User Rating: 7.7 | Kinnikuman Nisei: Shinsedai Choujin vs Densetsu Choujin GC
UM is fun with friends. The graphics are great (with minor clipping issues, which really should have been resolved during production). The music and commentating has to really be one of the true gems of the game. Going largely unnoticed, I laughed myself silly when I realized that the commentators were even commentating on me preessing pause to take a quick break. The control is spot on and the fighting engine is damn near flawless thanks to the great folks at AKI. With all of that, UM makes taking on a few of your friends fun as hell. The problem is that in a single player campaign, trying to unlock all of the various characters and M.U.S.C.L.E. figures, is more of a chore than anything else. The Comp AI can be very uneven. Some matches I breezed through. Others, I had a huge lead on my opponent, only to have him come back in a pretty vicious assault, AND THAT WAS ON EASY!! The story mode is crap. Sure it's fun to go through the first five times, with the real voices of the UM universe voicing little vignettes about battling for respect or to be a top M.U.S.C.L.E., but when you have to complete it again and again to earn enough coins to unlock all of the hidden characters (considering that all of the story modes are roughly the same single match, single match, tag match, single match, single match formula), you can probably guess how unfun the whole process becomes after a while. Overall, the game was fun. I'd have given it about a 7 out of ten. For me, though, it's not worth dropping 50 bones on. I'm gonna wait till the price drops and maybe pick up a copy on eBay or something. Give it a try, rent it, play it on medium difficulty, and if you don't end up throwing your controller through your TV, then maybe you'll be able to see all of the coll little UM details too. 
