few years ago, I reviewed a game called Victorious Boxers: Ippo’s Road to Glory. It was a little weird, way too Japanese for the American market, and not nearly polished enough to really be a strong contender. However, it did contain a hint of things to come in its control scheme, which allowed you to twist and sway your boxer’s torso with the left analog stick. Leave it to EA Sports to take this seed and nurture it into a title that may well change the way you think about boxing games. Much in the same way the powerhouse publisher has reinvented its golf and baseball franchises, Fight Night 2004 (the company decided to drop the Knockout Kings brand name) succeeds in creating a completely new formula for the sweet science.
To a large degree, with the exception of some special punches, face buttons are a thing of the past. Nearly all of your in-ring moves and blows are performed with the analog sticks. It’s an amazing system, one that accurately mimics the fluid motions of the real-life sport. To perform a right-hand uppercut, you simply swing the right analog down, then around and up. Jabs and hooks function in the same intuitive manner.
This new control definitely requires a big adjustment on the part of the player. I lost my first five matches, and was getting a more than a little frustrated (don’t be scared to go down to Easy difficulty while you’re learning). Then, as if a switch had been hit, the whole thing instantly made sense. Suddenly, I was bobbing and weaving, sticking and moving like an accomplished pugilist – me, whose real-life boxing experience is limited to getting beat up by my little sister. The AI will really push you to develop your skills, as it forces you to actually box – covering up and wisely picking your openings. Attempt to brawl, and you will be on the canvas in no time flat. I applaud what the development team has accomplished in Fight Night 2004, and look forward to future improvements to this already impressive package.
And there is significant room for improvement. The career and create-a-boxer modes, while featuring a good variety of unlockables and clothing options, don’t really match EA titles like Tiger Woods, Madden, or even NASCAR in terms of depth. Also, there are too many holes in its line-up of classic boxers (Larry Holmes and Oscar De La Hoya, among others, are MIA). On the gameplay side, I found the heavy bag training drill to be much harder than the others, sometimes resulting in my boxer having somewhat unbalanced attributes. Still, this is an exemplary first effort in a new series, one that I suspect will become a favorite of gamers in the years to come.
The Edge
I think you’ll begin to see a pattern developing as we hand out The Edge in EA Sports products in the coming year. Here’s the deal: as usual, the Xbox version of Fight Night boasts graphics better than those of its PS2 counterpart, with smoother-running cutscenes, beefier character models, and improved texturing. The PS2, as usual (at least with EA Sports products) has the advantage of online play, which we are happy to report is quite impressive. There’s no room for lag or hiccups in the lightning-quick sport of boxing, and we found that playing two-player over a broadband connection was virtually indistinguishable from duking it out on the same console. Impressive.