Photo courtesy of EA Sports

Playstation 2

Violence is as American as apple pie, so it is no surprise that professional boxing makes millions of dollars every year.

Knockout Kings 2002 attempts to deliver a "fantasy" form of professional boxing, where opponents can pit a boxer from today - such as Oscar de la Hoya - against a great from the past, such as this title's feature, Muhammad Ali.

But before anyone fights in this game, there is going to be a bit of a wait. This game loads about as fast as an 80-year-old grandmother gets on a horse.

After the graphics are finally visible, there is no excuse for the excessive load time. The arenas are populated with two-dimensional pictures of people who have three frames of animation. When viewed at the right angle, one can see that people are duplicated in a straight line from the front row to the back.

The boxers move fluidly, but the rendering leaves something to be desired. The boxers look glassy, like action figures covered in ice. A nice touch is that if a boxer gets hit in the face enough, the face becomes bloody and bruised - yet it will take a lot of hits to get to that point. In fact, some boxers seem to downright defy the laws of human physiology.

Sure, boxers are tough individuals, but if a boxer gets relentlessly pummeled for an entire round and falls to the mat, they should not get back up with more energy and more stamina than they had before being pummeled. Yes, that's right, in the world of Knockout Kings, a beating to the head makes the mind sharper and the body more alert.

Also in this strange and mysterious world, when a boxer is knocked down, the referee is kind enough to stop the count-out if the boxer shows even the slightest amount of movement toward getting up, and when the boxer does get up, another round has passed. Knockdown in round six, boxer is down, is allowed to get up - it is suddenly round eight.

The sound is also strange and mysterious. A boxer hitting flesh sounds a lot like someone punching a bowl of Jell-O. Further, the in-game boxing commentators seem to forget every boxer's name except for Muhammad Ali, a name they always pronounce with misplaced gusto, as in, "Ali! Lays down a right hook," or "Ali! Moves around the ring," or "Ali! Is doing really poorly this fight, isn't he, Jim?'

This game boasts a "radically new" control system in which a combination of the analog stick and button combinations will make the boxer stick and move like the pros. Except you won't need it, as you can do just as well mashing buttons at random. Paying attention to on-screen action is not even necessary; one can knock an opponent down on the screen, mashing away on the buttons in one hand while checking e-mail across the room.

Overall, Knockout Kings 2002 shows that, as far as boxing games go, the greatest of all time is still Punch Out for the Nintendo Entertainment System.