Last year's Dragon Ball Z: Shin Budokai for the PlayStation Portable was a decent fighting game that succeeded on its ability to deliver manic action with a good amount of over-the-top, Dragon Ball Z flair. A year later, Atari returns with Dragon Ball Z: Shin Budokai - Another Road. It was a wise decision not to call it Shin Budokai 2, as Another Road brazenly recycles nearly everything of consequence from the first Shin Budokai. What's there is still good, but the package feels kind of pointless.

The action is identical, offering straightforward, one-on-one fighting. The cast offers little in the way of surprises, featuring most of the major heroes and villains from the Frieza Saga on through to Dragon Ball GT, many of whom come in multiple forms. There are a good number of fighters to choose from, but there's not much of an attempt to balance them, with some fighters simply being rated as more powerful than others. There are plenty of signature DBZ touches to the gameplay, with a heavy focus on ridiculously potent energy attacks, most of which are unique to each fighter. Aside from their different power levels and special attacks, though, every fighter in Another Road handles identically, so once you've mastered one fighter, there's not a lot left to learn.

The gameplay modes are also stock for the genre, with a local, wireless two-player versus mode, an arcade mode, as well as survival, time trial, and challenge modes. As was the original Shin Budokai, Another Road is a pretty good-looking game. The environments are pretty bland and there are lots of blurry textures, but the characters look sharp and are well animated, and most of the time the game is soaked with crazy, explosive effects. Sometimes all of the glowing characters and massive energy attacks get to be too much, though, and there's occasionally some pronounced slowdown. Most of the voice work and sound effects have been pulled directly from the show, giving it a sense of authenticity, though during battle the fighters have a tendency to repeat the same few exclamations in rapid succession.

So what sets Another Road apart from the original Shin Budokai? Mostly it's the new single-player story mode, aptly named "Another Road." Rather than plodding through the same tired sagas that have been done to death in just about every prior Dragon Ball Z game, Another Road conjures up a sort of "What If?" story about Babidi appearing in the alternate future where Future Trunks lives...in the future. It quickly snowballs into a much greater conflict that involves loads of time travel and trips to the afterlife, as well as just about every Dragon Ball Z character you'd care to mention. While storytelling has never been a real strength of Dragon Ball Z, the arc in Another Road is so singularly focused on cramming in as much fan service as possible that the nonsensical story borders on insulting.

To its credit, the story mode does add one somewhat interesting layer to the gameplay. Each chapter consists of several missions, each based on a different continent populated with a handful of villages. Often, you can take on these missions in any order you please, but once you do, you'll find yourself with an overworld view of the continent, able to fly around above it in real time. The villains you have to defeat will also be cruising around this overworld, and more often than not they'll immediately start attacking the villages. You can stop them by rushing up to them and attacking, which will initiate a regular, one-on-one fight. Keeping the villages in good health is key, since your character's health bar carries over from fight to fight, and aside from using the extremely limited Senszu beans to replenish your health after losing a fight, the only way to replenish your health is by hovering over a village.

Most of the time, you'll be accompanied by two other hero characters of your choosing. Though you can't control them directly, which characters you choose will inform their behavior, such as whether they'll prioritize defending you or villages from attacks. Between keeping an eye on your health, your companions, the villages, and your enemies, there's a lot to juggle in the overworld. While it's frustrating when you need to be in two places at once, it's satisfying when you're able to keep yourself, your companions, and the villages all in good health. It's too bad, then, that the mode is undermined by fights that pit you against the same opponents over and over again, and an incessant amount of pace-killing load times.

Which characters you choose to back you up can make a big difference in how a mission plays out, though the new power-up system plays a pretty big role as well. In nearly every other Budokai game, powering up your hero was done through capsules that you'd earn either by winning fights, or by purchasing them from a shop with money earned by winning fights. Here, the capsules have been replaced with cards that can be placed on a three-by-three grid for each character. What makes this system functionally different from the capsules is that in addition to cards that boost specific attributes like health, ki, melee attacks, energy attacks, and so on, there are other cards, which, depending on where they're placed on the card grid, will boost the effectiveness of other, adjacent cards. It's not overly involved, but being thoughtful about fighters' card grids can make an appreciable difference in how they perform in a fight.

