Ready 2 Rumble Boxing is a fast-paced arcade-style boxing game from Midway, the creators of the NBA Jam and NFL Blitz series. Ready 2 Rumble lives up to the Midway legacy of playability. Just like NBA Jam and NFL Blitz before it, R2R can be enjoyed by non-sports gamers as well as sports gamers. The "Rumble" moniker comes from Michael Buffer's trademark slogan (which he repeats ad nauseum before every fight) and from the "Rumble Meter". During a fight, as you land unguarded blows or counterhits, you will receive one or more letters of the word "Rumble". When fully spelled, you can activate a special power-up that allows your boxer to send a flurry of fast and hard-to-block punches to his/her opponent.

Ready 2 Rumble Boxing has two different modes of play: Arcade Mode and Championship Mode. Arcade Mode is the standard fighting game setup; choose your character and fight your way to the final boss. In Arcade Mode, you start fighting for 10th place and work your way to a title bout against the game's boss, Damien Black, an devil-like creature with powerful blows.

Championship Mode is R2R's main attraction. In it, you choose a boxer from three: Boris "The Bear" Knokimov, "Butcher" Brown and R2R's poster boy, Afro Thunder. It would have been nice to choose from a slightly broader initial lineup. In order to play as the rest of the games' characters, you must first play through the championship mode with one of those three.

After choosing your boxer, you name your boxers' gym and the choose to either Train Your Boxer, Prize Fight or Title Fight. You start with $1,000 to your name, and no boxing experience. Prize Fights, held in a ring inside a nice, casino-like room, can be for as little as $2,000 to as high as $35,000. Title Fights will move you up through the ranks from 10th place to a 1st place title shot. You are allowed 20 fights per class, and you'll have to allow for at least 10 fights to make it to the championship bout in order to move up to the next class. There are four classes: Bronze, Silver, Gold and Champion.

Both Prize Fights and Title Fights will give your boxer stamina and experience, but to get speed and power you'll have to Train Your Boxer. For some of your hard-earned cash, you can buy different types of training, from speed bag to weightlifting to a Parappa-the-Rapper-style aerobics dance. After training and working your way through each class, new characters will be unlocked for you to play in Championship Mode. To unlock all the characters, you will need to play through every class with every character. This gets extremely boring after the first character. It's better to input the cheat code to get all the boxers at once so that you can see the boss characters without having to go through Championship Mode. Exclusive to the PlayStation version of R2R Boxing is a character named Gino Stiletto. A Rocky look-alike, Stiletto also sounds uncannily like Ray Romano. I guess everybody really does love Raymond, including R2R's developer. Even with that hilarious oddity going for him, Stiletto doesn't fit in with the rest of the boxers. Needless to say, character development isn't one of R2R's strong points.

The PlayStation version of R2R Boxing doesn't measure up to the Dreamcast version, but it comes off well enough on its own. Due to the PlayStation's lack of graphics power, the game doesn't look nearly as good as it does on Dreamcast. The games' title screen and character select screens are sharp and detailed, but the in-game graphics are not as detailed. The character models are composed of less polygons, which makes the facial expressions much harder to see. However, aside from the scrunched faces, the characters bodies and the ring are very smooth and clear, which makes the PSX version slightly more attractive than the N64 version.

The sound is just as good as the Dreamcast version. The music is flawless, from the opening theme to the repetitive and slightly annoying background music. The sound effects and voices are clear and easily heard, even if they are repetitive.

The gameplay, although easy to learn, lacks depth and style. You have access to a decent amount of punches, but nothing really captures your attention. There is also some noticeable slowdown after "Rumble!" powerups. The game itself lacks the depth of gameplay to warrant any playing after the initial run-through. Even on the hardest difficulty setting, you can waltz through the game by constantly punching and backing off, then repeating the process.