A GBW script appears! Command? (Patreon)

I have a ridiculous amount of Retronauts commitments to sort out by the end of the year (wish me luck), but I'm trying to squeeze in some video productions while I'm off of work (even if "off of work" is only in the most technical sense). Here's the first of my Game Boy World scripts: Heavyweight Championship Boxing. 

This one was kind of tough, because I hate boxing, and wrapping my head around this game's mechanics, strengths, and flaws took a lot of effort. I gave it my best, though. And I even found it in my heart to forgive developer TOSE.

Shockingly, I can't find a soundtrack rip of this game on YouTube to share with you, even though the music is pretty stellar! Some of it would be right at home in an NES Mega Man game... well, something to look forward to in the finished video, I suppose.

GBW 056: Heavyweight Championship Boxing

It's Game Boy World, and this is not Punch-Out!!

I know it's popular in many circles to slag TOSE, the Japanese ghost development studio that has been behind countless mediocre to lousy games over the past 30 years. Name a substandard game based on anime and there's a pretty good chance TOSE had a hand in it.

But is that really fair? TOSE has also produced some downright excellent games over the years, including Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime and Metal Gear Solid for Game Boy Color.

Those are hardly the works of no-talent hacks, and yet you'll rarely hear anything but disparaging references to the company. No doubt TOSE's own culture of secrecy has much to do with that; in many cases, the company is contractually forbidden to take credit for many of its projects.

According to one publisher anecdote, TOSE keeps a showcase in its offices containing every game the company has worked on. While they're forbidden from publicly claiming a role in many of these titles, they'll quietly usher prospective clients into this room and leave them alone for a few minutes to allow them to drink in the studio's expansive c.v. in silence.

But TOSE's real problem, I think, has to do with the nature of their business. They serve at the needs of their clients, whether those needs are to produce a brilliant portable interpretation of a world-class stealth action series or to barf yet another Gundam game on a tight schedule and minimal budget.

TOSE is only as good as their publisher needs and pays them to be, and because they exist as discreet, flexible, contractors-for-hire, most publishers are only too happy to pay them as little as possible in return for something that's merely good enough—not necessarily good enough by game enthusiast standards, but at least by clueless executive standards. Like Level-5 and countless other contract studios, a TOSE game is only as good as that game's publisher demands them to be.

Perhaps not surprisingly, TOSE came into existence in the golden age of arcade games, and the circumstances of their creation were no doubt similar to those that brough Satoru Iwata and HAL into Nintendo's orbit. Video games, not to mention the larger computer industry, came into being in the United States during the 1970s.

Japanese electronics companies dabbled in computer entertainment for a few years, but the 1978 arrival of Space Invaders awakened a tremendous thirst for video games among the Japanese public. Suddenly any electronics, toy, and utility company in Japan wanted in on the booming arcade scene, but the problem was that few of them had the first clue about actually creating games.

Enter TOSE and other similar companies, which pooled together skilled programmers and would produce games for larger companies under contract. The corporations wouldn't have to deal with hiring for a new division, and programmers had more or less guaranteed work stability—it was a win-win situation for everyone.

Well, everyone except kids who bought these outsourced games. Sure, some of them turned out to be timeless classics; Nintendo couldn't have made Donkey Kong without Ikegami Tsushinki, or launched the original NES lineup without HAL and Pax Softnica, or gotten into video games without Mitsubishi.

But Nintendo has standards; not all publishers do. Companies like, say, Banpresto were perfectly happy to apply a take the money and run approach, hiring contractors to do the bare minimum to get games up and running regardless of actual quality.

Which brings us to Heavyweight Championship Boxing, a game outsourced to TOSE by Tonkin House and published in the U.S. by Activision. We've seen the TOSE/Tonkin House/Activision combo before, way back with October 1989's so-so sports game Malibu Beach Volleyball.

We also saw a TOSE/Tonkin House team-up with Blodia, the promising but not quite fun portable adaptation of a pre-Blizzard game called Diablo for PC and Colecovision. So TOSE working for Tonkin House isn't the worst pairing imaginable, but neither does it promise greatness.

And Heavyweight Championship Boxing is exactly what you'd expect from this middle-of-the-road pairing. It has promise and even signs of excellence, but it never achieves its potential and, ultimately, proves to be sadly underwhelming.