If you're a DBZ fan who missed the original Shin Budokai, Another Road is a simple, enjoyable fighting game featuring a number of fan-favorite characters, all wrapped up in a tidy portable package. But if you've already played any amount of the original Shin Budokai, the new story mode and card-based power-up system, though interesting, are just not enough.

Unfortunately, the PC doesn't see many original fighting games. Though it's received a handful of ports over the years, most of the attempts to bring original Street Fighter-style action to the home computer have been total failures. One of the lone standouts is the 1993 release of One Must Fall 2097, a robot fighting game that followed the Street Fighter concept by presenting the action from a side view and giving each robot a handful of special attacks. It moved well, contained a good variety of characters and options, and was generally fun to play. Now, a decade later and after years of prerelease chatter, Diversions Entertainment has finally released a follow-up with One Must Fall: Battlegrounds. This new One Must Fall attempts to stay in the fighting genre while also presenting a free-roaming, fully 3D game for up to 16 players. It's a fun take on the fighting genre--once you manage to familiarize yourself with the controls--but some of its radical ideas work better than others.

Battlegrounds puts you in command of a pilot character that controls a giant fighting robot via a neural link. Apparently, this brand of robot fighting has become a popular sport in the future, so your pilot will have no shortage of opponents to face in a handful of different tournament settings. While the single-player game attempts to convey a bit of story here and there, it's mostly limited to some prematch chatter from the other pilots. Each pilot is rated in four different categories. However, the real difference is in the robots themselves.

One Must Fall gives you eight different robots to choose from. Each has its own set of strikes and special attacks. Additionally, each robot has at least one projectile attack, and, fortunately, the game has a pretty good aiming system to help you fire your blasts accurately. The game also has its fair share of rising and dashing attacks, and each robot features a few different superattacks, for good measure. The use of these superattacks are governed by an energy meter that fills as you play. Most of the superattacks are just pumped-up versions of your robot's special moves, though. Battlegrounds uses six buttons in all, one for each of your robot's limbs, one for jumping, and one for evading. Since the game takes place in a fully 3D arena that lets you roam around at will, the evade button is incredibly handy. The robots don't turn very quickly, and you don't have the ability to execute side or rear attacks, so using the evade button to roll out of the way or to perform backflips is key to dodging attacks and preventing enemies from sneaking up behind you while you're attacking another opponent.

The centerpieces to a fighting game's longevity are its balance and the depth of its combo system. The various robots seem pretty balanced, though some of the robots can get a little more combo-crazy than others, especially in some of the game's walled arenas. The game's combo system is very focused on pop-up attacks and juggles. A handful of the game's regular moves will pop a target up into the air. From that point, you can swipe at them while they're coming down and get in a few extra hits. Some robots, like the Katana, have a rising attack that will launch an opponent into the air. The Katana travels up with the enemy robot, and once you come out of the striking animation, you can land a few extra hits. You can even combo some of these moves into and out of supermoves. All in all, One Must Fall's combo system isn't the deepest in the world, but rather than stick to a somewhat rigid system of canned combos, it goes for a slightly more free-form feel that lets you try out new things.

Though the game has a good deal of single-player tournament options and various difficulty levels to choose from, fighting game AI only goes so far. Competitive multiplayer is where the genre gets most of its replay value. As mentioned, One Must Fall: Battlegrounds contains online multiplayer for up to 16 players. When the players all have good, fast connections to the server, this works fine. However, trying to fight a laggy player isn't any fun at all. Your hits don't land, the other fighter skips around the arena, and so on. The game has two multiplayer modes. Last man standing gives the last remaining player in a round one point, and play continues until a point limit is reached. In demolition, you earn points for causing damage, and the game ends when a point total has been reached. Both games can also be played in team variants.

