Tyler Durden once pondered how much a person can really know about himself without having been in a fight. Well, if you’re a gamer, this is a great time for self-discovery by way of getting a fist stuck in your nose. There’s a new UFC game (finally) that accurately recreates all the punching, kicking, grounding, pounding and grappling of the real sport. If the appeal of reaching out and touching your favorite ultimate fighter isn’t for you, then Nintendo’s got a revamp of the old Punch-out games, giving players the opportunity to fist-fight abnormally large men in the only league where the performers can refuse urine samples. Both games are looking to the future challenge of UFC’s natural Pay-Per-View rival and Punch-out’s laws-of-reality rival, the realistic boxing of Fight Night 4. And finally, if punches seem like a too-believable method of combat and you long for a fight league where the top boxer and Muai Thai practitioner must competitively fight with a Japanese schoolgirl, then the Street Fighter 4 community will probably outlast all of the above by several decades.
Now, until I can manage the funds and bravado necessary to make the leap into buying the new Punch-out!!!, lets boot up the Virtual Console and take a look at some big-bodied boxing history.
One can’t call Punch-out!!!-Featuring Mr. Dream a fighting game, unless you define fighting games to be “anything pitting one live creature against another”, but doing so transforms Bubble Bobble into a fighting game. You play as, and only as, Little Mac, and are thus pitted against a succession of boss battles. It’s like the game is a 20 year precursor to Shadow of the Colossus, giving Punch-Out!! instant artistic merit. Your control options are limited to “punch, punch higher, duck that guy’s punch, mash buttons to get up” on your way to the top of three separate fight circuits. Little Mac can best be described as a combination of Rocky Balboa and twigs. Meanwhile, trainer Doc Louis sits somewhere between Bernie Mac and a cheap shill, giving Mac the terrible pre-fight strategy of joining the Nintendo Fun Club.
Meanwhile, his opponents are a variety of massive ethnic stereotypes gone hilariously wrong. There’s the Japanese big-eyebrowed fighter vowing to give you a TKO from Tokyo, the egotistical Spanish dancer and the censored Soda Popinski; originally the evil Russian Vodka Drunkiski, his more family-friendly version as a coca-cola-fiend may be even more high-larious. The promotion, the WVBA, could only exist in Japan for these giant muscle-bound speedo-freaks and obese woolly mammoth characters to be pitted against the 170-lb LITTLE Mac with no fear of drug testing. But the game manages to get so much out of the NES’s feeble, unroided hardware, making each character a memorable personality that would fit in perfectly with any Southern wrestling show.
Reflexes and pattern memorization are the keys to unlocking knockouts from the chins of your adversaries. You have to study the visual cues of your opponents, evade their strikes with the right timing and respond with your little green fist of fury. In addition to knowing when not to be in a left hook’s path of movement, you can experiment to find the precise moments in which smacking the enemy will earn you a star that can be used for a super uppercut; these are harder to land but inflict more damage and have a better chance of concussing your enemy and making the IOC pay closer attention to Japan.
I bear little issue with having to repeat the same battle repeatedly on the precipice that I’ll come closer and closer to victory through studying the enemy. But when a lives system is in place to limit the number of times I can fight, then there becomes a major problem. It seems there is a three-loss limit before the Game Over screen encourages the player to attempt a comeback. The Password system is automatically updated with your progress (and in turn the Wii’s auto-save feature relies on this Password), but the password will also keep track of losses. The first two circuits have only four opponents and presents little issue, but the World League has seven straight battles against nail-bitingly difficult opponents. So if you go into the World League with two losses, then you’ve got little room for error and the reality of getting very well-acquainted with Piston Honda once again.
Therein is the first flaw that keeps Punch-out from true greatness. (The other flaw being the flagrant use of exclamation marks in the title.) I wouldn’t mind having to battle Super Macho Man over and over again to learn his techniques, but that one loss means I have to fight the guy ranked below again to earn the right of a rematch is a bit preposterous, and that I often had to find myself starting at the bottom of this juggernaut gauntlet of fighters because Little Mac retires after only three losses (what a wimp) is very preposterous. The internet eased the pain a bit; I found passwords to start World Circuit with a clean win-loss record, and passwords to go straight to final bosses Super Macho Man and Mr Dream …
….and while we’re on the subject, this isn’t the original NES Punch-out. Originally, Mike Tyson was the game’s final boss, but for any number of reasons you can theorize, later versions replaced him with the more vanilla (as in literally, same sprite with white skin) “Mr. Dream.” Iron Mike hasn’t done anything controversial in a good while, and the man is dirt broke, so I’m sure royalty fees wouldn’t be much to use his likeness once more, instead of this decidedly more Caucasian rendition.
