I’m the Double Greatest

Don’t bother getting your hopes up, don’t bother dreaming of glory and the flash of cameras focused on you and don’t bother thinking you will get to exhibit all those skills you have tried to finely hone in the gym. Why? Well I have a secret to share with you. I’m the best. It’s as simple as that. When I step on the canvas nobody can touch me, my right hook is unstoppable and my tactics are second to none. My team in the corner are the best there are, my fans are the loudest and I’ve been everywhere from London to Manila sending people to the canvas in pain with their mouth full of blood. Ali said boxing was a lot of white men watching two black men beat each other up, but he never reckoned on me lacing up.

I’ve spoken before about difficulty in games, mostly because it seems that with the technology leaps getting smaller we will have to look at other ways of ageing games and one such way is difficulty. Undoubtedly with gaming now utterly mainstream the notion that games should be able to be completed by everybody is a popular one. Why should you be unable to have the complete experience you paid for purely because either you aren’t good enough or the game is too tough? It’s a valid and strong argument, one that isn’t likely to go away now that Nintendo are contemplating games that play themselves at difficult sections, but I am here to provide the opposing view. As you may have guessed from my intro it comes from the sweet science, more specifically EA’s Fight Night Round 4.

The game maps your face in pretty well and now that its career mode is more realistic, you can really get into the moment and engage with your virtual boxing life. I’ve literally just finished playing a game, my mouth is dry and I’m bouncing about whilst typing this out of sheer adrenaline as the fight was that good. I won in the fifth, five rounds of letting him punch himself tired before one punch out the corner finished him. The game is probably the most realistic depiction of a sport I’ve seen outwith golf games and this fight more than any other proved that. I started very poorly, my usual tactic of landing fast light punches wasn’t working as his defence was far too strong but my corner pointed me to this. I had to move around and work any gap I could find and eventually I spotted a sore spot on his face which I managed to turn into a small cut. Not enough to stop the fight but enough to make him change his defence, protecting it more meaning I could go back to my original plan and start to pick away at him. He started to get reckless and punched his stamina away, leaving me to finish him with one punch reasonably early on. When I sent him sprawling I celebrated like I was in the ring, mainly because I was damn proud of myself. It was a difficult fight, I had to think and the game gave me little help. It was just me and my corner, if I wasn’t good enough I would have lost… the judges’ results proved this as until that punch, I was being outfought. Yet if it was easier, if it’d told me to go for the cut or if the AI had held back to let me into it would I have felt that good? Would I right now feel like I’d just sent Foreman to the ground in Zaire? The fact I had to work for it meant it was more than a game, it was a challenge and it tapped into the competitive side that’s in all of us.

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If games continue on this spiral then we’ll lose that forever in favour of letting those who aren’t talented in, but in doing that the experience would be diluted. You are all very lucky that I’m still here then, because as long as I’m in the ring on Xbox Live then the challenge of a lifetime will still be around. There’s a fine line between boxing and chaos, and I’ll send you from one to the other.