Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out was one of those staple games of my youth, along with Tetris and Metroid and Worms and Bomberman and other things I can barely remember.  The sort of game that was ever-present… my friends and I would gather around the little TV after school and trade turns trying to get to the final showdown with Tyson.  When it would actually happen (which was not often), it was a collective victory.  We all cheered and congratulated each other even though only one person scored the actual winning blow.

I rarely played it myself. I was never good at games that relied on strong reflexes. I mostly watched.  But I could appreciate the intense strategy that went into this title.  It was not a boxing game… it was more like extremely fast paced chess.  You could be aggressive or defensive, but either way you couldn’t win the match without understanding your opponent.  There is a counter for every move, and a way to circumvent the approach of every character.  It’s rhythmic, poetic, beautiful.

The characters themselves were indeed questionable. No one denies this.  Especially once we discovered emulation and experienced the original arcade titles. The towering Russian, Soda Popinski, was originally named Vodka Drunkenski. Great Tiger, the mystical Indian, wore a jeweled turban and appeared to have a gutted tiger in his corner of the ring. There was even an Italian character named Pizza Pasta. That’s not even clever! Just… awkward.

Those characters, however, did not matter. In retrospect, its refreshing to think that such ethnicities were represented at all. How often do you see a Polynesian anything in a game?¹ The characters were just there so you had a frame of reference when talking shop with your friends.”Bald Bull tried two rolling jabs right off the bat, but I countered the second one and got a star.”  When you hear Bald Bull, you think “the boxer that does the Bull Charge,” not “that ridiculous Turkish caricature.”  Or maybe not.  Those were simpler times, before privilege was even in my vocabulary.  Sometimes it’s okay to go back to that for a little while.

My friends and I spent a lot of time with this game.   I’m talking years.  We had expectations of one another, and a common pool of knowledge to pull strategy from. If you made it to round two and Glass Joe was still standing, you were doing something wrong.  We had stories of legendary matches that became comically exaggerated as time went on.  “I was almost out, and I see Mr. Sandman gearing up for the Dreamland Express, and as he’s coming at me with the first uppercut… wham!  I right hook him and he’s instantly KO’d and I get a million points and my name was in Nintendo Power!  Remember that, guys?  It was awesome.”  We became the veteran boxer stereotypes that the game drew inspiration from.

This new Punch-Out… it is something special. All the same characters, but with a few tweaks.  I’m not capable of objectively evaluating an iteration of this franchise, so let me sidestep with an anecdote: I vividly recall a conversation with my friend Ryan as he was going into the second round against Super Macho Man, sometime in the summer of 1997. “Dude, what if… instead of pressing buttons to throw punches, you could, like… just punch at the screen?” Crazy talk!

We all dreamed of things like this. Don’t deny it.  And I don’t think we give the Wii enough credit for enabling such fantasies. It’s not gimmicky… it what gamers like myself have wanted for a long time.

The main point to take away from this is that games can foster relationships in an extremely unique way, and revisiting old IP isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  So much so that, as soon as I finish writing this entry, I am hopping on a train to go see those same friends, the ones I played Punch-Out with as a kid. I’ve got my Wii and a copy of the new game in my bag. We have all grown old, gotten fat. My hair is predominately gray now and I seem to look tired all the time. But tonight we will tell ourselves that we’re teenagers again.

So here’s your box quote, Nintendo:  “Punch-Out is familiar enough to make you miss your youth, but new enough to help you find it again.”

1. Master Higgins does not count [↩]

For the past three weeks I have been fully consumed by a WiiWare title known as bit.trip Beat.  It’s very, very wonderful.  I’ve been trapped in the loop of thinking I should write something about bit.trip Beat, then deciding I should play bit.trip Beat a bit more before I write anything about it, and then waking up the next morning cursing myself for staying up until 3AM playing bit.trip Beat.

Basically, the game is single player Pong.  You have  a little paddle, and you move it around to repel tiny squares.  Except the little squares are smart, and repelling them produces harmonious tones. And each “level” is a section of a larger musical composition, of the chiptune variety.  And instead of using the directional pad, you twist the Wii remote.   And I feel at peace with the world when I’m playing.

