Bringing a beloved champ out of retirement and back into the ring is always dicey. Nobody likes to watch a former master get pummeled, humiliated and reduced to a punch-drunk shadow of his former self.
That's the challenge Nintendo accepted when it chose to revive Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! One of the best, most talked-about videogames of the classic Nintendo era, it knocked out gamers with its perfect combination of addictive gameplay and technological impressiveness: The big, colorful opponents were as close as games got to looking like a Saturday morning cartoon in 1987, and it was a lot of fun to smash them in the face.
Nintendo's decision to revive the series on Wii (sans Tyson) was thus fraught with peril, for in large part Punch-Out!! was a product of its time. Wii games aren't designed to impress with technology. The best hope Nintendo had -- by which I mean, what I personally would have told the designers to do -- was to figure out what made the original so compelling, and re-create it.
And this is precisely what the company has done, in spades. Punch-Out!!, released Monday, is some of the most fun I've ever had with Wii, and something that will appeal to both major types of Wii owners: Its gentle learning curve and laugh-out-loud funny characters will bring in the casual gamers, and hard-core players will be quite challenged by the brutal difficulty of the later fights.
Punch-Out!! has basically nothing to do with boxing. I remember being quite disappointed at age 10 when I turned on an HBO boxing match only to find that the fighters didn't throw elaborate, telegraphed blows with silly names like the Flamenco Punch and Bull Charge. (And that the referee wasn't Mario.)
Nintendo instead used the sport of boxing as a framework for a game that was a pure test of a gamer's reflexes. Throwing punches willy-nilly at your opponents would get you precisely nowhere. To beat the crazy characters like Piston Honda and King Hippo (above), you had to watch for their punches, dodge out of the way, then start landing jabs and hooks immediately after they missed their attacks.
These gameplay fundamentals, a combination of twitch reflex and memorization, remain unchanged in the Wii version. You've got to remember which "tells" lead to which punches, then dodge with the correct timing. You'll probably get wailed on the first couple of times as you're coming to grips with each boxer's peculiarities, but since the rounds are so brief and since you can try over and over, there's a tangible sense of improvement each time the bell rings.
It's also fun to lose because the boxers are so funny. The original Punch-Out!! games, from a less politically correct age, were exaggerated parodies of ethnic stereotypes. The Wii game, far from shying away from its roots, kicks it up a notch. When Frenchman Glass Joe is dizzied, he sees not stars but croissants; rotund Canadian strongman Bear Hugger drinks from a jug of maple syrup. Brief vignettes before each fight and between rounds add a great deal of personality to each opponent.
Nearing the end of Punch-Out!!'s lineup of 14 boxers, I started to get a bit worried -- was this all the game had to offer? As it turns out, no. As soon as I'd won the championship belt, I was thrown right back into the ring in the "Title Defense" mode, in which every boxer has been given a new look, a new set of animations and, most importantly, a whole new series of more difficult attacks that make things much more difficult. I still haven't finished, as it's taking me quite a while to master each boxer the second time around.
Once you defeat an opponent, you unlock him in the "Exhibition" mode, which -- in addition to allowing you to fight anyone at any time -- offers three different challenges for each. For instance, you might have to defeat a given boxer without dodging, ducking or blocking -- meaning you'll have to counter every one of his moves with well-timed punches, without missing a trick.
Punch-Out!! also offers a limited two-player mode. Each player takes the part of the main character, Little Mac, and the screen is split in two so each person views the game from behind their character. Once a player lands enough punches, he turns into the monstrous Giga Mac (above), and the contest becomes asymmetrical: The juiced-up player is throwing big, showy punches, and the smaller player is attempting to dodge them and counterattack. It's a clever way to add multiplayer to a single-player experience, but it's not an especially engaging mode.
Being a Wii game, Punch-Out!! allows you to play it using motion controls to throw punches. If you have the Wii Fit balance board, you can use that to duck and dodge by shifting your body weight. I find all this superfluous -- standard button controls are the way to go for a game that demands such precision. But I have no idea why it doesn't support the much more comfortable Classic Controller. Using the Wii remote by itself got kind of painful, a few hours in.
That's the only glaring problem I can find with Punch-Out!! It doesn't matter in the slightest if you have no nostalgic memories of finally figuring out how to dodge Mike Tyson's "Dynamite Punch." It's just a solid, addictive, finely polished game that's easy enough for newbies and challenging enough for those who remember. Sometimes, they *do *make 'em like they used to.
WIRED Tight action, hilarious characters, packed with content
TIRED Lack of Classic Controller support is absolutely baffling
$50, Nintendo
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