Dead or Alive (Import) Review

Dead or Alive is another one of those weird arcade fighting games that you've heard of, and maybe even seen, but never bothered to play. Tecmo's fighter, made using the same hardware that brought Virtua Fighter 2 to life, plays similarly to VF2 but uses a slightly improved fighting engine. The result is a game that plays pretty well, translates to the Saturn well, and ultimately, makes a more interesting home game than the arcade version ever hoped to be.

The fighting is a lot like the Virtua Fighter series, but there have been a few changes made. Instead of a dedicated block button, back blocks now, and the A button performs counters. The combo system is similar, but there is a larger focus on juggles. The edges of each arena are surrounded by floor jets. If your character falls on one of these panels, he shoots up into the air, allowing for some pretty insane juggle combos. Character design is pretty good, with the typical array of fighters, ninjas, and women.

The graphics are very smooth, but the most noticeable thing about the graphical design is, as strange as this may sound, the female characters' breasts. They bounce around like gelatin for no apparent reason. I mean, if you do a kick, they slightly jiggle. If you fall down, they bounce like crazy for far too long. You have to see it to believe it. It's the very definition of overkill. It's just plain wrong. You can disable the stupid bouncing action from the options menu if it really bothers you. The sound effects are decent, and the music is tolerable, but the speech is all pretty bad. It's very fuzzy and distorted.

In the end, Dead or Alive is an above-average fighting game. The graphics and sound are tolerable, and the gameplay is different enough from the VF series to keep it fresh. The PlayStation version will be released here, but it looks as if the Saturn version is going to be stuck in Japan forever, so if you're PlayStation-less, import away.

Like its plucky eponymous hero, Ultimate Ninja 3 gets by on sheer charm. Unlike the boy ninja, its ninjutsu is weaker than watered-down ramen. No, it isn't much of a fighting game. But it's so faithful to its source material, it should nevertheless provide hours of good entertainment to fans of the series. It has two short single-player modes, pitch-perfect writing, flawless voice acting, spit-shined graphics, and a surprisingly entertaining dating system. All of this is stuffed with the usual long list of unlockable characters, item collection, several terrible minigames, and of course, the wimpy combat. If you're looking for a good fighter, look elsewhere. But if you're looking for an interactive and sweet-tempered trip to Hidden Leaf Village, this is the game for you.

The meatiest single-player mode is called Ultimate Contest, and it tells the story of a festival thrown together by Tsunade for the sake of visitors from the hidden village of Sand. The main event is a battle royal in which each contestant gets a crystal. When contestants fight, the winner gets the loser's crystals. The two who finish with the most crystals get to battle for the right to create a new Hidden Leaf Village regulation. Rock Lee wants to force everyone to grow bushy eyebrows. Kiba wants to mandate regular medical examinations for the village canines. Sakura wants to create a lovey-dovey Sasuke rule. And Naruto, of course, wants to be Hokage.

If that sounds just like an episode, it also feels like one. From the way Naruto says, "I'm hittin' you, and you're hittin' the ground!" to Hinata's shy mumbling, every character is perfectly represented here, and they all get their chances to shine. This is immaculate fan service. The story unfolds in three stages: a qualifying round in which you have to get 60 crystals, a semifinal round in which you try to get as many as possible, and a final fight with another ninja. By the way, Jounin are also allowed to compete, so your opponent could be anybody. (If you don't know what a Jounin is, look at it this way: If Naruto is as tough as a nail, your average Jounin is as tough as a hammer.)

The way this all plays out is simple: You run around Hidden Leaf Village completing simple quests and challenging other characters to fights. For instance, at one point you happen upon Hinata, who has been badly beaten, so you go find her some medicine. As you travel around the village you can destroy pots and crates to find money, and collect scrolls that spawn after each completed quest. Money buys all sorts of things, and scrolls by the items you'll need to unlock new jutsus.

There are also a handful of minigames you'll be asked to compete in, nearly all of which are really, really bad. The shuriken-tossing game misses its mark the worst: Targets pop up in a field with button symbols on their chests, and you have to hit the corresponding button faster than your opponent. It seems simple, until they start appearing in numbers larger than three at a time. There's a penalty associated with hitting a wrong button, and in your scramble to throw shuriken at five different targets, it's easy to somehow completely lose all of your points. Right when you think all hope is lost, giant dummies spring up that can absorb dozens of shuriken, letting you make up all your lost points just hitting the button faster than your competitor. In short, this minigame kicks your butt and then lets you win.

