Mike Tyson's Punch-Out

Review by Loc

There's a ten-digit code so ingrained in my memory that I can recite it on cue. That was the code to skip all other fighters and battle Mike Tyson immediately. That code ruined my 1987 Christmas vacation. But even without that code, I would have spends countless hours fighting the likes of Piston Honda, King Hippo, Super Macho Man, and Mr. Sandman. Mike Tyson's Punch-Out was an instant NES classic that remains a favorite to this day.

The gameplay was simple enough. You were Little Mac, a mysteriously small boxer who fought against fighters at least twice his size. Your repertoire was simple: right and left hooks, right and left body shots, plus one super uppercut. The hooks were displayed as jumping punches smashing the jaws of your opponents. The body shots landed squarely in their abs. And the super uppercut, only available after earning "stars" by counterpunching, was delivered via crouched-springing right cross. It was sweet.

The fighters: all major caricatures. From the turban-sporting-teleporting Great Tiger to the beefed-pec-dancing Super Macho Man to the matador-turned-romeo Don Flamingo, the boxers looked more appropiate for the wrestling ring than the boxing ring. But each had his own special deliveries, each had his own style, and beating the game depending on you decoding their tricks.

Each match was a maximum of three 3-minute rounds. If either you or your opponent was knocked down 3 times, an automatic lose via TKO resulted. Between rounds your trainer would rub your shoulder. Once a match you were allowed to press the Select button to get an extra vigorous rubbing, leading to increased power recovery. Back in the day, it looked funny, nowadays, it looks like he was rubbing some Clear or Cream on you, if you catch my drift, Barry Bonds.

Overall, this was a fun game. It took a little work to figure out each boxer. Before figuring out the weaknesses, you had to have quick reflexes to dodge the onslaught of punches. Each fighter increased in difficulty, culminating in the intense trifecta of Mr. Sandman, Super Macho Man, and of course Mike Tyson. Tyson was so ruthless, he would knock you down in a single punch. Remember, this was back when Tyson was known as Iron Mike, the kid who won the title in 93 seconds, the youngest champ in the world. Granted, things haven't looked as good for him since then, but in his young prime, Tyson was a ferocious monster, someone who might really eat your kids. Out of a typical 10 count, Mike Tyson's Punch-Out scores the KO with a hearty standing 8 count! Oh, and what was that code all about? In the early days of NES, you didn't save games, you got codes after reaching certain levels. For this game, there was the legendary code that could get you straight to Tyson. And here it is: 007-373-5963. I swear, it's like a reflex, I spit that number out like it's a piece of Evander Holyfield's ear.

NES Pro Wrestling

Review by Loc

There have been so many wrestling video games, and some of them have been sooo good. The first WCW game for N64 was easily the greatest thing I played on that console for months. Ah, but before the days of polygon goodness, there was the 8 bit world of NES, and nothing entertained better than the generic sounding Pro Wrestling. Just how good was Pro Wrestling? It had features that later games often failed to capture and delivered a simplified, yet challenging gameplay system.

Let's start with the grappling system, one of the biggest challenges to any wrestling game. Limited by the era of a control pad and two buttons, Pro Wrestling delivered an intuitive and nuanced fighting system. Simple exchanges were punches and kicks, but once you grabbed your opponent, it was a race to execute a move. Pushing a direction and hitting the A or B button produced different moves. From suplexes to piledrivers, you had quite a repetoire at your disposal.

But that's not all! You had additional lariat moves, attacks you performed by running off the ropes. Sometimes, a well-placed clothesline is just so damn satifying. What about the ringposts? Of your course you could climb the turnbuckles and deliver a top rope maneuver. There was even outside-the-ring antics. Really, NES Pro Wrestling let you do all that you could have wanted in the 8-bit era.

Moving on to the wrestlers, there's nothing more important than the personalities you can control. For NES Pro Wrestling, the characters were fake, but based on some real-life counterparts. As a kid, I had no idea who they were referring to, so Starman was simply the pink dude with a star on his face and King Slender was the dude with the sweet backbreaker finisher. Each of these characters looked the same except for the color schemes and heads. But I gotta say, the Amazon did look like a piranha head was stuck on a wrestler's body, so kudos.

