Win A Wii While Getting An Insider's View Of "Ready To Rumble Revolution"!

  
Want To Win A Wii?  For Starters, Click On The Boxing Glove Below To Get An Up To Date Preview Of "Ready To Rumble Revolution.  When you are finished doing that, read the rest of this article to find out how YOU can win a WII.

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I learned my lesson from the last contest I was involved in that gamers are a tough breed and don't want to do anything unless they get something in return.  And since you can't beat them, why not join them.  And so, with a new contest now going on, I will offer up the Wii in the prize package being offered to bloggers who are participating in the contest by Atari to get readers to preview the latest info on "Ready To Rumble Revolution".  If you have done that and still want to win, your final task is at the end of this article.

From Chris Harris at IGN.Com comes this article:

 Back in the heyday of the SEGA Dreamcast, Midway produced a series of boxing games for the Dreamcast – which then got ported to the other consoles – called Ready 2 Rumble, a play on ring announcer Michael Buffer's trademark line. Over the past few years the franchise has exchanged hands, and now Atari's giving the arcade fighter a shot as a Wii exclusive. The company let us get an early hands-on with the game before the March release.

 
Ready 2 Rumble Revolution is a spiritual sequel to the Midway design. You're not going to find the same line-up of characters in the Wii game – sorry, Afro Thunder fans – but the look and feel in Atari's game retains much of the same elements that gave the original game its charm. Fighters are still over the top, borderline un-PC stereotyped caricatures that have crazy punches and taunts, and the game's RUMBLE system could turn a fight around and send a winning boxer to the canvas (or flying out of the ring) in a single overpowered hit. 

In the Championship Mode, you build a character from the ground up using a simplified creator – as you get deeper in the game you'll unlock different body parts, builds and types, but for newcomers your options are limited. Just like in the previous Ready 2 Rumble games, your character builds up his abilities if you perform well in training, and Ready 2 Rumble Revolution features a variety of training mini-games that put the players' grasp of the Wii motion controls and their sense of timing to the test. You'll hit the heavy and speed bags, skip rope, and work on the medicine ball in rhythm-style challenges, and if you do well your attributes will rise. Perform horribly and you'll watch your numbers fall. 

There will be a wide variety of characters in the final version, but for now the company let us play with three characters: The Impersonator, an aging, career Vegas Elvis imitator; Dragon Chew, a boxer with a Japanese flavor, and Sweet King, a gangsta fighter that'd put Notorious B.I.G's enormous size to shame. 

Ready 2 Rumble Revolution runs at a very smooth 60 frames per second – which is good considering the original Dreamcast version did the same several years prior. The visuals are a considerable step up from the original game while offering the same exaggerated "caricature" style for the different boxers in this fighter. Michael Buffer makes an appearance as the game's announcer, but the character designers kept him conservatively "real" instead of making him over-the-top cartoony. Characters who take a pummeling will show the appropriate damage with bruising and swelling on the face as the fight progresses. Fighters can also change their look during the bout: watch the Elvis impersonator's toupee fly off in a flurry of punches, for example. 

Ready 2 Rumble Revolution controls using the Wii Remote and Nunchuk combination, and requires motion to pull off all of the punches in the game. For the most part the controls work, but in our hands-on we did have to adjust our motions to make sure the game read them correctly. The Wii controllers' accelerometers have never been good at recognizing specific directions when swinging with wild, quick motions, and Ready 2 Rumble Revolution requires specific directions for the variety of different hits. Uppercuts, for example, are handled through a "scooping" down-up hit, and power moves need to be charged with a left-right move on the right hand, or a right-left move on the left hand before throwing a jab or uppercut. It will take some learning to figure out the proper speed to waggle the remote for the game to recognize what your intentions are, because if you play too quickly your character will throw punches that you didn't intend on throwing. 

After a bit of practice we got it, and started knocking down and out our opponents with skill and finesse. Don't be surprised if the game still misinterprets some punches though – even after understanding what the game's looking for, it was still difficult to stop whipping the remote and nunchuk as quickly and firmly as possible. The game's intensity almost encourages the wild motions. 

Even though the version we're playing appears complete, Ready 2 Rumble Revolution feels like it needs a bit of fight balancing. Computer opponents seem to have this precognition to hits and continuously dodge and counter attacks at the millisecond they're being thrown. The game also has a bit of an unfair element in its RUMBLE meter, as fighters who activate their RUMBLE attack retain it for far too long, and keep it charged even when the other non-charged fighters knock their butt to the canvas. 
Still, there's a lot of promise to Ready 2 Rumble Revolution, and it looks like it could be a decent alternative to the crummy Wii Sports boxing that every Wii owners has subjected themselves to.

By clicking on the boxing glove and going to IGN, you can see over 170 more screenshots and many more videos as well as all of the latest info. And if you like it, go ahead and preorder so that you will be the first to have it.

Now, if you clicked on the boxing glove, and you still want to win a Wii, all you have to do is send me an email at riesen2b@gmail.com and tell me your thoughts on Ready To Rumble Revolution, both pro and con. A name will be randomly drawn from all of the emails so don't worry about being a prolific writer. The best comments will be posted in a later post. Good luck!