Foreword

Beginnings of the 80s, Atari programmers choose to found their own company to develop videogames and call it Activision, from which we have already written before of some of its games. Amongst the first videogames offered were adaptations of board games and sports titles, being one of them a curious adaptation of boxing, the subject of this entry.

Game

The game has graphics incredibly simple, but very well-defined, showing a boxing ring from a bird’s eye perspective. The virtual boxers are a bit big for the aforementioned ring, but it does not affect badly the great playability of this title, quite the opposite.

Considering the times, when the Black and White televisions were very common, the videogames more often than not, had a limited variety of colors, so they could be played well enough in different televisions. Here there are a white one and a black one. If there is only a one human player, the computer controls the black. Imagine all of the possible matches: Balboa-Creed, Mayweather-Pacquiao, Chávez-Taylor, Ali-Marciano, Durán-Leonard, Nelson-Sánchez, Joshua-Ruiz…

In a very simple way to define a score, the two boxers fight themselves during 2 minutes, where if one can connect 100 hits to its rival the fight is over, or in case that did not happen before 2 minutes, the winner is the one who connected more hits. If you think connecting 100 hits in 2 minutes it’s unachievable, you are very wrong, because the pace is frenzy and if you can put your rival on the ropes you can connect quite a huge ammount of hits in seconds.

BUT, in my opinion, a brilliant touch of the game is that the AI rival is a more than worthy opponent. Remember I mentioned the amount of hits you can connect if you put your rival on the ropes? well, the AI rival can do the same to you. Also, if it’s winning, adopts a more defensive style of fight, and if it’s losing, takes a more offensive one. It’s not easy to predict its movements. Forget to seeing overrated deffensive fights, you can see different styles in only 2 minutes.

As mentioned in Video Game Critic, playing not seeing the score (covering it with tape is suggested) can give an impressive and interesting experience, because you don’t know who is winning. It’s amazing and surprising knowing that you won… or lose the fight quite unexpectedly. Between two human players, the game is incredible.

Epilogue

This game is a jewel courtesy of Bob Whitehead, with incredible experience in sports titles, we have already talked about some of his titles made for Accolade. Outstanding game for a quick match.

References

Sport Icon designed by Smashicons of FlatIcon licensed by CC 3.0 BY.

Console Icon taken from Retroarch.

Image in datafile taken from Atari Age.