One Must Fall's robots look pretty nice, though the game doesn't do a very good job of conveying the supposedly gigantic size of the fighters. The arenas come in various shapes and sizes, and some of these look good, as well. However, the animation leaves a bit to be desired. For example, you'll execute the same attacks regardless of your posture. So, if you're running and hit an attack button, you don't get any sort of running attack. Instead, your robot just plants its feet and goes through the same attack animation that it would if you were standing still. A lot of the basic walking and movement animations aren't very good, either.

Basically, the game really lacks polish from start to finish, from the menus to the generic-looking particle effects. The game is also pretty processor-intensive. Though the listed requirements aren't terribly steep, the frame rate is pretty jumpy on systems that are well beyond the 1 GHz recommended processor. When we moved it up to a Radeon 9800 Pro and a 3 GHz processor, the game ran very smoothly at the default 800x600 resolution, but moving the resolution up much higher than that had a noticeable impact on the frame rate. The game actually looks decent at 800x600, though, so this isn't that much of a problem.

Battlegrounds' sound also could have helped convey the size of the robots by using loud, bass-heavy footsteps, but the game unfortunately doesn't have anything like that. Most of the sound effects consist of pretty uneventful metal-on-metal clanks and crashes, as well as your standard laser and projectile effects. The music consists of a bunch of upbeat melodic tracks that sound like they were ripped out of the Amiga demo scene. As a whole, the game's sound gives the game a sort of throwback feel that's indicative of its decade-old roots.

One Must Fall: Battlegrounds is a pretty unique take on the fighting genre. There's definitely something to it, but not all of its concepts hit the mark just right. For instance, the game would have been better if the robots had back attacks or other, better options to prevent enemies from getting behind them. Regardless, there certainly isn't anything else out there that's quite like it, so fans of other fighting games should give it a look.

Wouldn't it be cool if your fully posable martial arts action figures could come to life and clobber each other? This is the core concept of Rag Doll Kung Fu: Fists of Plastic, which demonstrates that the answer to that question is an emphatic maybe. The game is an aesthetic delight that vividly creates the illusion of possessed plastic figurines with elastic strings in their limbs leaping through the air, punching, kicking, and tossing each other around with gusto. Unfortunately, while the visuals help make the game an entertaining diversion for a short while, the gameplay doesn't have the chops to measure up to the presentation.

There's little connection between Fists of Plastic and the original Rag Doll Kung Fu, a 2005 PC game with an unusual mouse-only control scheme. Fists of Plastic is easy to pick up and play, with simple controls that will have you grabbing nunchakus and tossing shurikens in no time. Face buttons are used to punch, kick, jump, and block, and basic combos can be performed by stringing these together. The analog sticks are used not only for movement, but also to rotate your fighter's arms when you need to grab items or swing weapons around. Furthermore, motion controls are smartly incorporated and feel intuitive, requiring you to give the controller a quick jolt to slam the ground or to convert your chi power into a lightning ball you can hurl at your opponents. And a series of single-player challenges give you plenty of ways to develop and test your skills.

Challenges include a straightforward survival mode and a challenge that has you using the propulsive firefly attack to tear through targets like a guided missile. However, in the most enjoyable scenario, you dispose of hapless goons attacking you by grabbing them and tossing them from the cliffs of a moonlit ninja fortress. Initially these challenges seem geared to familiarize you with the mechanics of the game so that you can get the most out of the multiplayer action, but instead they wind up being the most compelling aspect of Fists of Plastic. This is in part because they have a reward system that grants you new heads, torsos, legs, and other items when you achieve certain performance goals, which you can then mix and match to make your own character, providing incentive to come back and improve your high scores. It's also, unfortunately, because the multiplayer element winds up feeling shallow and unfocused in comparison.

