The high demand for the Wii continues in large part because of Nintendo’s inspired decision to include Wii Sports. In this series, Geek Out New York looks at the 8-bit progenitors of Wii Sports. Are the modern Wii games really so much more fun than the sports titles we played “back in the day”? Yes, yes they are.

Today: Boxing.

It’s a scenario I’ve witnessed many times. Gamers and novices alike are having a grand old time at Wii Sports when one foolish soul pipes up, “Now let’s try boxing!” You try to dissuade him, but everyone insists. So you hook up the nunchuk (all the other games just use the Wiimote, but no, not boxing). The first eager contestant steps into the ring. Cries of “Wow, this is cool!” give way to “What’s going on?” and “LORD GOD, HOW DO I PUNCH???” The crowd disperses, and everybody hates you and your stupid dumb Wii.

Wii Sports boxing isn’t a bad game, but it does have a learning curve, as newbies inevitably learn when the computer opponent rains blow after blow upon their Mii’s smiling face. Experienced players, who can handle the challenge, tend to be disappointed in a different way, as Wii Sports can’t approach the fun of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, the only boxing video game that ever mattered.

Despite the dominance of Punch-Out!!, there were other boxing games for the NES, presumably purchased as gifts by parents who didn’t know any better. (“You said you wanted the Nintendo boxing game! Why are you crying?”) These pugilistic also-rans make many of the same mistakes we’ve seen throughout this retrospective series.

Like the ill-advised celebrity endorsement. Mike Tyson signed over his name, cashed his check, and got lucky when the resulting game was a winner. Pity George Foreman, who did the very same thing, minus the luck part.

To be fair, George Foreman’s K.O. Boxing shows promise in its first few screens of window dressing. Just look at the gritty realism of that fight card!

Now, look at the gritty…whatever this is. Yup, that’s supposed to be Lorenzo “Bullet” Luciano, and while he looks nothing like his photograph, don’t forget that the video camera adds ten pounds and also transforms you into a completely different ethnicity.

The player assumes the role of George Foreman, facing off against Luciano on a fenced-in blue square. You’re rooted on by a crowd of faceless torsos and limbs. They’re not much for cheering, but they clap like nobody’s business.

Between rounds, Foreman entertains the torsos and limbs by flirting with the Doritos® logo. Given the way his physique has withered between the title screen and this one, Foreman’s love of that Cool Ranch® taste appears to be taking its toll.

Crass commercialism has no place in World Champ: Super Boxing Great Fight, but the game falls victim to another familiar pitfall of early NES sports titles, namely overselling. Whether it’s Perfect Bowling or Fighting Golf, overzealous marketing types set themselves up for failure by promising players experiences they couldn’t deliver. Is World Champ a decent game? Yes.¹ Is it super boxing great fight? That, sir, is asking too much.

World Champ shares another common offense with its contemporaries, boasting the worst audio atrocities I’ve heard from a Nintendo game. Remember when I whined about the robotic voice synthesis in Top Players’ Tennis? I guess those robots weren’t available during the making of World Champ, so instead the programmers kidnapped a low-level staffer and inserted his consciousness into the game’s code. Whenever a boxer in the game gets knocked down, you hear the imprisoned stooge screaming for help, deep within his cyberspace hell. His screeches almost sound like numbers. There’s plenty of examples in this video, but fast-forward to the 5:10 mark in this video to hear the whole blood-curdling 10-count:

(It is admittedly impressive that the thick Japanese accent comes through all that distortion.)

The gameplay in the video demonstrates what I’ve found to be the best sequence of attack in World Champ, going something like this: punch punch punch punch punch punch punch punch punch punch punch punch punch punch punch punch punch punch punch punch punch punch punch punch punch. Feel free, of course, to develop your own strategy along those general guidelines.

Finally, there’s Power Punch II, which embraces a motif I didn’t expect to resurface after Perfect Bowling: inexplicably setting the action in space. Nintendo washed its hands of this would-be sequel to Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! midway through the (outsourced) development process, partly because Mike Tyson was no longer a wholesome role model, and partly because they were freaked out by alien Don King:

I don’t plan to delve any deeper into Power Punch II’s backstory than that screenshot, so suffice it to say that you play star boxer “Mark Tyler” in the year 2006, and you have to box against a bunch of aliens. In space.

You can tell you’re in space because of the gargoyles and green carpet (obviously). Plus, instead of a win-loss record, your stat sheet shows a “cosmic record,” and you’re playing for the “Solar Championship”—apparently, in some deep-space goth freak’s dingy basement.

On that note, this will be the final installment of “The Way Wii Sports Were.” I didn’t do baseball, I know. For me, 8-bit baseball begins and ends with Tengen’s R.B.I. Baseball, and I plan to keep it that way, having been scarred by the horrors of NES golf, bowling, tennis, and boxing. I’m sure that there’s some celebrity-endorsed, outer-space robot monster voice-synthesizing baseball game out there, but for the sake of childhood memories, I choose to remain blissfully unaware.

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1. Actually, no, it isn’t. ↑