Power Punch II (NES) Playthrough
287A playthrough of American Softworks' 1992 boxing game for NES, Power Punch II.
For years, Power Punch II was one of the most obscure games in the NES's library. A few middling reviews and a short-lived ad campaign failed to inspire anything but apathy, and it was almost immediately forgotten by the few who knew that it ever existed.
And then the internet happened and rumors swirled, and Power Punch II somehow became known as the sequel to Punch Out!! that Nintendo disowned. ASC announced "Mike Tyson's Intergalactic Power Punch" in the summer of 1991 - more than a year after Nintendo's contract with Tyson had expired - and there doesn't seem to be any evidence out there to support the claim that Beam was working on the game for Nintendo. It seems far more likely that Beam was working on a game "inspired" by Punch-Out!! and thought that Tyson's name would bring in sales, only to rethink the endorsement when the boxer's social stock plummeted a few months ahead of the game's release.
All of that aside, Power Punch II casts you as Mark "Tough Guy" Tyler, the undefeated heavyweight champion of the world. He has grown bored with defending his title from the parade of pretenders, so when an alien invites him to participate in the Heavyweight Championship of the Universe, he jumps at the opportunity.
The game features thirteen fights split into three championships, and each championship begins with a training minigame that gives you the opportunity to improve Mark's agility, endurance, and strength for the upcoming fights.
The fights resemble Punch-Out!!'s in several ways: the perspective and the controls are similar, you earn super punches by landing hits on your opponent at specific moments, and matches are broken into three rounds each.
But for all of their similarities, Power Punch II feels nothing like Punch-Out!! to play. Rather than snapping left and right from a neutral position to dodge punches, Mark can slide back and forth across the bottom of the screen, and he'll automatically drift back toward the center if you let go of the d-pad. Your opponents react to your movements by switching up their own routines, patterns, and timings, and since they often don't clearly telegraph their moves, the challenge comes down to memorizing each fighter's patterns and figuring out how to manipulate their behavior to your advantage. The lack of clear visual cues and meaningful feedback can make the game extremely frustrating at first, but once you've figured out how to approach it and how to feel out strategies, everything becomes much, much easier.
Power Punch II is fairly hideous to look at, but I did get a kick out of the monster designs, the awkward punching animations, and the guy in the background whose head bounces up and down when he's excited.
Overall, Power Punch II is too unintuitive and unpolished to have any real mass appeal, and the sloppiness of the controls will likely drive away anyone who'd pop it in looking for a good challenge. It's not terrible - I'd say it's one of better games Beam made for the NES - but it's not very good, either.
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