Oh, come on Konami marketing guy! You know you wanted to slap another X in the title. Don't be scared of Clinton and her senatorial bloodhounds, you're an overseas company for crying out loud. Rumble Roses XXX. You know you wanted to do it. Can't you see the possibilities? "Konami brings the best in all girl-on-girl action to the Xbox 360". Awesome.

If you've not heard of Rumble Roses before, Rumble Roses XX is the follow-up to the lukewarm Rumble Roses, a wrestling game for the PlayStation 2 featuring female wrestlers in as little clothing as humanly possible. Let your imagination follow that concept and you'll be in the exact mind space Konami wants you to be. Rumble Roses XX is one part wrestling and one and a half parts puerile titillation.

But Konami had a lot of control as to how much the salacious aspects of Rumble Roses XX impacted the quality of the final product. Bury a solid wrestling game beneath the bustiers and thongs and Rumble Roses XX could have come out smelling like, well, roses. But just like last time Konami lets the skin sell the experience and we end up with an average game reeking of unused potential (you can almost smell the Smackdown engine hiding in here somewhere) where all 20 girls wrestle in pretty much the exact same way.

So that leaves Rumble Roses XX as an idle amusement good for an indecent laugh, assuming you can stomach the sexism. But even if that tickles your fancy don't count on a solid Xbox Live experience: neither the player base nor the network code behind this game is up to par. Attempts at Live play were met with loneliness or choppy, uneven gameplay. Match this disappointment with a practically absent single player mode and you're left with something simply to drag out at fraternity parties to show off the graphics of the 360.

And that is perhaps this game's only saving grace: it is one damn fine looking game. Both arenas and the ladies are visualized exceptionally well. Is that enough? Well, since at least half the selling point is the assets on the girls one has to concede Konami has done a fine job presenting the game's lone achievement.

It is tempting in this era of politicized gaming to get political on Rumble Roses XX. Words like "pander" are all that comes to mind when you see that a company has wrapped a blasé wresting game in scantily clad girls just to get it to sell. But that being said, those that are going to pickup Rumble Roses XX probably know exactly what they are getting and Konami is doing nothing but filling that void. There is nothing wrong with that.

Arguably, ladies engaged in the rigorous physical discipline of professional wrestling is less demeaning than having them bounce around a beach playing volleyball and collecting bikinis, and Rumble Roses XX is most definitely considerably less sexist than the lingerie-clad cavalcade of misogyny that is the WWE.

Does that make it better? If that's the sort of question you're prone to ask you're already not going to snatch up this game so there isn't really much of a point in trying to find an answer.

Score: 60%

Apr 12, 2006 | 0 comments
Edward Pollard