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Punch Out Game Review–A Serious Pain in the Shoulder

Again Nintendo prevails on my deeply ingrained sense of nostalgia by bringing a game that I actually recognized from my original straight-eight days of gaming. See, way back when, before Mike Tyson was a gigantic practical joke / train wreck, he was a professional boxer. And a good one, too! So good that Nintendo commissioned a game around him, dubbed Mike Tyson’s Punch Out. As time went on and Iron Mike’s career went wildly off the rails (and his contract expired, unrenewed), Nintendo then sought a way to re-release their game without paying Tyson. Thus, the game was shortened to Punch Out and Iron Mike was replaced with a no-name called “Mr. Dream”.

And now, Nintendo has once again released its Punch Out line, this time for the all too appropriate Wii. You’ll once again step into the role of the Bronx’s boxing sensation Little Mac, looking to make a name for yourself along with your trainer Doc Lewis. You’ll take on a series of outrageous characters with a series of different boxing styles until you face your final opponent. You’ll also be able to completely replay the game in a whole different way by selecting the Title Defense mode, in which you’ve already won the title but are now out to hold onto it against every boxer you defeated. And they’re none too happy about the loss.

The first thing that I have to tell you, if you’re going to try this game is, for the sake of all that’s holy, STRETCH FIRST. It may not be intuitive—stretch before playing a video game? Preposterous!—but you’re going to save yourself plenty of hurt if you stretch your arms and shoulders before playing. The way this game is set up, there’s two ways to play—with the Wii controller horizontally inclined like a normal controller, or using the motion sensitivity features of the Wii to make regular air punches, and believe me, you will be throwing a LOT of punches. The boxers you’ll face are downright turtles in their capacity for blocking, and you can pretty much count on one in every two or even three of your punches landing. That is, of course, unless you’ve studied a walkthrough or videos or even practiced in advance so you already know each boxer’s pattern.

Each of the boxers you’ll face does have a pattern, and generally, it won’t take too long to learn just where to lean and where to block and where to throw punches like a lunatic, but still, in the intervening space you will be wasting PLENTY of motion. All of this can do horrible things to your arms and shoulders if you’re not careful. Trust me, I still ache from my bout with King Hippo.

But still…I’m pretty satisfied with this game. It’s got decent graphics and excellent background musical effects and fun gameplay that’ll actually be a halfway decent workout. That’s the one really interesting thing about the Wii, really—a lot of their games make good workouts. And this is a workout that’s surprisingly plenty of fun, too, making it one of the best kind: the kind where participants will come back.

Facebreaker–Pretty Badly Broken Itself

The casual gaming phenomenon has been running for quite some time now, and it’s always a little bit of a surprise to see it segue into the console market.  What I’m about to say may be a little controversial, but I confess, it’s how I felt:  Facebreaker for the Xbox 360 is a casual console game.

You’re not alone in considering this odd–I certainly did.  Console games, unless they’re specifically marketed as such and generally packaged in collections, should not be so simple to play and so simple in construction that they can be called casual.  But this is the case–you play one of several boxers who’s out to win fame and glory and the right to punch a whole lot of people in the face.  And that’s ALL you do.  You punch. You have your choice of high punch and low punch, you can add dash moves to your punch, and you can even use SPECIAL punches called “Breakers” in conjunction with your regular punches.  But no matter how you slice it, you’re still just swinging a fist.

Some have criticized the game’s broken AI being unnecessarily difficult and thus unplayable.  And after playing a few rounds I can’t help but agree with them.  When the game itself actually TELLS you, even on the easiest settings, that you WILL lose and you WILL lose frequently until you figure out each boxer’s specific weak point, someone may have made a serious mistake designing the AI.  A game should never have to openly declare its own difficulty as though it were a box of cookies announcing its fat content!

This is actually pretty sad—the game itself is a good idea.  It’s clever, it’s funny, some of the boxers have really amazing backstories and are downright entertaining.  For instance, fighting Steve in the arcade pits you against a short fat kid in a ninja suit who’s the trivia king of his fantasy gaming guild.  There’s a Russian boxer by the name of Molotov who fights while wearing a belt of explosives.  There’s a certifiable lunatic, a giant with the mind of a child, a voodoo priest, a Japanese schoolgirl…and a legion of other great choices.  The whole thing is done in a cartoonish style, and the visible facial deformations are a riot to watch.   The character voices are nicely done—watching the audition tapes is a laugh and a half.

There are even celebrity boxers involved or at least scheduled to be; ever watch an episode of “Keeping Up With The Kardashians” and say, wow, I wish I could just slug Kim a few good ones?  With Facebreaker, you actually CAN!  Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag can actually square off via Facebreaker.

But all of these wonders together can’t quite exempt Facebreaker from its biggest problem—an AI so damaged that it’s virtually impossible to play in single player mode.  I can’t say how the multiplayer would work out—I generally work alone.  But the key point remains: playing Facebreaker is like trying to drive a Ferrari with a busted axle.  It looks great, it sounds great, it’s a beautiful system, but man…it’s not going anywhere any time soon.  And trying to go anywhere with it will only do more damage and leave you seriously frustrated.