My wife just bought me the new Wii Punch-Out!! for Father's Day. Let me just say at the outset that what you're hearing is true; it is brilliant. The thing is, the genius of Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!, which was not a particularly long game, was that it forced you to learn its secrets through frequent repetition. It didn't take long to get to any given point in the game once you knew how, so it was always easy to summon the determination to go back and repeat a section that had you stuck. And some things, like punching King Hippo in the mouth, you could learn at the playground or explain to someone fairly easily, but many things, like how exactly to dodge and block to knock out Piston Honda or when to hit Bald Bull, were lessons much better left to experience.
The beauty of the new Punch-Out!! is that it works exactly the same way, and in fact, it rewards even a veteran's experimentation, since some boxers are just a little different from their counterparts in the NES or SNES versions, just enough that you'll need to work a few things out for yourself.
At the same time, it adds a beautiful new coat of paint to the old game. As Scott Sharkey points out, those fighters from the NES game aren't nearly as large as we remember them being. True, every last one of them, even wimpy old Glass Joe, towered over the 107-pound (!) Little Mac, but even on a 4:3 display, which was the only way to play the old game, there was lots of ring space they didn't fill. That's no longer the case, as all of the fighters, particularly the big guys like King Hippo and Bear Hugger, take up a good deal more of the space on even a 16:9 display. The camera also bucks around with Little Mac's actions, making it feel like there's much more for the camera to take in. One of my favorite touches in the game is the noticeable step up in atmosphere from circuit to circuit; that Minor Circuit ring looks shabby indeed, and the gradations to Major Circuit and World Circuit arenas make the corresponding upward trajectory of Little Mac's fame much more tangible than it's been in the past.
Anyway, naturally I thought I'd check out the old strategies to see if they worked on the slightly re-tooled versions of Punch-Out!!'s characters. Glass Joe and Von Kaiser are still pretty pathetic, at least at the beginning of the game, and I didn't feel any need to deploy any well laid strategy against either of them, so I skipped straight to the details on King Hippo, who now comes a couple spaces earlier in the progression (click to see the full-size, readable version):
Yep, that checks out, though if you don't uppercut the new King Hippo when he pauses after the two hand squish-move, you're wasting a lot of crucial opportunities for those tummy-punches. In fact, he'll be a much more difficult KO if you don't.
And what about Piston Honda, or "Piston Hondo," as he's (I guess) less actionably called these days? 
Okay, that works too, I suppose, though the explanation's a bit more awkward than the more straightforward advice needed to get past King Hippo. As I said, for the most part, this was not a game that benefited much from playground shop-talk the way, say, Castlevania II did.
Ah, the olden days. Going back to that old Official Nintendo Player's Guide, the source of those hint sections above, made me want to look through the whole book, and so that was what I did. It got me thinking: there was once a time when I didn't know what Mother Brain looked like, when I didn't realize that registering your name as "Zelda" in The Legend of Zelda would allow you to start a completely different game from the one that most of us were playing. But it would:
See?
As Bob Mackey pointed out in a great column on 1UP recently (and see this post for an index to subsequent entries in this series), not all of us think too often about strategy guides anymore. Why spend fifteen or twenty bucks on a physical thing when you can just go to Gamefaqs and download someone's pride and joy, an obsessively compiled guide to anything and everything in a given game?
But there was a time when we weren't really thinking all that much about strategy guides simply because we weren't yet aware they were out there. I think that, with a few exceptions (some modern games need guides, because they really are just that hard or that vast), strategy guides had a brief floruit from the late eighties to the late nineties, a short period of time sandwiched between the dark times, when game hints were passed from master to pupil through a solely oral tradition, and the point at which the internet became the universal resource for gamers in trouble. Though it was hardly the first strategy guide published, The Official Nintendo Player's Guide nevertheless set an example that would eventually be followed by almost every console game guide published, at least in America. It may also have been one of the earliest, if not the earliest, examples of the screenshot-mosaic level map that remains such a memorable feature of classic Nintendo Power issues.
Thanks to the ONPG (as most people like to refer to it¹) and presumably the popularity of gaming magazines like Nintendo Power², the large trade paperback format, which was well suited to printing lots of screenshots and game-related art, won out over the, um, fun but somewhat less apt mass market format of such books as Jeff Rovin's How to Win at Nintendo Games or the Metal Gear and Castlevania II novelizations "created by F.X. Nine."
