Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!

Other than beating Zelda II: The Adventure of Link [リンクの冒険], I'm not sure if there's a single more rewarding experience on the NES than beating Mr. Sandman and actually reacting to his signature triple uppercut. He gives you sheer hell to start off with and being able to slowly figure him out and eventually beat him feels so satisfying. Honestly there are a lot of fun fights in general here, I really like the second Bald Bull fight since it seems the most in-line to what a Punch-Out!! (Wii) fight is like (I mean he taunts you and everything), and the Super Macho Man fight is great too. Pretty solid fun game overall, I wish it had more stuff though to do in the game other than beating Mike Tyson (or the super lame Mr. Dream they replaced him with).

On the surface, Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! seems like a regular ol’ sports game. The face and name of Mike Tyson, the king of the ring in the 1980s, is plastered all over this title. Mike Tyson using his name here as a brand naturally comes with connotations associated with most sports games. They cater to a specific demographic that favors sports over video games, with video game companies bridging the two for a wider profit margin. Sports games are one of the most successful and long-standing genres in gaming, with a multi-million titles sold, released annually across every popular sport worldwide. While the data doesn’t lie about sports games statistics, I am one of many gamers who feel ambivalent towards them and do not contribute to the abundant number of sales. Yet, Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! is one of my favorite games on the NES. The simple explanation is because Punch-Out!! is not a sports game. For existing in a market not catered to typical gamers, Punch-Out!! contributed so many radical ideas and other innovative features to the world of gaming.

The NES version of Punch-Out!! was a port of an arcade game released in 1984. The arcade version served as a vehicle to test the primitive limits of quasi-3D gaming, representing the playable character as a green, humanoid figure made of wireframes for greater kinetic appeal. The imperative of the arcade Punch-Out was to immerse the player as an all-star of boxing by emulating the first-person perspective of boxing to the best of their ability. However, this same feeling would prove to be too ambitious for the primitive hardware of the NES, so they had to think up something else. The NES Punch-Out!! is a journey of one’s ambition to be the best at something. It’s a typical arch for sports media, but it works due to the all-encompassing feeling of human drive and passion regardless of whether or not it relates to sports. The film Rocky is arguably the quintessential film about boxing (or Raging Bull, but Punch-Out!! does not detail the damning psychological aspects of a champion’s fall from grace), and the underdog persona of Rocky translates well as Punch-Out’s!! prime influence. In Punch-Out!!, the player must earn their title as the champion of boxing by fighting in a grueling tournament against the best boxers worldwide.

This golden-hearted, iron-stomached up-and-comer is not a nameless avatar for the player to place themselves into. The playable character is Little Mac, a young, scrappy boxer from the Bronx who does not wear the “little” moniker like many rappers do. Little Mac is of an incredibly short stature, a factor that leads him to be discriminated against by the boxing association. However, upon meeting former boxing champion Doc Louis teach him a thing or two about how to overcome adversity and follow his dreams of being #1. Their relationship is displayed through fight dialogue and training sequences, and all of this surprisingly effective at conveying a dynamic between the two. One can’t help but be reminded of the relationship between Rocky and Mickey Goldmill from Rocky, although I never saw Mickey jerk Rocky off in between rounds. Whatever seems to work for them, I guess?

Little Mac wasn’t rendered as a smaller man due to a shorter stature fitting a less inherently capable persona. The angle at which the player will find themselves is at a top down perspective where Little Mac’s opponent is front and center facing his opponent from the back. Here, the player has a full scope of the opponent’s movements while seeing the relation of space between them and Little Mac. Movement in Punch-Out!! is fairly restricted to a few functions, but the restraint is enough to solidify a competent control scheme. Similar to real boxing, Little Mac is confined to face and body blows with his fists. Body blows are standard pushes of the buttons while face punches are triggered by pressing up on the D-pad. The player can also alternate between left and right jabs with both buttons on the NES controller. Dodging and blocking will be performed as consistently as hitting the opponent and both are done with the D-Pad. The one intricate move is an uppercut which the player can earn by executing various attack moves, and it serves as a stronger, wound up version of a regular punch. While fighting, the player must keep a constant watch of Little Mac’s stamina. Once it drops to zero, Little Mac will turn an exhausted pink and have to dodge for a few moments in order to regain his strength. All of the moves that the player will utilize are simple, but executing them all in conjunction in the fights takes a certain level of mastery. The player will constantly be on edge focusing on the precise movements of their opponents, using a roulette of the few moves they have with style and grace in order to become champion.

