Sports games are often criticized for being forgettable in their individual iterations, with one game not unlike the one before it or after it in the series. Sometimes, however, a game arrives that just feels different. Fight Night Round 3, released around the move from PlayStation 2 and Xbox to PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, was one such game.
What Was Fight Night Round 3 And How Was It Received At The Time?
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The Fight Night series was EA’s take on boxing games. As the name implied, Round 3 was the third of what would prove to be five releases. Despite being released on the standard annual cycle, the last time the series released a game in consecutive years, it still managed to feel like a meaningful jump.
The game received favorable reviews and was immediately a hit with boxing fans. For a solid two years in college, if I walked into my house’s living room, the TV would be assured to be turned to one of two movies, Scrubs, or Fight Night Round 3. Players who liked this game tended to love this game.
The look and feel of the game on a new generation brought realism that had never been seen, and the underlying game mechanics backed up that excellence with matching gameplay. It was such a leap that many gamers still consider it the best the series ever got, even as later titles continued throughout the entire 3/360 generation.
Why Is Fight Night Round 3 So Beloved
To create a game that endures, developers have to be ahead of the curve, creating something that feels like the future arriving today. There are several elements they nailed that led to Fight Night Round 3’s generation-defying success:
Game Changing Controls
You simply cannot talk about Fight Night Round 3 and what made it such a great game that two decades later it still gets fawning retrospective play videos without talking about the controls. While fighting games have obviously been a massive part of the video game landscape for nearly as long as there have been video games, an arcade fight does little to replicate the tactics of an actual combat sports event.
Figuring out how to translate real-world combat sports into a video game setting has proven a tough challenge for boxing and MMA developers alike, but the Total Punch Control system remains a knockout success. With Total Punch Control, you didn’t throw punches by pressing buttons, but instead by using the right thumbstick.
By flicking the stick forward, you threw a jab. Swing it out to one side or the other before rotating forward, and you instead threw a hook. Swing it down and to the side before arcing up and unleashing a powerful uppercut blow. Under this system, you had one stick to move while the other allowed for complete control over the punches and combinations your boxer threw for the most realistic possible experience in the ring.
World Class Sound And Visual Design
One of the most important things when making a sports game is accurately recreating the feel of the sport. This often means finding the right balance of what to make as accurate as possible and what needs a little tweak here or there to feel right, even if it’s not actually right, such as how EA FC games play more quickly than a real football match.
While we often think of sports as something to watch, even when taking them in at home, they remain something to experience, with sound such an integral part of watching combat sports. An event that has been properly mic’d up helps you appreciate the impact of the blows landed by the way they sound, in addition to the way they look as they land.
Fight Night Round 3 absolutely nailed this. The way the game displayed big punches, the way you could feel the impact rippling through you or your opponent’s body, and the way they sounded when they landed all combined to truly put you in the ring. It all works together to create an immersive combat sports experience that holds up generations later.
Realistic Damage Management
Any fan of combat sports knows that damage control is an integral part of the sport. Whether in boxing or mixed martial arts, every fighter has someone in their corner between rounds whose job is to make sure that any damage done to the fighter is minimized and managed as much as possible. This means tending to cuts with clotting agents and using cold pressure to manage swelling.
This is more than an aesthetic or pain consideration, as damage in a fight can have serious consequences. A cut over the eyes can bleed into them, obscuring vision, while facial swelling can close up an eye entirely, leaving a fighter blind to strikes coming from that direction. The risks of damage to the face are so high that referees are given the ability to summon a doctor who can wave off the fight entirely if they deem the damage dealt to be unsafe to continue.
With Fight Night Round 3, this was not merely an academic concern. Instead, between rounds, you became the cut man. It was your job to tend to your boxer’s damage and keep them in the fight.
Openclass Boxing & Historic Bouts In ESPN Classics
While the roster size of Fight Night Round 3 may seem quaint by modern standards, where we are used to combat sports games with multiple fully stocked divisions, it still included many of the greatest boxers in history. Developers understood what they had in their roster and wisely made sure to maximize its utility at all turns.
Open-class bouts meant that if you ever wanted to see two of the greats battle, you could, regardless of weight classes. Not only was this fun for boxing fans, as a gamer, it was also a great way to work in a handicap when facing a friend who was better or worse than you if you still wanted a fairer fight.
ESPN Classics lets you recreate classic bouts that actually happened, including time-accurate presentation. Modes like this were once somewhat common in sports games of all genres and have sadly fallen by the wayside in the move to all-online, all-the-time developmental focus.
Get In The Ring Mode
While the primary gameplay is what carried this game, that doesn’t mean the first-person Get In The Ring mode wasn’t also fun in its own right. While not the only game to offer first-person boxing fun, Wii Sports wasn’t quite the hard-hitting simulation, so adding a mode that puts you in the eyes of a boxer squaring up with Muhammad Ali was a fun twist as an added perk to the game.
Now decades later, it speaks to how ahead of its time Fight Night Round 3 was that it can still provide such a satisfying experience, even to combat sports gamers with experience on the generations of followers in the intervening years. Did you play Fight Night Round 3 at the time, or is it one that instead will need to slide on your list to give a try someday?
