Title Bout Ii

[Brayan Jacobsen]

There really wasn't a decent representation of our favourite sport, pro boxing," Jim Trunzo recalls of the decision he and his brother made in the late 1970s to create a game in which players flipped cards to simulate a fight, rather than use the dice or spinners that were prevalent in sports simulations of that era.[1]

The Trunzos self-published the game, with help from Jim Barnes, who had founded the Statis-Pro line of sports simulation games. Barnes had developed what he called a "Fast Action Deck" to simulate the action and had given the Trunzo brothers his blessing to use the same concept in their game.

After the self-published version of Title Bout Championship Boxing barely made its money back, the Trunzos secured a deal with Avalon Hil, which had purchased Statis-Pro and wanted to compete with APBA and Strat-o-matic in the sports simulation space. Avalon Hill had also arranged a marketing partnership with Sports Illustrated to boost its credibility.

Title Bout: The Game of Professional Boxing sold well but was eventually discontinued as gamers moved away from tabletop sports games to computer ones. The Trunzo brothers did not retain the name of their game, but they had the rights to the rest of it and released TKO Boxing for DOS through Lance Haffner Games in 1990. They later published another tabletop game, APBA Boxing, that used dice, and in 2001 Comp-U-Sport brought the game back to the digital realm with Title Fight 2001.

The Trunzos eventually sold the game to OOTP Developments, publishers of Out of the Park Baseball and Franchise Hockey Manager. OOTP released Title Bout Championship Boxing 2 in 2005 and version 2.5 in 2008. In 2013, OOTP sold the game to P.I.S.D. Ltd, which released Title Bout Championship Boxing 2013 in June of that year.[2] Based on comments in the Title Bout community, the initial PISD version was a failed product and fans of the game are still waiting for an update some eight years later.

Title Bout Championship Boxing displays a boxing ring with fighters who trade blows, an immersive blow-by-blow text, a crowd that cheers, and ring card girls who flash up between rounds. The game features over 6,660 boxers past and present and in every weight class, allowing players to not only recreate historical fights but also stage bouts that could never have happened, such as Muhammad Ali taking on Mike Tyson in the prime of their careers, Floyd Mayweather battling the legendary Joe Gans, or Sam Langford trading punches with Marvin Hagler. The game's database is updated on a regular basis, allowing players to also forecast upcoming fights. Acting as promoter you stage fights between all the leading contenders, no exceptions.

On a scale of 1-5 comparing different games on complexity, realism and playability on one extreme you have quick play games which by their nature don't contain a lot of depth but are easy to get into, have many fighters rated and are fast to pick up and play. On the other end of the scale you have games that try to simulate just about everything and anything that could possibly occur in the ring. The downside tends to be less rated fighters and rather lengthy and complex rules books that can cause the game to become bogged down and unplayable by the weight of their own rules. The tough part for the games designer is to balance out playability with complexity. It doesn't matter how enjoyable a game is to play if it produces unbelievable results. Few would continue to play a Boxing game where Leon Spinks and Primo Carnera routinely beat prime Muhammad Ali and Joe Louis no matter how much fun the game was to play. On the other hand it doesn't matter if a Boxing game could produce highly realistic and plausible results if the game becomes an exercise in bookkeeping and simply isn't very fun to play.

Now when it comes to Title Bout II there are some things that I like, and more than a few things that I'm not that crazy about. I had some reservations when I heard that the new version was going to be substantially different from the original game as I've always felt that there was something endearing about the simplicity of the original release particularly when using the heavyweight set that Will Schubert produced several years back which provides some of the best results that I've ever gotten from a Boxing game. In my opinion there's two reasons to change a game engine that has already been proven to work and which has legions of fans that have been playing the game for decades. One would be to make the game more realistic and the second would be to improve the playability to make the game easier and more enjoyable to play.

Some of the changes that have been introduced in TB II may have made the game more detailed but in my opinion this has come at the expense of playability and I'm not really sure that it's made the game more realistic. For example the cut (and foul) systems in the original Title Bout release worked far better than in the new release. While I appreciate what he was going for I find that both over complicate the process far more than is necessary and there's just way too many cuts/cut stoppages for my liking.

