Game:

Super Punch-Out!! (1994)

Duration: 1:20

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This run was done on an original Spanish Super Nintendo cartridge of Super Punch-Out, as well as an original PAL Super Nintendo 1chip console that was recapped and modded with the Borti RGB amp.

Masked Muscle is a fairly innocuous fight in the full game speedrun. He doesn't dish out luck that can outright kill your entire lead due to a couple of backup strategies, but despite this, he has a fair bit of randomness that can make getting the perfect fight on him mildly annoying.

The fight starts off with the usual guard manipulation that you've been seeing in other fights where you hold up for the first frame of the fight, then let go and hold punch for the second frame, however this fight introduces something new into the mix: random blocking from the opponent.

This happens to be a very similar strategy as the newer NTSC one that McHazard found in his 2014 TAS (I know it's weird to call that "new" but it still feels "new" to me lol). If you'd like to directly compare this fight to its NTSC counterpart, you can check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spDuMYzQo9A

With this strategy, Muscle can block the first two punches, and the final punch that sends Masked Muscle into dizzy status. These are the only luck events in the fight, and the first blockable punch has a 3/4 chance of going through, while the second and third blockable punches have a (3/4)^2 chance of going through since they're buffered punches. This means the odds of the strategy working are:

(3/4) * (9/16) * (9/16) = 243 / 1024, or about 1 in 4.214 (~23.7%)

Once you’ve landed your first left gut punch of the fight, then immediately buffer a second one and pray he doesn’t block either of those. Thankfully, the next 2 left gut punches you’re about to buffer here will land 100% of the time, since Muscle is attempting to throw hooks here, and while he commits to throwing an attack, he cannot commit to randomly dodging during that time. It's also worth noting that this is technically different than the NTSC version of the fight, as you cannot buffer left jabs here since Muscle blocks them in the PAL version. You can technically do left jabs and get the same time, but you would have to delay them, which is silly to do when you can just do gut punches.

After the 2nd jab, you need to do a slight delay and counter an uppercut that Muscle is about to throw on your right side, to which, you counter with a right gut punch. From here, you need to hit a frame perfect delayed punch such that when the punch lands, you get 2 extra arrows, as well as speed up Muscle's recoil animation.

You can either time this delayed punch manually, or do a buffer that involves you to do 2 "quick ducks" which are actually pretty tricky, because this means you have to tap "Down" and "Up" extremely quickly one after the other.

Several years ago, Hootey had actually found that if you do not have your super meter completely filled up, that holding the "A" button will actually automatically cancel your dodges for you, which effectively eliminates the "Up" portions of the quick duck inputs, meaning now your only obstacle is to quickly press the "Down" inputs at the correct rhythm. It's still fairly tricky to get it down just right because of how fast the ducks come out now.

If you hold "Down" too long, then you end up getting a quick duck that isn't actually the fastest, which makes the punch get blocked. If you over compensate for that by going too fast, then you'll only have one duck actually come out.

Once you get the double quick duck, buffer a right gut punch into a left gut punch, which should hopefully get Muscle dizzy (remember he can block the final punch if he wants), and just hold "Left" until you start to see your character start to dodge, then immediately let go of "Left" and throw a low super as your character centers himself for an instant knockdown!

For phase 2, the NTSC version has you throw a low super exactly *1* frame after the fight starts back up again, otherwise he'll dodge your punch outright, however, inexplicably the PAL version doesn't have this issue at all. You can simply hold the super punch button and just automatically hit Muscle on the first frame possible with a low super. From there, Muscle will not be able to get up, which nets you a KO if you followed this strategy perfectly!

Anyways, thanks for watching!

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