The graphics are cartoony, but dark in The Con - more of a graphic novel feel is conveyed than anything else. The amazing thing about the character graphics in The Con is really how customizable the characters are. There are two editing modes, and in the advanced one, you can change almost every imaginable measurement on your fighter. You can also change the colors of things, from your clothing and accessories to hair, eye and skin. The wild thing is that there are no special skin tone restrictions. When selecting a character's skin tone, you can choose any color you like, just like when selecting clothing colors. If you want your character to be anime blue, lizard green or demonic red, you can do it here. This seems that from a programmatic standpoint, it would be easier than creating a limited subset of colors to choose from. Personally, I am surprised that so many games make you choose from a very limited range of skin tones.

The music in The Con was created for the game and there are no settings to select which songs you want to hear, but the songs are decent, fit the game well and have clean looping. You can change the audio balancing, at least, so if you don't like the music, you can lower its volume level while keeping the other sounds in the game at a higher volume.

The sound effects and voice work are well done in The Con, contributing to the feel of the game and helping to lay out a believable and absorbing story as you play.

So, The Con is simply a fighting game like any other out there. Well, except that you build up a team and manage their training and selecting their fights. And the characters are uber-customizable. That's about it; you build and manage a fighting team and they're highly customizable and you can actually "con" the people betting to change the odds in your favor. And that's it. You manage a team, they're really customizable, you can pull "cons" to change the odds and it uses a third person view that is like Punch Out on steroids...

Did I mention that you manage your character(s) training? Not only that, but their healing as well. You'll need to make them rest to regain health (or take them to the hospital if you can afford the money more that the resting time). You'll need to get them cross training - they can train for Speed, Power, Health, Skill and Toughness; if you neglect one of these, it will slowly decrease over time.

There are also special clothing items and accessories that you can purchase as you begin making some bling. Some of these items will give you a boost to your stats, such as a percentage increase to Speed, Power, Health, Skill or Toughness. This is basically the equivalent to magical items in an RPG, which doesn't make a lot of sense for a fighter / strategy / simulation game, but since this is the first game I can think of that combines these three genres, I guess they can call the shots a bit. The prices of these items help to reinforce the conclusion that they must be magical items. (Yikes!) At least some of them seem to make sense, such as the bikini bottom that gives a bonus to the girl's Speed rating.

There are two types of multiplayer gameplay available in The Con. Ad Hoc mode is a Wi-Fi multiplayer mode that allows two PSP gamers who each have a copy of The Con to play against each other, head to head. In this mode, you have a choice, you can "Just Fight" or you can raise the stakes and "Risk Items" that you've purchased as mentioned above. If you and your friend only have one copy of The Con between the two of you, you can still play against each other with the other multiplayer mode, "Game Sharing". Game sharing allows you to send a multiplayer 'demo'-esque (read 'simplified') version of the game to a friend via the PSP Wi-Fi connection, and then play head to head - with just the one copy of the game. This is pretty cool; although it's a limited form of the game, it allows for multiplayer gameplay without a second copy of The Con.

The Con is a strange game - which is not a bad thing; this merely means that the developers showed a bit of innovation when they developed the game. This is what gamers are supposedly craving. This uniqueness does contribute, fairly directly, to its difficulty; we have to learn how to deal with new and unexpected things. Again, this is not a bad thing. This inherent increase in learning curve is offset very well by the "tutorial" type introduction and other help offered in the game.

Also, as you progress in the game, you can gain new moves. These moves increase the complexity of the game, but you can use them to rebuild your combos to create more efficient combos or combos that simply fit your fighting style better. This improvement, along with increased stats, makes your character a better fighter, making it easier to win fights (or control the fight better, if you're throwing it). Don't expect to get bored, however, because there's still someone better than you that you can take on.

In The Con, you literally choose your fights. When you choose your fights, you can choose easier opponents (higher rank numbers) or select fights that are set further out if you need time to heal and train. Also, you don't have to win to make money - you can bet on the other guy and then try to look good at the beginning of the fight and then still lose to the guy - and the worse the opponent is ranked, the higher the odds will be against him beating you. (Just be careful not to accidentally knock him out.)

If you want to play and practice a bit without worrying about messing up your Story mode progress, you can simply not save your progress or, if you prefer, you can play in Quick Play mode. In this mode, you get into the action much faster and can try out different fighting strategies and get a bit of practice in. This is actually a good idea; sometimes it can be difficult to pull a con off successfully - some practice can help.

The Con has a lot of innovative and interesting aspects to it. First, it incorporates a camera angle that picks up where Super Punch-Out left off. It seems that the third person with transparency view has been completely ignored since Punch-Out - until now. You play in a third-person view and from a bit of an angle. When the action gets lined up so that your character would be blocking your view, he or she fades to a translucent rendering that allows you to see your opponent through your character. Once you play for a bit, this becomes much less noticeable, but remains very effective in showing you the action.

One very interesting aspect of The Con is the con element, itself. The dynamics of keeping up appearances to give a 'believable' performance for the crowd are very cool; it forces you to push things to the limit - you want to look like you're really taking a beating and then turn it around with an amazing comeback or look really strong, but leave enough of your opponent around to be able to throw the fight to him - without making it obvious that you're not trying to win anymore.

The character customization available in The Con is above and beyond most console games, not to mention portable console games. You can use the Simple Edit mode to set your character up or use the Advanced Edit mode and specify exactly how your character is to look, from height to eye placement to build and foot size. I was astounded at how many variables I had control over. All of this customization and tweaking ability does cause The Con to have elevated load times, but this is mostly incurred when actually in the Advanced Edit mode - this doesn't seem to greatly impact load times during gameplay.

The Con supports the PSP's "Game Sharing" feature, allowing two players to play against each other on two PSP's - with just one copy of the game. This is an interesting feature that seems to serve more as an interactive advertisement for the game (or a demo for the multiplayer functionality). The idea behind game sharing is that the PSP with the game can transfer a version of the game to the other PSP, allowing multiple PSP gamers to try out a multiplayer aspect of the game. In The Con, the size of this transfer is kept small by only allowing the same type of fighters in a match. In other words, in the Game Sharing mode, you can either choose "Street Boxing Vs. Street Boxing", "Jeet Kune Do Vs. Jeet Kune Do", "Wrestling Vs. Wrestling", "Tae Kwon Do Vs. Tae Kwon Do" or "Kickboxing Vs. Kickboxing". Additionally, you both use the same character model when you fight and the person "sharing" the game doesn't get any music. This can be almost unnoticeable if you're playing in close proximity with the other player and the PSP with music is turned up a bit. The data transfer load times are still not blazing fast, but are surprisingly acceptable, given the fact that you're transferring the game data to the other PSP. This is a nice feature if you really like the game, want to play mulitplayer with a friend and your friend is undecided about buying his/her own copy of the game.

All in all, The Con is a nicely made game, with some interesting cross-genre aspects. If you're looking for innovation and playing games that experimentally cross or blur the lines between genres, The Con is an excellent example of doing it right.