E3 2004: Rumble Roses Hands-On

Konami's Rumble Roses drew huge corwds at E3, so what is all the fuss about?

Update: Video coverage added.

Announced a few months ago in Japan as WWX Rumble Roses, Konami's new women's wrestling title was quite a hit on the show floor, drawing decent crowds to the gaming setups positioned at all 4 corners of the small wrestling ring setup in their booth. As players pummeled away at each other in the game, anxious (read: horny) fans lined up to get their pictures taken with the two live action Rumble Roses girls in the ring.

While Konami is proudly touting Rumble Roses as "the first and only female wrestling game on any platform", I won't dare refer to it as such as I am the proud owner of Human Entertainment's, All Japan Women's Pro Wrestling game released on the PC Engine Arcade CD-Rom back in 1995. But despite Konami's inaccurate claim, Rumble Roses is indeed the first female wrestling game released on a 'next-generation' console and is quite a dandy one at that.

The game sports some very nice colorful graphics that appear closer in style to the cartoon-ish look of Bandai's Ultimate Muscle more than anything else and features large, well-animated characters that are reportedly constructed of 10,000 polygons each, allowing the girls to look good while performing some devastating wrestling moves.

Having spent a lot of time at the Konami booth we got a chance to take the game for a spin and came away quite pleased with the in-ring shenanigans of these wrestling divas.

The game's control scheme took some getting used to, but once past that small hurdle we had a blast performing submission leg locks, high flying maneuvers, devastating suplexes, and various other high impact wrestling holds, counter holds, and moves that players can experiment with in order to develop their own combat techniques.

Despite the gloried T&A aspects of Rumble Roses, the wrestling engine behind this game is actually pretty good and focuses on providing fast paced arcade styled wrestling thrills that maintain the game's brisk pace throughout every match as opposed to the slow, methodic nature of wrestling sims.

Along with being able to dish out some punishing wrestling moves, the girls can also make use of classic in-ring psychology by taunting and insulting their opponents, setting them up for total humiliation by placing them in compromising positions. The game's Superstar system allows these virtual combatants to play to the crowd, and the more popular they become the more advantages they'll have during a match.

Another aspect of playing to crowd involves the ability to take on a good persona or a bad one by choosing to fight dirty or fair, thus influencing the crowd's reaction towards a grappler based on their personality.

While the E3 build contained only a handful of characters to play with, the final version will contain a roster of over 11 sexy grapplers, each with their own devastating signature moves, cool cinematic ring entrances, individual fighting styles and access to new moves and sexy costumes that will not only reflect the personality type of each girl, but make the WWE divas green with envy.

Along with a standard Exhibition mode, the E3 build also featured a Mud Match mode, allowing the female combatants to really get down and dirty in a mud pit, much to the delight of the male viewing audience. With these sexy vixens sporting some revealing bikinis while rolling around in the mud, you'll be kept highly entertained as mud slides off the bodies of these girls while dishing out the wrestling offense.

All in all, Rumble Roses is set to join the PS2 version of Ultimate Muscle as two of the most entertaining wrestling titles hitting the market this year. The E3 demo was tons of fun to play through and captured the championship crown away from THQ's run-of-the-mill WWE offerings.

Joseph Jackson
Staff Writer, Kikizo.com