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PRE-GAME

In Rumble Roses, choose one of  20 different half naked woman and join them as they battle to become champ. Driven by greed, power, fame, recognition, answers, revenge and in one case, retrieving an AWOL student, each wrestler has her own motives to be in Rumble Rose tournament. Do you have enough skill to go one on one with these hotties, or will you be stuck fiddling your joystick?

EYE-SPY

THE HOOK: Half naked, girl on girl action. In mud. If that doesn’t sell the game to you, nothing will. Unless you care about the specs, then you have an easy to pickup control scheme based on the WWE games, gorgeous character models and smooth game play, also similar to the WWE games (expect that comparison a lot, seeing how Yuke’s also develops the PS2 WWE titles.).

HOW IT LOOKS AND FEELS: Rumble Roses character models are it’s strongest points, and the sole reason for 98.3% of it’s sales, now that the "Dead or Alive" series has gone off to Microsoft-land. The girls look great, and what they do in the ring defy physics. Too bad the same cant be said about the rest of the game. The audience is paper thin, something that got real old and lame on those N64 wresting games.  There are 4 different types of rings and they all are pretty generic and the “mud” looks like brown water.

As far as controls, Konami/Yuke’s did the right thing and decided to port the control engine from the WWE games. The characters move well, and things do happen when you push the buttons, (a good thing on a video game). Mastering these controls can only help in your quest to become the best soft core porn star....err, wrestler out there.

HOW IT SOUNDS: This is where the game begins to go downhill. Konami made a wise move and got some of the “artists” (I use that term loosely) who contributed to it’s mega-hit Dance Dance Revolution series to make the soundtrack for this game. Awesome soundtrack is assured, right?

WRONG!!

The soundtrack manages to blow. In fact, the entire sound experience manages to, quoting Bart Simpson, “Suck and Blow” at the same time. Not only is the music HORRIBLE, but the game continues to molest your poor ears with some of the worst voice acting to disgrace a video game.

The spoken dialog could have be performed better by those drunken messes you see on those “Girl Gone Wild” ads. The sound system in this game makes me cry.

EXTRAS: Variant costumes, variant alter egos, and of course, variant bikinis.

CINEMATIC EXPERIENCE: Pouring salt on the wound that the sound department delivers, the story, and how it’s carried out, continues to make me beg to be put out of my misery. The characters may look great, but man, between a script that was obviously written in a 45 minute time frame 2 weeks before the game came out, and spoken by whatever unemployed bimbos that the staff were probably dating, there are lots of  reasons NOT to play this game.

BEST PLAYER: Basing this decision entirely on my hormones, Miss Spencer and her dominatrix alter-ego Mistress Spencer take this award. This could be because her unoriginal, but well animated character design reminds me of Quistis Triepe from Final Fantasy 8. Mmmmm, hotter character and a better game.

CHEAT CODE YOU NEED: None available.

CHEAT CODE YOU WANT: Originally, I was going to ask for a code that made these girls shut the hell up and turn off the god awful dialogue, but I realized I can do that by pushing “mute”, so I’m gonna wish for a code that unlocks all the girl’s various alter egos without having to suffer through the horrible story mode.

OH MAN! MOMENT: Fighting Lady X for the first time. Half woman, half robot, completely idiotic plot device with flying robo-fist. Somebody shoot the people behind this game to assure this travesty from happening again.

GLITCH ITCH: Some collision problems, the girls also have problem running in/out of the mud ring. You’d think they be like ducks in water with the way they dress, but no.

FAN SERVICE: Wow! You mean aside from the half naked hotties grappling with each other? Well the arena is covered with banners for other Konami titles, such as Metal Gear Solid, Castlevania and Contra, which is the closest you’ll get to getting MGS’ bad ass Solid Snake in this game. That’s right, those ads with Dixie Clemente (the queen of walking female Texan Stereotypes) and Snake throwing it down were lies. Boycott this game in retaliation!

END GAME:

I hope Konami fires people for this game.

Seriously, there’s no reason why this game should be so bad. Let’s add up all the factors: you have Konami, which has some of the best franchises out on the market today (see Metal Gear Solid, Castlevania, Ace Combat and the Revolution games for examples). Working for Konami are those rascals at Yukes, who, since they started on Playstation One, have delivered THE BEST wrestling experience, year in and year out. Then, providing the soundtrack for this game are some of the artist who contributed tracks to the Dance Dance Revolution, who any gamer with a sense of funk loves. So how did this turn out so bad?

To be fair, the developers did a fine job on the controls and visuals, at least in the character model department. These two factors alone prevent this game from being the worst wrestling game released this year ("Galactic Wrestling featuring Ultimate Wrestling" and "Legends of Wrestling 2" can fight for this title). But compared to Smackdown Vs. Raw, and EA’s hip-hop brawling masterpiece "Def Jam Vendetta: Fight For New York", the game's flaws outweigh the good parts.

I think you’ve all gotten the point by now. In conclusion, Rumble Roses isn’t the worse wrestling game you’ll play this year, nor, surprisingly, is it the worst game Konami came out with this year. Compared to it’s competition, Rumble Roses had potential to be a contender, but turned out to be a chump. So yeah, I would prefer to play as Method Man or "inset current popular WWE wrestler’s name here" than a oiled up half naked girl. But so would my girlfriend, or anyone else who enjoys good video games.

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