Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

Don King Presents: Prizefighter

1. Official Site
2. Platform: 360
3. Publisher: 2K Sports
4. Developer: Venom Games
5. Release Date: 06/09/08
6. Genre: Fighting

by Ron Burke

With nearly every title we review at Gaming Trend we get a fact sheet.  These sheets often give the key features of the title, as well as the relevant details of the story for the game.  Don King Presents: Prizefighter is billed as “the deepest, most authentic and entertaining boxing experience available” – a lofty assertion indeed.  The title was announced to the public on December 10th, 2007 and super-promoter Don King alleged "In all my years working in professional boxing, I have never seen anything come as close to recreating the thrill, the intensity, the courage and the spectacle of the sport”.  Just like the real thing, the hype leading up to the fight was thick enough to cut with a knife.  Could Venom Games, developer of Rocky and Rocky Legends bring 2K Sports back into the boxing ring for the new generation?  After a recent interview with Super-Promoter Don King and boxing legend / Boxing Hall of Fame Inductee Larry Holmes I was excited to find out.

Don King Presents: Prizefighter bills you as an anonymous boxer with the nickname “The Kid” as you rise from unknown amateur hopeful to potential heavyweight champion of the world.  It shows not only the drama that unfolds in the ring, but also the pressures and temptations that face a rising star on their path to greatness.  Do you follow the money and fame and date high profile celebrities, or do you knuckle down and hit the gym a little harder to continue to prepare for your next rumble in the ring?  Can you afford to be seen as an athlete who uses fad training methods?  What do you do when you get the information that one of the judges is crooked?  How do you fight when you break one of your hands just before the fight?  Professional fighters face all of these questions and more, and Don King Presents: Prizefighter attempts to recreate that in the form of a ‘mockumentary’ video game.  Does it succeed in grabbing the belt from its tried and true competitors, or is it a paper tiger when the leather really starts to fly?  It was time to climb into the ring to find out.

Don King Presents: Prizefighter gets off a few solid punches later on in the game and should be commended for it. Venom clearly put in some time in producing the cutscenes that punctuate the boss fights, recruiting such talent as Don King, Larry Holmes, Mario Van Peebles, and Ken Norton to fill out the FMV sequences.  These cutscenes explain your ballistic rise to the top, as well as the formation and festering of your rivalry with another boxer named Silva.  These videos keep with the feeling of the ‘mockumentary’ as all of these celebrities speak about you as if they were being filmed for a “Behind the Music” episode on VH1.  In keeping with that angle, the actors are being interviewed in ‘normal’ locations such as the back of their boat, the back of a limo, in front of a mechanic shop where one of the fight team has obviously retired, as well as the elaborate and cluttered desk of Don King.  For the most part it works and is a pretty large highlight to the game. 

Graphically, the boxing title comes up a bit short.  While the fighters have a decent bit of detail, the venues in which they fight are rather static.  You’ll fight in venues ranging from the sparring ring in your home gym to Trump Taj Mahal and more.  In all there are over 20 venues throughout the game.  Perhaps it is the multiplatform nature of the title (this game is coming to Wii and DS later this year), but it seems that the game just doesn’t push the 360 the way it should.  Since you’ll fight between 3 and 5 fights between the different ‘levels’ (if you can call them that) you’ll begin to see a great deal of similarity between the various boxers.  Many of them simply look alike, and their boxing styles and animations begin to blend quite a bit.  There is no doubt that Mike Tyson, Evander Holyfield, and Lennox Lewis all fight with very different styles, but graphically it just isn’t the case here. 

One of the things that I think is more important than a fighter’s date schedule or fame rating is their ability to take a punch.  Prizefighter does include blood, bruising, and swelling, but there simply isn’t any point to it.  We’ll get into that a bit later, but suffice it to say that Prizefighter just isn’t exciting to look at it.  I don’t care that my fighter is a bum fighting in some sweat-stenched ring in the back of the gym, he is an undefeated rising star and should look and act like he actually cares about being there.  There is almost no emotion beyond the occasional wince of pain on anyone’s face, including the folks outside the ring.

