Ring King - Mediocre Video Games for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)

Now, if you want to play a good game, you'd play Mike Tyson's Punch Out. Of course, Punch out isn't so much a boxing game as it is a series of move memorizations. If you think about it, that really is pretty much the case. Of course, for all of us NES fanboys, Punch Out is the ultimate boxing classic.

Then, sadly, there's Ring King. It came out the same year as Punch Out, and it has a more open boxing feel to it. In other words, you aren't glued to one spot like Little Mac in the center of the ring. That's kind of cool - I mean, it's more like a real boxing match. But that's a huge problem for the old NES and its limited capabilities!

The NES has limited control capability - two buttons and a directional pad don't offer much. That means you basically have punches and movement for each boxer, without much more to make it interesting. Suffice to say, Ring King becomes extremely monotonous very fast. This is just a button masher pure and simple - and no, blocking doesn't make it any more exciting. There are a few interesting moves to pull off, but other than that, this thing gets boring within 10 minutes.

I will say this about Ring King, it has a 2 player mode. This is cool, since Punch Out doesn't have any such thing. In this mode, two players can get bored with the game in under 10 minutes. Oh, and the music is annoying enough to want to make you commit suicide. I'm serious. Listen to it.

Does this game have any redeeming factors? No, it doesn't. It's literally just a boring mash-em-up boxing game where two boxers prowl around a ring and punch each other until one falls. That's about it. They really should have spiced this game up somehow.

This isn't to say that Punch Out isn't equally as simple as Ring King - it is. Punch Out is all just rights and lefts, body blows and face blows. Nothing special at all there. The reason Punch Out is magical is because the opponents have all sorts of crazy special moves that you must defend against. That makes it a veritable cornucopia of awesome. In Ring King, everything is bland and the same. It's like gruel vs. a Vegas Buffet. It's like Hulk Hogan vs. Cyclops from the X-Men. Zap. Ring King just doesn't cut the mustard at all, no matter how you try to make it look good. It's just bland, bland, bland.

It's not horribly bad. It's a functional boxing game. Punch Out isn't exactly realistic, but I think we'll all take the unrealistic approach of Punch Out over this mediocre crap any day of the week. The music in Ring King sucks, all the boxers look the same, they give you homosexual porn between rounds, and the gameplay is about as exciting as watching a camel take a piss. Does the game suck? I still say no, because it was one of the first to try and capture the "real" side of boxing.

But boxing can be pretty boring. Have you watched it before? They often run around the ring doing nothing for 20 minutes till someone gets hit hard in the face and drops flat. That's the exciting part. Sadly, in Ring King, the only exciting part comes when you take out the razor blades and head to the bathroom.