Multiplayer modes allow up to four players to compete in four different game modes locally. There's a straightforward Deathmatch mode in which your only goal is to defeat the other players as many times as possible. Wildly thrashing each other has a party-game, button-mashing quality that can be fun for a bit, but the combat isn't deep enough to stay compelling for very long. There's also a King of the Hill mode, which only exacerbates the chaos of Deathmatch, requiring you to fight to control a very small portion of the already small environments. The last two modes, Capture the Fish and Dodgeball, are a bit more interesting and fun. Capture the Fish has you earn points by grabbing a plastic fish and successfully tossing it into a basket, and Dodgeball drops a powerful ball into the level that you can hurl at each other for instant kills. Even these aren't involved enough to keep you coming back for long, though, and while they tend to feel a bit empty with two players, with four they often feel too crowded and messy. Though the loose rag-doll physics look great, they become a hindrance in action, as characters can get caught too easily on aspects of the environment, or each other.

Rag Doll Kung Fu: Fists of Plastic must be downloaded from the PlayStation Network, which makes it all the more baffling that there is no online multiplayer component. Without any online competition, the local multiplayer modes quickly run flat. You can fill up the games with AI opponents if you'd like (with the exception of Capture the Fish--apparently trying to grab a fish and toss it into a basket is too much for the AI to handle), but whatever enjoyment these modes offer comes from their loose party-game feel, and that just isn't as much fun when shared with dummy opponents.

If Fists of Plastic does one thing right, it's the flashy presentation. It's not the most technically demanding game in the world, but it's impressive to see just how well the appearance and movement of the characters realize the concept of combat between action figures. Equally terrific are the environments, which look like lovingly crafted miniature play sets. The sound is good as well, with some catchy tunes that are reminiscent of stereotypical martial arts movie music, along with some vocal samples that would be right at home in a badly dubbed kung-fu flick.

Fists of Plastic is a joy to behold, but the gameplay doesn't deliver on the concept's promise nearly so successfully. At 10 bucks, the shallow combat, dearth of multiplayer modes, and complete lack of online options make this an experience that even most chopsocky fans will find quickly loses its charm.

Incomprehensible plot setups and outrageous situations are nothing new in the vast and peculiar world of Japanese gaming culture. So a game starring a gaggle of pint-sized android schoolgirls that duke it out in a vitriolic war over who gets to eat the last pudding on earth seems pretty tame on the weirdness scale when compared to some of Japan's edgier offerings. A quirky gem hailing from Japan's thriving indie-game development scene, Acceleration of Suguri X Edition packs an oddball mix of bullet-hell blasting and competitive arena fighting that doesn't take itself seriously at all. That's mostly a good thing because the frenetic brawling action found in this small package is well paired with the game's outlandish vibe.

One-on-one arena battles filled with sprays of explosive bullet fire, insane special attacks, and volleys of giant missiles are the pulsing heart of Acceleration of Suguri X Edition. These enticing matches deliver quick and frantic blasts of rollicking good excitement in a handful of solo and multiplayer modes. Combat takes place within a vast circular arena set against a meager medley of unobtrusive backdrops. As the clock ticks down, you and your opponent zip around the screen, unleashing a flurry of rapid attacks until only one character is left standing. Most projectile attacks automatically rocket toward your foe, and melee swings generally push you in her direction too, but that doesn't guarantee a direct hit. A quick dodge maneuver lets you and your opponent move around the battlefield speedily to evade incoming fire, yet dodging too frequently overheats your character and leaves her prone.