Each of these characters also had special moves, signature moves reserved just for them. Thus, Fighter Hayabusa was the only guy who did the Back Brain Kick, and Starman had the Sommersault Kick. The grappling system was simple in that special moves usually just replaced a standard move, so no learning new things. But I still have to commend the AI involved, as not all moves were created equal, especially something like King Slender's backbreaker. You had to wear your opponent down a bit before you could bust out huge moves like that or the pile driver. Otherwise, you got yourself reversed into a painful counter. Ouch.

Don't get me wrong, this wasn't a perfect game. There were no life meters, so you had to guess how tired your opponent was. There was a crazy sounding buzzer when you beat your opponent to near death, that was always nice to hear. If I recall correctly, a couple back suplexes followed by three backbreakers and that screaming buzzer went off like clockwork!

Plus, beating the game was damn near impossible. First, you worked your way up to a title match by winning 5 in a row. Once you won the championship, and it was a trophy, not a belt??, you had to defend the title 10 times in a row. Let's say you've now completed your 15 match win streak, you get to the fight the hidden boss: The Great Puma. The bastard had every special move, which kinda sucked. But what sucked more was his near invincibility. Trying to wear him down in the 5 min time limit was almost impossible. Either you got the cheap win by getting him disqualified from 20 seconds outside the ring. Or you had the NES Advantage joystick, which allowed you to crank on the Turbo button and win every grapple...I was poor and did not own said joystick...I am still sad about it.

Yet, for it's time, Pro Wrestling really captured the must-haves of a wrestling game so well. Nice big move-set, simple-not-stupid grappling system, open ring and outer-ring antics, fun characters, it was all very enjoyable. This was the precursor to the later wrestling games and it did itself proud. Out of the required 10 match winning streak, NES Pro Wrestling drops a stunner on 8 jabronis! Oh hell yeah.

Baseball Stars

Review by Loc

Easily one of the most underrated sports games ever, our next review focusing on the NES classis: Baseball Stars. I guess in keeping with the early theme of showcasing the best games you never played, Baseball Stars has to be one of the all-time underdogs. Put succinctly, if this ever ends up on Wii Virtual Console, I might disappear for a couple weeks playing that bad boy.

So what makes Baseball Stars stand out from all the other contenders? After all, we've all heard of Bases Loaded, that one was way more popular right? Sure, but Baseball Stars had the one thing that games of the era failed to comprehend: general manager abilities! Whereas most sports games focused on the in-game interactions, Baseball Stars did them one better by also providing a means to create your own fantasy super teams. This was fantasy baseball before the internet.

How did the game pull it off? A couple of great innovations. First, you could create up a whole new team. Granted, the computer gave you a nice mix of average to above-average players, but you had complete control of their destinies. You renamed everyone, you gave them uniforms, and you set the line-ups. Simple enough.

Ah, but there was more. Every player had defined attributes including hitting, power, speed, and defense for batters, or stamina, right and left curves, and drop for pitchers. Now here's where Baseball Stars took things to a new level: these attributes could be powered up. BUT, every player had a "max" rating, meaning you had to be strategic in how you filled their categories. AND, to fill these categories you had to spend money you earned from playing games. Not just playing games, you had to win the games to earn money. AND each player had a salary, so that's how much it would cost to power them up. MOST IMPORTANTLY, every time you spent to power up a player, their resulting rise in ability would lead to a higher salary.

It's not like you needed to be a salary cap guru to figure this out, it just goes to show there were layers of complexity in this interface. Thus, you had to choose whether you really wanted to power up your best veteran player, when he had a "max" level of 67 but the most power on your team, or if you would invest in the young rookie who had great potential with a "max" 79, but had no current skills. Ahh, it was good times pretending to be a Moneyball genius before Moneyball existed.

One of the sweetest goals you could strive for was signing the "top" free agent. This guy had a "max" of 90, meaning you could fill up every single category to its maximum potential. This guy also cost $3 million dollars to sign, and still only had like 75 points assigned to him. So you'd have to drop $3 million just to get him, then spend another X amount to power him up to the max. I accomplished this once. He hit many homers for my team. I named him GOD. It was great.

Ah, but what about the baseball part of this baseball game? Happily, it was great as well. The pitching/batting interface was standard homeplate view for the time. Pitchers could basically throw 4 different pitches and batters could move all around the batters box. Cool part was having the different stances for the batters: the hulking brute, the compact speedster, the classic swing, all good.

