Punch-Out!! (Arcade) Playthrough - NintendoComplete

A playthrough of Nintendo's 1984 boxing arcade game, Punch-Out!!

Played through on the default difficulty setting.

Well before it ever made its appearance on home systems, Punch-Out!! had two arcade exclusive titles - Punch-Out!! and Super Punch-Out!!

Some fun random trivia about it: it was the first game that Koji Kondo (you know, the guy that wrote the music for Mario and Zelda?) ever wrote music for, and the characters were all designed by Shigeru Miyamoto himself.

And you may have noticed the the referee is not Mario, but Mario is still present. You'll see him if you search the crowd carefully enough, as well as Donkey Kong and DK Jr.

So Punch-Out!! was an amazing achievement when the Japanese version first launched in 1983. It featured speech synthesis for the ring introductions and move announcements, sprite-scaling so that your opponents could move both toward and away from the "camera," and a dual-monitor display so that the HUD didn't obscure any of the action. For 1983, that was all pretty amazingly state of the art, and while it didn't look as fancy as the brand new Laserdisc games, it provided more than enough gameplay to make the compromise worthwhile.

I'd recommend watching this video fullscreen on your phone. It will fill that screen far better than it will a horizontal 16:9 computer monitor or TV screen.

It plays a lot like the NES Punch-Out!!, but there are a few key differences. The joystick being pressed up and down toggles the height of Little Mac's fists - this is a biggie if you're accustomed to the NES controls - and there's no fatigue gauge. The power punches work like they did in Super Punch-Out!! on the SNES in that once you fill the gauge you get unlimited use of them until you get hit, and the general flow of the action is similar. Dodge, block, jab, repeat. It is significantly harder though - the controls aren't nearly as smooth and responsive as in the NES game, the yellow-eye "tells" for anticipating attacks are easy to miss, and your window of opportunity to counterattack is far smaller. It's a stupidly fun game, but despite the heavy downgrade the NES version saw in graphics and sound, it plays much better than its arcade counterpart.

I end up getting to the Mr. Sandman fight in the second loop of the game before I eat the mat and tap out - each loop makes the game harder, and it gets vicious pretty quickly.

So while I prefer the NES, SNES, and Wii games over their forefathers, the arcade Punch-Out!! is a classic that really ought to be tried out. If you have a Switch, I highly recommend spending the $8 on it - you'll get a lot of play out of it.

And lmao at Kid Quick. Could they have possibly made him any uglier?
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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