The characters of Punch-Out that are arguably just as important as Little Mac are the other boxers that he must face in order to become champion. Punch-Out’s!! beefy, shorts-wearing foes are an eclectic bunch to say the least. Each of them represents a global smattering of many places around the world such as Bald Bull from Istanbul, Turkey, and Don Flamenco from Madrid. Some boxers are inspired by other sources like Sandman, most likely an inspiration from Apollo Creed. While the cast of boxers are all unique to one another, their personas are a point of contention. The character of each boxer can be boiled down to flagrant stereotypes of their nation’s people. Glass Joe is a Frenchman who is depicted as a cowardly weakling who will surrender at the blink of an eye. The German boxer, Von Kaiser, is an all-around loser when it comes to fighting (read a book or watch a video on the history of the former half of the 20th century to learn why). Pacific Islander King Hippo is fat and lazy, Great Tiger sports a turban and uses yogi mysticism in fights, and the random Japanese phrases that Piston Honda utters between rounds would be a cause for alarm if the game wasn’t made by a Japanese company. The foul Russian stereotype known as Vodka Drunkenski has been changed to Soda Popinski, but only to better fit the family-friendly image of Nintendo.

The unsavory stereotypes that plague the fighters of Punch-Out!! make it seem as if Archie Bunker was the creative director of Nintendo in the late 80s, writing these characters from the comfort of his La-Z-Boy. Personally, the offensive caricatures were never something that irked me about Punch-Out!! They might have bothered me more if their fights weren’t as invigorating. I’ve seen a pattern in early console games that leaves me to believe that bosses were a new concept in gaming that took some time to blossom. Many bosses during this era were simple excursions and repeated often to pad the game without any variation upon numerous encounters. Punch-Out!! is essentially a glorified boss gauntlet under the guise of a boxing tournament. One might think that a game that offers nothing but one of the most underdeveloped aspects of early console gaming would be excruciatingly tedious, but Punch-Out!! is leagues ahead of its contemporaries in this regard. Each boss fight in Punch-Out!! has a puzzle property in which the player has to figure out how to defeat the fighter. The most obvious example of this is fighting against King Hippo, who cannot be defeated by wailing on his face or his podgy torso. He has a weak spot the player must find and exploit, and doing so will net the player a clear, gratifying victory after struggling to defeat him. The same goes for many other boxers in more subtle fashions. The game does pad the tournament with repeat fighters, but does not falter as a result. The returning fighters always come with a new trick up their sleeves and are much more formidable than their previous encounters. If the player loses too many matches, the arcade roots of Punch-Out!! start to show and they must start back at the minor league. Normally, this arcade-style of difficulty would be a major deterrent, but I do not mind facing all of the bosses again. Punch-Out!! is a game that one must practice, and repeat fights will shred the time taken to defeat the previous boxers.

At the peak of Punch-Out’s!! array of brow-beating boss fights lies the undefeated king Mike Tyson himself. That’s right, Mike Tyson doesn’t just brand his hype-latent name on this game for the point of increasing sales. Mike Tyson (or Mr. Dream in subsequent ports of the game due to Mike Tyson tarnishing his image) is the final boss of Punch Out!!, and he’s about as hard as fighting him in real life. In all of the vexing hardships the player had to endure up to this point, none of them will prepare them for the match against Kid Dynamite. His unpredictable haymakers will paint the ring with Little Mac’s blood and broken teeth, and having to climb all the way back up from the bottom here is one disheartening affair that has crushed many gamers. If you were wondering, I am not one of the proud few who have defeated Mike Tyson, for I am not a demigod with supernatural abilities.

