Punch-Out!!

Punch-Out!! put you in the corner of Little Mac, a scrawny featherweight who's outsized by literally every opponent on the roster, and asked you to win anyway — not through stats, but through memorization and reflexes. Every boxer, from the lovably hopeless Glass Joe to the terrifying final bout, telegraphs their punches with a tell you have to learn: a flinch, a wind-up, a flashing glove.

Dodge left, dodge right, block high, and land your own openings in the half-second window each pattern leaves you. It's less a fighting game than a rhythm game wearing boxing gloves, and that design has aged remarkably well — the difficulty curve from Minor Circuit to World Circuit is one of the most carefully tuned ramps on the whole console. Beat the game and you get a password, not a save file, so knowing your openings cold matters even more.

This page hosts the verified Punch-Out!! ROM, built for Delta Emulator's NES core on iPhone — load it directly with no BIOS file or extra setup required.