To get the hat, or not to get the hat, that is the question

by Jon Erik Ariza

Fun factor: Average

Worth to: Rent

If you’re a Platinum Nintendo member that got the hat over Doc Louis’s Punch-Out!!, you might have chosen wisely, but just barely.

This past year Nintendo brought its Club Nintendo customer loyalty program to the United States which awards points to people who buy Nintendo-published games. If you amassed a certain number of points you would qualify for Gold or Platinum status and be eligible for special prizes at the end of the Club Nintendo year. This year’s prizes are shipping out and if you were able to achieve Platinum status you qualified for either a licensed Mario cap or a downloadable game, Doc Louis’s Punch-Out!! Now that the Doc has landed, let’s see if it was worth passing up on that Mario cap.

Doc Louis’s [sic] gift to all his loyal fans

First of all, Doc Louis’s Punch-Out!! is based on the full retail game, Punch-Out!!, released for the Wii earlier this year. Doc Louis’s Punch-Out!! is basically a single fight from said game and as such is on par with the disc release in just about every way. The graphics are exactly the same as the disc release, which is actually very good, especially for a WiiWare title. The game also includes a decent amount of new voice acting for the loveable Doc and the Punch-Out music of course makes its return.




Of course, with a name like Doc Louis’s Punch-Out!! you would expect Doc Louis to play a substantial role and that he does. The entire game is set up as a training session between the Doc and Little Mac. The game starts off with two options, Warm-Up and Training. The first is a very basic mode for less experienced players. Here you fight the Doc, but he will tell you what to do and when to dodge his attacks. The second option plays out much the same except that he doesn’t tell you how to dodge everything and throws in a few more moves against you. The final option, Sparring, is unlocked after clearing the two other fights and is more of a straightforward sparring match between Little Mac and Doc Louis. The one fight is not particularly difficult, although if you know what to look for, there is a small hidden way to raise the challenge somewhat.

After that, however, the game doesn’t have much more for you to do, at least nothing immediately apparent. On top of that, although the game tells you what round and how long it took you to win a match, everything is cleared once you leave, so if you want to play the Sparring match again, you have to complete Warm-up and Training all over again.

For a free bonus, it’s really difficult to be overly critical. The game is a fun time-waster and by recycling assets from the disc release, it ends up being one of the better looking and sounding games on Nintendo’s download service, but it still would have been nice for the game to at least leave everything unlocked for you, not that it would necessarily take very long at all to unlock the final option.

Summary

Overall, it’s solid for a free download, but it also begs the question of whether or not game demos for retail Wii games are all that im/practical. This short game, a demo, really, is only 143 blocks, which is less than half the size of some WiiWare and Virtual Console titles but at the same time the game only uses two characters and one location. I could see a one-fight demo for something like Tatsunoko vs. Capcom or a portion of a level from MadWorld (without the commentary maybe), but I wonder if it would be enough for a sufficient demonstration of something like Metroid Prime, Resident Evil: Darkside Chronicles, or Red Steel 2.