Though it's essentially a competitive 2D fighting game, Acceleration of Suguri X Edition plays like a shoot-'em-up, and the addictive qualities of this refreshing combination quickly set in once you get a feel for the controls. It's a shame this requires a bit of frustrating trial and error due to the total lack of any help menu or explanation of how to play. The game just throws you into the fray and expects you to figure out everything on the fly. Button mashing only gets you so far, and it can take some time to get the feel for the types of attacks that different button combinations unleash. The vast majority of moves are pulled off by either a prolonged hold or quick tap of the square, triangle, or circle buttons. What's irritating is that it's not readily apparent that holding L1 while hitting these other buttons lets you fire off a modified version of each attack. Once you overcome that obstacle, battles become a lot more strategic and enjoyable.

Within the confines of each stage's circular boundaries, the twitchy gameplay yields some truly chaotic and dazzling fights to the death. The camera automatically zooms in and out of the action based on how close the combatants get to each other. With both characters spewing laser blasts, orbs of glowing death, explosive projectiles, and other hypnotic volleys back and forth across the screen, it makes for some dizzying rounds of airborne combat. In addition to a few cool-looking variations on several core long-range and melee attack moves, each character has her own set of hyperattacks. These range from giant focused laser beams and satellite orbs that hone in on their targets to chain whips and blocks of bullet-reflecting ice. Every successful blow landed on foes has the dual purpose of whittling down their health bar and charging your special meter, which lets you dish out a crippling barrage each time it's filled.

Diving into straightforward local multiplayer matches in Versus mode against another human opponent is where you'll squeeze the most fun out of Acceleration of Suguri X Edition, but there are a few options for loners. The standard Arcade mode lets you initially pick from one of seven battle-hardened young female combatants and plow through a string of a half-dozen matches per character. Completing these bouts with different characters unlocks new stages, additional fighters to play as, and snippets of background story to read through if you feel so inclined. Then, there's a practice arena for experimenting with moves against the computer and a sparse Story mode with two short campaigns that are heavy on wacky text and bombastic character dialogue. The text-heavy character interactions during story portions are packed with nonsense dialogue that shifts between humorous and annoying. The crisp character graphics from the Arcade mode are dropped for the story sections in favor of slapdash hand-drawn artwork, featuring color-pencil shading that looks more amateurish than charming.

Even with limited content and a few presentation issues, the intense battles and tight gameplay in Acceleration of Suguri X Edition offer a high replay value. If you spend a little time getting to know this shooter-brawler hybrid, you'll want to dig deeper to check out each character's moves, test her unique combat abilities against other adversaries, and grab a pal to pummel over and over again. When you factor in the budget price of this addictive download, a dusting of sugar sweetens most of the sour notes.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Smash-Up Review

In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Smash-Up, you and some friends pick from a roster of beloved characters and proceed to beat the heck out of each other in a diverse array of arenas. Sound familiar? The similarities between this game and the Super Smash Bros. series are clear, from the fast-paced action to the presentation to the announcer's voice. Yet there are a number of notable differences that set Smash-Up apart. Some are positive, like the more-straightforward combat that make it easier to succeed with a variety of characters. Some, like the not-so-sharp visuals and inconsistent victory conditions, are negative. These rough edges keep Smash-Up from making a legitimate bid for the Smash Bros. crown, but it's still an entertaining brawler in its own right.

Most of the fighters are longtime TMNT standbys, though a few of the unlockable characters will be unfamiliar to lapsed fans. While each character does play differently, their core movesets are fairly similar. You have a basic attack and a strong attack, the latter of which is slower, but has a bigger range and is more powerful. Using either of these attacks while pushing the analog stick in a given direction will activate a different move, so like in Smash Bros., you have a solid array of moves that are very easy to perform. Unlike in Smash Bros., none of the characters have flashy special moves. Though one character's strong attack may involve a katana while another character's involves a gun, the range and power of these attacks aren't drastically different. There are no lightning bolts, and nobody is swallowing anybody else. The moves are similar enough that you can choose any character and still have a reasonable degree of success, but they are also different enough to make each character unique. Combat isn't flashy or diverse, but this makes Smash-Up accessible to Smash Bros. veterans and new brawlers alike.

