Ready 2 Rumble Boxing
Reviewed by Clement Chan Zhi Li
I'm not really interested in wrestling when the fighting
atmosphere is all around the world, nor does boxing interest
me either. I must admit that Ready 2 Rumble is quite an
interesting game to play, considering that it has a large
variety of players to choose from, adding more and more
secret characters that could be easily unlocked but it can
get easily repetitive as you need to build up simply every
boxers that are available in this game, if you're interested
in doing that, of course.
Graphics - 9
The simplified graphics has been done greatly and when you
play it, you'll notice how Midway has gone into graphics so
detailed that every boxers has different facial expressions
on their faces. You can also see them wrath about in agony
with sweat being punched out when they get knocked with
those huge, red-wrapped boxing fists. And of course, every
boxers have been rendered in 3D with the cornerman, Michael
Buffer, looking especially real.
Of course, you can easily noticed the background, where all
your friendly supporters will shout out when you win or
lose. The fighting arena will be different too each time you
fight, and even Michael Buffer's face himself in the middle
of the ring. Every single part of the game was totally
rendered and the lighting effects are real cool on certain
parts, especially when you light out your fists when you
charge up in Rumble mode.
The animations are totally smooth and it can be really
comical to see your opponent get knocked out of breath in a
hilarious way. Really. The frames go about smoothly without
a single flaw or noticeable slow-down but honestly, more
could be done to touch up a little here and there to make it
look sharper and clearer. The colours, on the other hand,
can be seen used correctly here and there but the most you
can get out is red fists and shirtless bodies.
Music - 8
The only background music that you are going to here is the
foolish and awkward introduction with three real girls
shouting ÒLet's Get Ready 2 Rumble!Ó repeatedly to give you
a horrible beginning. To be honest, there are almost no
background music at all except in the menu only and several
other unnoticeable places with the boxing and rhythm music
repeating and repeating all over by itself if you left it alone.
One most acceptable features here are the voices and the
sound effects. Whenever you have won, you will hear your
selected boxer speak for the second time (first time is when
your boxer is introduced by Michael Buffer) and they sound
nice and certainly a great addition as you will have
literally dozens of boxers to select and train. Whenever you
have charged up in Rumble mode, you will hear the cornerman
screaming like a madman in an asylum ÒRUMBLE!Ó with the
'ble' sound stretching itself all the way.
You can easily guess that the sound effects can be heard in
a fight when you punch, kick or slam your opponent all the
way, especially when you perform a Rumble Flurry or any
other mythical stance that will surprise your failing enemy.
Other miscellaneous sound effects includes while your
character is training with one or another training equipment
that are available and while selecting an option in all
sorts of menu.
Gameplay - 8
Ready 2 Rumble is a fighting game so you must really expect
3D boxing sequences, especially as this is a fighting game.
Basically, you can perform special moves and even taunt if
you like, by combining various buttons and movements
together that will knock out your enemy immediately. If you
succeeded in giving your enemy a hard punch, you will gain
letters that will soon form the word 'RUMBLE'.
Pressing L and R buttons together will lead the cornerman
shouting 'RUMBLE' for you, while your character will bang on
his chest with his fists lighting up in a sparkling light.
During this time, which is called Rumble mode, you have now
temporary maximum stamina and can perform a series of cool
punching moves called the Rumble Flurry and your attacks
will inflict more damage towards your opponent. Of course,
if it's your opponent who got the Rumble mode, say your
prayers and block all you could from his attacks but
probably resulting your selected boxer to fall down exhausted.
There are three knock-downs with five rounds in default,
meaning that you must knock your opponent down within the
five rounds. As in the real life of boxing rules, your
opponent and yourself are given 10 seconds to awake after
you have been knocked out and you need to repeatedly tap
buttons to make your boxer up and alive again but with
lesser life. Knocking your opponent three times will result
you as a winner and him as the loser. Quite fun, I must say.
There are two bars on top of the screen, one you might
recognize it as the red health bar that will slowly decrease
whenever you're hit by the enemy and the other blue one is
the stamina that will rapidly decrease and increase. If you
attack while your stamina is full, you will inflict more
damage compared to when you have less stamina all together.
Basically, all you need to do is to wait for a few seconds
to have your stamina to be at the maximum and attack as hard
as you could.
There are only three modes in the game, Arcade Mode,
Championship Mode and one useless Option mode. The Arcade
mode does not serve any use at all, except that you can
choose between one-player mode or two-player mode to fight.
Fighting against computer would be boring as you would not
gain anything at all while fighting in that mode while the
two-player mode can provide a little bit of fun while you
fight against your friend.
The Championship Mode, of course, is one of the most
important feature of the game and also the one that you will
spent all of your 24 hours towards this mode, building up
abilities for your favourite boxer. At first, you start off
with a measly amount of $1000 and that alone won't buy you
any training equipment at all. You'll need to go for those
Prize Fights repeatedly which will let you bet up to $20,000
maximum of money and will earn you lots of money. Prize
Fights are almost the same as any other fights, except that
this one earns you money, and tons if you bet lots of them and win.
The Title Fights, on the other hand, are used to build up
your rank and finishing all of the ten fights will end your
training with the character, but you can still train him to
the maximum whenever you like. You'll need to do fight
approximately 40 fights to push your character to Bronze
rank, and then Silver, and then Gold and lastly Championship
rank. All of those 40 fights will be more than enough for
your character to fight till it racks and tires your hands
out. Quite useless but you can unlock many secret characters
after you have successfully go into a certain rank.
