Nintendo's Lost Sequel to Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!: Power Punch II

When it hit the Nintendo Entertainment System, Mike Tyson's Punch-Out! quickly became the most popular sports video game in the world. It had everything: great game play, catchy music, hilarious original characters to fight, and a memorable and menacing final boss by the name of Mike Tyson.

Nintendo desperately wanted to make a sequel for the Nintendo (Super Punch-Out! for Super Nintendo came out much later), so they enlisted the help of a company called Beam Software to help them work on the next game. This next game was set to star Mike Tyson himself, as Tyson was the most popular fighter on the planet and Nintendo still had the license to use his image. Making Mike a boss again didn't seem to make much sense since that had already been done. But after Tyson was accused of and forced to stand trial on rape charges, the family-oriented Nintendo company didn't want to use him in their games anymore.

The game that would eventually come out of the project was called Power Punch II. Unfortunately for video game fans anxiously awaiting a sequel, however, the game was nowhere near as good as the original Punch-Out! starring Mike Tyson. In it, gamers played as the fictional character Mark Tyler, who looked an awful lot like Tyson but wasn't quite the same. Part of that is due to the fact that he wore pink trunks.

The premise of the game was so bizarre that it was completely removed from the universe of the original game. In Power Punch II, Mark Tyler is the baddest boxer on the planet, but he has no one left to challenge him. So naturally, he opens it up to all comers from all planets and ends up fighting a bunch of assorted space monsters, aliens, and other random freaks in strange locales in front of alien judges.

Power Punch II's game play wasn't nearly as good as the original Punch-Out! in the end, however, and Nintendo decided not to publish it. Playing as Tyler was no fun mainly because he couldn't dodge backward any more like Little Mac in Punch-Out!, just side-to-side in an incredibly slow fashion. The alien combatants were overpowering and constantly peppered Tyler with jabs making it almost impossible to escape at times because of his lack of moves.

Thankfully, Nintendo remedied the situation a few years after Power Punch II by releasing Super Punch-Out! 2, a fantastic game for Super Nintendo and a proper sequel in every sense. if you come across a copy of Power Punch II for extremely cheap, it might be worth buying for a good laugh or two. Otherwise, keep playing the original Punch-Out! games and keep e-mailing and mailing Nintendo so we can finally get a sequel for the Wii.