ForeverGeek » Fight Night

Initial impressions on Fight Night Round 4

Mel — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 07:12:10 +0000

I finally finished downloading Electronic Arts‘ Fight Night Round 4 demo for the Playstation 3 last weekend and I’ve been playing it on and off over the last couple of days.

First off, the graphics have vastly improved. Everything is now more detailed – from the character models (you actually get to read Manny Pacquiao’s arm tattoos) to the environments. I’m still on the fence with regards to the generally brighter visuals because the darker lighting of Round 3 kind of suited the whole feel of the sport.

I’m still getting used to the controls at this point. My initial impression is that the controls are a bit floaty. It’s so much easier to throw punches and, boy, do they throw them very quickly. This is the reason why I initially think that the whole game feels arcade-y. The controls of Round 3 are not perfect but you feel the heft of the boxers when you try to throw punches. I appreciate the addition of the ability to back away with your guard up, which I think was a criminally left out of the previous game. Weaving is also a good addition, although it is a bit hard to execute. And talking about hard to execute, the new mini-game when your boxer gets KO’ed is really confusing. I still don’t know up to now if I’m doing the correct thing.

I don’t know if it’s an inside joke on the part of the EA team to use Ricky Hatton as the boxer you control in the tutorial with Pacquiao as the dummy, especially since after Hatton made a virtual punching bag of Pacquiao, the latter knocks out Hatton with one punch.

The demo has left with many questions unanswered and kind of tempered my over-all excitement for the game. But I’m still going to get this on launch day.

Fight Night Round 4 to ship June 30

Mel — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 02:26:45 +0000

One of the games that I’m highly anticipating this year is Fight Night Round 4. There’s a big reason why I love playing boxing games. First, I’m a very busy man that I rarely have the time right now to really sit down and spend more than two hours on an RPG. A boxing game is usually short and sweet. I can boot up my game play one match, win, and then turn it off and go back to work. It really fits my tight schedule at the moment. But more than that, I love to play boxing titles. It’s just really fun to pummel a fighter and try to emulate some of the moves that I see in real boxing matches.

I’ve played Fight Night Round 3 to death so I’m really eager to get my hands on the latest installment of the game. And with EA’s announcement that the game, which will be available on both the Xbox 360 and the PS3, will ship worldwide on June 30, I couldn’t be happier. I am quite intrigued by what EA claims as a ground-up reworking of the whole engine and system. I hope that most of the problems that I encountered in Fight Night Round 3 will be addressed — like the loooong load times, the usual sluggish movements around the ring and the boring corner advice from the trainer. I also hope that during online play players can get to choose if they want to fight with people who will use the buttons or the punch control system (the few times I’ve played online I keep getting beat by players who just continually push the haymaker button).

EA has promised that there will be more than 40 licensed boxers that will appear in the game and there will also be a Legacy mode – which I think is just perfect since It’s just silly that the game actually decides when you retire.