Home
SECTIONS
Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!
System: NES Rating: 4.4
THE OBLIGATORY SYNOPSIS
That game, which you may have guessed if your IQ is above the temperature of a
South Dakotan winter, is Mike Tyson's Punch Out!!, a brilliant combination of celebrity
endorsement, boxing, and midget propaganda. This game chronicles the quest of a
teenager from the Bronx named Little Mac, who despite being the size of my nine
year-old cousin, dreams of becoming World Video Boxing Association champion. He
enlists the aid of old time boxer turned manager/trainer Doc Louis, and sets out to
accomplish his dreams. The little fighter must endure battles with ten of the WVBA's
best cartoon rejects before facing the number one of reject of all, Mike Tyson! As
the game says: "This is a true story of victory!!! But the road is long...
Mike is waiting for your challenge!!!"
THE REVIEW
MTPO!! basically is the marriage of arcadish gameplay to something that all
'80s pre-teen Nintendo players could relate to, punching people in the jaw. To Nintendo,
this amalgamation sounded like a solid follow-up to their successful combination with
Super Mario Brothers, which paired jumping plumbers with LSD hallucinations. Much like
SMB, what resulted was a deliriously fun game with replay value up the wazoo.
Now, when I say that MTPO!! has arcadish gameplay, that isn't just me speaking out of
my ass. MTPO!! is actually based off of the 1984 arcade game Punch-Out!!*, which
laid down the gameplay groundwork for MTPO!!. Basically, two fighters stand
in the middle of the ring shucking and jiving, and as Little Mac you must avoid the
punches of the opposing fighter while simultaneously kicking their lily white asses.
One of the first things you'll notice is how dwarfed our little fighting friend is to
his opposition. According to the game's tale of the tape, Little Mac is 3' 6" and 107
lbs., which is not even menacing enough to intimidate a five-year old out of his box of
crayons let alone take on fricking Mike Tyson. The reason Nintendo made your boxer
Little Mac and not Fairly Small Mac or even Moderately Sized Mac is so you can actually
see what your wily opponent is doing. The arcade got around this by making Mac a wire
frame so you could see through him, but when Nintendo tried to get the NES to do
transparencies, the console literally hopped from the table and brutally slayed 14
Nintendo programmers before being put down.
In reality, the size of Mac makes no impact upon the oodles of greatness that is the
game. MTPO!! fits right in with Nolan Bushnell's precept that games should be easy to
learn and hard to master. Anyone between the ages of 5 and 85 can easily come to grips
with the control scheme of this game, unless of course that person is my dad . A and B
control Mac's right and left arm respectively, while holding up on the D-pad while
punching goes for the head. Left and right dodges, holding down blocks, down twice
causes Mac to duck**, and the start button unleashes Mac's uppercut if he has a star.
Besides the sad absence of a pause button, this scheme is nigh perfect.
It's a damn good thing that the controls are great, because it allows the player to
bask in the glory that is the MTPO!! gameplay. The game is wonderfully simple,
basically all the player needs to do is have Mac dodge the punches and counter with his
own. Essentially, the game is a simple timing and pattern game. Track the opponents
movements, react accordingly, and kick some ass. There are some subtle nuances that do
add to the flavor of the fights, such as the stamina heart meter and the vaunted star
uppercuts the player gets for landing timely punches.
Even with that, the game really is just an exercise in timing, and it would seem that
that would get monotonous very quickly, but somehow it remains fresh even after the
god-knows-how-many hours I've played it. I just can't seem to get tired of landing
punches on King Hippo's 63 inch waist or sending Soda Popinski back to the Russian
gutter he came from. The gameplay may not be the deepest, but is remarkably
addicting.
It doesn't hurt that the graphics and sounds are really quite impeccable, especially
for a game released in 1987. A special chip, the MM2, was included in the cart to
assist the machine to handle the gigantic sprites the made the opposing boxers***.
What results is some very impressive visuals, and all the boxers have a tremendous
amount of personality that really adds to the impact and replay value of the game.
And Mike Tyson actually looks like Mike Tyson circa 1987! Well, that is of course if
you have the pre-rape conviction cartridge and not the bastardized one with "Mr. Dream."
Mr. Dream my milky white ass.
As for the sounds, I had never realized how great the sounds were until I downloaded
the NESticle emulated version of the game. Because of the MM2 chip, NESticle really
can't emulate the game properly, which means the original sounds of the game are
replaced with the customary beeps and bloops. Talk about a difference! Switching
MTPO!!'s rich sounds with those old ColecoVision bleeps is like switching the theme to
Star Wars with the theme to Hee Haw! Oh yeah, and about the music, anyone who has
played the game for more than five minutes can hum the fight song even while in the
process of suffering a massive head wound.
Simply put, MTPO!! is a truly great game that has securely bolted itself in the
collective mind of NES fans everywhere. The gameplay isn't the deepest, and it sure
ain't real boxing, but it provides for a quick shot of arcade fun. In today's era,
where most games beseech you to play in three hour stints, MTPO!! with its wham, bam,
thank-you ma'am style of play is a welcome retro respite.
*Actually, MTPO!! is not a super true arcade port. What is a much more accurate port
of the arcade game is the SNES sequel to MTPO!!, Super Punch Out!!, which plays almost
exactly the same as the arcade original.
**In ten years of playing this game I have never successfully ducked under any punch
ever. All it makes Mac do is bend over before getting hit with a fist three times the
size of his head. I think the creators added it as some sick joke.
***Courtesy of www.nintendoland.com
More MTPO!! related articles: 
Publisher: Nintendo
Year: 1987
Genre: Sports (Boxing)
From the original Activision Atari game to the recent efforts like Ready 2 Rumble and
Knockout Kings, there have been more boxing games in the history of console gaming
than Leno jokes about Don King's hair. Yet, in a brilliant twist of irony, the most
popular boxing game to rise out of this morass is about as accurate a representation of
real life boxing as Super Mario Brothers is of real life plumbing or A Boy and His Blob
is of real life blob adventure.
Copyright 2000 by Daniel Koch
for the Jaded Eye.