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Fight Night Round 2 first impressions: *all kinds of awesome* by curst 03/05/2005, 10:11pm PST Of course, so was Fight Night '04, so I'm pretty much talking about marginal improvements and not much else. Still, if you want a boxing game but mysteriously passed up Fight Night '04, which I'm confident you didn't because you do enjoy great games, right? Anyway, don't make that mistake twice! This is the sort of game that is too good to allow me to strike a blow against The Man and EA's predatory business practices. Clinching has been added and does its job effectively. You simply press Y to clinch, and as long as you don't over-rely on it (that can result in a DQ) it can absolutely save you when you are in a "critical" state (where you've been beaten so badly that suddenly, much like the Rocky movies, the sound effects warp and slow way down and everything echoes). You're almost guaranteed to buy yourself enouhg time to recover enough health that you won't succumb to just one punch. Haymakers have been added. I have a hard time snapping off a haymaker uppercut, but the hooks are pretty easy to use. It's much easier to close in on opponents who like to run away. Here, you can keep your defense up and parry while simultaneously moving around, so you can safely march in if your opponent attempts to retreat. Maybe you could do this in FN'04, but I'm almost certain you couldn't. I remember having all kinds of problems trying to land any punches against punks, pussies, and perpetrators who would never stand and fight. There's a cutman that you can toggle on/off. If on, then in-between rounds, you have to play some minigame to try to reduce swelling from cuts. We've always left it on, so I don't know if there's an advantage by playing this minigame and doing great at it, or if you're better off turning the minigame off and letting the healing occur naturally. Big Tigger has been replaced by, uh, someone who isn't a poor man's Chris Rock. This is a huge relief - I appreciate the link between hiphop and boxing, but can we please keep that confined to the music? Luckily, yes we can - you won't feel compelled to shut off the commentary. The knockdowns are even sicker. The replays close in on the victim's face, and the artists a great job of giving the sucker a glazed-eye look, sometimes with the eyeballs rolling up somewhat while their jaw quivers like jello as they fucking COLLAPSE in a heap and their mouthpiece goes flying into the fifteenth row. The only possible downside is that sometimes the camera closes in so much that you can't actually see where the fist connects. Still, the replays never, ever get old. The sound effects also slow down here, and in an unintentionally funny bit, you'll almost always hear the victim groan - combined with this sound effect, it sounds less like a boxing game and more like the shibito zombies from Siren. I haven't played enough on Hard or in singleplayer mode to tell how good the AI is. I've lost more often than not, but I think it's because I am over-relying on haymakers and tiring myself way too quickly. We really haven't cared about the AI since we're far too busy whuping on each other, but like most games these days, it looks like playing the singleplayer mode is the only way to unlock a whole bunch of shit, so I'm going to have to fuck with it at some time.

Fight Night Round 2 first impressions: *all kinds of awesome* by curst 03/05/2005, 10:11pm PST