he has been easy to make in a lot of games. As long as there’s wacky dancing and a moonsault, you can come pretty close to getting a decent version of him in a game even if it feels a bit odd to not have his expressive facial expressions and mannerisms in full. It will be nice to have him back in a game with a more fully-realized moveset for things like taunting and the music between the notes, because RetroMania Wrestling did a great job with him, but was hurt by a lack of variety for the taunting and dancing for him.

Meanie joins fellow ECW alumni Chris Candido and WWF/WCW star