Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! - Blindfolded Race w/ sinister1 performed at AGDQ 2016
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 Published On Jan 7, 2022

This run was done on January 7th 2016, at about 2:37PM EST in the afternoon, meaning at the time of this scheduled upload being public, it'll have been 6 years since this race took place!

I was extremely nervous for this run, because at this point, I still felt like my Super Punch Out blindfolded run from 2014 was probably a fluke, and that I would fall apart if I were to try something like that again for a live run.

There are a couple of logistical things about this run that didn't pan out like we had hoped beforehand that I should mention. First off, I had asked several months ahead of time on if we would have proper noise cancelling headphones that were strong enough such that neither of us could hear the crowd.

Unfortunately when we got there, we had discovered that their headphones were not strong enough to cancel out the intense crowd noise when they're cheering, so for the sake of the run, we needed the entire crowd to be quiet for the duration of the run. This was kind of a bummer, because we were both set on the idea that the crowds would be able to cheer and have fun constantly, but we managed it as best as we could despite this setback.

At this point in time, I had just recently gotten the Mike Tyson's Punch-Out record from sinister, but it still felt like despite this, I was still an underdog in this race due to sinister's much longer history with GDQ performances than I had, especially with this game. In the practice room, I was getting 14-0's blindfolded constantly, even with distracting noises, so I at least felt reassured that I would be fine, but I was still deathly afraid of some unknowable disaster that I hadn't practiced for that would come back at me during the race.

When the run started, I was mortified when my Honda 1 buffer strategy started backfiring due to really rare outcomes where my punches could randomly sneak through his guard (I hadn't had this happen a single time in any practice run beforehand), which meant I had to counter Honda 1's rush attack at 1 minute in purely by feel. Thankfully right before this race, me and sinister were talking about random cues we had for various fights, and one of the ones he told me was for this Honda 1 counter, which is super different from Honda 2's counter. I'm so glad I remembered this just in time for that, and hit it when it mattered.

For whatever reason, I had a really really hard time with Bald Bull 2, even though he had a pretty solid blindfolded route by this point. I think it had something to do not practicing whenever I would go pink from 0 hearts, since I would usually just take the knockdown and start over, but I kept getting lost so frequently, and his erratic pattern when Mac is pink is hard to dodge when you don't know it. I barely squeak by him in round 2 after already losing a fight deep into round 2, and at this point I feel awful, thinking sinister is probably at Sandman or Macho by this point. Once I got past Bull 2 though, Don 2 through Macho were extremely clean, which I was hoping would help offset the massive time loss I sustained from Bull 2.

When I finished off Macho, there was a brief moment of silence as the endscreen of Macho finished playing the jingle, but before the newspaper theme started playing where I could actually hear a single small phrase from Breakdown on commentary, which I could make out that "9 count" was said. This actually gave me information that I didn't know, which was that sinister still hadn't finished yet! The only two places where a 9 count would be usable would be for Macho or Tyson, and due to how bad Bull 2 was, I was guessing it meant Tyson. It helped mainly because it told me this race wasn't a complete blowout where sinister was the clear winner like I was thinking it was.

Once I finally got Tyson down, I was terrified to unblindfold myself, because I figured I was way WAY far behind sinister at this point due to how shoddy that Bull 2 was. When I finally took it off, I still saw sinister fighting Tyson, and for the first instant once I could see again, I for some reason thought sinister was just fighting Tyson again way after he won the race as a joke or something, hahahaha. It was only when I noticed that no one cheered yet that it started to sink in that I really did win the race.

Overall, this was probably my worst blindfolded performance at a GDQ compared to what my potential was. For the most part, I felt like sinister's run went far better than mine, as his loss was decided by him as a race strategy, vs my loss on Bull 2 being entirely on me. Also sinister's finish on Tyson was such a cool moment, because as I was watching, I knew that if he were to go for the planned routed strategy that we both practiced on Tyson, he was going to go to round 2. He instead opted to go for a blindfolded frame perfect punch to get a star on Tyson to send him down. This was sick to see, and was probably the highlight of the entire run to me, haha.

Anyways, thanks for watching!

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