Gamers were treated to two highly entertaining boxing games this summer. Electronic Arts’ Fight Night returns to the ring after three years, and Nintendo’s Punch Out!! is duking it out for the first time in 15 years.
While these are both games of pugilism, each has a totally unique offering for gamers, and are both great games in their own right.
Punch Out!! is more of a puzzle-solving game than a true sports simulation. As boxer Little Mac, you have to figure out the sequence of punches thrown by your opponent to determine when to duck, dodge or return your own punches in order to become victorious.
Returning are all of your old favorites – Bald Bull, Mr. Sandman, Glass Joe, etc., and then there’s the addition of Disco Kid. I like bringing in a new boxer, but Nintendo could have done better than adding this annoying dweeb.
Also new to this version, Little Mac has to beat the whole group of 13 boxers again to retain his title – harkening back to the original Punch Out!! arcade game. Each opponent picks up new skills since the last time Mac defeated them, making it a much harder challenge.
There is also a new training round where you fight a holographic image of your opponent, so that you can train against them and lose without it hurting your overall record. It’s the wimp’s way out, but who cares? You save your record.
Anyone who played the original Punch Out!!, Super Punch Out!! or the two arcade games will love the new nuances this version brings to the table, and I highly recommend it.
Pugilist fans looking for a real simulation should check out Fight Night Round 4 by Electronic Arts.
EA has brought in a number of real boxers, including Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, Sugar Ray Leonard, Tommy Morrison (for reasons I can’t fathom), and, for the first time in a boxing simulation, Mike Tyson.
Each boxer looks almost identical to their real-life counterpart, and they each fight with the unique styles for which they are known. Muhammad Ali, with his long reach, is more effective fighting from the outside, while Tyson, with his bobbing and weaving and inhuman-like powerful jabs, is much better fighting in close quarters.
Using and fighting against these boxers is highly enjoyable, but what I feel is the real draw of the game is the “Create a Boxer” function. Players can create a boxer after their own likeness, with the ability to download a photo of themselves.
What is more, players can also download boxers that other players have created through a new community download section. So, if you want to, you can go head-to-head as Rocky against Ivan Drago, Apollo Creed, or Clubber Lane. You can also download some real-life classic boxers that EA didn’t include – like Max Baer, James Braddock, John L. Sullivan, Jack Dempsey et al. And, if you don’t like the young George Foreman provided in the game, you can download the 47-year-old heavyweight champ version that some amateur game designer created, which looks better than the young Foreman.
In the game’s Legacy mode, you take your newly created boxer through a career, starting at age 19. He has to go through 50 fights to finish his career, with the hopes of making the hall of fame. You get to set up the fighters he competes against – that includes any created boxers you made or downloaded – which makes it an even more enjoyable game.
Putting Fight Night head-to-head with Punch Out!! is hard – they are both enjoyable – it just matters what you are looking for in a game. If you want a true simulation, it’s definitely Fight Night, but if you just want to jump in the ring and enjoy some quick bouts, Punch Out!! is the way to go.
Overall, though, I have to give the nod to Fight Night. The online community, realism, and uniqueness of each bout gives it higher replay value.
--Reviewed by Dan Green
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