Issue 090
July 2012
This month’s video-gaming fighter has bridged the left hook and left click perhaps better than any other. Behind Jens Pulver’s knockout power and tenacity beats the heart of a true gamer.
So, Jens, we guess we’d better start at the top. Where did it all begin for you with video games?
“You’ve got to remember that I go all the way back through the Atari 2600 and then the Nintendo. I got 100,000 on Spider Fighter and took a photo of it to get my certificate in the post. Oh buddy, once I got my hands on Super Mario Brothers, though, forget about it. I had Tyson’s Punch Out and all that but then I got into PC gaming. Medal of Honor, the old school one, was probably the first and then I got into competing and playing properly.”
Mike Tyson’s Punch Out? Did you ever get to Mike Tyson? We seem to remember him being amazingly hard to beat.
“Yeah, I got to him and I remember waking my brother up and dragging him out of bed the first time. It was about 2am or 3am and I finally beat Super Machoman and I was going after Tyson. In the first round he blinks and fires an uppercut and it’s an instant knockout. I think the whole thing lasted about 40 seconds. I can’t even remember how I beat Super Machoman. I think I avoided his spinning punch just about enough and managed to get by him.”
You also had that Punch Out T-shirt as well that TapouT made which was well received by both communities.
“Well they were making that Punch Out shirt for Skrape originally and I said, ‘I gotta have it.’ He told me that it was one of his shirts and I said, ‘I’ve got to have this. I’m the MMA gamer and I just got to have it.’ He still wasn’t sure so I said to him, ‘0073735963.’ He didn’t know what it was and I said, ‘That’s the code to fight Mike Tyson, you put that code in and you go straight there.’ He looked at me and said, ‘Wow, that’s your shirt right there.’”
We guess he knew at that point… Sticking with fighting games then, were you a Mortal Kombat man or did you play Street Fighter 2?
“Street Fighter, if I had to pick. I liked the environments and they developed the story and it all worked together. I loved Guile and Ryu and it was great when you mastered the hadoken. You could use your feet with Chun Li or your hands with E. Honda. There was something for everyone in that game. Don’t get me wrong I loved Raiden and Scorpion, though, in Mortal Kombat.”
You mentioned you’re into PC gaming at the start and you’ve been known to dabble with World of Warcraft right?
“When I first heard about World of Warcraft I thought, ‘Wow you just out did yourself there, son.’ I’m the Dungeons and Dragons freak and you give me this? I tell you now, if I could respawn right now – I said respawn didn’t I? – I would be a night elf. Jack up my ears, give me a bow and the glowing eyes and I’m going after it… I turned down being in the corner for Matt Hughes vs Royce Gracie because I was going to get the Grand Marshall rank on the Tuesday and it was a huge investment of time and co-ordination. You can’t stop at that point and that’s what people don’t get, it was a two-week commitment. The food delivery guy knew what was happening though.”
World of Warcraft has got quite a negative media image in a lot of respects as do a lot of other games. What do you make of that perception?
“There’s a reason why fighters play video games and that’s because you have time, but you need discipline. If I’m getting ready for a competition and my friends are going out for the weekend, it’s better for me to play video games. People think social networking is a new thing but gamers have been doing this way before Twitter, Facebook and even Myspace. This is a social thing and that’s the misconception that people have. Nobody seems to bat an eyelid about people watching four hours of television a day, but if you play four hours of video games then there’s a problem. The big problem with the public perception of video games is ignorance.”
BACK TO THE FUTURE: VIDEO GAME HISTORY OF MMA
Combat School
The early UFC events were marketed on the basis of solving an age-old question. Fans legitimately wanted to know which style would prevail in a realistic context. But, as the years went by, it became apparent that every style had both strengths and weaknesses.
Some of the first fighters to have sustained success were those who looked objectively at both the way they trained and the disciplines needed to win and began formulating complex training schedules as a result.
The Lion’s Den was known for its punishing regime and in the years to come, the science of structuring a diverse and challenging fight camp became a fine art. Konami, however, already had this potential avenue covered with breakout arcade hit Combat School in 1988.
The game saw two rookies trying to make their way through a brutal military academy by overcoming a series of truly hardcore drills including cardio-sapping obstacle courses, iron man races and firing ranges.
The culmination of all this hard work, though, was a hand-to-hand fight with the instructor who usually always used kicks to dictate the range before dropping the big right.
In years to come many may look at Greg Jackson and company as the masters of strategic fight preparation but, as Combat School showed years beforehand, there’s no better drills than wall jumping, landmine dodging and heavy sparring to get you ready for war.
LAUZON'S BEST BITS
UFC lightweight contender Joe Lauzon shares the latest from his life in video games...
Lauzon on trolling: “I was kind of an a**hole in some ways because I made my gamer tag Joelauzon.com and that was back before I was in the UFC. It was so far back and I did it as a joke when I was taking local fights. I’ve always been big into the online stuff like blogs and videos and I used that tag as a joke and I just kept it. It’s lose/lose most of the time though because if I tell people it’s me they generally accuse me of lying and if I say it isn’t me then they accuse me of lying as well. It kind of backfires like that a little bit but it’s fun so I don’t care.”
SEPARATED AT BIRTH
GRAY/KARLOS VEMOLA
One’s a muscle-bound, armor-plated killing machine and the other one is just some guy from a computer game. Armored Warriors, apart from sounding like an MMA documentary, was a classic piece of Capcom carnage that starred the Karlos Vemola-a-like character Gray; who predictably enough drove the biggest, meanest looking tank imaginable.
