Well, I'm still angry at Nintendo for their latest installment of the series: Punchout! (Wii), which focuses more on the original style of play, and only has one new opponent:
FUCKING Donkey Kong! What's WRONG with you Nintendo!? Was the already large pool of completely good characters not to your liking? You had a ton of good characters to choose from! Has the imagination pool finally run out? More likely! He's not even that hard, and that's a real insult.
Also, in the game, to technically beat the game, you have to fight each boxer twice, once in normal mode, and again in "defense" mode where they have a modified attack pattern/special gimmick, but are otherwise unchanged. It was nifty for Glass Joe, who actually became challenging, but absolutely smacks of laziness on everyone else. It's like they don't even WANT to think of new characters.
What's worse is that, from what I've played of the original (really only up until bald bull) they had a field day completely reducing each character to an 2-dimensional stereotype.
Flanderization abound! It REALLY removes any likability a character has when they're made into a unfunny cartoonish exaggeration of their former self.
You want to know why I liked Nick Bruiser so much? Because of whole Super Punchout cast, him and his brother Rick were the only ones that weren't cartoony stereotypes or caricatures or walking gimmicks. The buildup to Nick and Rick is intense, without guides, I beat Narcis Prince and Hoy Quarlow (where the game suddenly jumps in difficulty), and then you had to fight a huge smiling muscular man named Rick who's size was so prodigial he could shake the whole ring and stun you for a knockout blow. Then, after I don't know how many tries, I finally beat him and got to his brother, Nick. Being he brother, he was a pallette swap, but was very different. He was much silent and stoic where his brother was smiling and emphatic, and his movements were mechanical, his punches were strong, and he shook the ring when he walked. He scared the CRAP out of me! However, when I finally managed to knock him down for the first time, he jumped up almost immediately, then
softly punched himself on the forehead and my heart
melted for this monsterous muscular behemoth. That little action, coupled with his ending quote ("I'm so ashamed. How could I suffer such total defeat?") in my opinion, made him the most interesting and likable character in all of Punchout canon, and endeared me to him permanently. Being a stoic myself, I could identify that he was a perfectionist, had high expectations of himself, and even the smallest mistake was unforgivable. Of all the Punchout opponents, he was the only one I felt bad about beating up, which only became worse once I figured out his pattern and found out how dead easy he was. Or, I could just be thinking about things too hard, but I prefer the former.
Also, in another bullshit move, Nintendo has a single match game, downloadable via WiiWare, named Doc Louis's Punchout!:
http://punchout.wikia.com/wiki/Doc_Louis%27s_Punch-Out!!
What I don't like about it, is that it's only available via download (already immediately shunning those that lack the ability or knowledge to hook up a Wii to the internet) and it requires that you have Platinum Status as a Club Nintendo Member (Hey! Want to play our game? JUMP THROUGH THE HOOP!). I feel this is unforgivable, and I can't believe they'd do something like that. What's worse is that it's blurb "implies that it won't receive worldwide release" so people outside of North America probably won't ever get to see it.
Modern gaming depresses me.
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Topic: Bub and Bob need you! (Read 8731 times)