Fight Night Champion
The game was officially revealed on July 20, 2010 at an EA Sports studio showcase.[1] It was added to Xbox One's catalog of backward compatible titles in May 2018. The game is the first EA Sports game to feature a full Hollywood-inspired story mode, called Champion Mode. The story follows the career of Andre Bishop, a talented boxer, who is forced to overcome great setbacks including a prison sentence and a corrupt fight promoter. Champion Mode is intended to further convey the brutality and hardship of the sport of boxing.
Fight Night Champion
Fight Night Champion is a third-person fighter that introduces an all-new control scheme to the series: "Full-Spectrum Punch Control".[2] This method allows players to throw onscreen punches by merely flicking their game controller's right control stick (in addition to the previous default option of punching by pressing a button on the controller). This extra option is intended to eliminate the more complicated controller manipulations that were necessary in the "Total Punch Control" system of previous editions of the Fight Night series.
The game features a full online mode, through either Xbox Live for Xbox 360 users or PlayStation Network for PlayStation 3 users. Players start out online with minimal stats, similar to Legacy Mode. They can then make progress through the ranks by winning fights.[3]
The player may win an Online World Championship in their weight division. The winner of the Online World Championship must defend their title two times per day to remain champion. If these requirements are not fulfilled, the player will be stripped of their title.[4]
Although it is not a completely different experience from the rest of the game, Champion Mode bears many exclusive modifications to make the story more compelling. In most of the fights, players are required to fight in a particular manner or create a certain outcome to be victorious. For example, players may have to be smart against a certain opponent who has a particular strategy. One example of this is an opponent who targets the body; the player is required to stay on the outside and avoid body punches. Another scenario puts the player against slim odds, in which Bishop suffers a hand injury and must avoid using certain punches to avoid permanent damage. The fights are generally meant to be won by knockout, although it is possible to win by decision.
Champion Mode plays out in a movie style, taking approximately 5 hours. Cinematic cutscenes control the flow of the story, and the actual gameplay takes place during fights. Occasionally, cutscenes can be seen in between rounds.
Andre Bishop is a boxer serving time in a correctional facility. After winning a jailhouse boxing match against another inmate, he is cornered and brutally beaten by other prisoners including his opponent, severely injuring him. The story then flashes back four years to his rise as a professional fighter. Bishop's career begins as a middleweight when he defeats nine-time amateur champion Joel Savon, earning him significant recognition as a contender. After a few successful bouts, Andre and trainer Gus Carisi are approached by DL McQueen, a crooked but famed promoter who wants to promote Andre under the management of his daughter Meagan. The two refuse, renewing the longtime rivalry between Carisi and McQueen. After continually failing to sway Andre and an attempt to fix a contender fight falls through, McQueen frames him for police assault with the help of two crooked cops, sentencing Bishop to over five years in prison.
After recovering from his injuries, Andre begins to train himself and keep fit while imprisoned. Andre's brother Raymond is rising up the ranks as a heavyweight, but Andre is angered upon discovering that he has signed with McQueen Promotions and cut Gus out. After Andre is released, Raymond organizes him a job as an assistant trainer. After Andre beats two ranked heavyweights during regular sparring sessions, Meagan, who has split from her father's business over 'philosophical differences', convinces him to make an unexpected comeback as a heavyweight and becomes his manager, with Gus returning as Andre's trainer. Following several successful heavyweight bouts, Andre becomes a contender to the undefeated world heavyweight champion Isaac Frost, a boxer under McQueen Promotions who has won every fight in his career by knockout.
Jealous of his brother's return and bitter about being overshadowed, Raymond challenges Andre to a title eliminator bout, with the winner securing a fight against Frost. Raymond knocks Andre out in the second round after Andre voluntarily stays down from a knockdown. Raymond then fights Frost, but is defeated by a first-round knockout and hospitalised. Angered, Andre challenges Frost himself. Meagan covertly records one of McQueen's crooked cops mentioning the frame job on Andre, forcing McQueen to agree to the bout. Adopting a defensive strategy, Andre knocks Frost out and becomes the world heavyweight champion. McQueen is subsequently arrested when the framing of Andre is revealed.
Fight Night Champion features over 50 boxers in total through 8 weight divisions (flyweight doesn't have a boxer in its roster unless a boxer has been created), making it the largest roster in the series. New inclusions permit recreations of fights such as Wladimir Klitschko vs. David Haye and Manny Pacquiao vs. Timothy Bradley. There are additional fighters available but downloadable content is not freely available. Some boxers are not licensed for use in the game's bare knuckle mode.
