Ultimate Muscle: The Path of the Superhero

The Kinnikuman Legacy gets Advanced, and it sure is weird. But how does it fare against other wrestling titles?

Evil cell phones, characters made up entirely of street signs, and guys who like to wrestle while dressed like deer?indeed, Ultimate Muscle is the wrestling game for people who don?t like wrestling games.

Ultimate Muscle (based on the anime-turned-Saturday-morning cartoon of the same name) is a well-presented portable wrestling game with a heightened sense of weirdness. The characters are big and bizarre, the moves are strange, and the dialogue is stranger. The visual variety and quality beats that of the few other GBA grapplers by a mile, even if the bargain-basement sound effects don?t quite match up to the pictures.

The variety doesn?t quite extend to the gameplay, however?while the characters all sure do look different, they all play pretty much exactly the same; and the distinction between different submissions and kicks is mostly just cosmetic. A Story mode, three-on-three tag team matches, and a Survival mode don?t do much to add to the variety, either, and there?s no create-a-wrestler feature like in BAM?s Fire Pro Wrestling 2.

The good news is that the wrestling engine is simple, accessible, fun, and totally unfrustrating. While you have a limited assortment of punches and kicks to wear your foe down, the grapples and counters are based on a ?golf game? gauge with a moving pointer and several colored ?zones.? If you tap the button while the bar is in the ?blue zone? before your opponent can, your move succeeds.

Ultimate Muscle is a simple, arcadey grappler that?s likely to appeal more to enthusiasts of things that are insane than hardcore wrestling fanatics. But everyone knows a guy with dinosaurs for hands could whip Hulk Hogan?s ass any day.

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