The Exhibition Fight will allow you to use your well-trained
boxer to fight against your friend's. This is like a Prize
Fight as you can bet in up to $20,000 if you like and see
whether you are defeated in humiliating way or the other way
round. Of course, if both of you are trained to the maximum,
it will take a total of five rounds to see who is the winner
as you will probably be spending time, knocking and boxing
each other in a very difficult manner. Successfully winning
the fight will gain whatever you and your friend has bet,
resulting easy cash coming in.
You can even go as far as to trade your boxer with your
friend's by going to the Trade Boxer option. If both of you
want each other's hard-earned and hard-trained boxer, you
can go to this option and choose which boxer to be traded
and the computer will do the rest for you. That means,
you'll need a second controller in order to trade or simply
plug in into the second plug of your controller where it is
designed to put Jump Packs and memory cards into it. Of
course, after trading, there will be no turning back so you
must make up your mind first before doing the business.
In this Championship mode, each boxer need to be trained to
the maximum of four different abilities (if you ever want to
train them, of course, which I'm sure you want to do that).
The Strength can be trained in the Training mode by buying
various one-time training accessories which can only be used
one time only. You'll need to buy them again if you want to
train with the same things. Training can be done by doing it
manually or automatically. If you do it manually, it
provides more entertainment to you but there is a 60% chance
that you won't make full use of the training equipment and
there is a 40% chance that you can get more out of the
training equipment if you train your boxer carefully and
efficiently. Training automatically is an easy thing to do
as all you need to do is to buy it and let your boxer to
deal the rest. But, your current training session will label
you as 'lazy' which easily offended people would want to
kill that.
As I have said before, you'll need to train four different
types of abilities to make your boxer unstoppable by life.
The Strength can be easily trained by using any of those
training stuffs or you can easily increase them by buying
the easy but expensive Rumble Mass Nutrition Regime which
can easily increase your Strength and Experience. By getting
your Strength to 100%, you're virtually unstoppable and
undefeated as your life will only decrease a tiny bit when
whacked by your enemy. Strength is basically your health,
how you can easily defend against your opponent's attacks as
well as the damage that you will inflict towards your opponent.
The Stamina, on the other hand, is the hardest to train as
you basically need lots of money and what seemed like
hundreds of training but well worth it all the same. Getting
it to the maximum will result your real stamina in the game
not dropping at all when you start to hit around like crazy.
Of course, maximum stamina means that you can inflict some
heavy damage at your enemy and your Rumble mode will be
intact much longer and you can perform a few Rumble Flurries
in one Rumble mode.
The Dexterity does serve some purpose and probably one of
the easiest to train. Dexterity is to see how fast you move
and punch and before you know it, your enemy will eat the
dusts. The Experience is the same too and I don't think that
there are any use in it except that it will make you brag
about that you have an experienced boxer. You can make the
Experience increase by eating the Rumble Mass Nutrition
Regime but you can let it increase by itself, the more
fights you entered and won. Getting all four abilities to
the maximum will mean that you are totally unbeatable,
unstoppable and undefeatable, making your enemy cower in
fright when you enter the ring (well, sort of).
To be honest, it does seem to be a waste of time training
all of the three boxers that you start off with and you will
unlock more and more of the boxers (more than twenty all
together). It does seem repetitive (and that explains why
I'm still training Afro ThunderÉ) and a complete waste of
time to train those dozens of boxers to the maximum.
Frankly, you had better spend all of your free time doing
something else, other than doing this repeating and
repeating training which can get boring after a while.
Controls - 8
The controls are a bit difficult to do in the beginning, not
to mention how to perform all of those special moves which
requires tapping several buttons and direction together.
They use four types of punches, two high and two low, two
left and two right punches, meaning that it will get a time
to get used to it. You can also choose whether to use
between the D-pad or the analog stick; decide it yourself,
it's your choice.
Replay Value - 6
Do you ever want to train all of those boxers? Hardcore
gamers may want to do so but certainly not me. Okay, what's
the point of wasting your time pushing up all of your boxers
to the maximum rank and abilities? Of course, that will be
your prime choice as there no basic goal in this game but
obviously, it's unlocking boxers and training them. Some of
you may like the idea but it can get too boring and
repetitive after playing it for a few days.
Overall - 8
This game is not at all that bad but the above review said
the rest: repetitive. Yup, it can get repetitive if you
don't like the idea of training all of the boxers but that's
just me. My opinion does not stop you from buying this game
so if you think you want to give it a try or simply love
boxing games, then this game would be your prime choice.
It's fun in certain aspects, especially the Exhibition Mode
and you can always go to the Arcade mode for a resting mind
against your friend or computer. Let's just hope Ready 2
Rumble: Round 2 will not be as boring as thisÉ
Good
-----
+ Interesting and well-detailed graphics.
+ Arcade Mode and Championship Mode will give you the fun
that you needed.
+ Loads of characters to unlock!
Bad
-----
- Limited, very limited music.
- Have you heard of anyone wanting to train those more than
20 boxers to the maximum?
- Can get boring too soon, plus the controls which can be
confusing. Ugh.
Overall: 8 out of 10
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