Mike Tyson got in trouble this week for, as he is wont to do, smacking someone upside the head. Jimmy Kimmel’s writers jumped on the case and produced this new game.

I’m not sure why I chortled at this. Maybe it’s because I know that lightning-flash punch is coming. Maybe it’s because anything is funnier with a censored bleep in it.

Mike Tyson’s Paparazzi Punch-Out [YouTube, thanks Stephen B]

The same is true for the other goods Club Nintendo gave away to Gold and Silver members, with reports from Kotakuland of Mario hats and Animal Crossing calendars making their way to serious Nintendo fans this week. I haven’t received my download ticket for Doc Louis’ Punch-Out!! (yet), but we’ve heard some reports that attempts to grab a download code have met with a technical uppercut.

Who out there has had luck downloading the game from WiiWare?

On his Flickr stream, KodyKoala describes his Guts-Dozer as kit-bashed from the parts of a “Mech Hulk Top” and a “GI Joe vehicle that I used to have as a kid”. I think that’s the “Wolverine”, the missile launcher that Cover Girl used to drive. Once again, I can’t remember the formula for circumference of a circle, but I can recall that. And that’s probably why I write about video games now.

As for HRH Hippo, I thought that 200-pounds-of-suet physique looked familiar. “I used a BLOB build [from the X-Men continuity] figure as the base, and unfortunately I had to make the legs not movable to make it look right.”

Custom Guts-Dozer figure by Donald “KodyKoala” Kennedy [TinyCartridge via Go Nintendo]

Me? I’m going for Doc Louis’s Punch-Out!!, somewhat reluctantly. I dig physical goods, but what am I going to do with a plush Mario hat? I don’t have a pet to humiliate with it, so that’s right out. I also have no space to store such things. So a digital downloading I will go!

Of course, Gold members—who we look down upon, naturally—can still get their Animal Crossing themed calendar (*giggle*) if that’s all they could muster up in a year. Oh, you’ll still have fun with it, Golds!

Anyway, don’t forget!!

Club Nintendo

Wada-san, who came aboard Nintendo right around the time the Punch-Out!!! port for the NES was being created, spills two interesting details. The first is that he created Mario as the game’s referee without permission. It was just accepted.

Satoru Iwata: You could get away with a lot then. (laughs)
Shigeru Miyamoto: We didn’t have an approval system when using Mario images back then and it went right past my check. (laughs)
Wada: That’s why it is a slightly strange looking Mario.

The second tidbit – it sounds like he’s describing a protip/easter egg that no one’s known, for 22 years.

Wada: This is a great opportunity, so I have something I’d like to say. In Punch-Out!!, the game gives you a lot of hints about effective timing of punches. There is a big boxer called Bald Bull in the NES version as well and a light flashes to the right in the audience when he charges. If you punch when it flashes you will land a body blow.
Tanabe: What? Really?
Wada: No one has known about that for about 22 years…
Everyone: (laughter)
Wada: I was wondering when I would have a chance to tell people that.
Iwata: You’ve been holding that information for 22 years since the release. (laughs)
Wada: Now that I had the chance. (laughs) There are a lot of hidden elements in the NES version.

I do know the first time you face Bald Bull in that game, you take him out with a one-punch body blow during his charge. In fact, it’s the only way to stop his charging. But I never timed it to any crowd camera flashes. Weird.

The rest of the discussion is a great read on the development of the franchise, and other early 1980s games at Nintendo.

Iwata Asks: Punch-Out!!! [Wii.com via Siliconera]

Next Level Games’ gameplay lead Bryce Holliday tells the Official Nintendo Magazine UK that the developer would “love to make a sequel.”

“Cooperative, competitive multiplayer support or create-a-boss mode would be places to start but we’d need to come up with a new ‘hook’ like the motion controllers gave us in this iteration.”

Punch-Out!! Dev: “I Would Love To Make A Sequel” [ONM]

“Nintendo’s tradition is that the hero or central character never vocally speaks,” the game’s producer, Nintendo’s Kensuke Tanabe, told Kotaku over e-mail. The player’s fighter, Little Mac, does keep quiet, as Link, Samus and Mario mostly have before him. “We also followed this tradition for the title.”

