365//365: Day 028 – George Foreman’s KO Boxing (SNES)

Quality control is something seldom seen in mostly NES and Wii games. Nintendo used to have their ‘seal of approval’ on games, which in retrospect, meant nothing important other than they were licensed by Nintendo. On the Super Nintendo, there were a higher ratio of quality games to poor games, however, some of those poor games, were disasters in a cartridge. George Foreman’s KO Boxing is one of those games.

Lets not sugar coat anything….as a boxing game, this is as bad as it gets. Which is quite contradictory to the career George Foreman had. He had knockouts, punching power, titles and a lot more. Why is it that in this game, his punches are as strong as a rain drop? This man has 76 wins with ONLY 5 losses in his career. He went up against the likes of Evander “The Real Deal” Holyfield and Tommy Morrison. He went 40 – 0 before finally losing against Muhammad Ali in the famous “Rumble in the Jungle” bout. He became the man behind the George Foreman Grill for crying out loud! Why is he represented like such a gimp in his own boxing game?

Even though this is the third round, your avatars on the bottom corners look beat up after the first 90 seconds.

Like I mentioned, your punches are weak. Like in Punch Out, you can get a special punch, but unlike Punch Out, it seems like you get it rewarded at random. That punch does maybe double the regular punch, which basically means you go from the punching power of a rain drop to an empty plastic bag from your local grocer, hitting you in the head. Your opponents can clobber you, beat you down, and run circles around you, without breaking much of a sweat. The first fight alone feels like I am playing a one armed Little Mac against Mike Tyson.

What this game boils down to is a hopeless button mash, which is a failure in its own right. No matter how you approach the fight, you won’t get a knockout of any kind. You’ll be lucky if you get a three knockdown TKO before you get it done to you. If either of you get knocked down three times, game over. Your body punches basically land on an opponents shoulders. You can only block by holding down and a punch, and after two seconds, you relinquish the block. Even when dodging a punch, you sometimes get hit when you’re clearly out of range. It’s a broken mess of a game to control.

That's a....colorful winning pose.

It’s also a broken game to look at. The avatars representing the boxers in the match look good enough, but why do I have a fat lip, busted eye and broken nose 30 seconds into the fight? My opponent starts looking the same as well, and I’m barely even hitting him. In fact, your opponent takes facial damage even when covering up. The boxers themselves look mediocre. Super Punch Out spared no detail with its look, even if those characters were sometimes over the top representations, so why couldn’t this game? You can’t move around at all aside from dodging punches. The crowds are represented by the same four cardboard cut out people. There’s little in the form of music, but there are some vocal quips here and there, such as “I’m gonna punch your lights out, Georgie!”.

When you start your first match, George Foreman will say “I’m big, I’m bad, and I’m back!” If we have a game like this representing you, it makes me wish you never came out of retirement that first time. George Foreman’s KO Boxing is a terrible mix of terrible controls, terrible gameplay, terrible graphics and the terrible knowledge that there was not quality control when it came to this game. Did I mention it’s all TERRIBLE? One of the worst boxing games I have ever played, if you can even call it boxing. The only thing you can compare this and boxing to, is the fact that the game comes in a cardboard box.

Congratulations, George! You nearly killed all the credibility you had throughout your career with this farce of a game!

Rating: 1.9