Ready 2 Rumble Boxing Round Two, or as I like to call it, Midway Facepuncher, has crowbarred itself onto the GBA as one of the launch titles. It has some good and horrendously bad features that will be yammered about here.

The good: Arcade, Championship, and Survival modes. Arcade mode throws all the opponents at you in a ladder mode. Survival tests how long you can stand up to opponents with a non-refilling life bar. Championship lets you build and customize one of the boxers with cool-as-hell minigames. They're either timing, reflex, or quick memory based. No button mashing games! Yay!

There's eight standard boxers, and a few secret ones - Michael Jackson, of course. That wacky Shaquille O'Neal of Shaq Fu and crappy movie fame (er, uh, and basketball?) and some guy named Rumble Man.

The graphics are nice and nothing is terribly dark or anything. The characters move fluidly, the rings are reasonably varied and the crowds actually look good. The ring rotates all the way around too, which seems nice enough. Unfortunately, the view is locked at a certain distance - you can't see in close on the fighters. So no cool bruises or swelling or anything like that. Bummer.

Michael Buffer is here, loooooooooooooooud and cleaaaaaaaaaaaar. He announces both fighters in each match and, surprise surprise, shouts, "LLLLLLLLET'S GET READY TO RUMMMMMBLLLEEEEEEEEEEEE!!" (mp3; 450k)

The bad: As far as I can tell, there is NO TWO-PLAYER MODE. BLLAAAUUGGH. I'm pretty sure that's the equivalent of Midway shooting me in the face so they can take my money and throw it in a big pile. Maybe I'm wrong but I kinda doubt it; there's nothing about it in the manual, or in the in-game menus. Also, another mark against it is the lack of a battery save. Passwords have to be written down for the Championship mode. Eh.

And, apparently, not all of the characters are here - where's this Freak E. Deke I've heard so much about? Er, well, anyway, the characters don't seem incredibly different either - that's something I ought to look into.

As for the gameplay itself, well, it's somewhere in between careful stamina pacing and hitting punch buttons a lot. One problem I have with it is that blocks can only be performed out of an idle animation. That is, you can't block by holding the block button as your punch finishes. Nor is there much for sidestepping, but I've yet to master the ducking and such. The computer opponents seem pretty tough - time will tell if that's because I haven't, uh, mastered it yet, it's classic Midway cheese AI, or if it's genuinely smart.

If you need a verdict on this game right this minute, the lack of two-player mode and kind of "plah" gameplay hurts it too much to make it worth buying at full price. But, hey, maybe I'll change my mind after some more Championship mode...