Like its predecessor, PS3 Fight Night contains a handful of modes. Play Now throws you into a fight, Career lets you select a boxer and battle your way to the championship, and Rivalry lets you select from 11 famous boxing wars such as Ali vs. Frazier, Jones Jr. vs. Hopkins, and Gatti vs. Ward. Interestingly enough, whenever you or your opponent is close to being knocked out while in Rivalry Mode, the game sometimes transitions to a first person perspective, where you must defend against an oncoming attack or decimate your foe. For whatever reason, the boxer on the ropes cannot fight back.

Rivalry Mode works great because it lets you jump into a classic match without having to wade through Play Now Mode's menus. Furthermore, you don't have to deal with the lag that plagues them (it takes some time for each boxer to load) and you get to box in an arena that would otherwise need to be unlocked in another mode, Madison Square Garden being one of the more appealing locales.

Fight Night's developers also deserve praise for the extensive list of options. You can select from three difficulty levels (easy, medium, hard), five cameras (Ringside, Overhead, Swing, Corner, Referee), number of rounds (4-15), length of these rounds (1-3 minutes), toggle illegal blows on/off, determine how often a fighter should be saved by the bell (never, any round, last round) and host of other things. You can even create your own boxer, choosing a first/last name, one of 50 nicknames, one of 63 home towns, stance (orthodox, southpaw), base style, punch style, block style, and several other factoids. Heck, you can even use sliders to adjust the size of his skull.

Online play shines, thanks to smooth play, headset support, easy to navigate lobbies and stat tracking. This is one of the few PlayStation 3 games that delivers an Xbox Live user-friendly experience, and EA deserves kudos. Finding opponents and setting up one-on-one fights takes but a couple minutes.

Enough about modes and options. Fight Night Round 3 shines because of how it plays. EA mapped the punching to the right analog stick, a feature known as Total Punch Control. By maneuvering the stick in various directions, you can throw several different types of rights and lefts. To perform a right hook, for example, all you have to do is tilt the stick to the right, then counterclockwise. To deliver a left hook haymaker, you tilt it to the left, slide it counterclockwise to the six-o-clock position and then slide it clockwise to nine-o-clock position. Total Punch Controls comes with a minor learning curve, since you need to figure out which punches to use at the right moments (miss a haymaker and you'll pay), but this system feels extremely intuitive, especially when combined with block and dodge. Before long, you'll dodge, weave and then put fools into comas.