Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

by Ron Burke

Fight Night Round 3 was one of the showcase titles that Sony was showing off to demonstrate the power of the PS3 at E3 2005.  The graphics were beyond anything that we’d ever seen in any boxing title to date, and the potential was huge.  On February 20th, 2006 we saw the release of the game on the Xbox 360, and I handled the review for the title.  I scored the game an 85% citing some sound repetition issues, a shallow career mode, inconsistent AI, but also pointing out that the game is a graphical triumph and easily the best boxing title we’ve seen in years.  We fast forward to today and we see the release of the Playstation 3 version of the game.  What has changed in the 10 months since the Xbox 360 version was released?  It was time to get back in the ring and find out.  Ding ding!  Round 3.

As I said in my Xbox 360 review, it is appropriate that we start off with the graphic section as it is the aspect that got the greatest overhaul for this title.  The Xbox 360 version had fantastic normal mapping with great texture work on every surface.  The PS3 version has the same fantastic normal mapping, but the extra 10 months has given EA Canada a bit more time to put additional detail into this version.  Most of the fighters have gotten a bit more texture work on their clothing and skin, although some things such as the blood and backgrounds still look like red wax and cardboard cutouts. The gloves have a leather grain to them, and the tape holding them tight looks striated and wrinkled from being packed and pulled taut.  Similarly, the boxers are well detailed.  They sweat and breathe heavier as they suffer the effects of fatigue.  The muscular detail is stunning as well – each boxer is built differently based on their stats.  A speed fighter will be more cut and lean, whereas a heavyweight power hitter will be more of a hulking behemoth.

The graphics engine really shines as your fight begins to move into the later rounds.  Fighters that have taken too many shots to the mouth will get bruising around the lips and a bit of swelling.  If you take a cut on the cheek you’ll see it begin to bleed more as you take more damage.  You can get a good amount of swelling going this time around as well.  It hasn’t happened but one time in my fight career, but you can also have the bridge of your nose broken.  It all can spell disaster for your fighter, but it is pretty awesome to look at! 

Taking a closer look at our stable of fighters, there are some legends present.  Sugar Ray Leonard, “Irish” Micky Ward, Arturo “Thunder” Gatti, Joe Frazier, Bernard Hopkins, Roy Jones Jr.,  Marco Antonio Barrera, Erik Morales, and Muhammad Ali are just some of the legendary pugilists that are featured in this title.   Each boxer is perfectly represented down to the intricacy of their tattoos.  When a fighter has taken too many shots and is ready to lay down on the canvas to ‘take a break’, you get an instant replay of the brutal action that caused the knockdown.  The impact causes ripples and distortion in the other fighters’ skin and a real look of pain as the ‘recipient’ winces from the impact.  If you think it looks unrealistic, watch some real replays from a Roy Jones Jr. or Mike Tyson fight – you’ll see that same ripple effect and wince of pain on impact. 

The camera system is extremely well behaved.  Not once in the hours that I played this title did I feel like the camera was in the wrong spot.  The camera is pulled in close to the fighters, but not too close.  When the fighters back away from each other, the camera pulls away a little bit to show the whole ring.   Pay attention developers, this is how it is done!

All of this said, there are some real oddities that could have been ironed out prior to launch.  Occasionally, you’ll get clipping of your legs through your trunks.  You’ll also see some odd contortions and flips when the fighters fall against the rope.  Sometimes it just turns your fighter into a flipping fish before they hit the canvas. 

Almost as bizarre as the fish impression is the amount of ads in the game.  Dodge, Under Armour, Burger King, ESPN, Everlast – some of these things belong, and some of them do not.  There is a full-length car commercial for a Dodge prototype.  The uber-creepy Burger King mascot, The King, represents a fighter and can be unlocked as a trainer who specializes in the Heart stat.  Somehow grilled onion rings and my heart stat don’t seem to stack well, but I digress.  My point is that it seems that there are about 2x as many ads as is reasonable and normal for a real match.  I expect to see a certain amount of ads when I go watch a boxing match, but this just felt excessive. 

