The awesome arcade hit breaks out onto the Playstation!


     Tekken, probably the best fighting game ever created, finally hits home this November. With bone-crunching sounds, stunning graphics, and innovative gameplay, this game makes MK3, Battle Arena Toshinden, Street Fighter II, and Virtua Fighter look like the little Galaga intro.
     First off, the graphics. Although I would love to give them a perfect score, I just can't. The animations and characters are perfect, put there are missing polygons and texture mapping flickers during some of the throw moves. Overall, though, the visual representation is stunning. Also, the lack of a true 3-d fighting perspective puts it slightly behind the cutting edge of BAT. Oh, and if you're trying to compare the Saturn to the PSX, just play this game side by side with Virtua Fighter 1 or 2. You'll feel like tossing a Saturn from a fourth story window.
     The sounds are truly fantastic. Excellent, symphonic arrangements accompany every stage, and each oomph and thud are enunciated perfectly. A nice touch is the bone-crunching sound made by some of the throw moves. This element adds a surprising amount of realism to Tekken.
     What can I say about originality with this disc? For most games, originality isn't a real big factor, since they don't usually clone previous games, just improve on them. However, whatever Tekken borrows from Virtua Fighter, it makes up by adding a totally original style of realistic martial arts combat. One point to note, though, is the fact that Tekken is still a 2-D fighter, with 3-D scaling. This style of games has been outdated since the release of BAT.
     The controls on this disc are hard to learn, but they really do the job once you learn them. With all of the possible throws and counters, the move count on some fighters pushes fifty. While these moves take a lot of time to memorize, they make for extremely deep gameplay which is yet unmatched by any other fighter.
     This game is a blast to play. With 9-10 secret characters to play, the match combinations are almost endless. Also, with all of the variety in moves, nobody can be really cheap.

And now for the grades....


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