(no subject)

[unbibium]

I watched some YouTube footage of Super Punch-Out for the SNES.

It's no wonder it never reached the popularity of Mike Tyson's Punch-Out for NES. All the 8-bit charm was replaced with 16-bit mediocrity.

The music consists of that weird synthesized music that can't decide whether it's trying to sound like an electric guitar, or a cymbal crash. It's like it's trying to evoke Mortal Kombat. And they instructed the voice actor to really ham it up when counting to 10, but hurry through the names of the fighters. On the NES, the characters looked like well-drawn cartoon characters, but on the SNES they look like kitsch oil paintings. The text is rendered with that pretentious raster bar effect, because apparently displaying a wall of fight stats in solid-colored text isn't funky-fresh enough. Overall, it looks like something a third-party developed barfed up.

It's a good thing they put some effort into the Wii version.

Comments

[kirkjerk.livejournal.com]

DUDE

You are being way harsh man.

NES Punch Out occupied a very special cultural place because A. It was the NES B. It was frickin' Mike Tyson!

I think the whole thing (including the music and the font and the graphics) FINALLY captured an Arcade vibe that the original would have liked but never reached -- the original was brilliant in its compromises, making Little Mac tiny and out of the way rather than grid or transparent, and then adding some nice stuff like the jogging in front of the city scene.

I came to SNES Punch Out late, but it still had this great feel with its well rendered characters, and the kinetics of it were right on.

[pootrootbeer.livejournal.com]

Punch-Out! was one of those games where it was a far better design decision to take the basic premise of an arcade game and adapt it substantially for the NES's relative strengths and weaknesses than it was to attempt a faithful port of the arcade game.

See also:
- Contra
- Strider
- Haunted Castle/Castlevania
- Bionic Commando(s)

The 16-bit home console era had a lot more direct arcade ports, which was good for some genres and bad for others.

[kirkjerk.livejournal.com]

Right, but does that mean SNES punch out is a worse game?

I mean does the NES really change the basic flow, to the extent that say Bionic Commando does?

It adds in the round intermissions and some other charming things, but ultimately, this is very much still an Arcade game - you start from one of the divisions, and play through 'til beaten, and if you're experience you breeze through , and if you're a newbie you get knocked out and have to start from scratch.

Graphics wise, I think they did some great things on the NES, but I don't see it as standing head and shoulders above SNES version.