Every fighter I’ve ever known (myself included) has a bag of stories that could kill a Clydesdale with its weight, and your coach Frank is no exception.  Occasionally he’ll drop into your office to wax poetic about some legendary fight, such as the Braddock vs. Bear fight, or the Marciano vs. Benn fight.  At this point you’ll get to lace up the leather as one of those fabled fighters in a recreation of the real events that occurred during their heyday.  These fights use the exact same look as the other fights, but with a crackly sepia tone, as if filmed with an old camera.  These fights allow you to change history a bit, but if you do you’ll get a ‘what really happened’ screen with a bit of history for your efforts.  These break up the normal fight sequence nicely and serve as a highlight to the whole affair.

Overall, while the game isn’t graphically as clean as some of the boxing titles we’ve seen in years past, or as detailed as some 360 titles on shelves today, it does an adequate job to convey the subject matter. 

My God was the voice work in Fight Night Round 3 awful.  I shredded it for repetitive voice acting from the announcers, your corner, and the rampant use of pushy advertising throughout the entire game. I was just one of many members of the press who saw this problem, and we all shouted in unison that we demanded better.  I can’t imagine that Venom simply skipped all of the Fight Night Round 3 reviews while building this title, so imagine my surprise when I found some of the same audio problems here.

When you start your career you won’t be hearing any sort of officiating or entrance music – you simply aren’t known well enough to bother.  As you ramp your skills, take out a few fighters, and rise through the ranks you’ll begin to go to venues that have full fight card introductions and color commentary.  When you do reach that point, you’ll hear the familiar voices of Jim Lampley and Emanuel Steward giving you the play-by-play run down of the ring action.  Unfortunately it seems that the commentary is a bit bugged as both of them make comments that seem to indicate that they are watching a completely different match.  While the officiating in other 2K Sports titles is superb, it seems that Prizefighter didn’t get the game love and attention.

Sadly this inattention extends to your cornerman, Frank.  By your 10th fight you might as well fire him or simply hammer the A button to skip his nonsense.  Other than special events (a fixed fight, a busted hand, etc.) that require a change in strategy, you can safely ignore any advice Frank wants to provide.  Let me save you the trouble – he’ll just tell you to keep your foot on the gas pedal and how great or poor your last round was.   Given that I’m completely repeating myself from my Fight Night Round 3 (and to an extent, Round 2) I’m going to take a few extra points – clearly I haven’t made my point clear yet.

One area that Prizefighter shines is the soundtrack.  With EA Trax meaning ‘All the rap your feeble noggin can handle’, it was a welcome thing to hear the likes of Boston mixed with Suicidal Tendencies, DJ Kambo, Survivor, Wild Cherry, Blue Oyster Cult, Iggy Pop, and James Brown.  In all there are 72 tracks to keep your feet moving, giving would-be champions plenty of great songs to train by.

To really get into a simulation of the sweet science of boxing, you really have to allow players to bob, weave, hook, jab, duck, dodge, zig, zag, and throw every punch but the kitchen sink.  To this end, Venom has eschewed the analog stick controls of other boxing titles and instead utilizes almost every function on the Xbox 360 controller.  In point of fact, there are 30 unique punches, sometimes requiring a combination of buttons to throw.  You’ll use X, Y, B, and A to throw your punches, and then modify those same punches with the right trigger for leaning punches, the Right Bumper for stepping punches, the right trigger for body punches, and the right bumper again to throw signature shots.  You’ll use the thumbsticks in a similar fashion to move and dodge, as well as clinch, guard, and duck.  If this sounds a bit more complex than you are used to, that’s because it is.  The early learning curve will leave you struggling for a bit, but if it weren’t for the other issues in the game, it’d work perfectly once you got the hang of it. 

