Seriously, this game whips my ass.
This is the face of fear.
So I'm playing this game, and I like it a lot and so forth, you know? This is a fun game! I fight my way through a French guy and a German, a hippo and a Japanese man, on and on and on.
All right, think I! This is pretty great. It's nothing but boss fights - kind of like Shadow of the Colossus, only the colossi are replaced by racial stereotypes and all the deep subtext and meaning are replaxed by a fat guy on a bike. This is my kinda game!
So I cruise through the Minor League, and I stumble a bit in the Major League but nothing too bad - Bald Bull is tough but he's not insurmountable once you get your jab timing down and learn how to counter his big rush. Don Flamenco was actually a bit more bothersome because I always had to force him into a counter-attack.
The World League is different.
The first match is against a revamped Piston Honda, who lays me flat in the first match. That's all right though, you know? I expect that. It takes time to re-learn all his timing, and I still can't beat him in the first two rounds usually, but he's not TOO tough. After him, though?
I take it back. This is the face of fear.
Now the thing about Soda Popinski is that he's huge, he's Russian, and he can knock you down in like three hits if he lands his uppercuts - which have little to no delay, so reacting to them is hard or impossible. He is a juggernaut, an avatar of fear and torment who could level armies on his own, who undoubtedly chews up vodka bottles for the fiber.
Fighting him is like fighting a gorilla - he can be taken down but you have to be either technically perfect or able to anticipate his uppercuts and hit him in the body as he prepares to do them, which makes him momentarily vulnerable to your haymaker.
I took me something like a dozen tries - maybe more - to take down Soda Popinski. After that, I thought, surely there could be nothing else so terrible, not until Mr. Dream himself.
Wait, who's the next fight?
AAAAAARRRRRRRGH
So let's talk about the NES version of Punch-Out!!, because it is fun, and also: hard.
