One of Sega’s Unfortunate Missteps

James “Buster” Douglas Knockout Boxing is one of the games I bought a long time ago, and I never really played it. I made sure it worked and put it on a shelf for later. When I started making YouTube videos, this was one of the first games I played. I don’t remember what I said about it, though.

The first I had heard of this game was in a few books about Sega. I was reading a lot of books about video game history, and this game was brought up as an example of Sega’s marketing strategy. It was released after Douglas lost the heavyweight title, so Sega leaned into that by adding “Knockout” to the name. At least that is what I read.

I wanted to take a fresh look at this game, especially since I don’t remember much about it. This wasn’t one of the games my friends rented, and I don’t remember playing it until the 2010s. Let’s check it out and see what it has to offer.

TLDR: A shallow arcade experience. It’s fine, but very repetitive.

Console Wars and Other Books

I originally read about the game in the book Console Wars. It was an interesting story, but I don’t know how historically accurate it is. The next time this game came up was when I read Playing at the Next Level by Ken Horowitz. A few other books might’ve mentioned it, but I either haven’t read them yet or don’t remember.

What Console Wars does is try to recreate the conversations that were had at Nintendo and Sega. This is an interesting way to write a history book, and it makes things easy for a casual reader. I’m not sure how accurate these quotes are, but they do tell a good story.

Other books tell a similar story, but leave out most of the quotes and narrative. What all of these books agree on is Sega’s marketing strategy in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They wanted to take the licenses of athletes, coaches, and celebrities to gain attention for their games.

The most notable were Michael Jackson, Joe Montana, and Tommy Lasorda. There were plenty of others that came and went over the years, and most of these were dropped. Buster Douglas had a one-off game that was trying to capitalize on his upset win over Mike Tyson. Unfortunately, it came out after Douglas lost the title.

That is the environment this game was released into. I’m not sure how successful this strategy was for Sega, but they almost always had better sports games than Nintendo. As someone who is blissfully ignorant of the fact that this was going on in the 1990s, it is cool to look back and study it.

Narrative

There is no story here. You just fight a bunch of other boxers and become the champion. It is what you should expect from an arcade sports game.

Gameplay

The gameplay is very shallow. There isn’t too much to this game, and you can finish it in about 20 minutes. I really don’t like this game. It got really boring as I was playing it.

The roster of boxers isn’t very big. Here is a list:

• Buster Douglas
• Dynamite Joe
• King Jason
• Fernando Gomez
• Kim Nang

There are two other boxers. Ironhead is the boss character, and Detroit Kid is only in the Japanese version of the game. With only a handful of characters, the game gets a little repetitive.

You fight each character twice, and then you go up against Iron Head. The difficulty does increase the further you get in the game. One thing that feels odd is how damage feels random.

You have two punches and a block. I can’t really complain about this since it is a boxing game and not a tournament fighter. I wasn’t expecting anything too crazy. At times, it feels like you’ll lose half your life in one hit. This goes both ways, so I guess it evens out.

For what it is, this is a decent boxing game. It isn’t the worst thing in the world, but there are better boxing games on the Genesis. If I weren’t curious about this game, I never would’ve come back to play this.

Visuals

The game is visually impressive. It feels like one of those games that is meant to show off what the console could do, but doesn’t have the best gameplay. It is an arcade port, which is what Sega was going for at the time. The sprites are very large and detailed, the crowd looks good, and the animations are nice.

The sprites’ size reminds me of the early Genesis games like Last Battle and Altered Beast. Those games were trying to show off what the Genesis could do. It took arcade ports, or arcade-style games, and brought them to the home console. This game looks better than those, but it is in the same style.

 The animations are fast! They look good for this type of game, and it is impressive to see the game moving this fast. It reminds me of something other than a video game.

Knockout Boxing looks just like a fighting game. You have a side view, and you can only move left to right. This perspective, along with the punching animations, reminds me of Rock’em Sock’em Robots. It just made me laugh when I first saw it.

I found the referee to be incredibly distracting. He just stands there in the center of the screen and stares at you with his dead eyes. It was really creeping me out. Once I noticed it, I couldn’t unsee it. I’m probably going to have nightmares about him.

James “Buster” Douglas Knockout Boxing is a visually impressive game. The graphics are really the star of the show here, and I think that was intentional. Nothing looks terrible; there are simply a few things that I found funny.

Final Blow

Normally, I would go over the reviews at the time, but I want to cover one other thing instead. Like many of these games, Sega purchased an existing game and turned it into something else. In this case, they took Final Blow from Taito and turned it into James “Buster” Douglas Knockout Boxing.

This game was released in 1988. It was ported to a few microcomputers, as well as Sega’s Home Console. Two years later, it was ported to the Genesis and had two boxers added to it.

The Genesis port replaces Detroit Kid with Buster Douglas, and Ironhead was added to the game. It was also used in the Genesis Does Campaign. It was paired with Mike Tyson’s Punchout, mostly because of Douglas’ upset victory over him.

6/10. It is what it is. This is a decent arcade game. It isn’t the boxing game that I would want to play on the Genesis. In 1990, it probably would’ve been fine, but the games on the NES are better. I would rather play Punch Out or Ring King.

Conclusion

The best part of this was looking up information on it. I had never heard of Final Blow, but it makes sense that Sega would reskin a game like that. It is actually a nice way to get around Nintendo’s licensing agreements.

Sega would license arcade games from Konami, Capcom, and other companies. Then they would program versions of those games themselves. The reason was that these companies had exclusive licensing agreements with Nintendo. This prevented them from directly releasing games on the Genesis in North America.

The story behind this game is way more interesting than the game itself. There are other arcade games I would rather play on the Genesis. This game looks great, but the gameplay isn’t there.

If you liked this post, please check out my other posts on Genesis games, such as TMNT Hyperstone Heist or Shining Force.