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.