But just because there aren't crazy special moves doesn't mean the combat isn't engaging. Because the differences between characters aren't as drastic, successful players have to get the most out of their repertoire. Positioning and blocking are as important as striking. You can launch quick attacks from the walls and dodge strikes while jumping, making the air as much a part of the battlefield as the ground. There are also ninja power-ups that you can grab and use, including fire breath, throwing knives, bombs, giant magical claw marks, and your own personal tornado shield. If you don't like the power-up that has appeared, you can hold a button to call up a pointer, which you can then use to change the power-up. In theory this adds an interesting strategic wrinkle to the game, but in practice, it's tough to find a spare moment to point and shoot.

The action is fast-paced and frantic, though you will encounter some rough patches, especially if you're accustomed to playing Smash Bros. Most notably, when you are knocked down, you often stay on the ground unable to move just a bit longer than you'd like. It's not a huge difference, but over the course of the match, you'll undoubtedly be knocked down enough to notice the delay. This can be frustrating at first, and though this frustration wanes as you play more, you'll still have aggravating moments of prone impotence. Smash-Up also gives you a split-second chance to break your opponent's grab, but the analog stick wiggling and Wii Remote waggling required to do so don't seem to register consistently (Wii Remote and Nunchuk, GameCube controller, and Classic controller are supported). On the whole the combat is fun and engaging, but there's nothing particularly exciting or unique about it.

The arenas that you fight in do their part to help spice up the action. Only two are static, enclosed areas. The rest feature hazards like bottomless pits, collapsing structures, or vicious monster crocodiles that can devour you in an instant. One level forces you to traverse a moving train as your opponents uncouple the cars in front of you, though you can easily get caught in a frustrating damage loop if you are left behind in a tunnel. For the most part, these arenas are varied and interesting, though they aren't exactly pretty. When the camera pulls out, it can be tough to judge distances, and the visuals aren't as clean and sharp as they should be. It can be hard to differentiate between characters, especially when there are similarly clad fighters in a match (four green bipedal turtles, for example). To help you spot your character, Smash-Up puts a glowing aura around each fighter. These colored outlines are certainly distinct, but they can also be fairly distracting. Fortunately, you can turn them off and use the initials that appear below each character to guide you, but it's a shame Smash-Up's visuals aren't quite up to speed with the gameplay.

In addition to four-player battles, you can take on a series of solo fights in Arcade mode. This short story arc features some lame cutscenes, but victory allows you to unlock the playable characters you'll encounter there. (Other, stranger characters are unlockable by completing a large number of matches in other modes or by using a cheat code.) You'll play a few minigames throughout your journey, and these are reasonable diversions that allow you to earn shells, which you can then use to unlock bonus items. An amusing shooting gallery lets you shoot shells at targets to unlock figurine parts, and you can also spend your shells to build a trophy that you can wager in online matches. Smash-Up features smooth online play that lets you fight with friends or jump into a random match. There are also various ways to set up local tournaments for up to eight players, and there's a mission mode that presents a long list of different battle scenarios for you to complete. This all adds up to a lot of extra stuff to do and goes a long way toward giving you more bang for your buck.

Smash-Up is best when played against some friends on your couch, but there are some issues in the Battle Royal mode that can mess with your matches. In a number of different match types, the victory conditions are not always consistent. At the end of each match, your match statistics are displayed in four categories: lives left, knockouts, times knocked out, and remaining health. In some Knockout matches, the player who reached the requisite number of KOs (five) lost to a player with only two KOs. In similar matches, the first player to five KOs won. It's unclear whether this is a bug or whether the game is using some undisplayed stats to calculate the winner. And in some Last Man Standing matches, the last man standing came in second. Whatever the reason for these irregularities, you'll find the inconsistent scoring to be baffling at best and aggravating at worst.

Despite these scoring issues and the not-so-great visuals, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Smash-Up is a fun, engaging brawler. The combat is solid and fast-paced, and though it's not exactly innovative, it's good enough to support some entertaining fights. If you're looking for a new source of Wii-powered beatdowns, Smash-Up fits the bill.

