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HBO Boxing
Score: 78%
ESRB: Everyone
Publisher: Acclaim
Developer: Osiris Studios
Media: CD/1
Players: 1 - 2
Genre: Sports

Graphics & Sound:
Boxing games always require certain things to make successful graphics: excellent player models and fluid animations for punches. Well, the player models are decent, something I've seen before from Acclaim. They have good detail as in muscle definition, tattoos and stuff. but for some reason, they still look somewhat blocky. As for the fluid motions for the boxing styles, they flow decently, but the punches seem very slow. The rest of HBO Boxing's graphics are the best they can be. The crowd is 2-Dimensional, fighters occasionally go through the ropes when they get up, and one of the referees looks like the Godfather from WWF Attitude.

I like to feel like I'm sitting ringside when I'm playing a boxing game, and I think I did when I played HBO Boxing. Round-by-round, punch-by-punch, the sound effects were there with uppercuts, screaming fans, and the hip-hop theme songs. One thing I didn't like was that the commentary by Jim Lampley, Larry Merchant, and Harold Lederman sounded very mechanical, and fell behind every now and then. Besides that, sounds seemed to run fine.


Gameplay:
Boxing greats George Foreman and Roy Jones Jr. highlight HBO Boxing. Those two fighters are just a sample of the 35 boxing stars from today and yesterday that are provided. Others include Robinson, Camacho, La Motta, Duran, Hagler, Vargas, Tua, Grant and more! Also included but not to be forgotten are the women fighters like Mia St. John & Bridgett Riley, who are making their debut to the video game world. With both the men and women, you are capable of playing in a few different modes: Quickbout, Single Bout, and Pay-Per-View. With Quickbout and Single Bout, it basically is just an Exhibition between any two fighters. With Pay-Per-View, you can create your own TVKO Pay-Per-View from HBO with up to 16 boxers, where belts can be on the line to add to the excitement.

There is also a Career Mode, where you create a boxer, start him from the bottom, and work your way up the rankings. You can change his appearance, choose different boxing styles, weight classes, and even his nickname. The way to improve his Power, Stamina, Foot Speed, and Invincibility is by getting great trainers, which will cost some money (or points). After each match, you will receive points (more if you win and less if you lose). Between each fight, you take your boxer through workouts to help those features, and depending how good your trainers are, that's how good your workout will be. I didn't like this feature, because I like being in control of how good my workout is. Once you've fought your way to championship glory, you can retire your fighter, but that won't be for a while. Believe me.

The gameplay itself tries to stay true-to-life with fighter tendencies and styles, actual boxing venues in Las Vegas and Atlantic City, and signature punches. The problem with my created fighter however was that I never got a real chance to use my signature punch since I was always on my backside. I was able to get my opponent to bleed every now and then, but no matter what fighting style I used, I was always getting knocked out.


Difficulty:
HBO Boxing provides you with three different degrees of difficulty with Amateur, Pro and Legend. However, there are other ways to make it harder for yourself, like by changing the options of TKO, round length, number of rounds, and whom you fight and whom you fight with. The computer's AI is also very tough, but sometimes I think you just knock them stupid, because they won't fight back no matter what you do.

Game Mechanics:
The biggest problem I found for HBO Boxing was that it ran slow. When you press a button for a punch, it seemed like an eternity for him/her to perform it. That also had an effect on the combos that are allotted. The controller configuration seemed simple enough, but I don't think it was ideal for the gameplay. For example, you need to press L1 to toggle between your active hand of left or right, but because it runs slow, it takes time to get your other hand working. I think it would just be easier if the game switched back and forth it self at random times, but that's me. The good in this category is that it only takes one memory block to save, and the game loads fast.

PS2: When I changed the settings of Disc Speed to Fast and Texture Mapping to Smooth, I really found little difference in HBO Boxing. I do think that player models were smoothed over a little bit, but for the most part, I found no huge difference. The loading time increased slightly in speed, but again, no real difference.

HBO Boxing is a decent game, but not a knock out by any means. If you've played games by Acclaim before, then you can expect the same quality out of this one. Whether you liked that quality or not is your choice, but you can expect this will be no different.


-Red Dawg, GameVortex Communications
AKA Alex Redmann

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