Danger Dance

Since the days of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, videogame developers have tried and failed to bring the sweet science of punching cartoon men and woman directly in the face to reality. EA is working on the latest attempt called Facebreaker, which could only be a worse name if they put two exclamation points after it. Facebreaker!! See? Worse. Utilizing chaos theory, I can accurately say that the addition of those two exclamation points just killed a butterfly in China, which landed directly on an old man’s sleeping face and suffocated him to death. So, in a roundabout way, Facebreaker has officially already broken one face before even being released. We will keep a wary eye on the rising death/face breaking toll.

To manufacture excitement over the game, EA has produced vignettes introducing the game’s many colorful characters, which as usual means stereotypical and ethnic characters, just like in Punch-Out!!. It’s a good thing, too, because what keeps Punch-Out!! relevant today are things like being able to punch that turban wearing guy right in the face. Who doesn’t like beating up a terrorist?

It’s a lot like the Team Fortress 2 shorts, if an EA employee tried turning up the comedy knob but, unsure of how the comedy apparatus worked, instead turned the comedy knob all the way down to zero. Confused by why Facebreaker wasn’t getting funnier, they kept turning the knob until it came off in their hands and the viscous liquid that the comedy apparatus ran on spilled all over their pants, irrevocably destroying comedy forever. The fact that the EA employee looked like they had peed their pants was the funniest part of the whole situation.

In their zeal to add quirky and hilarious characters to Facebreaker, they forgot to do the prerequisite research that would have informed them that there is no kicking in boxing. Apparently, this small fact was overlooked. It was more important to make fun of fat nerds than actually know what the hell happens in boxing, like punching or spitting into a bucket or, if you’re famous and crazy enough to be the title character of an NES boxing game, raping Miss Black Rhode Island. To EA’s credit, having a fat nerd character likely saved them a few dollars on motion capturing, since they just used someone from the Facebreaker programming team.