But alas, this be the game that’s thrown at us. Punch-out(!!?) is a more frustrating game than it ought to be; a result of an era where game length was artificially lengthened through repetition of extremely hard challenges. This game is as good an example as any of the argument where gamers should be given the option (stressing the word OPTION before some old school psychos start berating me for suggesting a “classic be tampered with”) to have infinite lives or something more friendly to the gamers of 2009.
But at the same time, it has the charming characters, the catchy NES music, the simple gameplay and the irresistible nostalgic charm. And upon further genuflection, that is worth the approximate $5 this game goes for on the Virtual Console.
4 stars.
Super Punch-out(!!) stars MAC, whom might be, or be related to, Little Mac from the previous game. One can’t be so completely sure, what with this MAC having a muscular frame and a goofy haircut that would have done the New Kids on the Block proud. He also lacks esteemed manager Doc Louis in his corner, due to either a dispute over MAC’s use of growth hormone or Mac’s refusal to join the Nintendo Fun Club. I can also theorize that this more facially effeminate MAC could have since founded a makeup company named after himself.
In any event, the WVBA has elected to continue their booking policy of creating the most disgusting, weight division-mocking matches in Super Punch-out (I give up on the damned explanation marks.) There are four circuits, each with four opponents of varying sizes, styles and discriminatory features. Only three juice monkeys from the previous Punch-out (the cheating Bald Bull, the gassed Super Macho Man and the Ali/Cosby lovechild Mr Sandman) return, and the new characters are a mixed bag of oddities. There’s some memorable characters, like the Jamaican stoner (not) cleverly named “Bob Charlie” and the karate practitioner and presumed Lyoto Machida fan, Dragon Chan, but the character concepts seem to be hit or miss. Shockingly, fighting an evil clown that throws juggling balls at you or a Japanese transvestite with a hair-whipping attack doesn’t pack the zaniness that one would expect.
Though part of that statement may be subliminal, due to the music sucking. The campy tunes of the first game are replaced by the “MIDI track recreating a synthesizer” songs that way too many bad SNES games had back in the day. So the nostalgic value of Super Punch-out lacks the heartwarming…errr…punch, of the NES version.
But the core gameplay of Super Punch-out is stronger at least. A translucent MAC fights at the bottom of the screen, bobbing and weaving out of the path of enemy attacks and picking his spots to counter with punching combinations of righteousness into the evil nostrils of the enemy. Stringing enough hits together will fill a super meter that allows the use of uppercuts (for you see, MAC cannot execute an uppercut unless he builds up the courage to do so), which is a fine system in of itself. But I yearn for the original game’s idea of earning each uppercut through a precisely-timed shot on your enemy’s gut.
Like the not-quite-super-Punch-out on the NES, quick reflexes and pattern recognition is key to victory. You must battle each rival a couple times and get killed a couple of time to figure out their visual cues…for you see, these boxers love to telegraph their strikes and would stand no match in a 12 round bore fest against Floyd Mayweather. But this is the WVBA, so most battles don’t last the first round, each of which will often contain up to 5 knockdowns in of itself. I will say that these boxers are at least more elaborate in their fighting styles, now demanding that MAC pays attention to which direction he dodges, which hand he counter-punches with, and what hard-to-read text instructions the manager is shouting to your oversized adversary.
My biggest issue with the original Punch-out and its trial-and-error approach was that game limited the number of lives Little Mac could afford to lose before giving up on his dreams. MAC is a bit more of a man in that regard; he starts each circuit with 3 lives and the chance to earn more through impressive scoring. On top of each circuit consisting of just four fights, each attempt at a play-through is eased by how your performance against previous opponents improves over time and thus MAC can enter the later, harder fights with more lives and chances of survival. But the strain of a lives system still wears on thee, and I would rather just be given infinite rematches to thwart an adversary rather than run out of lives and start from the beginning of a circuit, for I feel like I have nothing left to prove against Bob Charlie or the Irish guy. Also, to unlock the fourth and final circuit, the player must first complete the previous three circuits without a single loss. Upon watching Youtube videos and realizing that the last four challengers look pretty lame, I opted not to. The final boss looks like a tough fight…but what a boring look. Is he meant to reflect the reality of fighters with unmarketable looks and personality being detrimental to the promotion’s profit margins?
Super Punch-out is, in its own ways, better and worse than Original Punch-out. If you’re a fan of the first game and are feeling the itch for more pugilistic play time, then you’ll get your approximate $10 worth here. But I didn’t walk away from the game with the same sense of frustrated fondness as I did for Mike Ty….Mr. Dream’s boxing game.
3 ½ stars
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