Handheld
(PSP) Fight Night Round 3
By Ron Ayers
Apr 7, 2006, 5 :54 am

The first Fight Night was a breakthrough boxing game when it first debuted a few years ago. Arguably, it was the first real “pick up and play” boxing game since Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out on the NES, although some Victorious Boxers die-hards will disagree. Fight Night’s unique controls led gamers to have a “near boxer experience”, but the question is, does that experience translate with the latest edition of EA’s cash-cow on the PSP?

Fight Night Round 3 for the PSP may appear to be a port of Fight Night Round 2 for the PS2, but it’s more like a clone, programmed for the bottom up for the PSP, with a fair amount of extra features that will appeal to boxing enthusiasts. Obviously, the analog controls are long gone, but the presentation and action of the predecessors are still there, which is a very good thing.

The analog controls have been replaced with a mish-mash of face buttons and shoulder button modifiers, combined with the analog movement of your fighter. This is difficult to use at first, but begins to feel very precise after about ten fights or so. The face buttons are dedicated to the different types of punches that you throw: left and right hooks, jabs, straights and uppercuts.

The left shoulder button modifies not only body punches, but allows you to lean, which also lets you load up on your haymaker. The right shoulder is mapped for blocking, which, combined with your face buttons, allows you to be more precise with your blocks, allowing you to counter-punch your opponent.

If this seems pretty complex, it is. Despite over sixty fights, I still find it difficult to block my opponent’s body punches, and throwing the perfect haymaker is still a real challenge. That being said, I believe the game is a more realistic representation of boxing as a result, and you can get used to it.

One of the biggest gripes about the console versions of Fight Night is that you can abuse the haymaker, but it’s a lot more difficult now. The new control scheme has forced me to think about combinations and how to throw them better. I still miss the feeling of throwing a hook with the analog, but the PSP’s control scheme isn’t so bad.

I should also mention that the D-Pad is mapped to illegal blows, clinching and special punches, which is serviceable. You’ll use these D-Pad options sparingly, unless you decide to get a little happy with the special punch button.

You can jump right into a game and get into a fight by choosing from a large variety of fighters from the history of the sport, ranging from “The Greatest” Muhammad Ali, to Ronald “Winky” Wright. The selection is impressive and shows how serious EA is to providing a complete boxing product, as opposed to just featuring a single superstar and a bunch of nobodies.

The majority of the game will be played in Career Mode, where you can create your own boxer from a variety of options, or take a licensed boxer (such as my man Sugar Ray Leonard) and start his career from scratch, working his way up through the amateur and professional ranks until he’s the Middleweight, Welterweight, Light Heavy, Unified or Pound for Pound Champion of the World. Then it’s all about longevity, earning cash, and buying cool trunks and gloves in the Fight Store. The options in the Fight Store are pretty extensive, allowing you to pick up all sorts of different apparel, signature moves, and tats for your fighter.

In the Career Mode, you’ll have to manage your cash, purchase cut men who will fix you up (using the same mini-game from the console versions) and trainers who will bulk you up. Along with your promoters, these guys will want a cut, and the going is financially tough early on.  You’ll also get to pay to have an escort to the ring, along with theme music and special effects that will pump up your boxer.

Fights start at the amateur level with four-round bouts, but as you advance, the fights get longer and tougher. Maintaining your energy level is self-explanatory: don’t get punched in the face or it goes down. There’s also a punching power meter, which decreases after each punch, then recharges. If you punch too much, the top limit of this meter drops, meaning you’re punching yourself out and won’t have anything left in the later rounds.

Despite this, you can still easily knock a guy out in the eight or ninth round with consistent pressure. In fact, it’s still too easy to win by KO or at the worst TKO by continuing to punch a guy in his right or left eye, and forcing the referee to come in. My only knock on the game’s realism aspect is that I’d like to see a few fights go the distance. I either cream the CPU fast, over time, or he creams me, with no in-between.

Special to the PSP is the “Rival Challenges” mode, which really feels like it was made for the portable experience. This mode throws you into critical moments of historic bouts right at the turning point, and it’s up to you to make things happen. Usually, these challenges are three to four rounds long, just enough for a quick trip on the bus or train, but more than satisfying in terms of game play. The fights are extremely difficult at times, but there is a medal system, which provides you multiple goals to shoot for (draw, win, KO) and allows you to move on. The addition of the challenge mode tacks on a minimum of a couple of hours of play.

The graphics on the PSP’s version of Fight Night Round 3 are excellent. The wonderful camera replays after you dent your opponent’s head are still here, completely with blood splatter and sometimes even the mouthpiece flying out for show. The boxer models are very realistic, especially the licensed ones, not to mention that they’re fun to look at. My only gripe with the graphics comes from the venues themselves, which are “okay” at best, especially since they’re all copies of the venues from the console version of Round 2.

Sound wise, the EA-Trax are high quality as always and enjoyable to listen to during the menus and the introductions. Once in an actual fight, the commentary is repetitive, and sometimes falls behind, but is ultimately useful in that it lets you know when you’ve cut your opponent or when you’ve gotten away with a cheap shot. The corner commentary was actually much better than I expected, and you should be sure to listen to what they have to say after each round. Sadly, EA continues to give each boxer a generic nickname, which at times kills the effect of the commentary. I would be much happier if they had a bunch of generic last names instead of “No Dice looks like he could go down!”

The online aspect of Round 3 is a bit controversial. While there’s the ability to use the Ad-Hoc and Infrastructure Modes, both of which I continue to clamor for in all multiplayer PSP games, EA requires you to either provide some personal information and an e-mail address to ESPN to proceed, or pay them $2.00. They toss this in front of you after you’ve gone through 90% of the account creation process, which is a bit sneaky. While this isn’t a tough pill to swallow for most people, the spam and privacy conscious will be very much annoyed about the potential for ESPN and EA sending them unwanted advertising.  It’s a simple matter to insert a generic e-mail address and run with it.

Once you’ve registered an account, you can use the “Play Now” function and jump into a match or enter a lobby and join or create a match for others to join. Matches can be ranked and the ESPN/EA system keeps track of records and stats. Sadly, this is the only shining point of the multiplayer system, because once I got in, there were only a few people to fight, and the fights were not fun. In many cases, I was at an extreme disadvantage by being forced to fight from the right-hand side, which I’ve suddenly realized isn’t conducive to the button system that I’d been learning with in single-player. Secondly, the response is much slower, making it more difficult to throw combinations and block punches. Finally, button-mashers reign supreme, and that’s not fun either.

Overall: 7/10

Fight Night should provide at least ten hours of game play if you’re just trying to get multiple belts, and even longer for those looking to max out their fighters.  The game mirrors its console big brothers very well, and sometimes too well with the rehashing of some aspects such as the arenas. While I suspect Fight Night purists will be disappointed with loss of the analog controls, the control scheme works well enough, at least for single-player play. The online portion just isn’t doing it for me, and asking for personal information or cash before providing a product that doesn’t equal the single player experience will leave a sour taste in some gamers’ mouths.  However, if you’re willing to overlook this quirk, you’ve got a solid pickup that should only get better in future iterations.