First of all, We actually closed yesterday. So now, instead of only having 27 years left to paying off my house, I now have 30. Somehow I’m supposed to be relieved about that. What I’m relieved about is the absence of random phone calls demanding to know how much I spent on Mars bars in the year 1992 or that I immediately fax over notarized measurements of my dick.
In celebration of this new indentured status, I took my family to dinner at a slightly expensive restaurant (well, really, I had to, since the closing took an hour and a half thanks to some clerical errors the lender had made); then I bought my wife a CD she needed for a school function, and myself a new PS2 game.
The game’s name is Rumble Roses, and it is Exhibit A that the complete and utter collapse of civilization is underway, but at least this is a harbinger I can get behind. Here’s a screencap from gamespy.com to give you an idea of what this is about:
Yes, it’s a leather-clad dominatrix wrestling in a physics-defying bra design. 
Rumble Roses is theoretically a wrestling game, but it will come to be known in the future as “The Cat Fight Simulator”. All the playable characters are nubile (and given the Japanese origin of the game, sometimes disturbingly young) women, who seem to lead double lives as wrestlers and exotic dancers. The characters run the gamut of fetish types, including Catholic schoolgirl, cowgirl, naughty schoolteacher, nurse, and a masked wrestler in a red leather devil suit, seen above.
I’ve never played a wrestling game before, so I can’t really judge how it stacks up as an actual game in the genre; it is possible to target your opponents’ arms, legs, body or head in “Submission Holds”, causing damage and wearing them down. The instructions, though, are maddingly obtuse about how to achieve those holds. I’ve managed it by accident several times, but attempts to replicate them fail.
A lot of the moves are contextual; if you’re near a turnbuckle and press circle, you’ll climb it. Mostly though, you’ll be landing punches or kicks, building up a “Lethal Move Counter” that will either let you unleash your character’s signature “Lethal Move” or “Killer Move”.
Here, though, is where it gets perverse: Successful submission holds and some of the fancier flips and signature moves fill up a heart on the receiving character’s life bar. Once this heart is full, she’s wide open, so to speak, for a “Humiliation Finish”. The opponent then has one minute to build up her Lethal Move Counter to at least 1 so she can perform the humiliation move. You fanboys can put your cash back in your wallets, there is no nudity involved in these “Humiliation KOs”, but they do put the finishing touch to a game that seems like an interactive version of the “apartment wrestling” videotapes found in the back of lower-rent salacious magazines.
That’s still not the full package. The story mode is predictably stupid, but that’s not what is going to sell this game: The matches are not confined to the ring – there is also an option for mud wrestling. And it is possible to tell your Playstation to play both sides of a match, making it a cat fight generator. These two, alone, should cause the game to fly off the shelves and into the hands of Spike TV fans.
Yes, it’s a stupid game, and the very fact that I own it probably demeans me. Strangely, I don’t seem to care about that too much.
drfreex.com 