Teleroboxer (Virtual Boy)

Teleroboxer is a Punch-Out!! game in disguise. While it would be easy to accuse any boxing game made by Nintendo of being such, Teleroboxer has an incredible amount in common with the Punch-Out!! series to the point it can’t be coincidence. Its fighting system is based on identifying an opponent’s tells, dodging or blocking at the right time, and landing your hits during the moments of opportunity your opponent provides, Teleroboxer even making sure its lineup of opponents is as quirky as the characters you usually go up against in Nintendo’s main boxing franchise. While the similarities seem undeniable, it is likely the differences that kept Nintendo from directly tying it to the Punch-Out!! series, and I’m not just referring to the shift away from human boxers to battling robots.

 

Set in the 22nd century, the rise of telerobotics has lead to an interesting play for popularity from Dr. Edward Maki Jr.. To make the science more appealing to the masses, he developed a means of controlling huge robotic boxers. The sport of teleroboxing became a global phenomenon, and now the player finds themselves entering the first ever official Teleroboxing Tournament. Your character is in charge of the spiky-haired machine Harry and its machine gun punches, but your opposition is an increasingly eclectic bunch. Things start off sort of tame, but eventually you’ll face machines piloted by a nine year old boy or a strange 527 year old man who might not even be human, and the robots become even more unusual over time to match. Shifting away from humanoid boxing designs, you’ll end up facing a kangaroo machine where the joey can join in the fight as well as a robot whose midsection is a bomb that will blow you up if you don’t beat it quickly enough.

With eight opponents to face as well as a secret ninth should you manage to conquer the tournament with an undefeated record, Teleroboxer ends up a game where the bulk of your time with it will be spent figuring out your opponent’s movements and habits and exploiting them to come out on top. Presented in a first-person view from Harry’s perspective, you’ll see your own floating fists as you face off against other robots that similarly have limbs that float in mid-air. This gives most opponents a bouncy feel befitting a shuffling boxer, but it also gives them a freedom of movement that allows them to more easily provide visual information to the player. Despite going up against remote-controlled machines, the robots you face can have a fair bit of personality, some laughing at you or getting frustrated that can help serve as tells. Anticipating incoming strikes is still made a touch easier by also having the fists of a foe who is about to strike flash red, this helping you recognize which fist needs to be blocked and which direction it might be coming from. Even with the clear visual cues though, the opposing teleroboxers are swift to strike and may even perform feints, the player having to learn enemy habits to know when to actually block, dodge, or punch.

 

A bit of a complication arises though in how many angles of attacks the opponent has. In Teleroboxer, your mech can block high, low, or cover their mid-section, the player also able to strike at those different regions. Using the controller’s two D-pads, you are also able to control each fist individually, something that sounds like it could open you up to some clever plays. Blocking with one hand and striking with another sounds like the kind of skillful action you should take, but the fighting doesn’t feel built around the concept and the speed of matches means you might struggle to slip in something so flashy. Already simply identifying the right area to block can require a split-second response, but things get messy if you try to slip in dodges. Dodges require you to move your hands in the same direction to either side, a somewhat unnatural action that seems to not just have detection issues but dodges feel fairly slow and might leave you open to punishment. Dodging, in fact, is never required, blocking able to cover every attack, even if it’s something strange like a machine’s hat turning into a drill or a Teleroboxer with a feminine design revealing its chest fires missiles. Avoiding dodging can remove a potential failure point, but your robot Harry also has a range of Machine-Gun Attacks. If you move both fists up, down, inward, or outward, you’ll begin to charge up a powerful or rapid fire attack. These are perfect for specific windows of opportunity, especially for foes you can daze, but three of the four inputs required for these special moves also match up with guarding a part of your boxer with both your hands. What’s more, some attack options like a hook or uppercut are pulled off by pressing your punch buttons plus a direction on the D-pad on the same half of the controller. If you just defended downward, it’s not hard to accidentally do an uppercut when trying to get in a quick hit, but these special moves have wind-ups that make them often whiff if done any time that isn’t perfect. Quick blows and blocks are key to survival and whittling the foe down but complicated by inputs that are often so situational they’re not that helpful and more often harmful since they’re easy to execute accidentally.

