Mike Tyson´s Punch Out! Review.

The next game I played on the list was Mike Tyson´s Punch Out! This is and old game but gold.
It´s kinda hard to get a hold on for the NES because there are two releases of the this game, first we have Mike Tyson´s Punch Out! and then we have the regular Punch Out! and in the latter we have Mr. Sandman instead of Mike Tyson as the last opponent.

In this game you control a young boxer named Little Mac, and boy is he small. Your opponents are often twice the size of your character. But that doesn´t stop Mac from entering the ring. You got five different attacks, low left punch, low right punch, high left and right punch and uppercut. You can only do uppercut attacks when you have a star in your inventory and you use by pressing the "start" button. You get stars from hitting your opponent when the "shine" which means your are hitting them with a counter attack or similar. It doesn´t matter if you use your right or left attack but it differs if you use lower or upper attack, sometimes you need to hit the opponent in the head to be able to combo attack him.

You also have a heart symbol in your inventory which represents your stamina. If it goes down to 0 you´ll get kinda paralyzed and you are only able to dodge incoming attacks before it refills. So under that time you are unable to hit your opponent.

This game is all about memorise the movement of your opponent, counter attack and use uppercuts in the right time. If you go all in and just mash the buttons you will most certainly fall to the ground failing to win the round.

So let´s look over the extra life mechanic, you can get knocked down twice in the same round, if you get knocked down three times it´s over, you can´t get up. When you get knocked down the first or second time you will have to button mash the "A" and "B" buttons to get back up. One round has a three minute timer, however it goes a bit faster than normal seconds so I would say you got 2 minutes a round. If you fail to win a match you get sent back to the opponent before the one failed at, if you loose again it´s over and you need to restart the circuit. Don´t worry because at the end of every circuit Little Mac runs behind his trainer dressed in a pink training dress, and at the end of that cutscene you get a password which is the old way of using save points. However the password is very long so you better get paper and pen to write it up.

The game starts off pretty easy, just to get a hint on the mechanics of the game, the first opponent is Glass Joe, which has a 01-99 win/loss ratio, so winning over him shouldn´t be a big of a problem. But the second opponent is more of challenge for those new to the game and the third can be a real pain in the but for newcomers.

This is a game I played alot together with my father, we got pretty far in the game, but never got to fight Mike Tyson, I can probably say that will be the case again, because later in the game the difficulty is a real pain, the game is however still fun to play, challenging yes but fun. The game still holds up for todays standards, not the graphical department but the gameplay, it´s a fun game to pick up, play a couple of matches. You can now buy it on nintendos E-shop for the 3DS, I really recommend this game. Don´t forget that the soundtrack of this game brings awesomeness to new level.

Overall 9/10

Wanna see how the game looks? Check it out here: Lets Play!