Nintendo developers have previously stated that they keep their heroes silent so as not to spoil players’ own imagined sense of what the characters sound like. But on rare occasion supporting casts have gotten chatty. Little Mac’s trainer and opponents talk out loud. In 2007, Metroid Prime 3, another Tanabe-produced game, used recorded speech. And back in 1997, the supporting casts in Nintendo’s Star Fox 64 birthed some of the gaming’s better-known one-liners (Fox spoke as well, a little).

The developers said that Punch-Out’s voice work was included to give its non-playable characters more flair. “We recorded speech to express each character’s origins and characteristics, and to make Doc Louis have a larger personality and greater impact on gameplay,” Tanabe said. “I believe having fighters’ voices during matches is very effective in making the experience more immersive.”

The game’s developers at Canadian development studio Next Level Games echoed Tanabe’s comments. Plus, Next Level producer Bryce Holliday said, there’s a nice dynamic to the quiet hero in combat against massive, talkative foes: “Since we used the original camera view from over the shoulder and kept the feeling that the game is about overcoming your fears and knocking out your bullies, it makes sense for Little Mac to talk very little. He is more avatar than character, giving fans an opportunity to put a little of themselves into his character.”

Even Nintendo will break its characters’ tradition of silence when the moment’s right. Link, you can keep quiet for now. But, Doc Louis, keep on carrying on.

Punch-Out on the Wii was a collaboration between Nintendo’s Japan home office and Canadian studio Next Level Games. Developers in both locations recently fielded Kotaku’s questions over email. Their answers gave rare insight into how these kinds of collaborations work.

And, as a bonus, the developers explained why players didn’t get to punch Princess Peach or Super Mario in the mouth with Little Mac’s gloved fist.

As much as Nintendo wanted Punch-Out, like its other games, to reach new gamers, this was a title the company also wanted to reach the old-school Nintendo fan. “We firmly believed we could not betray our traditional fans’ expectations,” the game’s Nintendo producers Kensue Tanabe told Kotaku over email. “We consulted with Next Level Games and decided to follow the overall design of the NES title in every aspect of the new one. Characters were designed to look almost the same, and we also asked NLG to design them to be beaten with the same tactics of the NES version. This is also when we first decided to adopt the “classic” control scheme of holding the Wii Remote sideways.” (Read Kotaku’s Punch-Out!! review.)

The interview helped reveal a bit of who-does-what, the division of labour and ideas that can often be a mystery in collaborative projects. This game’s development team spanned the globe, connecting Japan-based Tanabe and Nintendo with Canada’s Next Level Games. Choosing the game’s roster, for example, was a collaboration. Tanabe said Next Level wanted to go with mostly fighters from the NES version of Punch-Out. Next Level proposed the others, including Aran Ryan, who Next Level’s producer Bryce Holliday described as the game’s “resident hooligan.”

Credit for the inclusion of a certain famous Nintendo character as an opponent, however, came from an executive at Nintendo of America, with support from Next Level. Tanabe revealed to Kotaku that he had a different idea for who to include from Nintendo’s library of icons: “Princess Peach, but the thought of punching women out made me give up my idea.”

Holliday said that Next Level dropped plans to include some other Nintendo icons in the game “to help solidify the WVBA world and its characters rather than simply borrow from existing Nintendo IP.” WVBA is the fictional boxing leage in the game. He added: “nobody would want to punch Mario.” (Mario didn’t even make it into the game as the referee this time — as he did in the NES version — because, Tanabe said: ” We estimated that if Mario appeared within the toon-shaded 3D atmosphere of the game, it would not be a suitable match.”)

Tanabe credited Next Level with pitching the game’s graphical style. According to Holliday, Nintendo was supportive, generous in the amount of time it gave the Canadian team to test the look and hand-craft the game’s animations.

Throughout their interview, Tanabe and Punch-Out’s developers at Next Level Games came back to discussing the new game’s Title defence mode. This mode moved beyond making Punch-Out a nostalgia title by pitting Little Mac against new and re-mixed versions of his classic opponents in a series of rematches that pick up where the first game’s finishing moment of winning the top championship would have ended. Beyond giving something for experienced players to dig into after they beat a mostly familiar roster in mostly familiar ways, the new Title defence, according to Nintendo’s Tanabe, helped meet modern expectations for game size. “The volume of content in video games has grown significantly since the NES days,” he said. “I’m sure a NES-sized game could never satisfy players today.”

