Ready 2 Rumble Boxing

Like Nintendo's Punch-Out!! series, Ready 2 Rumble Boxing features many characters with colorful personalities (i.e. Afro Thunder, Boris "The Bear" Knokimov, etc.); however, unlike the Punch-Out!! series, the game is in 3D, thus allowing for more control over one's character in the ring. Also unlike Punch-Out!!, players can choose whichever boxer they want from a rather large selection of characters.

Throughout the fights in the game, there is a special RUMBLE meter which fills up, one or two letters at a time, until the word "RUMBLE" is spelled at the bottom of the screen. Letters can be obtained by successfully landing hard blows; most such actions will yield one letter, though some particularly strong punches may yield more. Once the meter is full, the player can power himself up, enabling access to a special combo called "Rumble Flurry", activated by pressing a button combination. Each character's "flurry" is unique to them, and consists of a series of punches which does a large amount of damage if landed successfully.

Ready 2 Rumble Boxing was developed for the Dreamcast using PCs equipped with 3dfx graphics cards. According to lead programmer Dave Wagner, the development team separated the game's graphics layer from the rest of the code in order to keep the code portable, while the rendering engine was rewritten and optimized specifically for the Dreamcast.

Wagner found that memory cache misses were relatively costly on the Dreamcast and consequently rewrote the graphics pipeline into small loops designed to make use of memory prefetching. The team also performed back-face removal in software rather than through the Dreamcast's graphics processor in order to reduce the amount of data transferred to the graphics hardware. The game's artists used PowerAnimator 8.1 on Silicon Graphics workstations.

The game received "favorable" reviews on all platforms except the Game Boy Color version, which received "mixed" reviews, according to the review aggregation website GameRankings. Chris Charla of NextGen said of the Dreamcast original in its November 1999 issue, "With fast action, seriously funny character design, and excellent graphics, Midway once again proves it's untouchable when it comes to arcade sports." Two issues later, however, Adam Pavlacka said of the Nintendo 64 version, "After playing the Dreamcast version for months, it is hard for us to accept an inferior version of the game, even if it does play just as well." In Japan, where the Dreamcast version was ported and published by Sega under the name Ready 2 Rumble Boxing: Uchikomewarai no Megaton Punch!!

〜; Ready 2 Rumble Boxing: Crushing Comical Megaton Punch!!) on January 13, 2000, Famitsu gave it a score of 28 out of 40.