The fielding was extremely fun as well. Infielders could jump and slide. It was a game where you could dive for that scorching grounder and turn a doubleplay just like the pros. The outfield was really based on following the shadow of the ball. But the sweetest part, you could climb the outfield fence to try to steal a homerun. I did it once, timed it perfectly, stole a homerun off of Darth Wump. I laughed a long time, he did not.

Overall, this really was a spectacular baseball game. The balance between gameplay and building a team was lots of fun. The one thing that made ongoing play difficult was the powering up your team. First, you were stuck in a hellish position for a very very long time. Earning $30K for a win at the beginning makes it very difficult to build up your team very quickly. However, once you started really rolling and you could make lots of moves, you had an unbeatable team very quickly. As in all 9 of your batters, including the pitcher, could knock a homerun every single at-bat. But alas, if you get the point of having GOD on your team, maybe it's time to put the controller down.

Out of 9 innings, Baseball Stars mows down the competition with 8 innings of shutout ball. Extremely excellent.

GI Joe

Review by Loc

It's an interesting choice for the inaugural game review. Clearly, it was not the most popular. The game play was limited. And the majority of you probably never played it. But, the GI Joe video game for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) was one of those unappreciated, under-valued gems that fans can reminisce happily about as they yearn to recapture their youth, ie, me.

For those unfamiliar, GI Joe was your basic side-scroller, action game. You chose from a roster of 6 different Joes to combat the evil forces of Cobra, that ruthless terrorist organization bent on ruling the world. The levels were longish and formulaic: get through X-1 by punching, kicking, shooting the baddies, go throgh X-2 by planting explosives in strategic locations in the Cobra base, finish with X-3 by fighting a big bad boss. Just writing about the big bad boss brings back so many great 8-bit memories.

So why showcase GI Joe and what made it "under valued?" Really, it all lies in the excellence of execution. If you were a GI Joe fan, you were a fan of the characters. Snake Eyes, Duke, Rock n' Roll, all the classics. But, you never got an arcade game for them for some reason. You had a pretty sweet cartoon, but even that ended pretty early on. So some of the newer versions never saw much outside of their toy counterparts.

And maybe that's why this simple game is so cool to the GI Joe fans. Here, you get to run around as Snake Eyes and General Hawk. You get to see guys who were never in the cartoon, like Raptor and Road Pig. You even got to drive around in the smaller vehicles, like the Buzz Boar or the mini-Fang helicopter. And you fought against vehicles like the Cobra Bugg or Destro's Dominator. I mean, this should have been in the cartoons, but the series ended. And now you get to see them in action in the video game, plus you get to interact with them unlike the cartoon! How cool was that!

Beyond the cool character and vehicles, GI Joe also offered a cool game play functionality in the power-up system. For each level, you controlled 3 different Joes. One "captain" was chosen for the mission, and you chose the other 2 Joes to fill out the team. So, throughout the level, you could toggle between characters, maybe when one was close to dying, maybe when you were trying to power-up specific guys. The cool part was the power-ups were saved throughout the game. So if you had Snake Eyes at the maximum Ninja Majic level, his friggin energy blasts covered the screen Contra-style! Same with Rock 'n Roll, you finished powering up that guy, his machine guns spared no Cobra fools!

And plus 1 for early 90s "realism". I believe if you let one of the Joes die, they were done for the game. You just killed Duke, chump! Hahaha, not sure about that though. That's strictly going off my faulty memory.

Some bad things? Character selection jumps to mind. While GI Joe was the best damn toy line in the world, things started to slow down in the late 80s and early 90s. Thats when you got characters like Captain Grid-Iron, yes, the football inspired Joe who had football shaped grenades and a facemask on his helmet. Sigh, so stupid. And yet, they stuck this guy in the game as one of the Joes you could use. Ugh. Others like Metalhead and Overlord made you shudder, but most probably won't even know who these guys are.

And that's part of the magic or downfall of this game. As a diehard Joe fan, you could relish in the intracacies and appreciate the uniqueness of this game. As a non-diehard, you probably wondered who the hell everyone was and had no connection to the game at all.

But the gameplay was surprisingly enjoyable. In the last level you even get to take the reins of General Hawk, who at the time, sported a jetpack. Thus, in the game, you were flying all around as the leader of GI Joe, talk about your thrills!

Out of 10 La's in Cobra-la-la-la-la-la, GI Joe for the NES salutes with 7.