I Feel Like Tekken Tonight

I don't usually have an appetite for Namco's highly technical and somewhat clunky fighting game series, but that changed thanks to some fresh additions to the cast. Street Fighter's Akuma and Fatal Fury's Geese Howard both make appearances, and to my surprise (and relief) they actually feel like they did in their native games. 

You remember how in Street Fighter X Tekken, all the stars of the latter series were heavily modified to make them feel more familiar to Street Fighter players? The gameplay was sped up, there were chain combos like the ones in Marvel vs. Capcom, complicated multi-stage throws were changed into more easily executed super moves, that sort of thing. 

That didn't happen in Tekken 7... aside from the slightly leaden movement that's a series trademark, Geese and Akuma were largely unchanged. All of their moves are still there, triggered with the same half-circle and z-motion inputs, and they even have super meters which let you double the strength of their attacks! Since the newcomers are armed with fireballs and the other Tekken characters have no long range attacks worth mentioning, it tilts the odds rather heavily in their favor. Not that I'm complaining, mind you... I've always been pretty terrible at Tekken and will happily take any handicap the designers give me.

While I'm on the subject... is anyone else slightly confused by the tone of the Tekken series? On the surface it seems it's played straight, with a grim storyline about long-running family rivalries, punches and kicks that look like they could shatter concrete, and intense music that straddles the fence between heavy metal and techno. Then you jump into the main menu and you're given the option to customize your character with goofy hats, frying pans, and a health meter covered with adorable cartoon frogs. I guess that's just how Tekken rolls, but it's still a little jarring to hear an announcer gravely inform me that "Heihachi Mishima is dead," only to see him two games later, alive and well and armed with a giant salmon.

Oh yeah, one other thing before I go! Nordic Games, or THQ Nordic as they're currently calling themselves, bought the rights to Free Radical's TimeSplitters and 38 Studios' Kingdoms of Amalur. I've never played the latter game (it's still rotting away in my backlog), but I'm told that's good news. I have played TimeSplitters: Future Perfect, and I'm thrilled at the possibility of the game finding its way into the Xbox One's ever-growing list of backward compatible titles. I'm not great at first-person shooters, and Future Perfect is one of those rare games in the genre that shows less skilled players a little mercy, rather than swallowing them whole the moment they press start.

Imagine that... THQ, a respected game developer! If I had told me that twenty five years ago while I was suffering through the Super NES version of Pit Fighter, I wouldn't have believed me. Either that or I would have asked why I used the gift of time travel for something so trivial. One of those.