As with any sport, there's only so much you can do with a sport like boxing, so the quality of the experience ultimately comes down to the specifics. By 1990, boxing games had essentially been winnowed out to one of two formats: A top-down, birds-eye view of the ring, as seen in the likes of Data East's Ring King, and an over-the-shoulder or first-person view as popularized by Punch-Out!!

Admirably, Heavyweight Championship Boxing attempts the unlikely feat of combining the two styles into a single game. Matches begin with an overhead view in which the boxers can maneuver about the ring and jockey for position.

When the pugilists move in close to one another, however, the viewpoint changes to a first-person perspective in which you see the other fighter dancing back and forth opposite your boxing gloves. The A and B buttons allow you to throw a right and left punch, respectively, and you can modify these attacks by pressing up for an uppercut or down for a body blow. You can also block by simply holding up or down without attacking.

Both fighters' well-being is determined by their stamina and health meters. Both tossing and absorbing punches reduces your stamina, and a well-aimed punch takes down a target's overall health a notch.

Your goal in Heavyweight Championship Boxing is to wear down the opponent's health without running out of stamina, or else to win by a TKO. This is trickier than it sounds.

Interestingly, unlike other first-person games, however, the first-person combat style isn't fixed. You use left and right on the D-pad to adjust your perspective.

You can juke and dodge, or center your attention on an evasive foe, but you can also use the lateral controls to move away from the in-close fight altogether and return to the overhead view. While you're disengaged from the opponent, you can recover your health by evading or your stamina by entering a clinch.

You can pick from a number of fighters, each with different power levels and specific traits, including a dominant hand. You can also customize your boxer to a small degree by assigning points to his assets and determining the nature of his knockout blow.

All of this adds up to a fairly thoughtful interpretation of the sport, and if Heavyweight Championship Boxing's design worked entirely along these lines, it might be regarded as a classic. Unfortunately, the game suffers from overcomplicated design that undermines its potential.

Probably the biggest issue is that standard punches don't get you very far. You're more likely to drain your own stamina than the opponent's by throwing undisciplined attacks—which is fine. Very strategic.

However, the strength of your punches is determined by a pair of meters in the bottom left corner of the screen, one for each hand. Each time you throw a punch, the meter for that hand drops to zero and has to recharge.

So far so good, right? Unfortunately, once the meter recharges, it cycles back to zero a split-second later.

To throw an effective punch, you need to strike in the brief instant during which that hand's meter is maxed out, while also lining up your opponent in your sights and hoping they don't block. It's not a terrible idea, but the speed with which the punch meter fluctuates makes the timing far too finicky for its own good.

A further complication comes in the form of knockout blows, super-charged punches that can almost instantly win the fight. Every once in a while—the manual doesn't explain exactly how this happens—your gloves will begin to flash rapidly.

When this happens, if you land a punch with your fighter's dominant hand while that hand's punch meter is at maximum, you'll knock your opponent flat on his ass. Knocking down an opponent with low health or stamina guarantees a knockout, but you can also win by technical knock-out if you earn three knockdowns in a single round.

This would work really well if not for the hyperactive punch meter and the fact that opponents lack useful tells. Plus, the controls are sluggish enough that it's basically impossible to react when an opponent ducks, which is the only real hint of how or when the CPU is about to act.

Heavyweight Championship Boxing takes lots of inspiration from Punch-Out!!, but the brilliance of that game had much to do with the way its opponents would give away their actions a split second before attacking, and in the way the controls were responsive enough to allow players to react. Lacking those qualities, this game ultimately amounts to a tedious slog as you try to score those all-important knockdowns in the split-second windows that they become available.

Worse, there's no way to tell when an opponent is about to go for a knockdown himself, meaning that after several rounds of holding the upper hand you can lose a match in an instant. It's just not much fun, whether you're controlling the handicapped amateur contender or the overpowering heavyweight champ.

Heavyweight Championship Boxing has promise, but like an undisciplined young boxer it just can't pull its act together and rise to the challenge. About the only area the game really excels is with its music, which is brilliant.

But again, you can't really blame TOSE for the game's failings. They tried some interesting things here, but Tonkin House producer Ikurou Urai was no Mickey Goldmill and couldn't seem to shape this promising contender into a champ.

For more near misses at greatness, keep watching Game Boy World.

Next time: Kodai nihon no rourupurei!