Built upon Yuke's SmackDown! engine, Rumble Roses
follows in the footsteps of Tecmo's Dead or Alive Xtreme
Beach Volleyball for the Xbox. While the one-on-one fighting genre has always
been a popular genre among young teenage boys, Konami has made sure there was no question
about the title's intended demographic by including some of the sexiest pixels ever to
grace the gaming screen. The game contains all the punches, kicks and extreme moves
seen in other similar fighting games and adds plenty of jiggling and wiggling to the
mixture. Similar to professional wrestling, most of the roses fall into neat stereotypes
(strict schoolteacher, naughty schoolgirl, southern belle, dominatrix, etc.) It's as if a
brawl broke out at the Playboy Mansion over Halloween, and somehow, you got invited.
Similar to DOA Volleyball, Rumble Roses gives players the option of fighting
quick exhibition matches, playing through a story mode, or simply looking at the girls
with a virtual camera in the locker room. The story mode makes the plot of Mortal Kombat
look like Shakespeare's work (something about stealing the girl?s DNA to create super
female wrestlers) and is obviously only there to give players a structure to play through.
Under the skin (so to speak), Rumble Roses is actually a
pretty decent grappler. Yuke has already worked out the kinks in their engine, so there
are no major bugs in this department. The gorgeous ladies of Rumble Roses can
strike, grapple, counter, perform and receive limb damage, use weapons, and perform
finishing moves. And of course, most of the moves are designed to show you the maximum
amount of virtual skin possible.
Like most gimmicky-games, the biggest problem with Rumble Roses is, after a few
hours of playing, you've seen it all. Each fighter only has a few cut scenes, funny
comments and special moves, and after two or three fights you've seen most of them. Rumble
Roses is a good game with good graphics draped over a B-movie plot and cheesy voice
acting. Unless you can see yourself spending weeks upon weeks laughing over bitmaps in
bikinis, I'd recommend renting Rumble Roses first and making sure you don't tire
of it quickly. That is, unless you're in a fraternity, then I'd buy it and super glue it
into my PS2.