The other minigames are just as bad, but in less interesting ways. To give you an idea of this without describing them all, the best one is Orochimaru's Whack-A-Snake. But the best thing about it isn't repeatedly bopping snakes with a hammer, but rather all the money you get for doing so (since Whack-A-Snake is a casino game). And you'll want all the money you can muster in order to buy high-priced gifts for all the characters you encounter. Why? So you can go out on dates with them, of course!

In the third round of the competition, when the only thing left for you to do is challenge your rival, you can walk around talking to people. Or, if you have gifts they might like, you can give it to them. This will cause them to show up later, and ask you out on a date. These are generally a lot of fun, though you can go on only two dates per character. Some are sweet (Hinata's dates are very cute), some are sassy (when you go out with Temari, you basically call her fat), and others are downright weird (Kurenai wants to watch you eat vegetables. Lots and lots of vegetables.)

Guilty Gear X Review

There's no need for feeling guilty about still liking 2D fighting games in this day and age. Though the genre has seen few changes since the release of Capcom's Street Fighter II a decade ago, the fighting game remains characterized by its fast, responsive gameplay and competitive spirit--features that will never go out of style. Guilty Gear X, a visually impressive and altogether very Japanese fighting game, is good evidence that the genre isn't going anywhere, for better or worse. The game's bizarre yet likable characters, familiar mechanics, and colorful, high-resolution graphics can make it a lot of fun for fans of previous 2D fighting games. At the same time, Guilty Gear X offers little that hasn't been done before--not that its tried-and-true concepts don't make for fun matches.

Guilty Gear X is actually a port of a Dreamcast game that was never released in this country, which itself is the sequel to the 1998 PlayStation fighting game, simply called Guilty Gear. As a sequel, Guilty Gear X offers what you might expect--better graphics, some new characters, and some new moves and techniques. Like in its predecessor, the far-flung setting of Guilty Gear X immediately stands out. Each of the game's 14 initially selectable characters looks unusual to say the least, though on the other hand, the game's roots in anime and manga are obvious, as is the direct influence of other popular fighting games on Guilty Gear X's character design. At any rate, the cast of Guilty Gear X--featuring well-built, strangely clothed lanky guys with names like Axl Low, Chipp Zanuff, and Sol Badguy, and cute yet not-so-surprisingly powerful gals like Jam Kuradoberi and Millia Rage--will more than likely make or break the game for you. If you can't deal with special moves with such names as "Mr. Dolphin!" and "Dim Bomber," or characters that look nothing like normal people, then you won't like Guilty Gear X. These same things might just as soon attract you to the game, though. Guilty Gear X is the sort of game that provides a brief glimpse of how different gaming can be in Japan compared with this country, and if nothing else, it's always good to see domestic versions of games that are so decidedly foreign.

The gameplay isn't nearly as weird as the game's style and appearance might first suggest. If you're familiar with other 2D fighting games, you'll soon recognize that most every one of the game mechanics found in Guilty Gear X can be traced directly to some other fighting game either by Capcom or by SNK. Guilty Gear X uses the PlayStation 2 pad's face buttons for attacks--your character can execute punches, kicks, and light and heavy slashes with his or her weapon of choice. The game takes many cues from the spectacular battles of Capcom's Marvel Superheroes games, in that most characters can dash back and forth, execute super jumps several stories high, chain together strings of punches, slashes, and kicks, block in midair, counterattack from a blocking position, and much more. Guilty Gear X also borrows Street Fighter Alpha III's midair recovery system--you can juggle your opponent with consecutive hits in midair, but the opponent has a chance to snap out of it by pressing two attack buttons simultaneously as he's getting pounded.

TMNT: Mutant Melee Review

Based on the current Saturday-morning cartoon series, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game franchise has gone from merely average to downright lousy in the span of 18 months. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Melee is the latest of the crop, coming just six months after the last game's release. Alarming as that timeline is, Mutant Melee is so low-quality that it's hard to believe it took a full six months of development time to put it together. This is an incredibly slapdash and barren game that has absolutely nothing to offer you beyond monotonous, almost-broken fighting mechanics, tiny environments, and a bunch of lame unlockables. If you were holding out hope that Konami would finally right the Turtles franchise, Mutant Melee may be the last sign you'll need to finally abandon any and all faith.

