Ready 2 Rumble Boxing: Round 2 - Game Boy Advance

The GBA version looks good; it features loads of colour and everything from the taunts to Michael Buffer's famous tagline "Let's get ready to rumble" is intact. Unfortunately, the gameplay isn't. Ready to Rumble 2 for the GBA is a 2-D fighting game, not a 3-D one like before. You can move forward and backward, block and punch. Move while punching and you get an uppercut or a short jab. There's almost no sense of damage as you hit these poorly animated foes and this takes all the personality out of the game.

There are 11 characters in total: some favourites from the original games and two new unlockable ones--Michael Buffer as "Rumble Man" (yawn) and... Michael Jackson. There are four modes of play: arcade-style, championship, training and survival (where you've got to fight each opponent until you go down flat). You can create your own boxer if you like and participate in a few mini-training-games like rumble pads, weightlifting and the speed bag.

What Ready to Rumble 2 amounts to is a perfectly good and great looking Game Boy Color game but it doesn't do boxing justice. It isn't nearly as good as Ready to Rumble on other platforms and it just doesn't fit in with the other, mostly fantastic, GBA launch titles. --Andrew S Bub