Speaking of bizarre, there is one other oddity in the graphics engine – namely the ring girls.  When their hands are up they just look far too skinny, their arms looking like bean poles.  I found myself hammering the A button to not have to look at their soulless eyes and anorexic arms.  Creepy.
The Playstation 3 does bring a new mode to the table called “Get in the Ring” that gives you a look at the fight from a first-person perspective.  It certainly adds a new element to the game, and the visuals are pretty accurate.  Having been to the ring myself a few times, I can say that your vision can get blurred like it does after a few rounds, just as it does in the game.  It provides a new perspective for those who have played the Xbox 360 version.

Overall, the game does look marginally better than the Xbox 360 version, but not enough that most people would notice without owning both versions already. For frame of reference, Fight Night Round 3 for the Playstation 3 supports 480i and 720p.

I really tore up the Xbox 360 version of this game for the incessant announcer spam talking about how a Philly Shell defense is like a Philly Cheese steak.  Sadly, for the minor improvements that EA Canada made to the graphic engine, they made none to the sound engine.  The game still suffers from a great deal of repetition from Joe Tessitore, the announcer, and your corner still has the same advice.  Once you’ve played through 10 or 12 fights you’ll have heard every shred of advice there is to hear.  Similarly, you’ll still hear the same ‘brought to you by’ advertisement announcements throughout the fights.  I imagine the same advertising contract is in place for the PS3 version of the game, so I didn’t expect a great deal of improvement here. 

EA Trax makes a re-appearance with this title.  If you aren’t a fan of rap or hip-hop music, you are unfortunately stuck with it with the PS3 version.  The Xbox 360 version allowed you to use the custom soundtrack option to replace the songs, but the PS3 version doesn’t support this option.  Since there are only a few tracks included in the game, they will get repeated often.  After about 10 matches you’ll find yourself probably turning the sound and comments off entirely. 

Now that the bad news is out of the way, lets talk about impact.  Blasting your opponent in the face results in a satisfying crunch.  Since there is no interface to judge your stamina with, you have to rely entirely on how sluggish your boxer moves and the sound of their breathing.  If you swing for the fences for the entirety of the round, you’ll find yourself completely out of gas, and it’ll sound like it too.  When you get a replay, the event is replayed in slow motion with an extended crunch, complete with spit and blood flying.  Each punch impact to the body lands with a thud.  The music and announcing may be way off, but the rest of the sound is great.

EA introduced Total Punch Control with the Fight Night series.  First we’ll talk about the new innovations with TPC, and then we’ll look at what is new with the PS3 version of the game. In TPC, you can use the face buttons to control your boxer, but you can’t put as much control or heat on your punches.  If you are new to the series, you essentially use the left and right analog stick to control your left and right arms, respectively.  You throw hooks with a quarter circle motion, you throw jabs with a diagonal flick of the stick.  Uppercuts are a half-circle, and combos usually require using both sticks almost simultaneously.  You can use the same motions and hold the left trigger to work the body.  Holding the right trigger pulls your hands up, and when combined with a direction will bring your guard up to block or deflect depending on how far you pull it.  If you block well, you can drop a boxers hands and unleash some vicious punishment in the time it takes them to pull their hands up.  Just as with the last title, you can pull the stick back further and really jam your gloves in your opponents face with a haymaker.  The right bumper unleashes your fighters’ power shot which can be purchased in the fight store.

The next thing you’ll probably notice is the lack of a visible HUD.  By adding visible looks of pain or exhaustion to the face of each fighter, you have to take a visual cue as to how well your guy is holding up, rather than some arbitrary meter on the screen.  It goes a long way towards the immersion of the title.

New to this title is the Stun Punch.  A Stun Punch gives a first-person minigame where you see through the eyes of your opponent.  You get to see just what you’ve unleashed on him from his perspective.  It is a fun little minigame, but ultimately it opens you up too much to counters to pull off effectively.  In a similar fashion, there is also a new Flash Knockout punch move.  It is a haymaker, but with a little extra fire on it.  Like the stun punch, the Flash KO punch is really difficult to pull off effectively, and most people will probably end up skipping it entirely.   If you do end up on the receiving end of the Flash KO punch however, you’ll really get a feel for how much it unbalances the game.  The objective is to show how a single punch can change the course of a fight, just as in a real bout.  The result is that you are immediately stunned and put into the ‘danger’ mode.

