Fight Night Champion A One-Two Punch Of Entertainment

For years, sports game developers have slowly attempted to prove that it was possible to tell a story within the confines of a basketball, football, baseball, or hockey environment. Whether or not this trend started with Sony's SNE “The Life” (a short-lived story mode that Sony designed for its basketball series on PlayStation 2) remains unclear. But one thing is certain: storytelling is now a permanent part of the sports game genre. In 2008, Take-Two TTWO was one of the first (if not the first) publisher to do the same for boxing games. While it was a good idea in theory, the resulting product – Don Kong Presents: Prizefighter – was not fun to play, nor were the movie sequences fun to watch. If that game sent the message that boxing and storytelling don't mix, then EA's ERTS Fight Night Champion is ready to send another. Fight Night Champion is, in essence, cinematic boxing. In Champion Mode, players take control of Andre Bishop, a young contender who must fight through prison (literally) and other hardships to make it to the prize fight of his dreams. During these matches, players will often be assigned a specific goal (ex: win with a KO). Other times they will simply be given a survival rate (ex: survive two matches). And sometimes Andre will be restricted due to an injury or some other issue that prevents the player from fighting at his best. This can be both tedious and rewarding; though it's cool to be placed in scenarios that most boxing games wouldn't touch, there are times when you will wish you could just pound your opponent into the ground without thinking. That's not always possible. But while the story elements and its gameplay-inflicting consequences are cool, the core battles are where the game really comes to life. In Fight Night Champion, the developers have cleverly woven movie-style camera angles into each battle. When a pugilist is about to be knocked down, the camera starts to sway, almost as if the cameraman is hanging freely above the ring. Once the boxer is down, the auto-replay kicks in, complete with slow-motion hits (showing the last one, two or three punches) and the ability to change the camera angle on-the-fly. This presentation allows the player to get a front-row seat of his opponent's anguish. With every impact, the skin on his face ripples like waves on a beach. If it is your boxer that has been taken down, the camera will then shift to a first-person recovery view that's hazy, dizzy, and decidedly unstable. Using the left and right analog sticks, the player must push the former in one direction (left or right) to get up off the mat, and then push the latter to stand up straight and steady. Depending on the extent of his injuries, this task is easier said than done. If your athlete is wobbly, holding the left stick in one direction for too long will cause him to fly down immediately after standing up. Thus, you must learn to get up slowly, just as a real boxer would after enduring one too many strikes to the head. This, along with a precise, analog-based attack system (in which the player flicks the right stick to perform a variety of punches), sets the stage for a cornucopia of intense matches.