Another big difference is in how both versions produced the TKO results. The TKO's by accumulation of points is way down in TB II and TKO by cuts and injuries are way up in the new release. Gashes are occurring more frequently and are being reopened and resulting in stoppages far more often. This is speculation on my part but what I think is going on that in order to account for those fights where one or both fighters went down repeatedly (Patterson/Johansson, Frazier/Foreman, Jeannette/McVea) KD2 numbers were increased, 3 point punches reduced, TKO ratings removed and knockdowns score a max of 6 points. The original game couldn't account for multiple knockdown fights because you would end up getting a TKO by an accumulation of points first. The new version replicates the multiple knockdown scenario well but at the expense of TKO by an accumulation of points. I think that in order to get a correct balance of overall TKO results TKO by cuts and injury results were increased.

Out of the box which version Title Bout II or the original Title Bout produces the better results? I would say that Title Bout II produces the more believable results, cut issues aside, than does Title Bout I but I think that has less to do with all of the additions to the game and simply more to do with better rated cards. The reason that I say that is that the All Time Heavyweight set that Will Schubert made a few years back for the original game still produces probably the best results of any Boxing game that I've ever played. Far better than the original cards and better than TB II as well. I've done numerous career replays using it where the wins, losses, ko's, tko's, and decisions were nearly identical to the actual results. He made tweaks to a few of the charts and added some variations like the Trap and Recovery ratings that didn't complicate the game play yet made the game more realistic.

Is the new Title Bout II worth picking up? I guess that depends on how big a fan you are of Boxing in general and the original release in particular. It's not a bad game, better than many that I've purchased over the years. However in an attempt to include everything but the kitchen sink and account for just about anything that can happen in a fight the game has lost some of the smooth and easy to follow game play that the original game engine provided and that became readily apparent to me when I ran the Wladimir Klitschko campaign with the original game.

If you are a big Boxing fan and fan of the original release then I would recommend it with reservations because of the skewed TKO by cuts percentage and the learning curve associated with picking up the rules of the new release. However if you already have the original game and can somehow get a hold of a copy of Will's all time heavyweight set buy it, you won't be disappointed. I appreciate all of the hard work that has obviously been done to bring TB II to market, but personally I still think that I would have been happy to just see the original Title Bout re-released with re-rated cards instead.

This thread has been a fascinating read for a boxing geek like me! Thank you. This is the most thorough vetting of TBII that I've seen and I think you did a great job of presenting the strengths and weaknesses of the game. The amount of injuries would certainly annoy me, even if there is more "realism" amongst the details. I still hope to pick up TBII myself someday as I remain a fan of TB in general and Jim Trunzo in particular. His knowledge and impact on this niche hobby - for me - has been huge.

I happened to be looking at TB 1 cards when it hit me about the dearth of 30-50-60 point TKOs: The Punches Landed ranges of the old game are about 8 to 9 values higher. So punches that are "misses" in TB2 would have been tacked on to TB1's 25-point rounds -- and thus into TKO territory.

Definitely the TB2 game board cut routine is more trouble than it's worth. The Advanced cuts routine is fine, though I have yet to see a bout stopped on account of cuts. Not even Chuck Wepner! But that's the problem with RNs deciding cuts -- a 1-rated fighter can get a few 70+ while an 8-rated fighter gets a succession of low RNs. Maybe the answer is that both fighters must be subject to the same RN. That leaves the luck factor intact. Hmm ... house rule!

My heart skips a beat every time I remember this game. It took a long time to play, though. If Title Bout could find a way to merge Ring Showdown's inside-outside routine with TB2's playability and ratings, it would be unbeatable. As you say, Glory Days has that potential, judging by the YouTube run-through, but it's not on the market yet.

Initially I was only interested in the book, and didn't think I'd get as hooked on the game as I have. The reason is that he's got the ratings damned near perfect, based on his research rather than the fighters' reputations. He takes a lot of the noise out of the fighters' overall records and knockout percentages.

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