Today, while checking out the sales on PSN, I saw that two old PS1 "classics," Boxing and Kickboxing were on sale for a buck 50 each. Since they were so incredibly cheap I decided to check them out and...what the heck? I expected two bland sports simulators from the dawn of the PS1, but I got something much weirder.

The games are extremely similar to each other. They are basically 2Dish fighters with chibi characters (despite the realistic box art) and extremely limited and unresponsive controls. In the first 'championship' ladder in the Kickboxing game you fight a weird tall mime and a clown, whose name is "crown" because, I assume, of terrible localization.

In the first championship ladder in the Boxing game you fight a horrible caricature of an African American who is sucking on a pacifier. I know Japan is less PC than the United States, but...nope. You can't do that. You couldn't do that back then. Just terrible.

Apparently these were from the "simple" series on the PS1; cheap games put out by Publisher D3 with generic names and at least some crossover characters. This would have made sense to me if they were put out in '94 or '95, but Boxing is copyright 2000 and Kickboxing is copyright 2001! That's after the Dreamcast launched, and well after the PS1 had an enormous library of fantastic games, many of which could be gotten very cheaply used.

Why were these made? Who bought them? Why? They're terrible. They cost about $15 new. For $15 in 2001 you could have gotten a copy of Tekken 3 or Soul Blade and had a legitimately great time, vs these two ugly weird button mashers. In 2001 Soul Calibur had been out on the Dreamcast for 2 years, and the DC also launched with Ready 2 Rumble Boxing which, while not a fantastic game by any stretch, was leaps and bounds better than these 2 (and was released on the PS1). In 2001 there was no reason to buy a copy of Boxing or Kickboxing at any price.

Beyond the basic questions of why do these games exist, why were they LOCALIZED and, even stranger, why were they put on PSN? Who wanted to relive the fun with these PS1 "classics?"

I thought I was spending $3 on a couple bad old games I could check out to remember how things used to be, but instead what I got was some real weird racism and a bundle of questions.

Has anyone else played these games? Does anyone know more about them? There are more games in the series (MANY more) and I am intrigued, but I'm not paying $6 just to check out an undoubtedly terrible game called "Racing." $1.50 is about my limit for this kind of dreck.

Anyway, I'm always fascinated by these kinds of oddities in video game history. I like to imagine what it was like for the developers working on completely workmanlike crud like "boxing." I like to imagine the mind of the consumer who actually bought this stuff.

Weird.