Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection Review

How does $20 sound for a practically arcade-perfect version of Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection? It's a pretty good deal, and it's going on now on the PlayStation 3. The game is now available as a downloadable product, which makes a good deal even better. While the arcade-port-like nature of it means that you won't get any of the weird extra modes you'd expect from Tekken on a home console, you will get a rock-solid fighting game that also looks great.

This is a port of Dark Resurrection, which is the same Tekken 5 expansion that appeared on the PSP last year. That means you'll get Lili and Dragunov, the two all-new characters that made their first appearance in DR, as well as the returning Armor King. As a bonus, you can unlock Jinpachi, the game's final boss, as a playable character in the PS3 version. He's an interesting addition but not the most exciting character to play with. Of course, you also get the rest of the game's large roster, including Paul, Kazuya, Heihachi, Nina, Law, and so on.

While you won't get bowling, volleyball, or a Tekken Force minigame, you will get ghost mode in Dark Resurrection. Unlike the arcade mode, which puts you up against a handful of fighters and then sends you to the boss fight, ghost mode is meant to replicate the experience of taking on multiple challengers in arcades. You'll continually fight different characters that are governed by different artificial intelligence profiles. So you'll encounter beginning-level Baeks that are easy to beat, but the higher-level Baek fighters know how to use his combos properly and even know a few key juggles. This goes a long way to making them feel more like real human beings, since they all fight differently. This variety keeps the game interesting as a single-player game, which many fighting games have trouble with. Of course, it's still no substitute for actually fighting a real person, which you can do locally. Unfortunately, the game doesn't have any online support, but given the budget price tag, that makes sense.

As you play, you'll earn currency that you can spend customizing the characters' different costumes, much like you can in Virtua Fighter 5 and in the last couple of Tekken games. You can purchase new colors for their outfits, new hair styles, or additional little trinkets, like eye patches. You can also spend your money to purchase the ending movies for the new characters or concept art. Interestingly, Namco has kept the file size of the download a little lower than it would be otherwise by not offering these videos and images as part of the main download. When you go into the gallery menu, the game hits a server and returns a list of downloadable items. You pay a chunk of your in-game money, and it downloads the appropriate file. It's a slick idea, though at 500MB-plus, it's hard to call this a "small" download by any metric.

Graphically, the game follows the look of the arcade game, but it's been outfitted to run in 1080p. If you've got a TV capable of that resolution and are running over an HDMI cable, the game looks incredibly sharp--almost too sharp, in spots, as it'll reveal an ugly texture here and there. It's a great-looking game, overall, especially for a downloadable product, but as it's meant to look like the arcade version, you do get the impression that a Tekken game built from the ground up for the PS3 could look quite a bit better. The game also contains all the same sound effects and music from the arcade game. Tekken has always had hard-hitting sound effects, and they still work just fine here.

Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection makes a great case for digital distribution. Here's a game that might not be the newest game in town, but by clocking in at a budget price and not coming on a Blu-ray disc, it stands out and delivers on the potential of this sort of game-delivery platform. But forget all that nonsense. The bottom line is that Dark Resurrection is a fantastic fighting game, and it's especially sweet if you have one or more Tekken players nearby that'll get into the versus mode with you.

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 King of Fighters XI Review

The annual King of Fighters series is more than a decade old, and originates on arcade hardware that's older still, though the series' solid and varied gameplay has continued to bring the faithful coming back for more each year. Although many hardcore followers consider 1998's The King of Fighters '98 to be the best game in the bunch--and some feel the series has gone downhill since then--the 2D fighting series has finally returned in style with The King of Fighters XI, a fast-paced game with a huge, well-balanced character roster and a lot of gameplay depth. Even though the game originally appeared on the Atomiswave arcade platform (arcade hardware with the embarrassing distinction of having noticeable load times), the game traces its roots, and most of its art assets, back to developer SNK's NeoGeo platform, and this reliance on older graphics is hard to miss. However, if you're a bona fide 2D fighting-game fan, there's a good chance that graphics have always taken a backseat to gameplay for you, and if that's the case, you'll get all the great gameplay you can handle in this extremely well-crafted fighting game.

The King of Fighters series changed up the standard one-on-one style of most fighting games by introducing a unique team mechanic that lets you choose a group of characters to control across a series of rounds, and teams are back again in KOF XI, along with a new "shift" system. Shifting lets you call in another member of your team in the middle of a match, either to escape a severe beating or to assist in a few different ways to one you've been dishing out. The shift mechanic seems to work just fine and favors aggressive play; it's not a safe way to escape punishment (given that there's a slight delay on it), and it adds some good variety. If you're an ambitious sort who likes to string together huge combination attacks, you can use the shift mechanic for this purpose as well, though you can get through most of your matches with little to no use of it.