Unlike the last two TMNT games, Mutant Melee aims to be more of a multiplayer-focused arena fighting game, sort of in the vein of Power Stone or Super Smash Bros. Melee. Instead, it ends up closer to something like Stake: Fortune Fighters, in terms of quality. The main problem is that the fighting mechanics feel like they're built entirely off the action from the TMNT beat-'em-up games. Konami's Hawaii studio has gone to the trouble of adding a couple of three-button combos for each character, but the action is still repetitive. Hit, hit, knockdown; hit, hit, knockdown; and so on. The game attempts to break up the monotony of the fighting controls by throwing in a special move you can perform, but that doesn't help. Couple the bad mechanics with some thoroughly bad character balancing--some characters, like Michelangelo, are incredibly easy to abuse, whereas others, like Donatello, are near worthless--and what you have is some downright unpleasant gameplay.

The other way the game tries to break things up is by adding some weapons, power-ups, and occasional obstacles to each fighting arena. Basically, you can run around breaking open crates, and you'll find weapons like big swords, axes, and machine guns to nail your opponents with. It's a nice idea, but it's horribly executed. The special weapons just aren't worth using; despite the fact that they do a little more damage than the average hit, they're impossible to use effectively. The timing of the hits for special melee weapons is beyond insane, and the guns are too hard to aim properly. The power-ups are a little better. You can get attack strength as well as defense and speed bonuses, and each work as advertised, but they don't end up helping matters much.

The arena obstacles, which differ from level to level, are easily the dumbest aspect of fights. If you're fighting in a back alley, sometimes cars will drive through the middle of the arena, hitting people as they go. If you're fighting on a rooftop, sometimes bombs will randomly drop, and you'll have to jump to another rooftop before the whole building collapses. Once again, these aren't bad ideas, but they come across as lazy ways to try to dress up the otherwise lousy fighting and the completely cramped arenas. Every arena in the game feels cardboard-box-size in scale, with no room to move around or maneuver, and they all look pretty weak to boot.

There's also just not a whole lot to do in Mutant Melee. There are two modes of play: a really basic multiplayer mode with variants on king of the hill and survival battles, and the god-awful adventure mode. Imagine if you had to make a Turtles storyline for 10 different characters, but had no time, no writers, and no ability to make cutscenes--whatever would you do? Well, for starters, you would start out with a text intro, set up each stage with a quick thing like, "You've got to get into the lab! Beat down the foot soldiers!" and then repeat throughout each stage of the mode until you got to the end, where you would see another lame text screen. Sounds wonderful, doesn't it? Each stage pretty much consists of beating up all the enemies onscreen, and in the rare instance that it does try to deviate from that blueprint--as is the case in certain stages where you'll have to, say, operate a mechanical arm to pick up larger enemies and dump them in molten metal, all while trying to avoid said enemies--the game becomes almost unplayable. Your reward for braving the adventure mode is a bunch of character art, assorted other fan-service extras, and more playable characters that you'll probably never even want to play with.

In terms of graphics and sound, you're basically looking at the same quality of the last Turtles game, though with no animated cutscenes or much in the way of voice acting. The in-game graphics are the same cel-shaded graphics found in Battle Nexus, though with slightly more polished character models offset by some glitchy animations. The Xbox and GameCube iterations of the game look nearly identical, so you won't find any graphical differences between them. The audio consists largely of the same generic soundtrack as in the last two games and repetitive, annoying voice samples that repeat like crazy. In summary, this game neither sounds nor looks very good.

Mutant Melee simply amounts to an extremely poor effort. It seems to exist solely for the purpose of taking advantage of the fans of the TMNT cartoon. Regardless of your opinion of the show, or past games in the series, be sure to steer clear of Mutant Melee.

Yie Ar Kung Fu Review

Yie Ar Kung Fu is one of those arcade games that has largely been lost in time. When it was released in 1985, it was technically one of the first fighting games on the scene. But because it didn't allow for two-player competitive play, it's hard to compare it to what we now consider a fighting game. This one-on-one battle game pits you, as a generic kung fu guy named Oolong, against a variety of fighting thugs armed with swords, chains, clubs, fans, blubber, and so on. It's a relic from arcade's past that probably won't appeal to new players, but outside of being able to say "Hey, I remember liking this game back in the day," old arcade buffs probably won't get $5 out of it either.

Each stage pits you against a different fighter, and you work your way through 11 fights. Once you finish off the last guy who is an unarmed but savagely dangerous character named Blues, the game wraps around to the start, so you just keep playing for score. You have a punch and a kick button; these buttons in conjunction with different directions on the joystick make up your different attacks. For most fights, properly timed low attacks really do the trick, but really, the only difficulty in the game is figuring out which attack pattern to use to come out on top. That's not very tough, and if you get stuck, there are FAQs online that will surely help.

