"Woowee! Thanks for joining Club Nintendo, Mac!"
- Emulator: Dolphin 4.0-1522
- Controller: Wiimote & Nunchuck
- Audio: LLE Recompiler w/ Dolphin's DSP roms
- MD5 of WAD: 3c4cee847c905e940d0d853f41daff55
- Unverified; unable to find checksum to compare to.
Doc Louis's Punch-Out!! is an exclusive game that was released only to Club Nintendo Platinum members, and only in North America. It is by far the shortest Punch-Out game, and is really more like a demo for Punch-Out Wii. The game consists of only three different fights (all against the same opponent, Little Mac's trainer Doc Louis), fewer than even the arcade games, and the total in-game time is faster than SNES Super Punch-Out!! despite the ingame clock running faster.
As always with the Punch-Out games, the goal is fastest in-game time. Fastest real time is a secondary goal, but to my knowledge these are also the fastest real-time strats. The only places real time matters are menu navigation, skipping cutscenes, and one punch that happens while the in-game clock is stopped.
However, going through the menus as fast as possible means the fight times can only be seen by slowing down playback. To keep them visible at full speed, I sacrifice 20 frames at the end of each fight.
The Fights
For reference, the fastest unassisted times as of this submission are located here.
- Warm-up: 40.52
- Doc's guard depends on the number of punches Mac has thrown, mod 6; he will block punches 1 & 5. This is why there's so much punching at the air during the fight.
- The sets of punches when Doc comes back to the center can't be done as fast as possible, or they'll land before the timer for his next move starts, delaying the next attack. For the sets of two the first punch is delayed, and for the set of three, it's the second punch.
- The clock runs at 25% speed during stuns, and finishing the stuncombo makes Doc recoil with the clock at 100%, so it's better to just wait until he recovers.
- Training: 41.83
- In this fight Doc will let every 7th punch through and block everything else.
- Starting here intentionally blocked punches are used to start the timer for the next attack sooner. This doesn't help for short delays, such as the one between the first two attacks.
- A two-star punch will slow the clock down for longer after it lands than a one-star punch, and three-stars are even better. However, this happens if Doc's health gets too low, so a three-star punch can't be used in this fight.
- Sparring: 39.38
- Doc will never let an unstunned punch through in this fight, no matter how many punches are thrown.
- The second attack has a long animation and counterpunching won't give up a star, so it's move canceled. This also prevents Doc from doing a much longer recoil animation when the next one is countered.
- One more attack has to be canceled to get to the next star. The slow uppercut is chosen because, well, it's slow.
- The 3-star punch is timed so it lands after Doc recovers from the stun, preventing a long delay before the final attack.
- The final cutscene is the closest thing this game has to an ending, so I stop input at the last star punch and let that play out.
Total Time: 2:01.73
Nach: Weak audience response, but seems to be well TAS'd aside from some outside of play menu usage. Accepting for vault.