The behavioral patterns of these little squares, the “beats” (as the manual refers to them), are incredibly varied.  Some fly at you in triplicate, some skip along the bottom of the screen, and others move in such an erratic manner that you cannot predict them… you just need to react.  Unlike the falling gem rhythm games where you just need to monitor an area of the screen and respond accordingly, bit.trip Beat feels like playing actual music.  You are in the zone and you just know what will happen next, even when you don’t.

Contemporary psychology has a word for this:  the flow state. Popularized by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi¹, the flow state is a sort of involuntary mindfulness (think Zen Buddhism without the botanical knowledge). Key components include the loss of self-consciousness, focus of awareness, and an altered perception of time.  This is where your mind goes when you’re playing a sweet bass solo or, in my case, trying to hit little squares with a paddle.

Of course, I can’t bring this up without mentioning the game titled flOw (which will run you five dollars and is well worth your time). Jenova Chen’s thesis was a direct attempt to translate Csikszentmihalyi’s theory into an interactive experience.  Aside from the ridiculous capitalization schemes, flOw and bit.trip have little in common.  flOw used the prime ideas behind the flow state to dictate the game’s difficulty dynamically in response to player ability, while bit.trip hopes to invoke the flow state through extremely brutal difficulty.

When I say it’s difficult, I mean it’s difficult with a capital “WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED?”  It’s got the challenge level of a shoot-em-up², where you go from thinking life is great to crying in the corner over the course of thirty seconds.  It’s like a video game version of my first sexual experience that I get to play over and over again.

The difficulty is the beautiful part of the whole thing:  you will always fail at bit.trip Beat.

There’s no way to win.  Or, at the very least, I can’t win.  But not winning is where things get interesting.  Miss too many beats and you get sent into a “nether.”  The overly saturated colors disappear, you see only your avatar and the beats, and the sound cuts out minus a single rhythmic bleep from the Wii remote. Repel enough beats and you go back up to the main play area.  Miss them and you’re back at the title screen.

If I were to rank my favorite gaming moments, my first time entering the nether in bit.trip Beat would easily be number one.  Going from being fully immersed in a driving beat coming from my speakers to this extreme absence was like a slap in the face.  It is so jarring and so very beautiful.  I don’t think I’ve ever been more aware of the act of playing a game.   All I could see was a wireframe of an idea on my screen, and the game controller alerting me to the fact that I was still playing. This says something. I was so disoriented that I didn’t even understand what was going on at first.  It was like waking from a dream and hearing the buzz of an alarm clock, realizing that what you just experienced, no matter how real it may have seemed, was nothing more than a product of your mind.  I am now convinced that adding a speaker to the Wii remote was a stroke of genius.

It may have helped that I was playing on a projector in complete darkness with the volume at max.

The motivation to play again is not just to top your high score, but also to progress further and hear more of the song. I believe that the song never actually ends; maybe some  programming trickery allows it to mutate at a cellular level as you progress.  That may not be the case, as there are two inactive options in the main menu.  I assume there are prerequisites that must be met for those options to become active… maybe requirements such as winning, or at least not losing.

I haven’t even begun to touch on the narrative elements of the game (yes, there is a narrative!).  “Everything comes from something,” the operations manual informs me.  “We will return to something once we become nothing.”  Heavy.  The little paddle you control?  That’s your avatar, and he has a name. All of the bit.trip games (there will be more, I assume) revolve around a character known as Commander Video.   His mantra speaks of moral fallibilism and self-acceptance³:  “I am only a man.”  And, indeed, you’ll find no extra lives in bit.trip Beat.  You may be able to skate around that near-death nether, but once you’re done, that’s it.  You’re evaluated whether you win or lose.

Someday, when you’re older, remind me to tell you the story of the four player co-op.  Did I mention this game is only six dollars?⁴

Update: I just read the IGN review for bit.trip Beat, and apparently the song does end, and the greyed out options in the menu are additional songs.  I must be terrible at this game.  Forgive me.  I am only a gamer.