Punch-Out!! was the game on the NES that I’m sure was developed to bank on the overnight success of a young Mike Tyson and drain money from those who would not have been interested in video games in the first place. With great effort and impressive innovation however came an outstanding title on the system that made some unparalleled strides for gaming. Among all of the standout elements like the progressive, underdog narrative and the simple, effective control scheme, Punch-Out’s!! legacy lies with its bosses. Offensive caricatures aside, the boxers in Punch-Out!! exemplify a level of challenge and intricacy that had not been seen in the medium. All of the varied fights are exhilarating in their own unique ways, and they all culminate in the mother of final bosses: Mike Tyson himself. There is so much more to Punch-Out!! than the novelty of putting Mike Tyson in a video game.

Decided to celebrate boxing day by revisiting this. One of the best NES games for sure, the best part about it IMO is all of the work obviously put into making the game look charming and making every fight look and feel distinctive. It also has fun and responsive controls, probably would be even more fun if I played it on a CRT but alas we can't always get all the nice things in life. The main problems are that all of the fights can be beaten purely through reflexes with no real strategy required, and also a sorta wonky difficulty curve at times (both of which are improved on the Wii's Punch-Out!! (2009)). Still though, this is a game whose fun factor has endured, and it has stood the test of time quite well for a game from the 80s.

Punch-Out, a lot of people like it, and a lot of people talk about it. I have talked to many people who like the game but strangely in all that discussion I have not seen many people try to explain what is good about a Punch-Out as opposed to other games of it's genre and time. It just seems to exist invariant among the gaming canon where everyone acknowledges its great and from personal anecdotal experience I have never met someone who played it and disliked it. So maybe the reasons for it's success are just too obvious to state and I'm wasting my time here.... Anyway for the sake of argument lets examine what makes Punch-out good.

To those five or six people interested enough to be reading this review and who somehow don't know what Punch-out is. Punch-Out is a boxing game for the NES, a rudimentary boxing simulator that was part of Nintendo's general line up of sports titles on their debut console. It was originally called "Mike Tyson's Punch-Out" but over a few controversies or by licensing fees depending on which story you believe subsequent copies came to be called just "Punch-Out." For the sake of this review I will always call it just Punch-Out even though for nostalgia's sake I almost always mean the original Mike Tyson version. Aside from that minor historical trivia there really is nothing complicated about the game. You're a guy named Little Mac who wants to be a boxing champ and you have to face ranked opponents to move up in the boxing world. Oh and just as a minor side note it's probably one of the best designed games of all time....

Punch-Out is a nearly perfect game. Bold statement I know. Now to somewhat cowardly walk back on that boldness a little, let me explain. By perfect I mean perfectly functioning as it was intended to be played. Not as in this game is "perfect" in the positive, content-wise sense. To further elaborate, Punch-Out is not my favorite game or anything by any means, but every criticism I have thought about it usually evaporates on further playthroughs or by learning more about the game and what can be done with it. Even with those elaborations I still think it can be seen as extremely high praise that a game at least in game play sense functions perfectly in intention and seems flawless in the same sense. Everything about it's design seems calculated and intentional rather than merely left to chance or happening by accident. This only seems even more true when you compare it to it's sequel. Now to people who know anything about the relationship between NES games and their SNES counterparts for the most part when a game from a pre-existing series came out on the SNES it would always seem like a major upgrade of the formula. AThe Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past [ゼルダの伝説 神々のトライフォース], Super Metroid [スーパーメトロイド], Super Castlevania IV [悪魔城ドラキュラ] and Contra III: The Alien Wars [魂斗羅スピリッツ] are perfect examples of this. Each one of them not only updated things you would expect them to update like the graphics and sound, but in a fundamental sense the game play improved dramatically at least in my and a lot of other peoples opinions. Super Punch-Out!! was a rare exception to the rule, it was by no means a bad game but the additions it made to the game aside from the graphics and to some extent the sound seem so much less like an upgrade and more like a detriment to the already nearly perfect game play formula. It just felt inferior and clunky in a game play sense to the already tightly designed game play of the original Punch-Out. So the sequel exists as a fine example of adding to an already perfect formula can only make things worse, albeit not dramatically but still to the extent that when I go to play a Punch-Out game, the SNES game is never the one I choose to play. I don't think I'm anywhere close to being unique in that choice or sentiment. (Wii version omitted intentionally)

