Midway’s Ready 2 Rumble Boxing made a big splash when it launched alongside the Dreamcast in 1999, mainly due to its visual splendour. A celebrity-laced sequel followed in 2001, before the franchise disappeared into the same void that claimed Midway’s profitability. For one reason or another, Atari has decided to bring it back, sans the original cast in Ready 2 Rumble Revolution for the Wii. In doing so, they may well have defined the proverbial bottom of the barrel for the Wii.

Gimmicky boxing games have been around for over 20 years, featuring larger than life characters, exaggerated physical appearances and ridiculously over-the-top fights. Up to this point, these arcade-style boxing games all had one thing in common – the ability to control the action in the ring. Ready 2 Rumble Revolution is different; controlling this game is like trying to drive a car without a steering wheel or foot pedals – it just doesn’t work.

Ready 2 Rumble Revolution had the potential to be a slightly better than average arcade boxing game. It’s got a reasonably large cast of characters (most of them parodies of somewhat famous folks like David Beckham, David Hasselhoff and Vladimir Putin), a decent career mode and a highly involved form of in-ring action with lots of variation. Had Ready 2 Rumble Revolution been made with the classic controller in mind, it might have even been worth a quick rental.

With the game being targeted for the Wii, developer AKI Corporation (known for their fantastic wrestling games on the Nintendo 64) was pressured into giving Ready 2 Rumble Revolution a motion-based control system. Rather than adopting an over-the-shoulder perspective like Wii Sports’ boxing game, Ready 2 Rumble Revolution uses the same side on viewpoint as its predecessors, yet its movement controls don’t match.

Slightly off-key movement control is nothing compared to Ready 2 Rumble Revolution’s completely broken and unresponsive fight controls. The game introduces them innocently enough with a tutorial which requests that you demonstrate each possible punch before moving on. Here you’ll find that everything seems pretty straightforward, but the truth is that the practice mode has very loose standards, and will let you through regardless of what punches you throw.

The proverbial hits the fan when you go into a match against a computer-controlled opponent who has none of the difficulty of punching that you do, and can do so at a speed that would not really be possible even if the control system did work. You’ll be flailing all over the place trying to get the machine to recognise your punches – if it actually picks up what you’re doing, it’ll often execute the wrong punches and completely exhaust your boxer, and all the while you’re being tenderised like a slab of meat.

One would think that any issues in fighting computer controlled players could be alleviated by playing with friends, but the problem really boils down to the busted control mechanics, rather than the abilities of the AI. Ready 2 Rumble Revolution’s boxing motions are totally awkward; some stuff like jabs and uppercuts are simple enough with forward or upward actions, but hooks require specific left-to-right or right-to-left gestures which seem totally unnatural. You can kind of see what the developer was trying to accomplish, but it feels absolutely nothing like boxing.

Control problems also ruin Ready 2 Rumble Revolution’s selection of training mini-games, which players need to perform well at in order to stand any chance of progressing in the career mode. These mini-games are the usual sorts of things you’ll come across in boxing games – heavy bag, speed bag, punch pads and skipping rope, but it has a few that you don’t always see like medicine ball and track work. Like the rest of the game, training games are broken by the fact your gestural moves just aren’t picked up by the game – in fact, the only training game that works is the speed bag, since it just requires you to shake the life out of your controllers.

The gameplay may be broken, but Ready 2 Rumble Revolution doesn’t fail in the looks department. Some of the design decisions are a little odd – the characters all feature totally exaggerated features, yet the announcer Michael Buffer (the dude who made a living out of saying “Let’s get ready to rrrumble!”) appears in a realistic form. Characters are highly detailed and animate smoothly, and the game runs at a brisk pace.

Ready 2 Rumble Revolution would have been a perfectly competent arcade-style boxing game if its control system worked. The game looks reasonably nice, has a decent career mode and it features a roster of somewhat amusing parody characters. However, since the game is focused on clumsy gestural combat which is seldom registered by the game, it is practically unplayable.