Punch-Out!! (Wii)
The Revenge of King Hippo!
5/18/2009 9:02 PM | 7 Comments | Page 1 of 3
What's Hot: First new Punch-Out!! iteration in 15 very long years; Plenty of candy for the eyes; Lovingly created homage to the original games; Split-screen multiplayer is surprisingly fun.
What's Not: Too much homage, not enough evolution; Still boldly un-PC; Voice acting is offensive and annoying; Old-school difficulty; Using motion controls and/or Wii Balance Board is silly and futile; No online play or leaderboards.
Scott Jones
Status: Coffee makes me feel 4-percent sexier.
When I was in my teens I had a job in a rundown amusement park on the shore of Oneida Lake in upstate New York. I managed Treasure Land, which was the least exciting of all the "Lands" in the park. No one ever came into Treasure Land except for drunk bikers and the one lesbian couple that was generally shunned inour town. Mostly what I did was to use a broom to sweep the lake spiders off the neglected Roll-O machines. These spiders were an angry brown color. I still have nightmares about them.
On my lunch break I'd hustle over to the Carousel, a dilapidated wooden structure that housed an out-of-order merry-go-round along with a handful of arcade machines. Among these arcade machines was a
Punch-Out!! machine.
You got a little something on your chin there, Joe. BAM.
Instead of fighting spacecraft, or in the case of
Satan's Hollow, fighting Satan's face, in
Punch-Out!! you were fighting virtual human beings. Each opponent had a face and a name. This might not sound like much now, but at the time, it was a big deal. These opponents even laughed at you whenever they knocked you down. They taunted and teased. There was something very human and visceral about the experience that really appealed to me.
I rarely played the game, partly because the line to play it was always too long, and partly because it made me too nervous. Sweat would bead up on my forehead, and when I'd lose -- I always lost -- I would be so traumatized by the laughing face of Bald Bull that my hands would literally be shaking.
I played the NES version to death, knocking out Mike Tyson on at least two memorable occasions. (No small feat.)
I played the 1994 Super Nintendo version to death, knocking out the game's final pair of bosses, Nick and Rick Bruiser, on many occasions. I've spent several not-unpleasant hours online pricing vintage
Punch-Out!! machines and trying to picture how one might look in my apartment. Which brings us to
Punch-Out!! circa 2009. After a 15-year hiatus, and after skipping the Nintendo 64 and GameCube generations entirely, Little Mac and his wife-beater return on the Wii.
Production values are on par with what you'd expect from a current-generation Wii title. Visually, the game really pops. Everything is so colorful and shiny that it looks like a cartoon. The animation is incredibly organic, even when the fighters are doing unnatural things, like teleporting around the boxing ring (Great Tiger) or striking embarrassing dance poses (Disco Kid).
Move left when Von Kaiser comes in for the big uppercut.
Aside from some extended intros and outros before and after each fight, gameplay remains fundamentally the same. Throw punches; avoid getting hit by your opponent's punches. As usual, Little Mac's punches do minimal damage -- you'll have to really work to whittle down your opponent's health meter. Your opponent's punches, however, still do massive damage. In most fights, you'll have to hit your opponent around eight to 10 times in order to equal the kind of damage that he can do with one punch.
Fights are structured similarly to the NES version of
Punch-Out!!. You've got three rounds to either knock out your opponent or out-punch him and win by decision. Unlike the previous games in the series, which always had a sped-up sense of time, the new version features three real-time rounds. In other words, one second of each round equals one real-time second. This makes the bouts feel more tedious and drawn-out than I would like them to feel. Even when the referee counts out a downed opponent, it feels like it takes him ages to count to 10. The whole operation, as a result, winds up feeling like it could use a strong cup of coffee.