To round out the boxing action, you can also clinch when you’ve taken too much damage.  You can also taunt your opponent or unleash a little unfair advantage with an elbow to the jaw, a knee to the groin, or other illegal moves that you can purchase from the fight store. 

Just as before, you have to train your boxer to improve.  Reducing the system from four minigames to three, you can work your fighter out to improve skills like Strength, Stamina, Speed, Cut, Heart, and more.  The minigames are simple Simon-like follow-the-pattern, or blasting the heavy bags.  Half of the minigames is timing and practice.  Just like Fight Night Round 2, you will have to keep your fighter on his feet by keeping the swelling and cuts down.  Thankfully, you only have the left and right side of your face to deal with this time, instead of four quadrants.  If you take too much damage you will have difficulty blocking incoming punches.  If you are bleeding too much, the referee will call the fight. 
One final new aspect of the game is the ability to change your fighter’s style.  You can use the previously mentioned Philly Shell style of blocking, a cross-block, a traditional block, mummy style, and many others.  It’ll affect your boxer’s movements, punch style, and blocking style.  It makes quite a difference if you work hard on learning the individual styles.  Some styles are much better at the block and counter strategy, while others are better for absorbing damage. In the end, you’ll end up settling on a style that fits you best and hanging with it throughout your career.

The Playstation 3 version of the game features some minor use of the Sixaxis controller.  You can use a quick thrust forward with the controller to throw out an illegal move, such as the aforementioned knee or headbutt.  Other than that, the control system isn’t used at all, making it feel like it was tacked-on at the last moment.

The gameplay in Fight Night Round 3 for the Xbox 360 was pretty solid, so I didn’t expect any drastic changes for the PS3 version.  In fact, the gameplay actually hasn’t changed, other than a new mode called ‘Get in the Ring’.  In Get in the Ring mode, you can jump onto the canvas in a first-person perspective to fight, seeing the fight through the eyes of your boxer.  It takes a few minutes to really get the hang of the new mode, but it is a new perspective for the boxing genre.  The same gameplay mechanics apply, so just getting used to bobbing and weaving from this view is the hardest part.  Just like the regular game, you can usually dominate your opponent rather quickly, putting them on the canvas in less than 5 rounds.

One thing I really like in modern sports titles is the inclusion of a franchise mode, or a career mode.  In Fight Night Round 3, you get to bring up a new boxer and help them fight their way to the top.  Your early fights will be against complete nobodies, but they do set the stage for some later rivalries.  One particular fighter, a bald guy named Black Mamba was fairly insistent on fighting me over and over again.  Our first fight was a round 1 knockout, and the second and third fights only lasted into round 2.  It is cool that these rivalries exist, but it would have been nicer if something more had been done with it.  Granted, one fight breaks out outside the ring thanks to this rivalry, but ultimately it is a fairly shallow affair likened to knocking down just another pin in the bowling alley.

It isn’t all sunshine and roses with the PS3 version of the game though, the create-a-fighter mode is very cumbersome.  Each time you select a new object to place on your fighter, such as a new hairstyle, or facial hair type.  It takes roughly 4-5 seconds per object to load, making the whole mode a tedious affair. While you can change your fighter at any time, the long load times means you’ll only want to do this once.

Since we are talking about load times, I’ll say that the loading process was somewhat lengthy. In comparison, the load times for the PS3 are even more significant. The load times between fights and minigames are at least double that of the previous version.  For the marginal gains that you get in the PS3 version, you’d expect that the load time would have been either shorter thanks to 10 months more development time, or maybe only slightly longer due to the change in media.

