Guess who won the Punch-Out!! tournament?

This guy.

Here are my prizes: the poster announcing the tourney, a sweet bumper sticker I'll stick on my car after I finally wash it, and a Little Mac T-shirt, black, size XL. Which I will never take out of the bag because someday it'll be worth all money. Then I can sell it and buy a Ferrari! Aw, dreams.

So what if nobody else showed up? That doesn't mean I didn't train until 3 a.m. this morning! I was ready to use those gimmicky (yet still kinda cool) motion controls to lay down a whoopin' on any 10-year-olds in my way.

+2 experience for being in the right place at the right time.

An analogy to describe my first impressions of Punch-Out!! on Wii

You know when you listen to a CD, and you learn all the words, and you fall in love with the band, and then you go see them in concert, and it's just incredible?

Alright. You also know how when you listen to a comedy CD, then you learn all the jokes, and you fall in love with the comedian, and then you go see him in concert, and it SUCKS because you know every punchline?

That's how it is with Punch-Out!! on Wii. You played the original Punch-Out! and Super Punch-Out! to death, and this is the same game with prettier graphics. You know every jab, and every boxer's tell-tale signs, and all you need is the quick reflexes you honed back in the late 80's and early 90's.

It doesn't suck. It's fun. But it's the exact same fun you had 15 years ago. Is that a long enough wait for you to have forgotten the "punch"lines?

Tournament Time, Part II

Saturday, May 30th. The next GameStop tournament is coming to a town near you... Punch-Out!! That's right, Nintendo's newest and oldest fighter has a weak multiplayer mode that is apparently fun enough to make a tournament out of. You have to use the not-so-precise Wii Sports Boxing-esque motion controls and the only prize is a t-shirt for the winner. Who cares? Being the best in your city at something and winning a sure-to-be-amazing Punch-Out!! T-shirt is more than many average people could ask for. Sure, it might not be able to compete with the pink hoodie given out at the Nintendo World Store in NYC, but it would still fetch a pretty penny on eBay in a few months... or at least make all your retro-geek friends uber-jealous.

Too much nostalgia

There is a new Punch-Out game coming for Wii. It let's you use the classic controller, nearly all of the characters are re-hashed from old Punch-Outs, and the only thing that looks to be updated is the graphics. And the jump from SNES sprites to Wii graphics is not that huge of a jump, honestly. Next month, millions of people will pay $50 for a game they already have. There won't be an online component to school middle-aged Wii players across the country. There probably won't even be a multiplayer component aside from a few party/mini-games. You will memorize patterns and use your reflexes to defeat boxers you've already defeted while moving up through ranks you've already attained 20 years ago.

Nostalgia is nice. Street Fighter IV took the best of the old, polished it to perfection, and added new, improved features. Punch-Out is taking the best of the old, and polishing it to perfection... and that's it. There are supposedly only two new fighters in the whole game, and the only one revealed so far is the incredibly boring-looking Disco Kid. He flashes white before he punches. Oooohhh innovative! Not.

Nintendo fans are so starved for "hardcore" games that they will gobble up any game that even appears to allude to the company's former glory in the 8- and 16-bit days, even when the games bring absolutely nothing new to the table. I understand the mentality of remaking a game. It's a guaranteed seller in a market in which financial risks are increasingly hard to justify. Okami's poor sales single-handedly shut down an entire studio. Still, while Nintendo fans may not always crave something completely different from what they've played before (who wouldn't want to play the next Metroid or Mario?), they do want something better than what we've already seen. Without progress there is only stagnation, and the Wii is starting to stink.

(Virtual) Reality

Computer graphics are getting too good. Once, your onscreen representation was nothing more than a monochrome bar against a black, endless background in the Pong universe. Now, computerized ninjas look almost indistinguishable from real ninjas. Scratch that, we'll go with football players. If a person across the room sees his buddy playing Madden, he might easily confuse it for a real football game on TV. What happened to the days where games were easily separated from reality? Now that Call of Duty finally has the technological prowess to look just like Jarhead, the lines are blurred even further. In the original Super Mario Bros., you only controlled Mario - you weren't actually Mario. Now, when you play Mirror's Edge, you are Faith. You control her and look out of her eyes; you feel when she's hit and you die when she dies.

It makes the whole experience feel more immersive, and yet... I am not a young, supple Japanese girl. I'm a tall white guy with no real athletic ability. I am not Faith, and there's always going to be that distinction in the back of my mind. I can't relate to a free runner parkouring all across Tokyo rooftops. I can relate to Pac-man. In the words of D.B. Weiss, author of Lucky Wander Boy, "Pac-man is just a mouth. I have a mouth. You have a mouth. Everyone has a mouth." Mario is the everyman plumber type. Jesus was a carpenter. See the similarities?

Another recent trend in games like Metal Gear Solid 4, God of War II, and pretty much any FPS is the whole "ugly is the new pretty" motif. With the enhanced graphics on the PS3 and Xbox 360, you can see scars, stubble, and all sorts of imperfections on main characters' faces. Remember back in the day? Mike Tyson's Punch-Out - Little Mac was the pretty boy good guy facing off against the big ugly behemoths like King Hippo and Bald Bull. Very Ayn Rand-ian. The good guys are pure and beautiful; the bad guys are obviously immoral. It's a fun concept, but games are only recently coming to discover all the small nuances of what actually constitutes good and evil. It's not as clear-cut black and white as Saturday morning cartoons and The Fountainhead lead us to believe. Maybe that's why the ug-ifying of main character anti-hero types? To show that they are human too, that Solid Snake also lies on his taxes and leaves the toilet seat up? Maybe. Maybe people just want to do the bad things in games that they can't do in real life. Yet 9 out of 10 people still pick the good guy path in Fable. People don't know what they want.