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Not a huge fan of Tekken - the characters don't appeal to me, the controls never really struck me as all that intuitive and the single player on the PS versions was broken, which was a pretty big problem for somebody whose mates don't like playing beat 'em ups.
Virtua Fighter was always something I got much more enjoyment from. The sheer simplicity of the control setup - block, punch, kick, and that's it - means that it's a game that even the most ham-fisted non-gamer can have a crack at. The combo system is equally simple and friendly - all those PPPKs and PP>Ks aren't just moves that a beginner can pull off by accident while hammering the buttons, but also strings that are easy to recognise and memorise. There's a huge amount of variety in the characters, all built up from that basic three button setup.
I've not played either series since their third episodes. Really want to try out both Tekken 5 and VF4Evo, but nowadays a beat 'em up has to have an online mulitplayer component for me to be able to justify buying it.
Mortal Kombat's just nasty, imo. No balance between the characters whatsoever, lazy repetition of both character sprites and movesets, one move that has priority over everything else and can lead to hilarity because it makes the game such a farce (leg sweep, wait, leg sweep, wait, leg sweep...), *so* little balance that one of the installments features a character who can pull out and fire a gun, and so on.
The worst of Mortal Kombat has to be the control setup. Conisder the Street Fighter/King of Fighters way of doing things - the command you input into the pad/stick translates directly into the character animation on the screen. When you pull a down, down-forward, forward fireball move on SF, the character moves down, down-forward, forward. The same applies to every move in the game - dragon punches, 360 grabs, charge moves, hurricane kicks. Your fingers are the character.
Now look at Mortal Kombat. In comparison, it's from the Beavis & Butthead school of design.
"Huh. Huh. Yeah, dude. Let's have some ninja guy, only, like, he'll have this special move, yeah, where he can transform his arm into a chainsaw and slice the other dude's head off!"
"Shit yeah! How you wanna have the player do that?"
"Left, down, up, left, up-right, low kick, block, left, right, high punch, block, block, down, Start!"
MK's horribly inept. It built its fame on two things - the use of digitised actors for character sprites and the fatalities. Remove those and it no longer serves any purpose, other than to be dragged out at parties when you're all pissed or tired of having to think about what you're doing and just want to laugh at somebody else's misfortune.
So yeah. I'm a big fan of Street Fighter, with SF Alpha 2 being the best in the series for me. Sure, SFIII is a more technical game, but Alpha 2 is exuberant, funny, colourful, not as frightening for newcomers and yet still deep. And it's a tighter game than the bloated Alpha 3.
I'm also a fan of SNK's beat 'em ups, even though my experience of them is limited - historically, they've hardly ever seen release over here. Even the current Xbox and PS2 ports are a source of much frustration - the company supposed to be releasing them in Europe, Ignition Entertainment, are a complete bunch of incompetent fuckwits whose lack of organisation has meant the King of Fighters ports have been delayed for about a year, and are now being split into a number of seperate packages for which we'll be expected to pay more than twice what US gamers are.
Sorry. It's a bit if a sore point.
Also lots of fun is the Dead or Alive series. The multi-tiered arenas are a great laugh and the ability to counter has, as the series has progressed, been turned into a slightly more demanding option, leading to a game which, while still lacking some balance and not asking an enormous amount of the player, is both accesible to newcomers and offers some scope for mastery. And DoA Ultimate has what can be a superb online multiplayer mode, when it's not being screwed up by massive amounts of lag. |
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