As you work through your career, you earn fairly small purses that eventually begin to lead to larger paydays.  Sometimes there is a bonus if you can knock your opponent out in a certain round, win by decision, or throw the fight in a certain round.  I couldn’t help but feel that I was being paid by a bookie as the fights often had these conditions tacked on.  Granted, they are optional, but they can often get you to your objective a little quicker. As you fight opponents you become more popular.  As your popularity meter fills, you can get a shot at a title fight.  The previous title had rankings and you could skip ranks and call out much tougher fighters early if you felt confident enough.  In Fight Night Round 3, it is simply a matter of filling the bar to full, and then fighting a title holder. You have to become popular to wrest that Burger King title from the hands of its holder. The King won’t settle for some unpopular loser.  It would have been nice to have a full franchise mode where you have to spend money on your trainer, better facilities to train in, equipment, and better sparring partners like a true boxer would.   It would have been a better solution than making me buy $750,000 plastic mouthguards. 

The training mode makes a return here, but some of the angles have changed.  For instance, instead of a head-on view of the weight lifting portion of the game, you get a upward angle that provides a better perspective to hit the tick marks for maximum training payoff.  Other than the visuals, the minigames have remained the same, providing you a path to improve your boxer over time.

The AI in this title is a mixed bag.  Sometimes they’ll go absolutely nuts on you and parry everything you throw, then slam you with vicious counters all day long.  You’ll struggle to survive to anything past the 3rd round.  Other times, they don’t push the pace or defend well at all and you’ll just walk right over them like they were sparring partners.  Unfortunately, this happens throughout the game, and randomly.  It could be a guy you’ve faced before that suddenly becomes comeback-Rocky in the ring, while Roy Jones Jr. suddenly becomes Mr. Pushover.  Even on the hard difficulty it is inconsistent. 

To add to the authenticity of the title, there is an ESPN Classics mode.  The Classic mode allows you to face off against some of the greatest fighters of all time.  You can even make a few new Classics as the rivals you battle in the career mode are added to the mix.  Some of the fights are in black and white, but nothing else was changed to relive these moments.  They are apparently still sponsored by Burger King and Dodge, and the same broken commentary is present throughout.

When you take the game online, you can make online rivalries.  Since the AI is too inconsistent to provide a real challenge for the game, you will have to turn to your friends for that. 

For a change of pace, there is also a Hard Hits mode.  This mode has no time limit – you fight until somebody drops.  You’ll occasionally get a chance to participate in this style of fight in the career mode, but it is few and far between. 

When the Xbox 360 version of Fight Night Round 3 shipped, the Live mode was the star of the show. The offline modes serve to train you for the real deal – the online modes.  You can easily round out 30 or more fights to get to the top of the career mode.  While some parts of that rise to greatness are marred, there is a great deal here to enjoy.  Even having mastered Total Punch Control, this title isn’t one you’ll sit down and complete in a weekend of play.  The online mode on the PS3 suffers from lack of players due to the number of people with systems.  Thankfully this will improve as the online mode is the heart of this game.  There is no substitute for smack-talking and beating down random strangers.  It just never gets old.  You do lose the achievements from the 360, meaning that you lose some online bragging rights, but other than that the game remains the same.

One aspect that I’d hoped would make an appearance in the online mode is a fight bracket system. It would be great to be able to organize a bracket and have your fighters work their way down to a big fight at the end.  Perhaps in Fight Night Round 4.

There are a lot of great things about Fight Night Round 3. There are a lot of things that hurt the title as well. While the online modes stand out as superb, the career mode can’t be overlooked and ends up being a great deal of fun. The Playstation 3 version adds a first person perspective mode with ‘Get in the Ring’, but hardly utilizes the Sixaxis controller at all. This title is amazing to look at, and the graphical candy will hold you for a while. My suggestion would be to just turn off the sound if you intend to show the game off, and then take your boxing gloves online.  If you’ve already got this on the Xbox 360 though, you might want to take a pass – there isn’t enough to warrant the re-purchase.

Gaming Trend Score

83

1. Graphics: 93
2. Audio: 62
3. Controls: 85
4. Gameplay: 85
5. Value/Replay: 85
6. OVERALL:83