Now let's get right back to the absolutely bonkers celebrity cameos that are more firmly planted in the incredibly strange variety, where public figures are taken from their familiar surroundings and dropped into a situation very different than the one audiences are used to. Like fish out of water stories, only with more violence. The pugilistic series Ready 2 Rumble lived and died with Sega's Dreamcast console, also the home of Space Channel 5, but whilst it was around it was a lot of fun - the larger-than-life alternative the more realistic boxing simulators, Ready 2 Rumble was like an update of the classic NES Punch-Out games, with a focus on fun gameplay and ridiculous colourful characters rather than actual boxing physics and sportsmen. One of those non-sportsmen featured in the second game? Michael Jackson, funnily enough, who goes by the name of The King Of Pop and not only allowed his likeness to appear in the title, but also did motion capture for his character. That's a little less weird than his appearance as Space Michael, and is considerably less weird than the fact that the Clintons also appear in Ready 2 Rumble: Round 2. Yep, then-current President Bill Clinton and the First Lady, Hilary, both appeared as playable characters. Their appearance was a little less official, as evidenced by them being credited respectively only as "Mr President" and "The First Lady", but yeah. If you wanted to solve the Lewinsky debacle in the old-fashioned way, this was the game to do it in.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
