When Midway launched the original Ready 2 Rumble Boxing on the Dreamcast, its mind-blowing graphics and smooth animation sold skeptics on the power of Sega’s next-gen console. The game harkened back to the glory days of arcade boxing, and provided a simple yet fun gameplay experience with memorable characters and entertaining multiplayer. Now, Atari hopes to bring back the good times with Ready 2 Rumble Revolution, an all new motion-controlled slugfest built exclusively for the Wii. Unfortunately for fans, a lot has changed since the old days.

The roster of this title is made up of 18 boxers that are loosely based on popular celebrities. These ‘parodies’ include doppelgangers of Jack Black, David Beckham, John Travolta, James Brown, Brad Pitt, and Antonio Banderas, each with a super-deformed look that accentuates their defining characteristics. The major problem is that the developer’s forgot to include any semblance of humor in these imitations. Sure, the Simon Cowell character has a British accent and a big mouth, but that seems to be where the joke ends.

The gameplay of Revolution relies almost entirely on motion control. The lengthy tutorial will fill you in on the intricacies of the fighting system, which has the Wii remote controlling your boxer’s right glove and the nunchuck controlling his left. There are a surprisingly large amount of punch types for each hand, all of which are executed through a different controller motion. There are also five different block or juke moves that can be used to avoid the wrath of your opponent, as well as the special RUMBLE attacks which can be triggered after you fill up the on-screen meter. If you think that this sounds a bit too complicated for an arcade boxing title, you are absolutely right. Unfortunately, things only get worse once you leave the tutorial.

To put it plainly, the motion controls of Ready 2 Rumble Revolution are horrific. There are just too many functions available to you, and none of them are easy to pull off when a lumbering behemoth is charging your way. Some of the punches are simple, like swinging your remote upward to do an uppercut. The problem here is that the boxer’s animation takes awhile to finish the move, so you have to either hold off on your next attack until he is done or just crazily swing the controller so that he launches the next swipe as soon as possible. Neither of these options produces fun.

There is also a baffling lack of strategy to the game, and you will find that the best way to win is to wildly throw your arms through the air as if you were swatting imaginary flies. The more damaging maneuvers—like the hard jab—are nearly impossible to execute in-game. To perform this, you have to swing the Wii remote to the right, wait for the character to cock his arm back, and then thrust the remote forward to complete the shot. Of course, this takes awhile to do, leaving you open for just enough time for your opponent to slug you in the face. Had the attacks been more Wii Sports Boxing-like in their simplicity, Ready 2 Rumble’s gameplay might have been fine. In its current form, the game will do nothing but fill you with disdain for its creators.

While the controls are frustrating enough to keep you away, the AI contributes to this by sending you into a furious rage. Since the computer-controlled opponents don’t have to deal with the same motion control problems that you do, they are usually able to weave around your attacks and execute all of the more complex maneuvers with perfect efficiency. Things get no easier once you activate your RUMBLE power, which supercharges your punches for a limited amount of time. While these shots should be able to level your combatant, most of them will be instantly blocked by the omniscient AI. I played through the game on Normal, and my constant losses in the first ten minutes of play left me with no desire to continue. That might be a new record.

Visually, the game looks marginally better than the 1999 Dreamcast original. The models all have a weird 'caricature' design to them that hovers somewhere between ugly and unpleasant. While they have some nice detail--like the jiggle of David Hasselhoff's belly fat—the characters lack any defining personality or play style that would make you want to choose them. The environments are generic as well, each looking like a real boxing or wrestling arena with no flair or pizzazz to them. Also worth noting is the crowd, which is made up of about six blurry people repeated several hundred times, all doing the same animations at once.

The audio department doesn’t fare much better, as the tunes sound more suited for Peggle than a boxing match. Michael Buffer introduces each fight with his signature catch phrase, but it is the same every time and not interesting in the least. The sound effects do the job, but don’t stand out in any particular way. The faux-celebrity voice actors tend to sound nothing like their real life counterparts, relying more on bad accents than witty dialogue.

It is unclear to me who the audience for R2RR was. The celebrity parodies lead me to believe that it was made for the casual gamer, but the complicated controls and baffling gameplay make me think otherwise. With Punch-Out! arriving in a few short weeks, there is no real reason for Ready 2 Rumble: Revolution to exist at all, and I implore everyone to stay as far away from this palooka as possible.
 

Gameplay: 2
The gameplay amounts to ferociously throwing your arms through the air as the unreliable motion controls keep you from ever pulling off specific punches. Playing it once will leave you with no urge to come back for more.

Graphics: 4.5
The character models are nicely crafted despite their lack of artistic flair, but the arenas are bland and the crowd is abhorrent. When taken as a whole, it looks marginally better than the decade old original.

Sound: 3.5
Michael Buffer does his best Michael Buffer impersonation, but the rest of the voice acting is painful. The music sounds like something you would hear during an infomercial, and the sound effects are acceptable but nothing special.

Difficulty: Hard
Unlike a human player, the AI can read exactly what moves you are about to pull off and blocks them with Neo-like speed and flexibility. Battles will range from boring to maddening depending on how perfect the opposition decides to be.

Concept: 6.0
There are a ton of modes to play, including an Arcade mode, a Tournament mode, offline multiplayer, and a Championship mode that has you lead a new fighter to future greatness. There are also plenty of boxers to unlock and decent creation tools that you can use to make your own character. The only thing that R2RR is truly lacking is any semblance of fun.

Multiplayer: 2.0
Revolution plays a bit better with friends than it does solo, but not by much. Once your buddies learn that RUMBLE moves can be blocked, the gameplay breaks down and becomes an exercise in tedium.

Overall: 2.5
When the Wii first hit store shelves, some purists worried that motion control would be shoehorned into games that didn’t need it, while others believed that playing a Wii title would amount to nothing more than flopping your hands around aimlessly. Ready 2 Rumble Revolution shows that both of these can be true in some cases, amounting to nothing more than exhaustion and anger for all those unfortunate souls who play it. Avoid at all costs.