Chavez 2

Get ready to put up your dukes! If you love boxing games, then there's plenty to like about this game. Julio Caesar Chavez is one of the best fighters in boxing. This might be the best boxing game out there!

It looks good and has several new features, including a mode to create your own boxer and customize his punch knockout power.

You can choose from either an Exhibition or Career Mode. There's a status board consisting of the clock, and a health meter for both you and your opponent. The graphics are fantastic. From the boxers to the ladies who carry the round cards--everything is top-notch!

The game allows you to fight Chavez vs. Chavez. Or, fight your way through the ranks to fight Chavez with the fighter you create. You'll have to increase your player's attributes to reach the top of the tourney to make sure you can fight against the best--Chavez.

Oh boy... another boxing sim... yawn. The big difference here is that the text is primarily in Espanol. That means Spanish, for those of you who have trouble with English as a first language. If you like pushing buttons, get this game.

Oh boy... another boxing sim... yawn. The big difference here is that the text is primarily in Espanol. That means Spanish, for those of you who have trouble with English as a first language. If you like pushing buttons, get this game.

Hey, it's getting to the point with boxing games that if you've seen one, you've seen them all. Usually each new heavyweight champ of the world gets his own title game after winning the title fight.

Now Chavez II brings another boxing title to the SNES library, but there's little here that differentiates it from boxing games of the past. One of the more unique points of the game is that its target audience is primarily Latino and therefore all the text is in Spanish with occasional English equivalents. But from that point on it falls into the same old rut.

Even without a background in Spanish it's relatively easy to figure out the menus. There are the standard exhibition and career modes, the latter of which lets you create your dream boxer from scratch and customize his strengths to your liking with an allotted amount of power units. Inside the ring, the 3-D perspective (a la Electro Brain's Legends of the Ring) gives you a great view of the action, and even though you can move to the right and to the left, that view and the fighters' relation to each other remain the same throughout the match. Two buttons are used in combination with the D-pad to throw jabs, hooks, and uppercuts along with a super punch. And the familiar head icons and boxing gloves for each boxer lose their background color to indicate injury or fatigue. Of course, if you don't mind button-mashing, Chavez II is an entertaining boxing game, but if you've played Legends of the Ring before there's really no reason to step back into the ring. But maybe you can play it to kill time until someone revolutionizes the boxing games genre.

Mexico's most popular sports hero gets his second boxing game. With added realism and better game play, this game significantly improves over its weak predecessor.

Champ or Chump?

Chavez II has much in common with last year's version. As before, playing this game teaches you some Espanol, because all the set-up screens are bilingual. You choose from nine fictional fighters (down from 24), or you can create your own customized combatant. You can fight exhibitions as any boxer (including Chavez), or work your way up through the Career option toward the powerful champ (Chavez, of course). You again fight from a third-person view, and the nearest boxer has his back to you.

The controls have been strengthened for this edition. Not only can you preset the strength of your individual punches (with illustrations of their effectiveness), they've all been speeded up a bit. Your seven regular punches and three Super Punches fire more quickly, but your boxers still lumber mechanically around the ring.

Fightin' Fury

The biggest change in this game lies in the graphics. The boxers are no longer big, soft cartoons; more realism and detail has been drawn in. They're also bloodier: This game adds a mild portion of gore that was missing from Chavez I. The sound effects aren't much different, and a Spanishspeaking announcer supplements all the typical grunts and thumps.

While Super Punch-Out gets the attention this season, other SNES boxing games, including this one, are decent. It's no champ, but it's not a bloated tomato can, either.