Rumble Roses (PS2)

Rumble Roses
PS2 (2003)

Twenty-two beautiful women in skimpy costumes beating the crap out of each other. No, it’s not my Christmas wish list — it’s the basis of Rumble Roses, Konami’s new all girl fighting game for the Playstation 2.

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 game’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. Then I’d super glue down the PS2.

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