Tao Feng: Fist of the Lotus is the first game from Studio Gigante, a development house started by Mortal Kombat co-creator John Tobias and a handful of former MK team members. Tobias was widely recognized as the more story-minded side of the Boon-Tobias duo, and you can see some of his penchant for fleshing out a fighting game with some back story here. Unfortunately, the game's sharp graphics and elaborate universe--well, elaborate for a fighting game, anyway--are nullified by its subpar gameplay.

Tao Feng takes place in futuristic Metro-China, which is actually the real estate formerly known as California. Here, two ancient Chinese sects known as the Pale Lotus and the Black Mantis are engaged in a never-ending struggle to eradicate one another. At the moment, the two sides are attempting to recover ancient artifacts that are said to grant immortality. This all ties into the quest mode, in which each sect has one artifact and is attempting to recover the other. Each artifact is broken up into six pieces, and each piece is placed in the care of a particular fighter, so each character's stint in the quest mode will put him or her up against the six rival fighters of the opposing sect. Each fight is introduced by a little background information that describes how the opposing fighter fits into all this. Once all the artifacts have been recovered, you are sent into a six-on-one team battle against the game's boss character, who, in classic Mortal Kombat fashion, is best beaten by simply jumping and punching until he's defeated.

The 12 fighters themselves are a fairly diverse bunch, though each in turn is fairly typical of the sort of characters found in other fighting games. You'll run into characters like Exile, the large, lumbering fighter who appears on the cover of the game, and Divinity, the female traitor who wears an open-fronted outfit that's surprisingly similar to the one worn by Kylie Minogue in her video for "Can't Get You Out of My Head."

Rather than adhere to the standard fighting game system of best-of-three-round matches, the game instead takes a Killer Instinct-like approach, giving each player three meters full of health. When one player's meter empties out, the fight stops for a brief time as the character recovers, and play continues until one player has lost all three life bars. The gameplay in Tao Feng is focused more on strikes and combos than on projectile attacks or any sort of supernatural behavior, though each player does have a supermove or two--usually an unblockable projectile of some kind--that can be used when his or her chi meter is filled. The chi meter can also be used to heal limb injuries, which occur if you block too many attacks and cut those limbs' effectiveness in half. In addition to standard strings of attacks, you can make use of parts of the environment. You can kick off nearby walls for airborne attacks or grab and swing around poles and trees to gain momentum for kicks and so on. The game uses four buttons for strikes--two punches and two kicks. The combos are somewhat Tekken-like in their execution, though they require a bit more precision.

Unfortunately, the game doesn't establish a firm set of rock-paper-scissors-like systems, and the gameplay quickly boils down to the tedious tactic of waiting for an opponent to whiff on a move, executing your most powerful combo attack, and then retreating to wait for another mistake. Many combos don't have a lot of startup or recovery time, making it easier than it probably should be to get another combo attempt started before the blocking player can punish you for failing to land your strikes. All this combines to make the gameplay feel incredibly shallow and very boring, because once you've learned a few basic combos, there's little reason to mess with any of the other moves in your character's repertoire.

Beyond the quest mode, the game also contains the standard set of fighting game modes, including versus, team battle, and training. They all function about how you'd expect, though there's a curious problem in the game's training mode. The game asks you to perform a specific move, but it won't actually tell you how to execute the move unless you bring it up in the pause menu. Considering that most of the players who will go through the training mode probably won't have any idea what something like "trailing punch long form combo" even refers to, let alone which string of button presses is required to execute that combo, this seems like a real oversight on the developer's part. Showing the button presses underneath the name of the move, rather than making you ask the computer to demo the move so you can see what the commands are, would have been very welcome.