The game play is extremely simple. Punches, blocks and dodges to the side. It's combat at it's most basic level possible. Simplicity and the aforementioned perfection of this simplicity is what makes Punch-Out so great. To the point that on my many repeated playthroughs of this game my intention is not to just beat the opponents but rather to see how fast I can do so. I often find when I'm discussing problems with other games and their mechanics Punch-Out serves as the video game equivalent of "Desert island scenarios" or "apples and oranges" comparisons the game play is so simplistic but so on point that I feel it serves as a great example of what is wrong with other games specifically when it comes to combat.I have a hard time directly explaining what the game play is like beyond the simple commands listed within the first sentence of this paragraph. Suffice to say I think the moment you get your hand on a controller with this game the simple mechanics will become easily known to you without much or any hassle.

I noticed in my own personal tastes with video games, I really like games that reward memorization and pattern discovery, both are extremely important to this game specifically. The better your memory and pattern recognition the easier and more rewarding these fights will be. Some people might think of these things as a minor detail but I actually think it's what makes Punch-Out so good and so enjoyable even after thirty years of play. The game starts you off with the basics of combat I talked about before, but it continuously builds on these minimalist mechanics from the first fight to the last. I think it's easy to apply the often said phrase "easy to learn, hard to master" in regards to what makes a games game play great, but Punch-Out serves as a singularly great example of this cliche at work. The first opponent Glass Joe is a relatively easy opponent and a perfect start to the game you'll notice if you look at his moves and the timer he waits almost a full minute and a half before actually trying to engage you. This gives the player a chance to the test the controls and actions they have in a relatively free environment before having to get on with the fight. Each fight onward even the one with Tyson has ways of signifying to the player the pattern or necessary maneuvers needed to get over the fight. Some of which are obvious and other ones have only recently been discovered in the Internet age like the guy who ducks in the crowd signifying when you need to punch at certain critical moments. Between the the games basic mechanics, the patterns of the bosses and the ques intermixing the two is the wild land of strategy you can learn. Not to sound like Todd Howard, but the game play just works and the patterns and strategies you have to use to beat specific fighters manage to make the game feel far deeper than an NES boxing title should. No matter how much you think you have the best strategy for certain fights there are always better patterns and strategies to learn.

