Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out – How To beat Bald Bull – First Match

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a notoriously rock hard game. Well I’m not going to argue, this took me many attempts to finish. If you know what you’re doing then making it to the Technodrome really isnt as hard as you might think though.

Besides being based on the same movie, the two games couldn’t possibly be more different. Activision’s offering had all the charm and aesthetic you’d expect from what was essentially a cobbled together collection of mini-games, none of which were particularly fun to play, all of which felt particularly phoned in. It was also a difficult game to beat. Hal Lab’s entry is the polar opposite. Perhaps not crafted with quite the love of their later Kirby game, but nonetheless created with a seemingly effortless expertise that instantly shines a proton beam at Activision’s lacklustre failure.

Your mission is to put an end to the usual tyrannical dictator. Each level is broken into two sections. First you’ll have to survive a ‘dog-fight’, ie air combat against enemy fighter jets (I assume MiGs). As levels progress, the number of bogeys increases. By the final stages you’ll have to take down 9 jets before you can move on. These fights are initially where you’ll struggle most. You have a cockpit perspective.

CRT televisions have many advantage over modern displays when it comes to retro gaming, but the ability to play light-gun based games is perhaps the most obvious. Light guns work by manipulating the scan-rate of a CRT tele. Wild Gunman has a target on screen. When you press the trigger, you cause the screen to flash briefly. If your aim is true you’ll hit the marker. There is no scan-rate for a flat-screen tv, so the game is unable to know where you’ve aimed at the screen, ergo you’ll always miss.