1. Hottest psychologist ever, am I right?! [↩]
2. I refuse to use the word schmup, unless it itself is incorporated into an equally ridiculous portmanteau.  Like “aweshmup” or “schmupsicle.” [↩]
3. For additional information, please see the Wikipedia entry for Human. [↩]
4. I totally stole this footnotes idea from The Quixotic Engineer.  I think it works well.  Though the hypertextual nature of the internet may render traditional MLA style citations pointless, there’s a lot of stuff that just doesn’t fit into a document.  Like whatever the hell I’m saying in this footnote. [↩]

Me: tall and thin, dark hair, dark eyes, wearing multi-colored Chuck Taylors and a goofy Cosby sweater.
You: gutted box on Gamestop shelf, upside down, partly hiding behind Rune Factory.

I almost didn’t see you. I was just killing some time at the mall before a movie with my buddies. You seemed timid, unsure if you actually belonged there. I know the feeling. Your fashion sense was what caught my eye. You had a classic look… your simple black outfit made me think of Audrey Hepburn, or maybe Clu Clu Land. The bold yellow accents told me that you didn’t take yourself too seriously. And that typeface… cute, unique and charming. The kind of typeface I could stare at every day and not get tired of.

My friends had told me about you. They said you’d be perfect for me. Smart, liberal and with a great sense of humor. That you present an initial air of simplicity, but there’s a level of depth that most guys can’t appreciate. I was unsure. I had just finally gotten over Space Invaders Extreme a few weeks earlier… was I ready for another game so soon?

I had to get going to catch the movie. Almost out the door, I decided to man up and let you know how I felt. I ran back in, grabbed you, and settled up at the register. The cashier smirked at us. “Nice choice,” he told me. He was jealous, and rightfully so.

(You spent the next three hours in the trunk of a car. I hope you’ll forgive me. I normally don’t do that to games, but I was afraid of losing you.)

Later that night, back at my apartment, I took the opportunity to learn more about you. Study your difficulty curves, devote myself to memorizing your form and patterns. Whenever I would think I had you all figured out, you’d change things up on me. You’re a challenge. Not the sort of thing a guy like me seeks to conquer, but something I strive to comprehend and piece together. Something I want to understand and appreciate. I want to learn about you, learn about everything that you are, and figure out what makes you tick.

Normally when I find a new game, my first play through is quick and messy. I pop the cartridge in, then start mashing the A button as much as possible until I find the fun stuff. Not with you. I had patience with you. I read all the dialog, learned the characters, and took my time getting to the action. And when I got a high score, what did I do? I didn’t roll over and go to sleep… I was ready for another go. There’s something special here, I can feel it.

Before I knew it, it was almost dawn. We were up all night fooling around. I can’t even remember the last time I’ve done that with a game. I felt like a teenager again! That was a golden time, those teenage years… when everything was unexplored, when there were discoveries waiting around every corner. Before I learned how incredibly boring most games are. Before I settled for playing a different Pop Cap title every night. Before the crushing disappointment of adulthood stole those transparent pleasures. When I’m with you, things are fun again.

Yes, you remind me of games from my past. Is that wrong? I have good memories of those games… autumn afternoons spent curled up on the couch together, wasting time just because we could. Even if it may have sometimes ended badly, I don’t want to give up those memories. I want a game that reminds me of simpler times. What I loved about those games, I see in you. You’re the complete package I’ve been searching for.

That’s not to say that things will be easy. You’re hard to figure out. I’m sure there will be conflicts, but I promise that I won’t get frustrated or angry. Even when things get difficult. If I’m not up to the challenge? I’ll learn. I’ll change. Just make it clear what you expect from me, and we’ll take it from there.

You’re the rare sort of game that makes me want to be a better player.

I can’t wait to see you again. Tonight, my place? I’ll cook dinner, you think of something fun we can do together. I don’t think you’ll have any trouble with that.