How About That Thing?

Boxing is a sport I kind of drift in and out of. I’m familiar with big names like Mike Tyson, Evander Holyfield, George Foreman, Wladimir and Batali Klichkoph, etc. I couldn’t tell you who’s the champion anymore… Though just as much of that has to do with the fact there’s, like, four different heavyweight championship belts alone. But I digress.

It’s probably the one sport that a lot of my friends and family don’t agree with me on. To them, it’s just two dudes wailing on each other like rock-em sock-em robots. In reality, there’s a lot more technique involved than you’d think. Things like counterpunching, having to adapt to left-handed opponents, having to learn how to fight left-handed, having to pick and choose what time to strike, looking for cracks in defense… It’s a lot more complicated than you’d think.

Unfortunately, due to my vision problems, there’s no way in hell I’d ever be able to take up boxing professionally. Even amateur boxing leagues wouldn’t let my blind ass anywhere near the ring. The closest to a professional fight I ever had in my entire life was acting as some other boxers’ sparring partner here and there back in the early 2010s..

True story, by the way. It didn’t happen especially often, of course, but I often helped some local KC boxers work on their defense during sparring sessions. One of my favorite anecdotes was a time I was helping a guy work on his defense. At some point early on in the fight, I decided to try what had jokingly become my signature: a fake jab into a left uppercut. I figured he wouldn’t fall for it in the least… Except I totally managed to get him with it. I think I even managed to stagger the guy! I threw a flurry of wild lefts and rights while he was staggered, but he eventually found his way out of it. Once out, the trainer in his corner, who’d been shouting things like “stay on the move!” and “keep those hands up!” suddenly shouted “I forgot to mention, he loves throwing uppercuts! Watch out for his uppercut!”.

Those were fun times. However, those wouldn’t be for many years.

As a young boy, all I had were video games. Quite a few, in fact. I often loved the more cartoony games like Ready to Rumble Boxing, but I was just as good with the simulation type games.

So naturally, at some point in my life, I found myself checking out Power Punch II for the NES.

If you’ve never heard of the Power Punch franchise… Well, don’t feel too bad. In large part because there ISN’T one. Power Punch II is one of those situations where the behind the scenes story is more interesting than the game itself.

The original plan was to call the game Mike Tyson’s Intergalactic Power Punch. It was intended to be a spiritual sequel to Mike Tyson’s Punch Out. The plot, simply put, was that Mike Tyson would get abducted by aliens, and forced to fight every challenger they threw at him. Competitors from every corner of the galaxy would try their hand at knocking out Earth’s undisputed heavyweight champion.

Then, Mike Tyson assaulted his girlfriend. Or maybe she was his wife? I forget off hand, but yeah, there was definitely an assault. And suddenly, this game was looking like a massive boondoggle.

Rather than scrap the game altogether, though, the developers decided to recolor Tyson’s trunks to pink, and rename him to Mark Taylor. The name of the game was also changed to Power Punch II… Though I have no clue why. I guess there was already a Power Punch 1?

The game was released, I rented it at one point… And whew boy, what a frustrating experience this turned out to be.

Before you can take on any of the opponents, you have to train.

The interesting thing about Power Punch II is that you TECHNICALLY don’t have to play through this training exercise. You can literally go into the options menu, and force the clock to run out of time. It’s not even a hack!

The thing they DON’T tell you, though, is that if you skip this training sequence, as well as every other training sequence that pops up every third or fourth fight, then your boxer will be super weak as a result. If there was something about it in the instruction manual, it was news to me. Partly because there was no manual with my rental copy, partly because I wouldn’t have been able to read it at the time, and mostly because I never read the manuals when they DID come with the game. Fuck that, let me figure it out! There’s only, like, five buttons on this NES controller. How hard could it be?

It turns out it was actually VERY hard.

Galactic boxing apparently follows the same rules as Mike Tyson’s Punch Out. You have three rounds to work with. If you can knock them down for a ten count, or if you can knock them down three times in one round (IE, a TKO), you win. The knockdown counter goes back one knockdown per round, so if you knocked them down twice in round 1, you need two more for round 2. If three rounds are up, and neither of you has been KO’ed or TKO’ed, then it goes to the judges.

FUN FACT: it’s actually possible to win via judge’s decision in this game. I remember always thinking the fights were rigged, and the only way to truly win was to go for the knockout. Or maybe that was just young me justifying the fact we both got knocked down twice, and the judges went for the opponent, even though I was pretty sure I landed more punches. I don’t know how I got there, in all honesty, but it turns out I was wrong, for what that’s worth.

The guy you see in the above screenshot is your first opponent. And if you’re like me, he’s probably the only guy you’ll ever see, because you’re impatient, skipped the tutorial, and went into the fight super weak every single time.

I would find out literally decades later that if you just swallowed your pride, and did the fucking training exercises, your boxer would not only be strong, but virtually EVERY opponent, including the final boss, can be knocked out within the very first round. Especially the very first guy.

I GUESS it’s an interesting way of teaching the younger players that training exists for a reason, and if you go into a fight with no preparation, then you’re getting smoked like salmon on a Friday night. However, it’s kind of funny how easily the opponents get once you go through with it. I mean SURELY these guys trained too… Right?

Even if you DO go through the training, though, you run into the problem that most of the opponents don’t have very obvious tells like they did in Punch Out. Again, I don’t have the best vision in the world, but I’m not the only one who seems to have made this claim. Even when I DID do the training, I remember still falling for that first guy’s old left right combo.

Also, watching through the longplay on YouTube, I can’t help but notice a few of the opponents get repeated rather frequently. Where as in Punch Out, they at least had something new to bring to the rematch, the repeat opponents HERE don’t seem to do anything all that different. And if they aren’t repeats, I’m pretty sure I saw a palot swap or two in there as well. True, Punch Out did the same thing IE, (Mr. Sandman is basically black Bald Bull), but when the game is lackluster, you tend to notice the shortcuts a lot more.

Overall, Power Punch II is not a great game. As a spiritual successor to Punch Out, you could do better. As a boxing game based entirely on its own… You could still do better. There’s a reason everybody remembers Bald Bull and Super Macho Man, and nobody remembers… Actually, I don’t remember ANY of these guys’ names. And I literally just got done screencapping off of YouTube!

Play it if you absolutely have to. Otherwise, I wouldn’t recommend it.