Prizefighter has a HUD, unlike some other boxing titles.  You’ll see a meter for your health, stamina, and adrenaline in the lower corner for both you and your opponent.  Your stamina and health will recover over time, but repeated flashes of punishment will permanently reduce your health.  If you take a signature shot, you’ll see that health fall even further.  Effective boxing will obviously keep your boxer healthy, whereas ineffective boxing will leave you tired and beaten about the face.  When your adrenaline meter builds to one of three levels you can unleash a signature punch.  The signature punch is a devastating punch that often drops your opponent in a single hit.  When you build it up completely you can go into ‘adrenaline mode’ which allows you to push your fighter into overdrive, his stats maxed for 10 seconds.  This burst can be enough to devastate your opponent, breaking his guard and causing maximum damage.  This meter fills slowly through blocking and punching, so you won’t see this mode used very often in the course of a full match. 

Overall the AI does a competent job, giving you some bums to fight in the beginning, and slowly ramping up their skill level until you are facing what would be considered professional level boxers, at least according to their punch stats.

We’ve ignored the elephant in the room long enough – Prizefighter has a massive bug in it that renders it almost impossible to recommend. The old school gamers among us can remember the horrifically bad game Shaq-Fu and how you could beat the entire game by holding right on the D-Pad and pressing the kick button.  This attack method worked for everyone from the easy opponents all the way through to the very end boss.  Unfortunately I’ve discovered that you can essentially do the same thing in Prizefighter.  During one particular match Frank tells me that the fighter I’m facing is fast and I’ll have to use my jab to be effective.  Well, I threw an excessive amount of jabs into the face of my opponent and they were effective – so much so that I scored a second round knockout.  Amazed but worried about this turn of events, I fought the next five opponents using ONLY my front jab.  Each one suffered the same fate, roughly 300 jabs to the face and a round 3 TKO or KO.  While later fighters (especially when fighting for over 1 million dollars) were more difficult and tended to block a bit more, all of them succumbed to the turbo-jab fighting method.  It’s hard to call this the deepest and most realistic fighting game when you can beat it using a single move. 

Insult to injury, if you decide to try to play the game without exploiting this flaw in the system, you’ll find that there is an even larger elephant in the room.  One of the most crucial elements in any fighting game, whether it is an old school 2D fighter or a modern 3D one is collision detection.  Somehow this fact evaded everyone at Venom and the ‘safety net’ QA testers at 2K as well.  I’m sitting on my couch throwing a beatdown to my next clone victim and my mother makes the comment “Hey, are you supposed to be able to punch through his head like that?”  It is a sad day when my casual-gaming mom is more observant than the testing team at the developer.  Throughout the round you’ll punch through your opponent’s head or torso at least a dozen times.  Your punch flies and should make unguarded impact, but instead passes harmlessly into your opponent without effect.  Obviously in a tougher match, every punch counts, so you can imagine how double-frustrating it is when you build up enough adrenaline to throw a signature punch only to watch it whip through the air and hit…nothing.

I don’t want to continue to use Prizefighter as a punching bag, but I have to knock it down a few more times before this round ends.  Don King went on and on (and on) about realism in boxing titles and how this title was going to stupendify and dazzlate us with how it will pontificate the…yea, it didn’t make sense at the time either.  I think the point was that he felt the game was realistic.  I’ve been a long time fan of boxing and I’ve never seen a combined 12 knockdowns in 6 rounds.  Since each fighter can bounce back with almost full health (or full to the end of the slowly reducing maximum) bar, you’ll find yourself pounding people to the ground easily 7 times in the course of a 3 round fight that ends in a TKO.  Even MMA doesn’t have that sort of ups and downs. 

Another black eye with a dash of frustration cropped up pretty early in the game. Just prior to one particular fight I had broken my right hand, meaning that I couldn’t use it very effectively.  Rather than having my punches do a little damage to me, or have it degrade my guard, or have that one hand do less damage, or some combination of the three, Venom went with the most ridiculous method of all – just cut your health drastically with every punch.  By the fifth punch I was almost completely unconscious, and I lost each and every round as my health was lower than the punching bag I was fighting against.  My first fight resulted in a loss as I essentially knocked myself by using my right hook too much.  I jump up for a rematch and find that my hand is broken once again.  Wait a second, how is it that time doesn’t move forward for me so I can fight without my broken hand, but I still take a loss on my record?!  One or the other people, you can’t have both.  Insult to injury, a quick glance at the fight card showed that I was losing every round 10 to 7.  Why?  My health was lower.  Why even license CompuBox if you don’t pay any attention to anything beyond health and knockdowns to determine a winner?

