I miss boxing – not that I ever did it. It used to be a kind of combat-sport backbone running through the country. I remember sleeping at a friend’s house when Frank Bruno was fighting Mike Tyson in 1989, and us kids were listening to the fight on a radio upstairs while our parents listened to it on a radio downstairs. Their cheers led ours. Boxing matches were big deals, they were moments where everyone seemed to turn around, but where are they now? Lying on the canvas alongside Jake Paul.

Boxing games echoed this. They used to be as predictable for games machines as football games and driving games and tennis games. The first one I properly remember is Super Punch-Out!!, on Super Nintendo, but there’s another more obscure boxing game from around that time I remember strongly too: Foes of Ali, on 3DO – a console no one other than my friend down the road seemed to own.

We’d play Foes of Ali relentlessly. It featured all of the fighters Muhammad Ali had famous fights with: Foreman, Frazier, Liston. I can’t remember the others. But I do remember I had a fondness for Joe Frazier, so I’d forever be trying to lure whoever I was fighting with onto my left so I could pulverize them with his trademark hook. I remember excitedly telling my dad about this one day and he looked at me in surprise. How did his tweenage son know about the strengths of Joe Frazier? Video games, Dad – they’re educational.

But the boxing game that really caught my chin was Fight Night Round 3 on Xbox 360. It arrived at a golden time for the Xbox 360, Microsoft’s best console (Bertie!), barely three months after it was released. There’s a case for it being a launch title, although Wikipedia tells me it was released on the original Xbox and PlayStation 2 as well, which I don’t remember at all. They were the runts of the litter, though, because on Xbox 360, Fight Night Round 3 was effectively a different game. The settings were ramped up to graphical showcase level, boasting “pore-level detail”, and the UI was dramatically altered. But most significantly of all, on Xbox 360 it had a completely different control method.

This was one of Fight Night Round 3’s major novelties, or intrigue points: you controlled your punches with the thumbsticks. One thumb handled one side’s punching and blocking, and the other thumb handled the other. You determined what kind of punch you were throwing by performing a similar movement with the thumbstick. A jab required a short sharp shove, for example, whereas a hook required a semi-circular hooking motion. It was quite intuitive. And it was a startlingly new approach for the time.

Alongside the fancy graphics, the wacky control scheme made Fight Night Round 3 alluringly next-generational. This was the sort of game you’d whip out to show your friends when they came over for tea – that’s a sentence I’ll never write again – because it was forward-presenting and new. And perhaps partly because it was so bizarre to control that your friends would flounder while you flattened them. Button mashing wasn’t possible here because there weren’t button-based attacks to bash, though it was possible for a lucky result if a newcomer went berserk with the thumbsticks, which they usually did, and accidentally landed a few solid blows. I wonder how many thumbsticks suffered as a result of this game.

But depleting stamina usually negated this, and the game had long punching animations you’d be vulnerable after committing to, meaning you wouldn’t want to swing recklessly. This all led to a real sense of learned skill in the game, and a closer relationship with what you were doing in it. Fight Night Round 3 pulled you closer than other boxing games did. The feeling of trapping someone in the corner and then unleashing a thumb-twirling barrage of hooks and uppercuts was thrillingly tactile and violent. Then you’d land your haymaker and get your cinematic knockout cam replay, and feel a huge rush of gaming satisfaction.

What really stuck me to Fight Night Round 3 was the Career Mode. This was basically an RPG. You’d customise – in impressive detail – the look and shape of your boxer, then you’d set about training them and fighting your way through lower divisions all the way to the floodlit top. It wasn’t all about winning fights, though. There was background progression here whereby you’d hit the gym between fights to do mini-games like weightlifting, heavy bag work, or combo dummy work, to improve your stats. You’d be able to spar to practise your general boxing as well. Then you’d do things like select fight contracts to choose which boxer you’d go up against next, weighing up prize purses, their form, and varying match conditions. There was a lot to do.

I have very fond memories of turning my ridiculous-haired nobody into a ridiculous haired somebody, and watching all that hard work pay off in the shape of better muscles and flashier patterned shorts. I had a pretty good fight record as well, right up until I didn’t. I’m fairly sure I got knocked down and then imploded at the distressing sight of a loss on my career record and stopped playing the game. Can I excuse that behaviour by saying I was much younger at the time?

Regardless, I miss it. I miss boxing. Every so often I look around for a game to scratch the itch with, but I never find anything. All I see is UFC. UFC on all of the advertising, UFC dominating combat video games. I respect it but it’s never really appealed. It doesn’t hold the same historical and hallowed allure for me that boxing does. It’s too new, there are too many variables, too many things I don’t understand. I want to be taken back to the days of Bruno fighting Tyson and that feeling of a whole nation backing their fighter. I want to be Joe Frazier landing the historic hook that took Ali down.