Regardless of what you think about the shifting system, the game's teams are quite solid because you can select from a huge, well-rounded group of characters. Most of them are old favorites from previous KOF games, and there's a few transplants from other SNK games. In addition, you can unlock several more hidden characters both by completing the single-player arcade mode, and by playing the "challenge" mode, which has a series of odd, puzzle-like requirements (such as defeating an enemy using only a certain type of attack). By default, the game offers a solid roster of 33 characters to play (divided among 11 teams of three apiece), though you can unlock 14 more characters, which brings the roster to a whopping 47 characters total. With the exception of the unlockable bosses, all of the game's characters seem balanced pretty well; just about any team of characters can take down any other team. And because there are so many characters choose from, there's a good chance you can find at least a few that you like. But you'll probably find a few that you don't care for, either, such as the extremely powerful sub-boss Shion, and the extremely unimpressive final boss, Magaki, who has an annoying voice and doesn't look terribly threatening, but is so absurdly overpowered that your final battles with him will be a chore rather than an exciting challenge.

The whisper-thin Magaki will be a bit hard for most players to look at, but depending on your experience with and expectations of fighting games, you might have some issues with the rest of the game's presentation. No, you're not going to get a game that looks as impressive in motion as a Virtua Fighter 5 or even a Soul Calibur 3. However, if you've played these types of games before, you should easily be able to look past the dated graphics and appreciate the game's artwork for what it is. This is truly a 2D fighting game with character sprites that have been retouched and tweaked countless times over the years, and they look just fine in motion. Many of the characters have plenty of personality and lots of different voice samples that play when they attack, get hit, or recover from being knocked down. The game's voice acting is all in Japanese, but it's all delivered decently well, and the menus and dialogue screens (for between-match cinematics and victory screens) are all in decently translated English. However, KOF XI's music isn't quite as impressive. Much of it is pretty generic high-energy techno and electronic stuff that's easy to forget.

The North American PS2 version of KOF XI seems to be a straightforward conversion of the original Japanese PS2 version of the game, minus support for online play. Both versions have one-on-one multiplayer, a single-player arcade mode, an alternate single-player team mode, a survival mode, a challenge mode, a practice mode, and a gallery of unlockable artwork. Likewise, the character roster is both big enough and deep enough (every character in the game has his or her own set of fighting maneuvers with special properties you'll want to experiment with) to keep you busy just playing the game in single-player mode against the game's fairly challenging computer-controlled opponents. However, like most head-to-head fighting games, KOF XI really doesn't really come into its own unless you have some good human players to take on.

KOF XI brings together some decent extras in the form of additional play modes and unlockable art galleries, a unique twist with the shift system, and a surprisingly good single-player experience. Each of these elements is a good addition, but taken together with a fighting game that offers solid, fast-paced gameplay and a huge roster of interesting and well-balanced playable characters, you get a very compelling package for any players who consider themselves to be 2D fighting-game fans.

Vampire Savior (Import) Review

Vampire Savior is the third game in Capcom's Darkstalkers series, which up until this point has essentially been "Street Fighter with monsters." At its core, Vampire Savior is still just that, but it has a few twists that manage to make it feel quite a bit different.

How? Instead of going by a best-two-out-of-three-round system, VS takes the Killer Instinct approach, where each character has two life bars. When one is drained, the character falls down, refills, and the match continues. Another new twist is the Dark Force power-up, which takes one level of your super meter and acts a bit like the gems did in Marvel Super Heroes. Each character is affected differently by Dark Force. Some characters get armor, others get mirror images of themselves that double their attack power, etc. There are two types of super moves in Vampire Savior. ES moves are powered-up versions of normal moves, like super fireballs, extra damaging throws, and multiple dragon punches. EX specials are entirely different moves. For instance, Demitri can turn his opponents into little girls (even the boys turn into girls - don't ask), pick them up by the neck, and choke blood out of them, while Lilith tosses a top hat at her opponent. If the hat hits, her enemy is forced to do a little dance, taking damage all the while. A good portion of the EX moves are, in a word, insane. They go a long way to making the game substantially more fun than your average post-Street-Fighter-Alpha-2 Capcom fighting game.

This is the second game to support the Saturn's 4MB RAM cart, and the results are similar to the first (X-Men vs. Street Fighter) - an arcade-perfect translation with very little load time. So not surprisingly, the graphics in Vampire Savior are pretty good. All of the backgrounds look great, and most of them are pretty animated. There are a lot of frames of animation in this game, and the Saturn pulls them all off without a hitch. The sound and music are also quite nice. The speech isn't muffled at all, and the music fits the game very well.

