Player's Club: Punch-Out!!

Punch-Out!!

Rated E10+ for Everyone 10+

Released May 18

Nintendo Wii

Published by Nintendo

What It Is: Here’s another revival of a classic Nintendo franchise from the good ol’ days. Punch-Out’s particular good ol' days ran from 1984 up to 1994, commencing with the arcade original and stretching to the SNES installment Super Punch-Out. Somewhere in-between saw the series’ most famous and successful title, Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out, a game familiar to pretty much anybody who ever owned an NES. Punch-Out’s certainly had a good run. Those ten years between the arcade original and the SNES version may not seem like much, but that’s an epoch in gaming time. One version of Punch-Out or another was a formative gaming experience for both my oldest brother and my youngest brother-in-law, which is an almost twenty-year swing. Now my nieces and nephews can have fun beating Glass Joe and King Hippo down to the mat. Times change, but violence is always popular.

Lands a knock-out punch: simply by existing. Nintendo updates the past better than any other company. The nostalgia factor associated with Mario, Zelda, and now Punch-Out can’t be understated, but it’s in no way vital or even necessary to enjoy the actual games. If you’re old enough to remember Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out or Super Punch-Out, you’ll probably love squaring off against old foes like Bear Hugger or Soda Popinski. You probably won’t love getting destroyed by them when you first face off. They might look the same, but after the first few rounds your opponents largely don’t fight like they did in the past. Defying our expectations like this doesn’t just insure that Punch-Out will challenge those familiar with the series; it’s a blatant provocation to fire up those of us who can’t believe we were actually beaten by a stiff like Don Flamenco. It keeps you motivated.

The fidelity to tradition extends beyond the roster. If you want to fully recreate the Punch-Outs of old, you can pick the classic control scheme, holding the Wii remote on its side like an NES joypad. A revved-up score reprises seminal tunes from the NES original, and your old trainer Doc returns to impart occasionally helpful bits of ring wisdom. The multiplayer mode might be bare-bones and imperfect, but it’s still a lot of fun for two players, and a welcome inclusion.

Most importantly, though, Nintendo doesn’t mess with what made Punch-Out so memorable in the first place, namely the strikingly large fighters and their cartoonish, stereotypical personalities. Without the distinctive look and larger-than-life idiosyncrasies of boxers like the Great Tiger or Aran Ryan, Punch-Out would be a characterless exercise in pattern-recognition.

Takes a dive when: you realize the motion controls can’t hold their own against the classic button-mashing approach. They’re not a disaster by any means, and perhaps those without Punch-Out experience will prefer them. An old ring general like me, though, needs the more precise and tactile feel of the sideways Wii remote. The balance board support, meanwhile, is a sloppy novelty barely worth mentioning.

What To Do: It doesn’t matter how old you are, or whether you’re familiar with the series or not. If you own a Wii, you need to own Punch-Out. Like the best Nintendo games, Punch-Out is pure, undiluted fun. It’s also the finest first-party Wii title since Super Smash Brothers Brawl.