- by Owen Morton
In my ongoing quest to find things I despise which I can then level my bile at, I have rarely come across anything I dislike quite as much as Tekken. Bargain Hunt is pretty much the only thing I can think of, apart, of course, from the list of things I gave in my article the other day about rap. Small wonder, then, that those same individuals who glorify Bargain Hunt and used to watch it every day (before the BBC took it off and replaced it with the “vastly inferior” Cash in the Attic, much to my glee) are the ones who now subject me to my experiences with Tekken.
Tekken is, in the only context I know, a game which is played on the Playstation. Now, since the Microsoft Word spellchecker recognises ‘Tekken’ yet does not understand ‘Playstation’, I am guessing that Tekken has some other meaning as well. What this other meaning may be, I do not know, but the Tekken to which I refer in this article is the irritating game.
Unlike other computer games I’ve reviewed on this website, I have absolutely no fondness in my heart for Tekken. To be quite honest, I think that’s because it’s totally crap. In its defence, I’ve never actually played it, but I have watched – on more than enough occasions – two of my housemates play it for hours on end, and I can’t for the life of me see the attraction. For those of you fortunate enough to never have had the inestimable displeasure of encountering Tekken, I will here describe the game. It will not take long.
Essentially, in Tekken, you take control of someone and use this someone to fight against another someone, who is being controlled by either another person or, in the very definition of pointlessness, the computer. Whoever wins the fight wins the game. And that, my friends, is the entirety of Tekken, summed up in two sentences (the latter of which, I will point out, was a very short sentence).
So why do I hate it so much? Well, primarily because it’s utterly pointless. As far as I can make out from the behaviour of my housemates when they’re playing it, all you do is hit the buttons on the control pads randomly until you happen upon a combination which constitutes a ‘good move’, which will then result in your character knocking a few points off the other one. It doesn’t require any kind of tactics, and no intelligence is involved in playing. Whereas with true classics like FreeCell, you are solving a puzzle, all you’re doing in Tekken is endeavouring to knock the living daylights out of a computer-generated image.
Of course, one can argue that everything is utterly pointless, in the long run. I mean, can you see any point at all to being alive? I certainly can’t; it’s not as though we’re all part of a grand plan by some deity, surely – that seems very unlikely. I’m not, of course, arguing that since there’s no point to life, we might as well go and end it. I’m just saying that while you’re alive, you might as well use your time to make yourself as happy as you can be. And if that can be achieved by playing Tekken, then so be it. But try as I might, I can’t really understand why playing Tekken would make you happy.
Which brings us back, rather clumsily, to the point of the article. And the problem now is that I can’t think of anything else to say about Tekken, because I’m getting bored with writing this. And yes, I am aware that my articles are getting ever shorter recently. Believe me, I’d pad it out if I could, but I honestly don’t see the point.