Overall, Vampire Savior is a lot of fun. It's easily the best fighter Capcom has put out in years. It doesn't fall prey to the cookie-cutter formula Capcom's been using to make Street Fighter games for the past few years. It's almost completely in English, and there is a code to make the entire game play in English, so Capcom was obviously thinking about importers when it designed this one. Saturn releases are few and far between, and this one isn't coming out here, so all Saturn owners would do well to get a RAM cart and pick this one up.

Virtua Fighter 4 Review

The blocky, flat-shaded 3D fighters first seen in 1993's Virtua Fighter have sure come a long way. Nearly 10 years after the original arcade game was released, Sega's Virtua Fighter series now spans four games, not to mention a number of weird spin-offs like Virtua Fighter Kids and the outrageous Fighters Megamix. Virtua Fighter games have appeared on virtually every Sega system ever made. Last year, Sega bowed out of the hardware business, so the latest installment of Virtua Fighter is the first that isn't exclusive to Sega's own hardware. And PlayStation 2 owners couldn't be luckier, because Virtua Fighter 4 is the best fighting game to debut since Namco's superlative Dreamcast version of Soul Calibur back in 1999. Virtua Fighter 4 is also the best game in the series to date: It offers even more of the depth that fans of the series have enjoyed for years, yet it also quickens the pacing, streamlines the controls, and fixes the problems found in previous installments. Furthermore, the PS2 version of Virtua Fighter 4 packs some interesting bonus features and the best artificial intelligence hands down of any fighting game. Superficially, Virtua Fighter 4 may resemble any number of other graphically impressive 3D fighters. But the real beauty of it is definitely in the gameplay.

Virtua Fighter 4 has 13 characters you can choose from, two of which are new to the series. Only Virtua Fighter 3's conspicuous sumo wrestler Taka-Arashi didn't make the cut--all the other fighters from the series are back with new moves and new looks, including such favorites as the Japanese martial arts expert Akira, the massive Canadian pro wrestler Wolf, and the blonde-haired high-kicking siblings Jacky and Sarah Bryant. As in all previous Virtua Fighter games, the last bout in Virtua Fighter 4's arcade mode is against Dural, basically a very mean female mannequin made of metal (there's a way to unlock her as a playable character for use in the versus mode). The first of the game's new fighters is Lei Fei, a shaolin monk whose dizzying kung fu skills are as effective as they are spectacular. The second is Vanessa Lewis, who looks like X-Men's Storm and specializes in both defensive counterthrows and in kickboxing. Lei Fei looks better in action than Vanessa, though both of the new characters have dozens of interesting moves. Actually, the same can be said for all the characters, not just the new ones. Each returning fighter boasts a number of new abilities, many of which become important additions to their repertoires. Many of the new moves aren't just punches or kicks--they're complex techniques like deflections, reversals, and alternate fighting stances.

Virtua Fighter 4 isn't just for hard-core fighting-game fans--the game is only as complex as you want it to be. While it will definitely appeal to you if you enjoy poring over long-winded character FAQs or spending an evening just practicing the same tough move or combo over and over, you'll also enjoy it if you just want to play for fun. The majority of the game's playable characters are very easy to pick up--by the manual's own admission, more than half of them are well suited for beginners, even for those who've never played a fighting game before. All of the fighters are competitive, yet all of them are substantially different. There's much more differentiation now between some of the characters who seemed similar to each other in previous installments.

What all the characters do have in common is that they respond equally well to the game's flat-out perfect controls. Virtua Fighter 4 reverts back to the deceptively simple control scheme found in the first two games in the series: There's a punch button, a kick button, and a guard button. The evade button introduced in Virtua Fighter 3 is gone, yet lateral movement and evading attacks are still easily accomplished just by tapping up or down on the directional pad, to shift your character away from or toward the screen. You don't necessarily need to know that--using some of the characters, you can have a good time just mashing on buttons, watching as they perform various great-looking strings of attacks. But sooner or later you'll notice that Virtua Fighter 4 rewards skill and precision. The pacing of a typical match is just right--very fast and intense, but not frantic. Most of the moves in the game are easy to execute, but there's still a lot to remember if you want to get good. And some of the more advanced techniques and combos are as challenging, and rewarding, as fighting game moves get.

Virtua Fighter 3tb Review

There was a time not so long ago when the words "Model 3" were acknowledged with equal proportions of awe and respect. It was Sega's newest arcade hardware, and a mighty three million polygons it did move. These days, such numbers are almost commonplace, with the arrival of the Dreamcast and the impending arrivals of polygon crushers from Sony and Nintendo. However, when the Model 3 hardware first debuted, it was with Virtua Fighter 3, the flagship fighter borne of Yu Suzuki's AM2 development team.

To think that in 1997 Virtua Fighter 3 almost made it to the Sega Saturn is, in hindsight, practically hysterical. To this day, the Model 3 hardware has only recently been superseded by the relatively inexpensive but comparable-in-performance Naomi arcade board. As PlayStation fans got every installment of Tekken ported right to their favorite console, Sega fans had to languish until more powerful hardware arrived.

