As I was walking to the bus stop after work last night, I heard music off to the right across the parking lot, and lo and behold, there was some Nintendo promotions guy projecting the new Punch Out game on the side of a large building, encouraging people to try it out.

I think it was mostly an excuse to project a video game on the side of a building rather than a [I]real[/I] marketing exercise -- the site chosen was a little out of the way, there weren't as many people walking by as in some other parts of town, and it was right across the street from Next Level, the company that developed it for Nintendo. Most of the people crowding around were, in fact, drunk Next Level employees who had worked on the game in question.

The game played pretty well, from what I saw. I'm generally not a big fan of boxing games, and I didn't play the original, but I enjoyed flailing around with the wiimote, and the graphics intrigued me. I say intrigued largely because cell-shading isn't really my thing, but they did a very good job of it, and I recognized both individual characters and the general art style from screenshots of older games. I played it long enough to beat some German character -- von Kaiser, I think he was called -- and since I relish any opportunity to use my limited German, was delighted to hear him announce "Ich bin eine Kampfmaschine!" (I am a fighting machine) in between rounds.