Speaking of black eyes, where is my cutman?  Several times during the course of the cutscenes you’ll see interviews with Johnny Marukami or Randall Hooper, both serving as cutmen.  Unfortunately there is never a cut on you to worry about.  Between rounds you get to listen to your corner repeat themselves, but you’ll never see anyone other than Frank breathing on you.  There is no cutman mechanic to reduce the swelling, re-apply Vaseline, or close cuts on your face.  If this is the most realistic simulation, there would be a cutman.

During our interview Don King remarked that you need money and fame to be the best, and it is completely true.  Nobody is going to give some unknown a shot at greatness out of the kindness of their heart – you have to earn you way up.  To that end, Prizefighter will throw temptations at you that force you to make a choice as to whether you’d like to spend that extra week training or go out to an event that could make you more money or raise your fame level.  The higher your fame, the more fans you’ll have.  The more fans you have, the higher your purse for victory.  There is only one thing missing…there is absolutely no point to any of it.  I can get 5 points of fame for going to some mall opening or dating a hot Supermodel, but I’ll take a hit on my strength and dexterity stat.  I can also choose to stay in the gym and bump my stats instead.  At the end of the day, when I knock out my next victim I get 6 points of fame anyway, so what is the point?   You are supposed to get a higher adrenaline if you have more fans and the crowd on your side, but in practice it really doesn’t make any difference when my leather meets their glass jaw. Similarly, if I knock out Sergei Liakhovich I’ll get over $10,000,000 dollars, but I have literally nothing to spend it on.  No better training gear, no better fighting gear, and no better trainers.

Is the game all bad?  No, not really.  There is a 4-stat system that gives your fighter their skills including Strength, Dexterity, Stamina, and Agility.  You train these skills using a minigame based training system (or you can auto-train for a few less points) including Jump Rope, Heavy Bag, Focus Mitts, Speed Bag, and Shuttle Run.  They are entertaining and require a bit of concentration without beating you up too bad for doing poorly – if only my trainer would shut his mouth.

There is no way that I can justify the $59.99 pricetag for Don King Presents: Prizefighter.  While the career mode is more entertaining than a parade of nameless/faceless boxers, and the inclusion of 80 boxers (30 licensed and 10 classics from the past + 40 more fictional) makes for a more complete package than other boxing titles, the busted gameplay mechanics are completely inexcusable. 

A step in the right direction, you can fight online via Xbox Live with a stable of up to five fighters from any weight class in a mode called Fighter’s Club.  This mode gives you a chance to earn points, similar to a racing bracket, to determine a winner at the end of a specified amount of fights.  A tournament mode is also present, with proper bracketing that I’d like to see in any future boxing. There is also a versus mode that just allows you to square off against another fighter to see what you are made of.  Unfortunately the collision detection ruins all of this, bringing more frustration than victory.

Unfortunately, if you are looking for a realistic boxing game, you aren’t going to find it here.  I couldn’t have been more excited about a true boxing simulator, giving me the chance to grow a fighter and pushing through the temptations and trials that present themselves throughout his career.  Sadly, Prizefighter takes a few steps onto that path but loses its way very quickly.  There isn’t any other title out that would challenge Prizefighter, so I can’t imagine why this product was rushed other than to say this:

“Never veer from your career!  The dollar is your collar, money is your honey, and green is your dream!  - Don King 

You heard it here first folks - only in Simulated America.

Gaming Trend Score

58

1. Graphics: 75
2. Audio: 55
3. Controls: 80
4. Gameplay: 45
5. Value/Replay: 45
6. OVERALL:58