My memories of Ready 2 Rumble are me, something of a self-proclaimed gaming stalwart, being repeatedly thrashed by a good friend who was, let's just say 'video-gaming-ly challenged'.
And for me that was the beauty of the game, fun, easy to pick up and play even for the complete novice and utterly rewarding - pulling off combo's the next best thing to the satisfaction reserved for ultras and fatalities on Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat respectively.
With Wii giving the latest incarnation of the button-mashing classic the perfect platform to show off what it can do with motion detection, to show it can be the entertainer of boxing games - the Naseem Hamed of computer game fighting - just why are we left with little more than the Audley Harrison of the genre?
The game is big, brash and bright but is ultimately just all bravado and brutally clumsy. You will find yourself fighting more with the hap-hazard control system than your opponents throughout.
Atari have proved that Nintendo's motion detection in its controllers isn't anywhere near as prime as the company wants you to believe they are. Either that, or Nintendo's the only company that understands how it all works. Ready 2 Rumble Revolution is the latest game that attempts all sorts of various Wii waggle for all of its attacks, and ultimately fails at giving players the precision they need to pull them off. The game would have been far better suited with traditional button presses and most likely would have been a recommended Wii title had the developer simply stayed away from OTT motion controls.
Don't get me wrong the potential is clearly there. The game has a wide variety of attacking and defensive moves and can be engrossing as it requires a lot of blocking, ducking and countering. The game rewards players with satisfying retaliation hits if they sway or weave at just the right moment but this doesn't happen anywhere near enough.
The game's fatal flaw is that the producers have applied Wii motion controls and completely ruined them. Throwing basic jabs may be a simple left or right handed motion, but the power moves, roundhouses, and uppercuts are a completely different beast since they're totally dependent on thrust direction, and in some cases, require two thrusts instead of one. By requiring players to move the remote or nunchuk in multiple directions to throw a single punch, you completely kill the pacing of the fight. And the Wii remote's not precise enough to recognize the specific motions a hundred percent of the time.
All in all the game is a huge disappointment. Perhaps I expected too much from a game that used to give me and my friends hours of endless fun but it doesn't deliver on any of the basic principles which make for a successful computer game let alone a successful Wii computer game.
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