Don King Presents: Prizefighter is the latest attempt on the Xbox 360 to add depth to an existing genre, which in gaming terms will shortly be found in the bargain bin muttering that it could have been a contender, and could have been somebody.
Boxing, despite its simple premise of two gentlemen in shorts punching each other repeatedly until a bell rings or someone looses an ear, is a very difficult sport to competently translate into a game. There have been valiant attempts to loosen the gaming pugilists feet of clay, but this isn't one of them. The fighting invariably becomes a graceless, desperate slugfest with both sides blindly hammering at each other until a pre-determined special punch can be delivered. The punch lands, one man falls, gets up a few seconds later and the whole horrible show is repeated at least four or five times.
The controls of Prizefighter are probably one of the more competently arranged aspects, with 4 basic punches mapped on to the face buttons, the right trigger toggling these between body and head shots, and a right and a left uppercut performed by X and Y or A and B simultaneously. A few extra buttons involve ducking and weaving and raising your guard, and despite the speed at which this will all get thrown at you in the initial training bout, it becomes intuitive quickly, enabling you to find the punch you want even in the thick of the action.
The individual punches do snap out with a reasonable enthusiasm, and if judged entirely on one fighter throwing and landing one punch, it would be a pretty good title. Unfortunately Prizefighter falls apart when the gamer has the audacity and poor sportsmanship to then want to land a following, associated blow rather than wait patiently for the other chaps turn. The concept of combinations is essentially non existent here, and rather than being able to fluidly string together punches as the situation calls for it, a-ducking and a-weaving, there are instead a grand total of about four 3-hit combinations that actually work to any extent and you'll find yourself repeating those over and over.
As you chip away at your opponent, in the bottom right hand corner an adrenaline meter will fill up based on successful hits. There are sections three in this meter of might, each one representing the use of a special punch. Landing one of these jawbreakers will make short work of the majority of the opponents health bar, and if not already decked a few follow up knocks will put them down. These punches are pretty much the match deciders, cheapening all the other pugilistic action into simply frenetic chipping at each other until unleashing a wild and career-ending gazelle punch. I pity the fool, most sincerely. Should all three of the adrenal bars fill up then you can use your secret weapon, reveal your true form, play your trump card, unleash your ultimate secret technique or whatever other madness the characters in anime tend to say before glowing, changing colour and kicking the stuffing out of the antagonist. In this iteration the screen will go misty red and you will briefly become the berserker foretold in legend, each punch a hammer blow and a knockdown effectively guaranteed.
The animation and mapping of the character models is far from terrible, but is by the same token unimpressive. The graphical moments that will stand out are the fairly frequent clipping problems when a forearm will phase right through an opponents head, or an allegedly successful punch will fall noticeably short in what looks to be a parody of bad fight choreography on 70's Star Trek. Given that the programmers has exactly two characters to animate and get the modelling right for, moving slowly insides a very limited space, and one of which is always you anyway, it seems odd that the fighters often seem so disassociated from each other actions.
So the actual boxing in Prizefighter isn't up to much, and you'll probably get a better sense of pugilism in Wii Sports, but what does Mr King intend to distract us from these shortcomings with? What does the man who's added almost as many hybrid words to parlance as President Bush proffer to dazzle us? Will there be spectaclarosity, or will the whole show be a victim with extreme fectaculosity of its own magnormous pompestuity? (All genuine King-isms)
It's mostly the latter, as all Prizefighter has to offer in the stead of a competent fight mechanic is FMV sequences, repetitive stat-building minigames, the Adrenalin system and an unimpressive build-a-fighter option. It truly is a Don King game where the hoopla outside of the ring is overhyped to pull focus from the dubious nature of what goes on within it. In career mode you will fight as The Kid, biffing your way up from the grimy neighbourhood gym to the big time heavyweight champeen title in Vegas. The level progression is dictated by winning three or four fights, followed by taking down the regional champion before moving up to a higher bracket of boxers and winning purses. The fight money is in fact purely decorative, and the only discernable purpose of being told how much you win is as a vague gauge of the opponent's difficulty level, but this is frequently inconsistent. It's the FMV sequences that are played through every couple of brackets or so that actually introduces the Don King elements, as the take the form of a sports documentary following your career. As well as Mr King lending us his splendiferous sagacity, there's a cast of trainers, ex-girlfriends, agents, family members and actual genuine boxers and sports pundits spinning out some sort of background against which the repetitive fights are meant to have meaning. What is confusing is you can't really tell who in the footage is meant to be a character and who is making a cameo appearance. A few of the boxers you'll recognise, several of the sport journalists are clearly the real deal, but many of the pundits act so badly its actually hard to tell between them and the its-either-this-or-porn character actors. I'm looking at you, actor turned sports documentary maker Mario Van Peebles. There's a few snarling panto villains, a sleazy agent, and of course Don King who already walks amongst us a caricature of a caricature. It's highly ignorable and adds exactly nothing to the drama or lack thereof within the ring.
By: Duncan Lawson
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