Tao Feng's strongest aspect is its appearance, by a long shot. The game has a sharp, crisp look in both its characters and its environments. The animation is passable, and the texture work--which takes a cue from the SNK fighting game Art of Fighting by depicting cuts, scrapes, and bruises on the characters as they sustain damage--is nicely done. The game's environments are pretty cool as well, taking you from a seaside pier, to an arcade filled with humorously titled arcade machines, to an ice-filled cave. The game also makes nice use of some colored lighting and other effects in a few spots, most notably in the rooftop level. The game's camera manages to get in the way of the gameplay at times by shifting perspectives quickly and without warning. This perspective change can move your player from the left side of the fight to the right side and vice versa, which can mean serious trouble if you're in the middle of trying to block an incoming attack, since this turns your block stance into defenseless forward movement. The sounds of the fighting in Tao Feng are good, and the characters' voices, though used sparingly, are also good. The game's music stays in the background and does the job.

Tao Feng looks and sounds just fine, but it doesn't have a strong enough fighting system to make it a viable option for fans of the genre. Players looking for a solid fighting game on the Xbox would be better off sticking with the reigning champions, Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance and Capcom vs. SNK 2 EO.

Mortal Kombat 4 Review

The Mortal Kombat series is one of the premier arcade series around today. The series, which until now utilized digitized actors to give the game an extra layer of realism, has been the topic of comic books, movies, action figures, and even Senate hearings. The fourth time around the game has gone polygonal, giving the developers much more leeway when it comes to adding new moves, holds, and characters. Also, weapons have been added into the mix, with each character possessing a different sword, club, or staff to beat his enemies with.

The storyline of MK4 picks up the loose ends left behind by both MK3 and the console-exclusive MK Mythologies: Sub-Zero. With Shao Kahn defeated, Shinnok picks up the slack as the main bad guy. However, he is also a selectable character, which left arcade players with no big boss to look forward to. To remedy that, the home version contains MK1's four-armed bad boy, Goro. Goro looks terrific in 3D, moves very fluidly, and has all the great moves he had in MK1, as well as a few additional ones. He isn't selectable from the start, but a code makes him (as well as Noob Saibot, another hidden character) playable. Returning characters include Scorpion, Sub-Zero, Liu Kang, Johnny Cage, Sonya, and Raiden. Most of the old characters retain their old moves and add a new one here and there. The new characters fit very well into the MK universe, a welcome change from most fighting game sequels.

While the graphics may not be quite as detailed as the arcade version, they are very close, and the game runs very fast with hardware acceleration. The software-rendered graphics look pretty blocky, although a patch has been released that allows a higher resolution in software mode. The music comes off the CD, resulting in an arcade-perfect soundtrack. The character voices, while occasionally goofy sounding, are all present. The arcade version's endings used the game engine, but they have been redone for the PC version, and the results look fantastic. The game now plays the high-quality rendered FMV endings instead.

Whether or not the game plays like the arcade version all depends on which controller you use. You're going to need at least a six-button gamepad to properly play the game. The Sidewinder pad works perfectly, although some of the game's fatalities are hard to do on any controller other than the arcade's. MK4's combo system has been greatly simplified when compared with previous MKs. Each character can start a combo the same way, and some of the more damaging moves in the previous games (the uppercut, for instance) have been weakened. The introduction of weapons seems silly at first, but once you've played for a while and gotten used to using them, they really do add a new dimension to the game. Each character has two fatalities, and there are two stage fatalities. The fatalities look nice, but too many of them are merely 3D updates to old fatalities, and the new fatalities in MK4 simply aren't that great. It would have been nice to see some more innovation here. A few modes have been added to the game, including a practice mode, which shows all the characters' moves and fatalities. There are also three types of endurance fights, a team battle mode, and a tournament mode.

If you aren't a fan of the previous Mortal Kombat games, this one won't make you a fan. It's pretty much the same game but with a few 3D elements tossed in. But fans of the other versions of MK4 won't be disappointed with this excellent translation.