X Vs Y

I had read that Capcom were already planning another fighting game after the forthcoming Marvel vs Capcom 3, but there was no indication as to what it was. However, at Comic-Con this week, Capcom and Namco have announced two joint games, Street Fighter X Tekken and Tekken X Street Fighter, making true a long-rumoured Namco vs Capcom game. Essentially, Capcom's game will be a 2D fighter based on the Super Street Fighter IV engine, and Namco's will be a 3D fighter using the Tekken 6 engine. Both will feature characters from the Street Fighter and Tekken series.

This is a terrible idea, the sort of thing that would excite people who write crossover fan-fiction, and the less said about that the better. Story is never a strong point in fighting games, but it does help if they're at least thematically consistent (which is why the unavoidable Star Wars characters in Soul Calibur IV greatly detracted from the game in my opinion). The games are also mechanically incompatible, 2D and 3D fighters are very different types of games, things like projectiles, anti-air, gauge specials are not common in 3D fighters, which have more of a focus on strings, evasion and the ground game.

I'd actually be quite interested in a 2D Tekken, as Namco have far better character design than Capcom (as iconic as it is, the Street Fighter cast is a bit rubbish - that's why there's such a problem with "shoto-spam", most people don''t want to play anyone but Ryu and Ken), and I do enjoy 2D fighters. I don't think I'd be that keen on a 3D Street Fighter, I have bad memories of the awful Street Fighter EX series. The cross-over, however, holds very little interest to me.

What is really sad, though, is that the two companies with the most success in fighting games, are both releasing a cross-over when the fighting genre is so starved of new games. Just look at what's on the market: Tekken 6 (7th game in the series), Soul Calibur 4 (5th game in the series), Virtua Fighter 5, Street Fighter 4 (probably between the 7th and the 15th, depending on how you count the versions), King of Fighters 12, the new Mortal Kombat will be something like the 9th in the series. Those are some big numbers. Even a newcomer like BlazBlue is only there because Arc lost the license to their own Guilty Gear games, and the similarities between BlazBlue and Guilty Gear are very evident. I'm not saying that sequels are a bad thing, the fighting genre benefits from an incremental approach because it is more about mechanics than narrative, but a little new blood wouldn't hurt.

Could you imagine if after Halo: Reach and Gears of War 3 Bungie and Epic decided to get together to make Halo vs Gears of War (because those two games have about as much in common as Street Fighter and Tekken do)? Instead, they'll (belatedly) move onto some new IP, with both companies probably continuing to make shooters, but they won't be forced to look back on themselves like the fighting genre seems to have to.

Finish Him?

Eurogamer reports that some THQ exec has stated that a new game has been signed to their fighting division (which currently houses only WWE Smackdown and UFC Undisputed, as far as I'm aware), which will be announced at E3 in June. Judging from his words ("it's a major developer" and "when we announce it you'll go, 'oh they're going with THQ, cool") it's clearly an established name, rather than a new startup. As they're currently covering wrestling and MMA, they could be adding a boxing game to compete with EA's Fight Night series, but the wording doesn't suggest that a certain amount of melee combat in it" So what could it be?

There are four major players left in the fighting game genre, being Sega, Namco, Capcom and Tecmo, none of which would need THQ to publish any of their games, as all are either big players in their own right, or have links with other publishers in Western markets. Minor players in the fighting genre like Arc Systems and SNK-Playmore wouldn't be worth announcing, as their appeal is very niche.

So what does that leave? In my mind, there is only one option: Mortal Kombat. With Midway having disintegrated after declaring bankruptcy, the MK team would need a new publisher, and Ed Boon and co had said that they had salvaged their IP from the wreckage of Midway. By my count, a new game would be Mortal Kombat 9 (that's assuming you don't count things like Ultimate MK3, Mortal Kombat Trilogy or Mortal Kombat Gold as titles in their own right), although it is unlikely to be called that, since the games haven't used numbers in their titles since Mortal Kombat 4.

So, does Mortal Kombat still matter? In the larger scheme of things, no: even with the slight resurgence in fighting games brought on by the huge success of Street Fighter IV, another Mortal Kombat game is unlikely to get people too excited. On a personal level, I had played every Mortal Kombat game up to Deception (MK6, technically), but when Armageddon (MK7) came out Mortal Kombat apathy had set in too deep for me to get it, even when it became really cheap. I didn't even consider MK vs DC Universe (MK8) because the idea seemed so awful.

However, critical reception of MK vs DC Universe wasn't too bad, and even though all the footage I saw of the game seemed to suggest it was as stilted and awkward as the Mortal Kombat games had always been since moving to three dimensions, maybe the work they were supposedly doing on the fighting engine did actually pay some dividends. I still do have a slightly irrational fondness for the series from my youth, and an all-new, proper Mortal Kombat game (not another wretched cross-over) does still pique my interest.

I could be way off the mark about the announcement, though. Roll on E3, then.