I don't like to leave things hanging or under explained so for the sake of clarity before we move on to aspects of the original Punch-Out beyond the game play I would like to list a few things I think the SNES game got wrong and in doing so hopefully shine a light on what the original did right by comparison. By the time Super Punch-Out!! came out the landscape of sports games and boxing and wrestling games in particular had changed partially due to a related genre ascendancy at the same time that being fighting games. Street Fighter II: The World Warrior was a hard game to ignore during this era of gaming and I'm sure its success was not lost on Nintendo. I bring up Street Fighter II: The World Warrior specifically here to bring up the fact that I think one of the biggest problems with the SNES version of Punch Out was it's life bar which tried to emulate that of fighting games at the time more that it tried to reflect the original game. Now you might say in rebuttal "oh but didn't the original game have a health bar? You might see it as one in hindsight now given that games evolved to think of such bars that way but I think of it more as a representation of your endurance and it's use in game reflects more of an endurance bar than a health bar. The effect this has on the game play is that in the long run the Original Punch-Out's game mechanics encourage you to use the fastest route possible in exhausting an opponent where as the SNES becomes more of a race to getting your opponent to hit the deck twice in a round as fast as possible which doesn't take as much strategy or building on of mechanics throughout a full play through of the game. This is also compounded by the fact that star hits were basically replaced by a "special meter." Which again is less about the strategy of accruing hits so you can use them at the right time to get an early TKO and more about the game ques you to do specific actions at specific points of the round. This is even further entwined with something I truly hate about the SNES version the NES game had ques that the fighters or some aspect of the game play signified to give you hints on how to defeat opponents but the SNES games actually has a fucking box flash sometimes to literally just tell you when to hit an opponent. Not only does it hurt the game play, become annoying to people who already know when to hit people on subsequent play throughs but it also on a whole makes the fighters less expressive and their personalities are ironically more subdued in a game that had double the technology to convey such things. That is not to say none of the fighters were expressive in the SNES game but that in the aggregate I would say they were less so than the NES game, more on that later. On that note I would say the graphics are undeniably better, but the animations are more stock due to things I alluded to the in previous criticism and the art style seems more generically anime'ish. Little Mac looks like a DBZ character in his portrait and victory poses, but not a cool DBZ character. Those would be Piccolo and Vegeta BTW. He looks like a random guy Goku runs by when he goes to the city every hundred or so episodes. It might sound like a joke but some of these characters in SNES Punch-Out were so close to Akira Toriyama designs that I actually felt compelled to research somewhat extensively to either confirm or deny that he had any part in creating them. I'm sure it's more homage than rip-off on Nintendo's part here but it's pretty fucking close regardless in this case. Either way, I think on a whole SNES Punch-Out tried to make design improvements which I'm sure seemed natural or purely seen as technological innovations over their previous entry but I felt that the majority of these changes while probably well intended fundamentally missed the point about what was good with the game play of the first game. I'll end this compare and contrast on what i think was the biggest flaw of SNES Punch-Out. If the original game was easy to learn hard to master, I would say the inverse is true of the SNES game it was more like hard to learn and very easy to master over subsequent play throughs. The game is a mix matched design of hand holding game play in comparison to the original and spikes in difficulty that start from the second fight onward but become a complete cakewalk once you know the extremely easy to play "patterns" the game wants you to learn. There aren't as many options or room for strategies with the SNES game because of this. The original game is beatable and can become "Easy" in a sense over a lot of play throughs but even people who can literally beat it blindfolded have a hard time in at least a few areas. The point of all this besides the fact that I want to needless hate on game from childhood that was otherwise adequate is... I want to use my endurance bar on Bulma, I mean my special punches on Chi-Chi.... Anyway on to the next subject.

So now that I'm done jerking the game play off a bit maybe I can discuss some of the games other features in more detail. As stated before you play as a character named Little Mac and your goal throughout the game is boxing your way to the top ranking and eventually facing Mike Tyson or in the edited version "Mr. Dream." You start your journey with Glass Joe a man so pitiful he has only won once and lost 99 matches. Who did glass joe beat by the way? It's a question I've had since childhood and the mystery only becomes more compelling as time goes on. Anyway, from Joe you gradually move up the rankings to better fighters. My favorite being King Hippo, due to the fighting mechanics and the sense of accomplishment I got from first beating him as a child many, many years ago. In between rounds you get to see their and your own current health status visually and somewhat vaguely displayed by your player portraits and they say things to you. Also in between matches and rounds within a match you talk to Mac's Meme worthy black boxing trainer Doc Louis. He attempts to give helpful tips about the current fight. He also does several terrific 80's sport montages with you on the way to victory. You might remember before that I mentioned Glass Joe doesn't attack you for a quite a bit in your first round with him. Well it serves a game play function but it also works from a light story perspective in that Glass Joe is a nervous and fearful weakling and it makes sense that he would be extremely over cautious in his movements before attacking an opponent. You'll notice that most of the opponents have play styles that work great on a game play level but also fit and flesh out their personalities. Great games find ways of doing two things at once but the best games find ways of making the game play the primary conveyor of the story. Punch-Out found a simple way to do this that just fits logically with the rest of the games mechanics. I might also add that this was one of the things the SNES game failed hard on as I mentioned earlier the removal of ques and the blandification of the fighters play styles mostly served to make their personalities seem mostly flat and unconnected to the game. I need to get over that game though. None of these little small story elements, if you'd like to call them that are necessary or even important to the games overall boxing simulation aspirations, but they give the game much more flavor and memorability than it otherwise would have. I don't really care for sports much personally and it would be hard for me to name all but even the most famous of athletes, but I remember these 8-bit boxers and their personalities more than I do people in some 80 hour+ story driven games. The "story" like the game play is simple but succeeds in enhancing the game rather than bogging anything down or taking the focus away from more important elements. Oh yeah and Mario is the Referee, I guess he fits it in between being a doctor, plumber, painter etc.