Now that time has come, and the question is whether Virtua Fighter 3 (the complementary "Team Battle" tag amended), with all its encompassing history, has been worth the wait.

As fans of Virtua Fighter will attest, VF3 (as well as its predecessors) is one of the deepest games you will ever play. When it comes to technique, move combinations, and overall feel, few games can boast the sophistication of VF3's fighting engine. While not as instinctive, perhaps, as a 2D fireball-throwing, dragon-punching series that will go unnamed, VF3 features a depth nearly unsurpassed in the 3D arena. Certainly, button mashing will certainly get some gamers a fair amount of success in the one-player mode, but match a novice up against a skilled Virtua Fighter veteran, and the difference in their skills will quickly become apparent. Building on the simple three-button interface of the groundbreaking VF2, part three adds a dodge button to the mix as well as two new characters, Aoi and Takarashi. With the established VF fighting engine already in place, the dodge button adds a whole new slate of moves to the labyrinthine arsenal of attacks and defensive strikes. Unfortunately, since games like Soul Calibur have used the benefit of hindsight to further the genre in a more refined manner, VF3's dodge function could have, admittedly, been implemented in a more intuitive manner (see Tobal 2 for a good example) than simply having you thwack an extra button. After all, Virtua Fighter 2 had practically perfected 3D gameplay on a 2D plane, offering such an array of offensive possibilities that Tekken 2 could never seriously approach. By adding a fourth button to what was basically a perfect configuration, something was simultaneously gained and lost.

Aside from all that, how does the Dreamcast version of Virtua Fighter 3 Team Battle compare with the arcade version? It compares very well, especially when you consider the newly released American version over the rushed-to-production Japanese port. While the American version adds little else aside from a versus mode, which was somehow omitted from the Japanese debut, it's not so much that the features that have been improved, but that little glitches found elsewhere in the game have been removed. Gone is the slowdown when the camera zooms into certain arenas. The shadows that were found to be so imperfect have also been patched up a bit, so that the breakup found on uneven surfaces (such as stairs) is not nearly as problematic as it had been. However, even in the original import version, these problems were merely superficial and never actually interfered with gameplay.

Graphically, the character models in the game suffer from a lower polygon count than the models found in the arcade version, resulting in some odd blockiness at times. Keep in mind that the occasional blockiness doesn't stop VF3 from looking better than 99 percent of the other fighting games out there. Other touches like the loose, fabric-like qualities of Jacky's jacket have been lost, along with a couple other minute inconsistencies with the arcade version. However, all in all, developer Genki did an admirable job with AM2's techno-baby, and almost all this is nitpicking. Certain stages have lost a couple bits of polish along the way, like Aoi's stage, where the water and snow aren't arcade-perfect, or the desert stage, where you no longer leave footprints in the sand. For the most part, the stages look absolutely amazing: Pai's rooftop level and Sarah's subway arena are practically pixel-perfect, and they offer unique strategic possibilities that no other fighter (until the approaching Dead or Alive 2 is released, anyway) has. The upside and downside is that aside from the standard game (team battle notwithstanding) there is little else to hold your interest once you have beaten the one-player mode. While it can be argued that the game itself is littered with endless replay value, truly there is little incentive for anyone other than the hard-core Virtua Fighter fan. For some, this may be enough, but for others, spoiled on the fruits of Soul Calibur, this game is little more than a direct port of the arcade game. That is no mean feat, considering that this game was the arcade elite just a couple of years ago, costing upward of $4,000 depending on the size of the monitor attached. Now it can be in your home, nearly arcade perfect, for 50 bucks. Unfortunately, Namco has since proven, on Sega's own turf no less, that this can be bettered by a sizable stretch.

Brand loyalty aside (and there are VF fans who take offense to anything other than complete adoration of the series), Virtua Fighter is a great game that has a few flaws. As a port, it comes up a little shy of what's considered standard nowadays. While the game offers everything that a Virtua Fighter fan would need, the average gamer - unable to master the complexities found in the fighting engine - will find the process and resultant award daunting and ultimately unfulfilling. While the TB addition may have seemed novel when it was released in Japanese arcades a few years back, it is all but standard practice now. The same goes for time attack, survival mode, and the rest. By now, these features are more obligatory than anything else, and Virtua Fighter 3 seems a little too late to be revolutionary. With hardware increasing in power on an almost daily basis, so are the ideas and concepts that follow. That said, Virtua Fighter 3TB is a nearly perfect port of an excellent game whose ideas and innovations are no longer the trendsetters they once were. For Joe Blow on the street, Soul Calibur is still the better choice, but Virtua Fighter fans will find all they need neatly wrapped in this package. Highly recommended if you know what you're doing.