Next Level game designer Ken Yeeloy echoed his colleagues’ comments and added that the Title defence mode helped add colour to already-colorful personalities. “It … fit it with the idea of giving the characters more background and story to them,” he said. ” Since their personalities are such a focus in the game, learning from their previous fight with Little Mac and becoming better made sense and we felt users would appreciate that.”

Before the Title defence part of Punch-Out begins — beyond just its first several fights — the new Punch-Out reveals itself to be a crushingly hard game. Tanabe said that he believed the zeal of new gamers might compel them to overcome that challenge. His unflinching take at that question might seem un-Nintendo given the easiness of many recent games from the company designed for a broader audience. Compare, for example, the level of difficulty in New Super Mario Bros. to its tougher predecessors. Next Level’s Holliday said that his team simply tried to create something that was easy to pick up but a challenge to master: “Games are about choice and we believed at the beginning of the project we wanted to give any user of any skill level a great opportunity to enjoy what we loved as kids. Every circuit provides a distinct challenge. A new player who beats King Hippo gets a sense of accomplishment, while those who’ve played the original will choose to grind it out with the puzzles in the Title defence World Circuit. Losing in this game can actually be enjoyable because it gives you the clues to the design of the puzzles and will hopefully let you get a little further every time you play.”

The difficulty level took some tuning, but an even more formidable challenge, it turns out, may have been figuring out how to make this game work for two players”Unlike other fighting games, Punch-Out!! did not provide an easy template to realise multiplayer gameplay,” tanabe said. “As players are always viewing over the shoulder of their fighter. It made the situation more challenging that we could not manage the distance between fighters unlike other side-view fighting titles. I think it was the realisation of idea of Giga Mac at Next Level Games and the specification of stunning the opponent when punches are dodged which helped implement this new style gameplay in Punch-Out!!, which is unique to Wii and has a lot of possibility.”

The developers were expectedly coy about the future of the Punch-Put series. They agreed that whatever could come next would have to, in Holliday’s words, be “fresh and new.” Said Tanabe: ” We are not planning a sequel where simply the fighters are replaced. If we get so many requests for Little Mac and other fighters to come back, we will make another game in a totally new, different way. But of course, Doc Louis must also be there!”

This is what it looks like. An awful lot like the Wii-imagined Punch-Out!!, obviously, but with the ability to box Little Mac’s trainer Doc Louis. You’ll also have the opportunity to be gently touched by Doc, as seen in the other screen shot Nintendo released today.

Looks amazingly comforting, doesn’t it?

I’m still on the fence about which of the three items I’ll choose, but leaning heavily toward Doc Louis’s Punch-Out!!. I’m all set on hats, thanks.

Speaking to Kotaku late last week, Nintendo Australia managing director Rose Lappin revealed the eagerly-anticipated date and the retailer-exclusive agreement. When asked about the boxing title, which was released in the US and the UK last month, Lappin said:

“Yes, we are bringing Punch-Out in. It’s coming in late August, but as an exclusive with one retailer.”

When asked if she could say which retailer, Lappin said: “Yep, it’s JB Hi-Fi.”

“To be honest we didn’t have a lot of requests for the game,” she contined. “There’s a few people… there’s a lot of noise but not a lot of sales, that sort of thing. However there was one retailer that was chasing it, so that’s why we’ve decided to go that way. Of course, if it continues and consumers want it then that’s what we’re here for. At the end of the day if we don’t support consumers then we don’t have a business. We’re certainly here to work with what people want.”

So, basically, most retailers weren’t excited by Punch-Out!!, at least in terms of how many copies they could sell. However, JB Hi-Fi were a little excited – understandably, given the boxing sim’s NES heritage positions it as something of a core gamer’s game – and have arranged an exclusive with Nintendo.

Expect an exact release date to be confirmed soon. UPDATE: Looks like the date is August 27, according to the listing on the Nintendo Channel, as reported by Vooks. (Thanks Jordan!)

So, since it would seem not many of you were interested in preordering Punch-Out!! before, who’s now keen to pick it up next month?