The King of Fighters

2009 has been a pretty good year for fighting games, particularly 2D ones. It has seen Capcom release the critically acclaimed Street Fighter IV, the first new Street Fighter game in 9 years, it has seen Arc Systems release BlazBlue, the spiritual successor to the Guilty Gear series (which Arc somehow lost the rights to), which was also highy rated, even if it probably couldn't hope for the same level of commercial success. It has even seen a new King of Fighters game, which wasn't as well received, but at least they did redraw all the art in the game for the first time, well, probably ever.

However, the fighting game which I had been looking forward to most has been Tekken 6. In fact, considering it was released in the arcades in 2007 and a home port was always going to be released, it may have been the game which I have waited for the longest out of any I can remember. I have always had a particular fondness for the Tekken series. Tekken Tag Tournament was the primary reason I bought a PS2 back in 2001, so it is essentially what made me a console gamer.


My copy arrived on release day, and while I haven't had that much time to play it, just a shortish stint of versus play was enough to confirm that the Tekken series is still very much on form.

Tekken's big strength is the cast of characters. Each game has added new characters, without removing or diluting old ones, and Tekken 6 now has 40 playable characters, with the only real incidence of direct move sharing being that Eddy and Christie still appear to be carbon copies of each other. While the cast does have some serious weak points (Roger Jr, Panda, Mokujin), there are also an enormous number of really good ones. Character design is a personal thing, but I think Tekken has a stronger roster than Soul Calibur, and is far superior in this regard to the relatively staid characters of Virtua Fighter or the oddball cast of Street Fighter (there is a reason why the vast majority of casual SF players play Ryu or Ken).


In addition, they've continued to improve the transitional animations and update old move animations. I can still spot some vestiges of Tekken 2-era animation, but for the most part animations are newer, smoother and more impressive than before. It works really well with the motion blur effect they've introduced in T6, which smoothes out slow moves, and emphasises the fast, powerful strikes which characterise the series. They've added a fairly substantial number of new moves to each character (remember that this game is essentially 3 updates from Tekken 5, there was the Dark Resurrection update to Tekken 5, the base Tekken 6, and then the home version is effectively a port of Bloodline Rebellion, the update to Tekken 6) without removing old ones like they did in Soul Calibur 3 and 4, in which certain characters were quite badly denuded.

I tried to play a bit of the Scenario Campaign mode (the Tekken Force-style beat-em-up they've included with the console port) last night and to my surprise, I ended up watching what seemed like nearly half an hour of intro and cutscene before I even got to start playing (although I did think the prologue, which recaps the Mishima storyline from Tekken 1 through to the start of Tekken 6, was quite good). I think they've missed the point here. A Tekken Force mode should be something you can jump into, preferably with a friend, and annihilate scores of identikit enemies for a bit before going back to the core fighting mode. I don't think we need hours of cutscenes showing characters interact and elaborate on the plot. A rendered movie on starting and finishing the story mode is all (some would even say more than) a fighting game needs in terms of exposition. If this mode is the reason for Namco's painfully slow conversion of the arcade game, then they've wasted quite a lot of their time, especially seeing as the mode still seems ugly and awkward compared to a genuine third person action game.


However, to a fighting game fan it doesn't really make that much of a difference as long as the core fighting is so strong, and because of this I think, for me at least, Tekken 6 appears to be the best of the current generation of fighters. I've read some criticisms that it doesn't do enough to move the game forward, but I actually appreciate that, in an attempt to reinvent themselves Namco haven't taken a step backwards (as happened to an extent with Soul Calibur 4). Essentially, Tekken 6 may be more of the same, but it is more of the things that made Tekken good in the first place.

Tekken 6 Release Date

Namco have announced the release date for the console ports of Tekken 6: the game will release in North America on 27 October 2009, with releases in Europe, Japan and the rest of Asia "shortly thereafter". That's much later than I had expected, I was hoping that the previous estimate of "Fall 2009" would be early September, but as it stands, we will probably only get the game in November.

That's a pretty slow conversion considering the arcade game was released in Japan in November 2007 (admittedly, the console version is not based on the original arcade release, but rather the Bloodline Rebellion update). What has taken them so long? For one, they've needed to port the code to the Xbox 360 now that the game is multiplatform (the arcade hardware it runs on is very similar to the PS3, so very little work would have been needed for the PS3 version). They've had to add online play, but I'm assuming that the Tekken team would just have purloined most of the Soul Calibur team's netcode. Namco had previously talked about wanting to add new modes to increase the game's longevity, maybe this was what was taking all the time?

Well, at E3 this year, the new mode was revealed to be Scenario Campaign mode, a rudimentary beat-em-up in the style of Final Fight. This really isn't anything new, as there has been a mode like this in every game since Tekken 3, with Tekken Force mode in T3, Tekken Force Assault mode in T4 and Devil Within mode in T5. These modes have always been at best a novelty, briefly entertaining, but nothing you'd return to over the core fighting, and videos of this mode in action lead me to believe that it will be no different. The only redeeming feature of this new mode is that it can apparently be played co-op, and games like this are usually far more entertaining with a friend. We'll have to wait until November to find out, though.