A boxing game centred around the famous “lets get ready to rumble” boxing/wrestling catchphrase. This starts off with a song that samples the original line (not the Ant & Dec song unfortunately), and takes a far more cartoony approach to boxing, with a big group of fairly stereotypical characters and a couple of inventive ones.

Despite its looks and the colourful cast of characters, the core gameplay of Ready 2 Rumble seems oddly normal. You have a few punches and weaves, and filling up a “RUMBLE” metre lets you do a flurry of punches, but I was really expecting a lot more crazy stuff. It’s still decent, and something that’s fun in multiplayer, but it doesn’t quite fully gel with the style of the game.

For singleplayer, the main mode is championship mode, where you pick a character and try to become the best, which includes taking part in some training minigames to boost your stats. A character creator feels like it would have been very welcome here, especially as the game suits odd designs.

Ready 2 Rumble is a decent boxing game, but feels like it could be doing more with its premise.

Fine

Despite Ready 2 Rumble’s ‘crazee’ nature, though, the game sticks to the rarely-broken golden fighting game rule – one-player games just aren’t any fun. With moves restricted to identical-looking fist jabs, hammering away at your rival soon gets tedious, and while the ability to duck and weave looks good, it’s easier to avoid other player’s firsts by simply scampering to the opposite end of the ring.

Mark Green, N64 Magazine #37. Review Score: 81%

Remake or remaster?

Perhaps a collection of the games in the series.

Official ways to get the game.

There’s no official way to get Ready 2 Rumble Boxing.