The e-mail explained that strong marketplace competition had made it challenging to staff up for Fight Night, which was intended to enter production alongside UFC, and that it did not want to split its senior creatives between two fighting game projects.
"Essentially what we wanted to do with Champion mode necessitated this being an M-rated game," explains producer Brian Hayes. "It's a story with mature themes. Not topless mature themes, but it's gritty. Being an unlicensed sports product and being in the world of boxing where there is a lot of stuff going on ... if you're going to tell a story about boxing, it's not going to be, 'Hey, I just got an e-mail from your rival and he's really upset.' There are a lot of fighters who we drew inspiration from, and they've been through some real mature experiences. So we laid out our vision for Champion mode and we said, if we do this, there's no way this can be T.
And since there is no longer a directional mechanic involved in blocking (you no longer have to choose high or low), the right analog stick and/or the buttons are still available for punching, enabling gamers to hold down the right trigger to block, flick the stick to throw a punch, then go right back to blocking. "This just offers another strategy aspect and enables you to fight like Winky Wright, picking your shots," adds Hayes. "Now I can punch from the guard, and if I time the block correctly, I can get in a bigger counter shot. And since you no longer have to let go of guard, we don't have to do the video game-thing of slowing your opponent down to clue you into throwing a punch. Now it's up to you to counter in real time, so the gameplay action is much more realistically paced."
"Under the hood, we have also added individual stamina meters for right arm, left arm, torso, and legs, so now if you keep throwing the same punches or if you keep throwing punches with the same arm, that arm will become tired. It's no longer about, you throw a bunch of punches and your legs are tired and you can't move. Now your arm will be tired, but you will still be able to move around the ring in a realistic manner. All of these things help us manage more realistically what a fighter can and cannot do during a fight."
And not only are heavy punches thrown with more steam, they can be applied to any punch you throw, from a jab to a hook. Certain fighters even have unique animations tied to these heavy punches, so now, a Mike Tyson uppercut will finally look as devastating as it once did in real life.
This all works back into your created characters in Legacy mode, and of course, your character fighting in prison. No skills, just raw power. You start out as a great athlete, it's up to you to mold him into the boxer you want to become.
I'm a long-time fan of EA's Fight Night series -- it's one of the better sports franchises of the past decade. Its analog control system essentially reinvented the entire boxing genre, leaving its predecessor Knockout Kings in the dust. However, like many individual sports (like the upcoming Top Spin 4, which I'm also playing right now for review), it always struggled to deliver a career mode that was as compelling as team sports like baseball, football, and basketball. Obviously, there's no real coherent league structure or -- especially in boxing's case -- a season schedule. This takes away a lot of what people love about Madden, etc.: managing rosters, drafting, coaching, and making trades. No matter how well done the gameplay, any individual sport career mode has essentially been little more than a dressed-up series of matches. There's nothing particularly wrong with that -- or at least I didn't think there was. However, after playing the first hour of Fight Night Champion, it's clear that EA Canda has done something very special.The game's Champion mode plays out very much like a boxing film. You star as Andre Bishop, an ex-amateur boxing champ and convict. From the very first second, you're instantly transported into the ring -- in this case, a brutal prison boxing match. After besting your opponent, you're then taken to the prison showers, where your in-ring foe and his white supremacist buddies beat you down. It's dramatic; you don't know why you're in prison, but it's clear that your life went off the rails somehow.After the prison sequence, the game flashes back to four years earlier, as you see Bishop entering the ring as an up-and-coming amateur. Again, you're thrown directly into the action. After winning, the story development begins. In a post-fight TV interview, Andre's brother Raymond hogs the camera, trying to overshadow Andre. From there, it's back to training with our grizzled trainer Gus (an amalgam of Mickey from the Rocky films and Mike Tyson's real-life trainer Cus D'amato). Our sparring session is interrupted by a sleazy promoter named McQueen, who's there to steal us away from Gus (he's joined by his daughter Meagan, who seems to be a potential love interest). After we refuse his advances, he storms out and promises we'll live to regret our decision.This all happens in less than an hour. It's amazingly effective. Boxing has always lent itself to the silver screen, and the story I've seen so far seems to hit many of the classic tropes of boxing films. I can't think of a game -- especially a sports title -- that hooked me so quickly. I can't wait to see where it goes, especially considering the early foreshadowing of Andre's eventual fall from grace. This is a direction more sports games should pursue. So far, Fight Night Champion has my undivided attention. 041b061a72