Pure, unadulterated fun. It is an idea that seems to have escaped this industry and its audience. Yes, its audience. I am even guilty of this bastardization of the games industry in my own way. Somewhere we got caught up in the idea that video games have to be a certain way, and now we are stuck where the comic books of the 90’s were. Trying to become more accessible, yet only capable of appealing to the same limited market with adolescent concepts of “grim and gritty”.

Thank God for games like Punch-Out!!, and thank God for the Wii. For so long I declined renting it from GameFly, believing it would take no time at all and be a waste of precious time that could be better spent hoping for the latest Xbox 360 release instead. Everything I had assumed was instead wrong. Punch-Out!! is a reminder of what it means for a game to be fun, accessible and yet still challenging. In other words, “hardcore”.

One of the points a developer at Bungie brought up, a point that was popular to repeat amongst fans and the public relations folks at Microsoft, was the concept of six seconds of fun repeated. In other words, the secret to an enjoyable game is a simple act that can be done over and over and still be enjoyable. This is Punch-Out!!. All you have to do is dodge enemy attacks, take advantage of the opening and bash their faces (or stomachs) in until they fall over. It’s a simple concept and it works.

This fun is part of what makes the game so accessible. The player only needs to know how to dodge and attack. Sure, there are different directions that the player can dodge and you can strike either high or low. Yet these changes can be inferred rather than spending time in a tutorial mode. In fact, imagine my surprise when the game dropped me into the middle of a fight with Glass Joe without as much as a cut-scene or pop-up box trying to tell me what’s going on, what my motivation is or what I’m supposed to be doing. It is all crystal clear. I’m a boxer, I’m trying to become champion, and the idea is to dodge and strike. If you need any help, the pause menu has the controls (and if you bought the game instead of renting it from GameFly, I imagine the instruction booklet would be helpful in informing you ahead of time how to play).

The problem with the modern industry and its audience is that there’s an assumption that a simple concept cannot, therefore, become a “hardcore” experience. Punch-Out!! must clearly be for “casual” players that just want to kill five or ten minutes of the day. Well, it is certainly possible, but the difficulty curves steeply upward as the player climbs the ranks.

This is where the challenge comes in, and where Punch-Out!! still manages to be accessible. Less experienced gamers won’t be able to climb the ranks as easily, but it provides an easy format to learn the “try-try-again” formula that veteran players have grown up with. If you lose a bout, it doesn’t really matter. You just shrug and come back another day. If you want to practice then there is an Exhibition mode where the player takes no damage and is allowed to learn the foe’s attack patterns at their own pace. Believe me, this mode will be useful for “hardcore” players as well.

By building the game on individual confrontations, new players can be introduced to heightened challenge at their own pace rather than forcing them to go from one checkpoint to the next. They may get a bit stuck on later matches, but at any time they can go back and complete the challenges they know they can beat, refining their abilities and improving.

Once the champion belt has been won, of course, a player may believe everything is over. It isn’t. The career mode extends to defending your title, and the player now fights every foe a second time with some minor changes to make them even more difficult. Even Glass Joe is a decent challenge, and thus veteran gamers have more to keep busy with and greater goals to shoot for. After all, if Glass Joe is putting up this much of a fight, then imagine Mr. Sandman!

There is no doubt about the value of Punch-Out!! It is the sort of game that any Wii owner ought to have. It also doubles as an excellent exercise game, forcing players to sweat and waking them up the next morning with sore arms and shoulders (that is, unless you are lame and switch it to classic controls). It is a game that is fun, accessible, challenging and comes with enough to keep players entertained for hours. It is six seconds of fun repeated across thirteen separate fighters, each of which you fight twice (minimum). This is nothing to say of the amusing animation and charm of each of the fighters. The game is fun, it has spirit, and it is not only nostalgic as a remake but nostalgic in just pure, unadulterated joy.

Which is probably the best way to describe the game. Punch-Out!! is, quite simply, a pure game. It is what a video game should be without all the marketing, demographics and other crap thrown in. It would be nice if we could all remember that once in a while.

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