The game's two-player mode alternates between the two players, so there's no versus combat at all. A handheld version of this game appeared not too long ago, and it featured a mode that let you fight against other players. But this one is a strict emulation of the arcade version with the option for some nicely redrawn graphical updates. While there's an online mode, it's the same goofy online option that's appeared in other Konami Xbox Live Arcade games. You both play one-player games at the same time, but you don't even see the other player's screen. Yet for some reason, your game still feels jumpy, and it lags in spots, which makes it difficult to play.

It's hard to imagine players coming away from Yie Ar Kung Fu feeling as if they got a good deal for the $5 they'd spend to get the full version of the game. The graphical update is nice, but there isn't enough depth to the game, and even players with fond memories of the original release probably won't find much to enjoy.

The second Toshinden title for the Saturn, Toshinden URA, is an enhanced version of Toshinden 2, which originally appeared on the Playstation. In addition to a new storyline, players will find new moves and new characters. In this installment, a mystery man has stolen the Toshinhei Replicant and is wreaking havoc on the world. What better way to get to the bottom of this mess than by getting in a ring and fighting it out?

Alongside the eleven fighters from Toshinden 2 is a batch of new fighters. They include RonRon, a wimpy scientist who has the unfortunate tendency of falling down while doing some of her moves; Ripper, a murderer who carries around spinning blades; Repli, the Toshinhei Replicant with the moves of both Eiji and Kayin; and Wolf, the final boss (who beats his opponent into submission with a stick). Though weak fighters, these new characters fit into the Toshinden mythos just fine.

The graphics in Toshinden URA don't stand up to those found in the Playstation version. The backgrounds appear blocky, as do the fireballs and other special moves sprites. The character animation is somewhat choppy, and the graphics appear to be pixelated (the main 3-D enhancement is the ability to dodge incoming attacks by diving out of the way, but it doesn't make the game worthwhile). This version adds some full-motion video intros and a video that plays if you get a double perfect against any character. The music is the standard fare for fighting games, and the hits and noises aren't anything special.

Though URA has the most features of any Toshinden release to date, it's still like playing the previous Toshinden games. That is to say, the control is sluggish, the combo system is weak, and the special moves are dull. However, for those in need of a new fighting game, and who don't already own any other Toshinden title, then URA is worth a look.

Hot on the heels of Bushido Blade, Tobal 2 (Square's other fighting game) captures all of the good points of the original Tobal while making several improvements. The result is fresh and interesting gameplay, and a sequel that is exactly what it should be – a game that's better than the original in every way.

The story behind Tobal 2 is much the same as the original's. The Emperor Udan is holding another fighting tournament, and all the original characters have returned. This time around, however, two new fighters have taken up the challenge: Chaco is a woman with some incredible-looking combos, and Doctor V is a tall, powerful fighter with some kickboxing skills. There are also a ton of hidden characters in the game, including the lovable Chocobo from the Final Fantasy series.

The basics of Tobal haven't changed in this sequel. The controls are identical, and most of the characters' moves have remained the same. However, the game is now more combo oriented, so every character can link moves together for some impressive combinations and juggles. Also, each character now has a fireball, and although it steals some of your health when it charges up, it more than makes up for its theft by doing incredible amounts of damage when it connects. (A fireball only needs to be charged up for two seconds for it to kill in one hit.) This may sound cheap, but as the fireballs are easily sidestepped, which means it requires a fair amount of strategy to use this technique effectively.

The Quest mode has been improved quite a bit in Tobal 2. Instead of just picking a dungeon and fighting through it, you can now explore an entire town as well. You need to eat and sleep to stay in top form, and there are shops and other facilities in the town to keep the fighter fighting. The dungeons themselves (which are in several different locations in and around the town) haven't changed too much, but they look much cleaner now. There is also a Tekken 2-style practice mode that helps you to learn the new combo linking system, practice your throws, and try out new techniques. The Practice mode also has a feature that is used to customize each character's hair, clothes, and glove colors.

Tobal 2's visuals make a strong case against the Nintendo 64's superiority for delivering quality graphics. Not only are the untextured characters (much like Mario 64) very smooth, but they also move incredibly fast and at a very high frame rate. The lighting effects are very nice looking as well, especially on the game's fireballs. Tobal 2 also has some really great sound effects, although the game's music is occasionally inappropriate for a given action.

Tobal 2 may not ever be anyone's favorite fighting game, but it's a solid title that will keep players occupied for quite some time. It makes for a great diversion from the norm (much like Bushido Blade does). Even so, it doesn't pose much of a threat to the Street Fighters, Tekkens, and Mortal Kombats out there.