The controls are great and some of the best and most responsive of any game on the system. I will mention that the NES D-pad tended to have this problem where downward inputs were less responsive than the other three directions. I'm not exactly sure why, but I have noticed it's impact the most on Punch-Out especially after emulating it and using various different controllers for this game specifically. Something about the NES D-pad just did not always feel right. I cut it some slack seeing as it was the first ever D-Pad (I know of) but I just thought I would mention this one minor issue I've had with this game and the system I most played it on as a kid.

I would say the soundtrack of Punch-Out is easily the weakest aspect of the game. Not because the songs are terrible or anything like that, but because the competition on the NES is so astronomically high that it doesn't really excite me and unlike other NES games like the Castlevanias, Megamans, Marios or Zeldas I cant imagine myself ever pulling up a Punchout song on Youtube or burning one to a CD, where as with all those other games I have and I would. That being said it is adequate to what it's trying to accomplish and I have never found it annoying or repetitive. Which is saying something because there are only three songs throughout the game and a few small musical intros to each fighter. I will say that aside from the soundtrack the sound design for Punch-Out and it's impact on the game play, sometimes being an audio cue like in the fight with Great Tiger was a great game mechanic and not one I would say happened often in that generation or the next two after.

The graphics are pretty good for the era and I would say the game has aged better than most other games from that time. The stylized looks of the fighters and the basic design of the boxing ring made it easy on the eyes at release and now. If I had to criticize just to criticize something, I would say I always found it funny that Mac was so small compared to other fighters and I realize it's an old game and his size was more to emphasize a quasi first person perspective shift rather than his actual size to scale, but I guess if I had to criticize something it would be that minor thing. I actually know that in the small bits of research I have done that this criticism of mine was the one major compromise between the NES and arcade version, so hence in the actual original release of the game this problem with the graphics doesn't exist. I'll also say in the SNES games defense for once, the undeniably had a better solution to this problem and conveying Little Macs place on the screen. Making him comparable in size to other boxers but making him transparent until an action is done in game so you can see what the other fighter is doing and still have little mac be to scale.

The genre of games most likely to be dated are sports titles. There are a lot of unfair reasons for this, the primary target of sports games does not always overlap with the same consumer of video games that generally turns titles from fluff to masterpiece through criticism and accolades. That is not to say the two types of people never overlap or that sports games are never considered classic, but think of the few that can are considered that and then consider the sheer amount that come out every year on an annual basis. Tecmo Bowl, Mutant League Football & Mutant League Hockey, NBA Jam, NFL Blitz, Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball.... I like those games a lot for some reason and a few other extremely rare titles might be considered classics. I'm not saying all this to hate on all the games that aren't remembered in this genre, but to point out the insane fact that I and many other people love playing a boxing game from fucking 1987, 1983/4'ish if it's the arcade version. I think when you look at it that way and through the harsh lens of dated and obsolete games Punch-Out and the sheer fun and perfection of it's game play really shine. It was great then and it is no less great now. Bulma call me plz.

The NES version is still a spectacularly fun way to spend an hour even if you've grown acustomed to the patterns of the lively and colourful(and hideously stereotypical) opponents. The difficulty curve is among the nicest there has ever been in a NES game and every opponent feels like it's specifically there to teach you a new game mechanic or strategy, but loses none of its challenge and engagement in the way, with good risk/reward situations(like trying to get a star for the knockout punch). Mike Tyson himself is still hard as balls though.