

Low blows and headbutts are possible, but come with point penalties and do offer strategic advantages. You can also grab your foes to stall out the clock towards the end of a round or to simply take a breather after getting rocked from a hard shot that sends you reeling. Shoulder and trigger buttons act as modifiers for either stronger, but more tiring strikes or gut shots. EA’s attention to detail extends to things like textures on shorts and gloves, while small touches like clipping when the referee puts his fingers in front of your face after a knockdown, stand as a reminder that no game is truly perfect.įight Night Champion features two main control methods. Whether you’re looking at them in a cinematic or playing the core game, Fight Night Champion remains an impressive game to simply look at in 2019. The cutscenes feature realistic facial expressions and the detail in the character models is impressive to this day.

The game’s release around the time of The Fighter made the battling brother tale a bit more fitting then and it remains a classic tale in part because of sibling rivalries being a timeless problem.Īndre’s climb back to the top is compelling and one of the better attempts the industry has seen at going for a Hollywood movie-esque story in a game. Andre has nothing when his story begins and as time goes on, we see a complex tale play out with corrupt promoters, crooked cops and even Andre’s jealous brother. The story mode follows a young fighter named Andre Bishop as he goes from being violently beaten in jail, where he was framed to get in there to begin with and assaulted before entering.

Champion opted to give you a journey to the top, but focus more on the fighter and their life outside of the ring. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that design as it fits a sporting competition and the goal being to be the best, but it didn’t do much to make you care about the fighters beyond the journey to the top. Most boxing games featured a traditional rise up the ranks in order to win. If that’s the case, then boxing games went out with a bang as Fight Night Champion does justice to the sport in ways that hadn’t been done before. In 2011, EA released not only the greatest boxing simulation ever to that point in Fight Night Champion, but as it stands in 2019, it looks like it might be the last major one on the market.
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That series didn’t gain traction until a rebranding to Fight Night. In 1998, EA released Knockout Kings on the original PlayStation and that was the best overall console sim that boxing fans had. Games like Legendary Rings sought to cash in on legends, but couldn’t skate by on names alone. Buster Douglas Knockout Boxing tried to cash in on Tyson’s loss and delivered a good-looking game, but it played fairly poorly. The sweet science couldn’t quite be replicated on older hardware. But while the Punch-Out series gave fans a more arcade-friendly version of boxing, sim-seeking fans were left out in the cold. Tyson being attached to Punch-out gave the NES incarnation a layer of credibility.

That game took a sport that was on the rise in pop culture and secured the most lucrative licensing deal at the time - Mike Tyson on the rise. The most highly-regarded early boxing game was Punch-Out! in arcades, which morphed into the NES classic that is held so near and dear to everyone’s hearts now. Activision had a notable overhead camera-placed game called Boxing, but the technology just couldn’t do justice to the sport itself. Since the earliest days of gaming, boxing has been a staple of the industry. You’ll see both good and bad souls unearthed every month as we search through the more… forgotten…parts of history. Inside, we’ll be digging up games that have long been without a pulse. Watch your step, for you’ve just entered the Graveyard.