Anyway, this isn't an exhaustive history of the genre, though I'd love to see something like that, so enough with all that. The ONPG, which had somewhat in-depth coverage of twenty-four games and capsule summaries of fifty-six more, was, to this seven-year-old, a revelation from God. The God, yes. You see, there was obviously an omniscient being behind this Nintendo Player's Guide thing, because not only did it know how many missiles it took to beat Mother Brain and what she actually looked like (this, incidentally)
it had also apparently beaten goddamned Ghosts 'N Goblins.
The one thing the ONPG didn't have going for it was an entirely sound grasp of the Queen's English in all its idiomatic splendor. Not that there were too many real howlers, but the text was a little funny in some places. Ghosts 'N Goblins, for example, is described as "a very torcherous adventure." To be fair, there is a torch weapon in GNG, and trying to make it through the game with that piece of crap is an even more, ahem, torturous experience than usual, so maybe this was just a particularly witty turn of phrase, but I doubt it. Towards the end of the book, a capsule summary for Excitebike does a particularly good job of showing the book's flair for dipping into strange English as it grows nearly poetic in its dramatic intensity:
Your objective is revenge against your old adversary, Arch Rivale, who humiliated you at the last Excitebike race. You can still hear his taunting laughter as he rode over your foot, flattening it like a road bunny. Will you finally have your revenge? Or will Arch Rivale have the last laugh? Again.
I guess someone got bored and decided that Excitebike was in desperate need of a plot? Interesting choice.
Evidently, only the most glaring errors were cleared up in the ONPG's translation from Japanese to English, leaving quite a few oddities. The intro to the full-length review of Castlevania is pretty good (and I swear the following text, capitalization and all, is precisely copied from the book):
"You are the hero of this game! The Whip is your constant companion. Power-Up to Level Two and knock down the Monsters. Inside the castle you'll find Candles. Strike them with your Whip and important Items will appear."
For great justice! By the way, is "to knock down" a euphemism for "to murder" in Japanese? That would certainly explain that old line from Final Fantasy.
Some of the other fun bits are the frequent scare quotes in other games' capsule summaries that make it sound like the writers were choking back disdain at having to commit this stuff to paper:
"To defeat Ganon, you must find the eight pieces of the 'Triforce of Wisdom' which are scattered throughout the land."
"The cruel King Ligar and his soldier beasts have stolen Argool's 'Door to Peace' and have established an evil reign of terror."
"The pirates have hidden this 'Metroid' deep within the fortress Planet Zebes where they plan to make it multiply, and use it to destroy galactic civilization."
"Pick from three levels of play depending on your 'b-ball' skills, when playing the computer."
It's a fun book, moderately useful (if only half of the "in-depth reviews" didn't cut off halfway through their respective games!) and certainly an amusing read in places, and now it's a fun antique, pre-dating even the first issue of Nintendo Power. Wikipedia thinks it's in a direct line of continuity with those Nintendo Power Strategy Guides that came out in 1990, the ones that covered Super Mario Bros. 3 and Final Fantasy, you know, and that's kind of cool to know, considering that the more recent line of Nintendo Player's Guides, which covered almost everything and included the deservedly famous NES Atlas, ran almost twenty years, from the early 1990s to 2007. At any rate, The Official Nintendo Player's Guide is one of the really early examples of the form, and if there's such a thing as a strategy guide enthusiast, and if you happen to be one of those, the book really belongs in your library. And hey! There are fun stickers!
[While this week's pictures are mostly my own scans, I've also grabbed an image from Sydlexia.com's hilarious essay on memorable NES quotations; there's also a great article on how inferior the SNES Super Punch-Out!! is to its predecessor (and, I'd imagine, its new successor); that seems pretty topical. There are run-downs of the top 100 games on the NES and the SNES. In fact, many of Syd's articles are great, and it can be hard to stop reading the site's content once you've started, so you've been warned.]
¹Yes, I am being facetious.
²And it's worth noting that Nintendo Power published four "Nintendo Power Strategy Guides" as part of its print run in 1990, focused on SMB3, Ninja Gaiden II, Final Fantasy, and various four-player games for the old NES, with several sports games, Gauntlet II, and (ugh) Swords and Serpents.
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