Rumble Roses

Like Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball or The Guy Game, Rumble Roses is one of those games you bury at the back of your collection when your parents or girlfriend comes over.

Rumble Roses is a wrestling game featuring all female wrestlers. To be specific, attractive and scantily clad female wrestlers. I am pretty sure this game started life when the gang at Konami saw the Christina Aguilera "Dirrty" video. In fact, one of the wrestlers, Aisha, looks a lot like her. We've also got cowgirl Dixie Clemets, sadistic doctor Anesthesia, "Judo Babe" Makoto, Reiko, daughter of legendary joshi Kamikaze Rose, and more.

The game is set up to show off those toned, big-bosomed CGI bodies as much as possible. Everything, from their costumes to their elaborate entrances to the moves they dish out and take, is designed to show some jiggle. When not wrestling, there is a gallery where you can look at a wrestler in her assorted costumes, and you can control the camera and zoom in on the model. There's a mud-wrestling match too, so the game is being very up front about its intentions. There is no actual nudity, but the game is rated M for Mature. Though maturity has very little to do with it.

The wrestling mechanics are basic, but effective. The Square button is for strikes, Triangle for grapples. Pulling the joystick in different directions tries different moves. Every successful move adds to your Lethal meter which, when full, permits you to launch special attacks. The game has reversals in the form of combinations of buttons, different ones for every kind of attack. You can reverse any kind of attack, though the special ones are certainly more challenging to avoid. Still, I found that reversals worked often enough to make a match interesting, without going overboard.

The game by no means has the depth of some wrestling games out there, but it does the job. It also has three different categories of special moves, which makes things a little more interesting. A "Killer" move is like a finisher, and can be activated once your Lethal bar is full. "Lethal" moves do double the damage and are specific to the wrestler. The bar must be full and your opponent must be in the proper state before you can use one (laying on the mat, have your back turned to you, etc.).

Finally, you have the "Humiliation" finisher. Certain moves embarrass your opponents, gradually filling a heart-shaped meter. Once full, your opponent is in a humiliated state and is susceptible to the Humiliation finisher, a devastating move that usually wraps your opponent into something that looks borrowed from the Kama Sutra, and makes them look owned big time.

There's a story mode where you take a wrestler of your choice through a series of matches. Each wrestler is either a face or heel (good wrestler or evil wrestler), and you unlock her opposite persona by completing the story. You'll be rewarded with a new look for the wrestler, and there are also bikini costumes for those mud matches. Naturally.

The story mode for each wrestler can be completed very quickly, and most stories are pretty cheesy. I swear though that this is part of the game's appeal. When Miss Spencer remarks of Anesthesia that "I do not like the cut of that woman's jib," or Aigle is intimidated not by Dixie's wrestling skill but her uhm, you know... you just gotta laugh. With ninjas, mad scientists, and young girls looking to avenge their mother, sister, or a previous loss and lots of panty shots, the game is so very Japanese.

There is also an Exhibition mode, and strangely, this is where you can win the belt. First you must get your wrestler to 100 percent face or 100 percent heel by taking "vows" before you start a match. The more difficult the vow, the faster you get to 100 percent. Faces will take vows not to use weapons, not attack opponents lying on the mat, etc. Heels will be asked to beat someone without taking damage, finish the match with a Humiliation K.O., etc. Once you get to 100 percent, you can challenge for the championship belt. It's a pretty interesting system that I wouldn't mind seeing expanded upon.

The game looks pretty good, though not quite as pretty as DOA Volleyball. The animated is usually very good as the ladies grapple and twist each other into pretzels, though limbs do occasionally disappear into other limbs, and the hair movement isn't quite right. The mud effect on the ladies is pretty good as it slides down the women's bodies, although in lying in the pool it is not quite as convincing. It's too bad they couldn't do the particle sand effect you can see in DOA Volleyball.

The game sounds very good, with sweet mat-stomping noises and stretching limbs. There's an interesting selection of music including a pretty good cover of David Lee Roth's "Yankee Rose."

Assuming you don't have any outright objections to the subject matter (which won't be remembered as one that advanced videogames as an art form) Rumble Roses is a decent, if light wrestling title that showcases its T&A very well, exactly what it set out to do. I can't recommend it over other wrestling titles because it doesn't have a CAW system, a wide selection of matches or a complex grappling system. However, I have to admit Rumble Roses became a guilty pleasure of mine. If you like the videogame equivalent of a Russ Meyer film, here you go. Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

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