Vital Stats

Genre: Action
Players: 1-2
Online: None

Developer: Next Level
Games
Publisher: Nintendo
ESRB Rating: E10+
Release Date: 5/18/09

Platforms

• Wii

Punch-Out!! is an excellent franchise retread, if a merely competent game. The attempt to integrate the Wii’s gestural controls will do little to entice casual gamers past the first handful of fights as the steep difficulty curve was clearly designed with a controller in mind. All in all, it’s game that’s low on content, but high on nostalgia.

It’s fashionable to criticize Nintendo for rehashing its old properties, tapping them again and again without concern that they’ll ever run dry. Fashion or not though, that doesn’t stop the charge from being true. Between the virtual console service and the parade of sequels, even apologists have a hard time arguing that Nintendo isn’t returning to the well time and time again.

The well runs deep, though, and even the numbing sameness of repetition doesn’t seem to strip Nintendo’s star franchises of their selling power. The Wii has been fairly prolific, having already seen a Mario, Zelda, and Metroid game, so Nintendo has been scraping the bottom of the bucket for some of its less universally beloved—but no less iconic—franchises like Punch-Out!!

It’s Only Fun If Someone Loses an Eye
On the surface, Punch-Out!! is a boxing game. A tiny 17-year-old boxer with big dreams claws his way up through increasingly fearsome, if comical, opponents (who all just happen to be strangely indulgent about repeated rematches) to take the world circuit boxing title. However, that’s where the similarities end.

Punch-Out!! is to boxing games what Smash Brothers is to fighting games: a streamlined doppelganger built for accessibility. You have a handful of attacks and can dodge incoming punches, but your feet are locked in place. So the gameplay isn’t built so much on strategic fighting as it is on pattern memorization and learning to read the tells of your opponents. One boxer might wiggle his eyebrows before a right jab, while another might shake his head. If you dodge out of the way, they’ll be momentarily surprised and you can retaliate. It’s like playing Simon Says with a series of 13 opponents, but they all speak different languages and will beat the hell out of you if you fail.

Oh hell.

The way this pans out in normal gameplay is that you meet a boxer, flail at him ineffectually, and kiss the mat a few times as you figure out the sequence of his attacks and which tells precede each one. Punch-Out!!’s ritualistic approach to gameplay reveals the game’s arcade roots, especially as the game ratchets up the difficulty by having smaller tells, shorter response times, and more incoming damage when you fail. Arcades may be dead, but Punch-Out!!’s boxers still act like they’re taking your lunch money. This sort of approach to design (as well as the game’s eventually high difficulty) will likely appeal to challenge-oriented gamers, but others will find it more repetitious than anything.

This design emphasis on catering to hardcore gamers makes it puzzling why Punch-Out!! has been retrofitted with gestural controls, and extensive ones at that. In addition to using the Wii remote and nunchuck to punch, balance board owners can use it to duck and sidestep incoming punches. However, it just takes more time to make a punching gesture than it does to push a button and Punch-Out!! was built to challenge the players who use the controller. Worse yet, punching thin air is much harder on your joints than punching a button. You’ll land 150 punches in three minutes to drop some of the sturdier boxers. Go ahead and try it right now. Hurts, doesn’t it?

Probably the most offensive part is that there are literally more buttons to press and gestures to memorize if you want learn Punch-Out!! using the Wii remote and balance board instead of the controller. When your barrier-eliminating gestural controls are actually more complex than the competing controller standard you’re doing it wrong. The only thing that the Wii remote controls are good for in Punch-Out!! is duping unsuspecting buyers into playing a game that will prove to be an exercise in masochism. On the bright side, the controller feels good. Despite the game’s graphical upgrade, it hasn’t taken a performance hit and the controls feel just as tight as they did in the NES era.

Beyond the core game in career mode, Punch-Out!! offers a few more gameplay options. Truly serious gamers can defend their world circuit title in Punch-Out!!’s take on hard mode. Title defense revisits remixed versions of the game’s 13 boxers with more damage, more variety for incoming attacks, and a general disregard for your self-esteem. There are also exhibition battles, which are Punch-Out!!’s adoption of achievements, and a two-player competitive mode. However, none of these expansions on the base game can hide the fact that, when all is said and done, Punch-Out!! offers 13 boxing opponents, each of whom can be defeated in about three minutes. So that’s about 40 minutes of gameplay for a $50 game. Those 40 minutes are stretched out into hours by the game’s difficulty, but the fact of the matter is that there just isn’t very much content in Punch-Out!!

Shiner
That’s not to say that the game is incomplete, because there’s pretty much everything here you could want from a Punch-Out!! game. It’s a faithful recreation of the first two games with some incremental expansion and the addition of more modern gameplay conceits like achievements. The same sentiment holds true for the game’s graphics. Punch-Out!! has gone for big cartoony cel-shading, which is really the natural extension of the big cartoony sprites in earlier series entries.

Were Punch-Out!! released in the McCarthy era
Soda Popinski would have been the final boss and been
named Blooda Kittenski.

The art is really shown off by the boxers: larger-than-life caricatures of nations worldwide who’ve assembled for some mutual pugilation. Less charitable critics might call them racist, but they’re really just stereotypes that are so ridiculous that they punch straight through racism and come out on the other side as good-natured sendups (ok, the Canadian who chugs maple syrup is nauseating, but that’s not the racism so much as chugging maple syrup). Even the scary boxers are adorable, and tiny ethnic foods orbit their heads like birds as you beat them senseless. The visible aliasing that mars the cel-shading is considerably more offensive than the boxers themselves, but even then it’s hard to hold a grudge because the game’s performance is silky smooth.

The music consists of different ethnic arrangements of the Punch-Out!! theme from the NES game. There’s enough instrumental diversity to cover for the fact that there’s really only one melody, especially in such a brief game, but players should be aware up front that the Punch-Out!! theme will follow them to the grave. That said, the music is catchy, and the arrangements are both clever and pleasant.

TKO
It’s difficult to reduce Punch-Out!! to a single recommendation, because whether you’ll enjoy the game is ultimately a matter of taste. Nostalgic gamers will enjoy what amounts to an arrangement of the first two games’ themes, and challenge-driven gamers will enjoy honing their game to overcome Punch-Out!!’s unforgiving precision gameplay. Other gamers however, may not appreciate the constant rehearsal and may regard the pattern memorization as a shallow imitation of a boxing game. The former should check out the scores below, and the latter should just skip the game altogether.

What It Costs: $50

What It’s Worth:
•To The Hardcore: $30 (rent)
•To The Genre Fan: $30 (buy)
•To The Casual: $10 (skip)