Don King Presents: Prizefighter is a tour de force lesson in gaming, boxing, and—mostly—the pointlessness of human existence. Playing through the Career Mode that is the heart of this innovative game taught me things that no game before has come close to matching. Here, in no particular order, are the mind-blowing revelations unveiled to me by Don King Presents: Prizefighter.
- A man can punch clean through another man’s body. This game perfectly captures the true-to-life ability of a skilled boxer to drive his fist so forcefully into another man’s abdomen that it bursts out the other man’s back like an Alien baby wearing a boxing glove hat. I am certain that only the game’s Teen ESRB rating prevented the creators of Don King Presents: Prizefighter going for the ultimate in realism by having your boxer’s fist erupt from his opponent’s back clutching his bloody spine. While I personally have never witnessed a man gore another with his entire arm, this must be realistic, for why would it happen with such regularity in this game? Elitist naysayers may suggest that piss-poor collision detection and generally amateurish programming may be the cause, but these are probably the same people who don’t realize that a man can also be knocked out by an errant jab that sails a full foot over a boxer’s head or an awkward slap on the ear with the armpit. The action here is a brilliant commentary on the unpredictability of human existence—danger lurks everywhere, even in the armpit of your enemy.
Fantastic controls are way overrated. If you’ve played the tremendously deep and engaging Fight Night Round 3, you know how sensationally the simple, intuitive controls of that game worked to draw you into the action. But Don King Presents: Prizefighter is not for players looking for thrilling entertainment, it is for players who want to be as completely distanced from the action onscreen as humanly possible. To that end, Don King Presents: Prizefighter has controls that rely on a convoluted array of some 31 button and trigger combos to direct the action. That frustration and confusion you feel is a brilliant existential metaphor for man’s place in an uncaring universe.- Mario Van Peebles is a werewolf. I’m just saying. Check out those lower canines in the cut scenes and you’ll know what I mean.
Boxing games need more Citizen Kane, less excitement. Did you feel that the fantastic action and gripping realism of Fight Night Round 3 should have been scrapped in favor of lengthy interstitial full-motion video cut-scenes? Did you think that telling the game’s story would be best accomplished in the “looking back” manner of Citizen Kane but created via the cut-up writing technique of opium-addicted, wife-shooting Naked Lunch author William Burroughs? And did you think that these disjointed scenes would be best played by actors of limited ability? Yeah, me too!- Good camera positioning is for babies. You want the replay camera to be placed in such a way that you can relish that devastating knockout blow you just unleashed? Boo-hoo, Senor Crybaby. Don King Presents: Prizefighter understands that replays that completely obscure the few exciting moments of the game create a stupefying aura of ineluctable mystery that elevates it above the rabble of lesser games pandering to simple player satisfaction. That air of mystery is scrupulously maintained throughout the game: even in those instances you can see the action during replays, there’s no guarantee that it will come close to matching what you actually did or think you did. Don King Presents: Prizefighter understands that sports-based videogames should be a surreal meditation on the reliability of memory and reality, and not a recreation of the actual sport.
The most successful fighter is the least successful fighter. Zen koans such as this, in tandem with a rigorously depicted alternate reality, nurture the philosophical growth of players, challenging them to grapple intellectually to make sense of events that defy their base expectations. Delivering a devastating knockout to a heavy favorite after knocking him down nine times in six rounds will drive your Media Profile down, not up, in this game. You’re on top of the world yet simultaneously diving toward the bottom. Could this be a depiction of the painful emptiness that aches within you, the sense of personal failure and worthlessness that drives your character literally to fight his way through life? You could say it’s just another broken slab of gameplay in a game that gets almost nothing right, but then why would the in-game commentary reinforce the sense of failure that spurs your character on? Why would announcer Jim Lampley opine “Norris had the edge in that round” even though you just knocked Norris down? Why would Lampley undersell your achievements by stating you could “probably rack that up as your round” after you dropped a guy twice and drove your whole arm through his skull? Obviously, Jim Lampley is a stand-in for a cruel daddy figure internalized as an eternally damning superego. When Lampley gleefully declares, “Welcome to Hell!” you will nod in grim assent. Truer words were never spoken.- No one likes mini-games. Building up your skills in Don King Presents: Prizefighter is accomplished via mini-games that endeavor to bring things like heavy bag work, jumping rope, and shuttle running to life. This is accomplished through hand-cripplingly repetitive button-mashing mini-games that are as unenjoyable as possible. Another pithy commentary on the futility of striving by philosopher king and killer of two men, Don King.
Spamming is good. Forget the brilliant strategic depth of Fight Night Round 3, a game that had you adjust to your opponent’s strengths and weaknesses like a true boxer. Don King Presents: Prizefighter knows that you’d prefer a game where you could launch the same attack over and over again without repercussions. Is it realistic to throw a right hook more than a dozen times into someone’s body without them adjusting in the slightest? Of course not. But it’s the best (and possibly the only) way to win the fights in this game. Fight strategy in Don King Presents: Prizefighter is another rich metaphor for the redundancy of human life—you dutifully and joylessly punch away here the same way you dutifully punch the time clock at whatever corporate entity is slowly consuming your life. What does it matter? In the end there is only death. And pain. And Don King Presents: Prizefighter will leave you wincing in pain and longing for death long before you finish. Brilliant.
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