Over time you can learn to better space your button presses to better react to the action and not make mistakes, but Teleroboxer’s difficulty increases fairly quickly with only the first fight close to standard fare. The second battle against the skull-faced robot Spokong already has a foe who can move his head into his belly or have it pop out above his shoulders, this fight clearly meant to teach you about targeting specific parts of the body but also likely where you first face the control confusion that sometimes arises. The high difficulty does sound disheartening for those interested in seeing the secret final fighter, although since the game offers 3 save files you can essentially make one a training file and the other the serious one, or more likely, you’ll play it on Switch Online where Restore Points means you can undo any loss. However you tackle it, you’ll find your foes do take understanding to overcome, and despite the growing pains of understanding your own mech, learning an enemy is usually a more interesting process. Bomkun pushes it a bit far with his self-detonation gimmick that means you only have 50 seconds at a time to learn his tricks before you’re hit with an instant loss, but other matches will go on for multiple rounds and should you have more life when the time is up, you win even if you didn’t achieve a knock-out.

 

For the most part, the battles of Teleroboxer are interesting to learn and their difficulty makes them thrilling to overcome, and there are even some extra considerations on how to gain an edge. Between rounds you can mash the punch buttons to recuperate health, but your opponent will use the same time to slowly recover too. You can skip the between rounds recuperation though if you don’t want them to refill their life bar with the cost being you naturally can’t get any health back yourself, but this essentially gives you a way to either keep momentum in your corner or try to build up some life after a rough round. When a robotic boxer is at low health, they also tend to have one final panic mode of sorts. New techniques are revealed that tend to be stranger and more dangerous, but that also means you can identify them more easily, especially since they’ll have longer wind-ups compared to regular punches. Some of these last ditch techniques can be quite devastating if they break through though, making control flubs even peskier. Punch-Out!!’s simpler control style of only blocking high or low and having quick snappy dodges is a much better fit for this style of combat, but despite the complications added that don’t feel like they expand things to your benefit, there are still good matches to be found in figuring out how to defeat your powerful Teleroboxing opponents.

THE VERDICT: Figuring out the tricks and tells of your strange robotic opponents gives Teleroboxer’s small set of fights some satisfying pay-offs, the difficulty high but wearing down as you get better and better at reacting and identifying the opponent’s techniques. However, you are held back a bit by some unfortunate complexity in controls that can often lead to incorrect inputs, and with the other Teleroboxers being so adept at blocking any attack that isn’t perfectly timed, pulling off the wrong attack can lead to harsh punishment. Over time you can refine your movement a touch but may still throw out an accidental uppercut just trying to keep up with the pace of the game, but when you’re in the midst of a fight, honing your understanding and easily battering a bot that used to give you trouble before you know their tells, it’s easier to forgive the occasional control stumble.

 

And so, I give Teleroboxer for Virtual Boy…

An OKAY rating. While making the final opponent require near perfection to even see, Teleroboxer otherwise feels built well to facilitate its boxing by way of learning the enemy. You can rematch as many times as it takes, and while some robots like Bomkun make that process a bit too rough, others are exciting tests of your ability to adapt to something new. Teleroboxer really just needed to thin the range of abilities you have or map them to more reasonable button inputs. While there may be some advanced play styles that make blocking with just one hand worthwhile, more players would likely benefit from blocking and special attacks being unambiguous actions rather ones that have the tendency to overlap if you don’t time button and directional presses just right. It is a shame some options like uppercuts and dodges are best avoided and yet occur by mistake on occasion, but even if there were fewer tools for how to fight, the boxing format would have been enough to make for an entertaining sci-fi twist on the sport. The opposing robots can have stranger twists than the human boxers of Punch-Out!! and having three regions of the body to block would have worked well if it was better handled. As is you can still fight your way through and Teleroboxer isn’t so punishing that some flubs will spell your doom, but it can take the wind out of your sails during a good fight when the action isn’t as responsive as it needs to be.

 

Perhaps Dr. Edward Maki Jr. should have ironed out all the kinks in telerobotics if he wanted it to truly catch on, it not quite feeling like you have the full control of your Teleroboxer that you would like. However, there is still an apparent appeal to battering the large and often unusual machines you go up against, your growing knowledge and developing eye for opportunity inverting the difficulty of many fights in a way that usually doesn’t take too long to master but still feels like a meaningful feat. Teleroboxer might not be as clean as most Punch-Out!! entries due to it overcomplicating controls in a fighting system that is so focused on sharp reactions, but fans of the series will likely find Teleroboxer is a nice if not totally effective twist on Punch-Out!!’s compelling boxing format.