Street Fighter X Tekken

Street Fighter X Tekken is delicate business. Not because it smushes together two wildly disparate fighting game rosters from different developers, but because it actually caters to everyone - without compromise. More on that in a sec. First, I’ve got to pick my fighters. Yep, plural – you get two a side with a tag-team mechanic to boot, not entirely unlike Tekken Hybrid or even Ultimate Marvel VS. Capcom 3. The difference is if even just one fighter loses all their health, you lose.

Currently there are about 34 fighters on offer, with the PS3 getting a few more than anyone else: “We just announced Pac Man, who’s riding on Mokujin, and a dumpy, out-of-shape Mega Man,” laughs Capcom guy Scott, “in an attempt to troll the internet.”

I pick Kazuya from the Tekko side and ol’ reliable Ryu from the Streeties line-up. Good synergy there, I thought. Immediately I go for Kaz’s Spinning Demon. Always a winner until you overuse it like a noob. Thing is, it doesn’t work and Kaz karates the air with a more conventional high kick. The basic stuff like his Flash Punch Combo are there, but concessions have been made and entering more Street Fighter-esque commands yield results instead.

“Yeah, I would say the game leans more strongly towards the Street Fighter side by a lot,” Scott nods. “We’ve even given some of the Tekken guys some projectiles. Guys like Raven who always seem to be carrying knives? Now he can throw those knives.”

It’s not the biggest surprise in store by a mile. Each fighter can now pick three gems prior to the bout. Each one will activate during the match after specific conditions are met: Assist gems, which impart auto-blocking or automatic throw escapes, and more offensive ones that speed up your moves or make your hit harder. Using them, however, costs valuable Cross Meter (which is the Super Meter with a new name). They come in tiers of three. At level 1, you don’t have to accomplish much to get them happening, but they’re not as effective. At level 3, it’s much harder to activate them but the rewards are very palatable. Theoretically, if you want to play Zangief like Chun-Li, you could gem him up to those kinds of specs.

As a fighting game purist, I’m experiencing shock. But then Scott shows me the Easy commands – and the Super Easy commands. Shock becomes super-shock. At any time, you can flick your controls over to Easy commands, simplifying all the special moves by a couple of movements. Go even further into Super Easy territory and fireballs occur at the touch of a direction and a button. You have to sacrifice a gem to activate this, though, and you also lose access to more of the game’s nuances, like Ryu’s overhead punch et al. You could never play at tourney-level with this setup, and good players will still triumph. It’s a very interesting initiative, and is liable to cause some amount of player schism. Under the hood, however, Capcom have worked like demons to temper that accessibility with offset details. Sounds like Street Fighter to me.
Asura’s Wrath

I went into Asura’s Wrath expecting something a lot closer to Onimusha than what I got. While its insane action pieces are pretty much all we’ve seen of the game thus far, it’s a lot bigger on storytelling than its preamble would have you believe.

“Asura is a demigod in this world,” begins Marco Bombasi, Capcom’s English Localization Expert. “He used to be part of this elite force, called the Eight Guardian Generals. He was one of them. What happened was, one day the other seven betrayed him: They kill his wife, they kidnap his daughter, and they frame him for killing the emperor. Then they banish him to earth, which is basically limbo where he stays for 12,000 years. He’s so angry he eventually wakes up. It’s a revenge story: He wants to kill the other Seven Generals and rescue his daughter, who they are still holding captive.”

Presented much like an anime TV series (each chapter ends with a “To Be Continued...” cliffhanger motif followed by a preview of the next “episode”), it’s also largely an exercise in (admittedly tremendous) style over substance. There is button-mashing combat galore, but it frequently gives way to abrupt QTE events, which CyberConnect2 have bemusedly renamed “PDE” events (Player Driven Events). These happen a lot, and are also inevitable.

Under Asura’s health bar, he has a red Burst Gauge. The basic concept is to beat up on the demonic Goma opposition and nail PDEs in order to fill his Burst Gauge until the game will advance the plot. None of the enemies have health bars precisely because of this.

The gigantic boss battles that ensue invariably become a massive PDE-fest, and while it’s possible to fail these various on-screen demands, all it does is trigger an “Ouch! Poor Asura!” moment, lower your Burst Gauge, and elongate the battle.

There are some cool touches: In the middle of a villain’s epic monologue, for example, you can actually skip it by punching him in the face and starting the fight immediately with a bit of extra Burst Gauge. Ultimately, however, Asura’s Wrath rang a bit hollow. It’s awesome to watch and features an excess of carnage (the highlight of which was Asura punching one of the Seven Generals through the middle of the entire world), but I kind of get the feeling CyberConnect2 should’ve fulfilled their anime dreams instead.

Resident Evil: Raccoon City

It’s been a day of surprises, and Raccoon City is no different. We all knew it was going to be a co-op shooter set during the titular city’s zombie mayhem circa Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, but it’s not until you get your hands on it that you realize just how much of a co-op shooter it is. This thing is manic. Resi Evil fans from way back won’t know what the hell’s happened to their world, but as far as co-op shooters go, it’s excellent.

You command an elite squad of the Umbrella Security Service, and there are six of you. However, you can only choose four agents for your squad between each mission, which, by the way, is: get in there, brutally hush any survivors, and maybe kill Leon (a “What if?” choice you can make at one point). There’s Vector the Recon class, Bertha the burly Medic, Four Eyes the Field Scientist, Beltway the Demolition dude, Lupo the Assault class and team leader, and Spectre the creepy Surveillance mouth-breather. Each of them is a surprisingly fleshed out deviant, and plot-wise, it pays to stick with the same agents as the game goes on (even though you don’t have to).

Once that’s down you can kit your people out with various abilities (Vector’s disappearing act is great) and select weaponry. Then the horde comes calling, and so does a rotisserie of peripheral things you have to deal with: Being infected by the T-virus, bleeding, and making sure your squad stays alive. Interestingly, these aren’t simply “Oh no! Gotta fix this!” moments; when you’re in the process of turning into a zombie, for instance, you become almost invincible. High risk-high reward type stuff, right there.

The gameplay might be wildly different (even from the action-y standpoint of Resident Evil 5), but the narrative is somewhat of a treat for longtime fans. Lots of attention has been paid to intersecting the events of Raccoon City with the series’ canon, and Nikolai shows up early to make things very difficult on you. Nemesis even appears at one point, but he’s berserk. First you have to fight him, then you have to repair him so he stomps off to hunt down Jill. That kind of stuff is great for diehards, but may be a little lost on newer players. An unusual prospect, then, but ultimately an enjoyable one for the open-minded and trigger-happy.