With the advent of Street Fighter IV, many gamers are rediscovering their love of fighting games. Heaven forbid this should tip us back into the explosion of mediocre offerings of the nineties, but a few more decent fighting games here and there certainly wouldn't go amiss. Since Ryu and Ken's latest outing seems to be tearing up the charts like nobody's business, developers and publishers have got to be pondering how they can get in on a piece of the action.

Well, fighting fans can look forward to one pretty special release, anyway, with the announcement today that Japanese 2D fighter BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger will be making its way to the English-speaking world - and we just happen to have some screens.



eleasing on PS3 and Xbox 360, BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger is the spiritual successor to the Guilty Gear series, hailing from developers ARC System Works. The Guilty Gear games are considered cult classics amongst fighting aficionados, and from all indications, BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger doesn't do a great deal of tampering with a winning formula. Why a franchise change? Perhaps ARC simply took the opportunity to start afresh with a new set of characters and stories when making the jump to the current generation of systems.



It might "only" be a 2D fighter but the anime-influenced art of BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger is not to be sneezed at. It looks just about as pretty as could be, with the character's figures thankfully not having that weird bluescreen feel over the 3D backgrounds that so many titles in this field suffer. If the delicious visuals are matched with the same incredibly deep level of gameplay as its predecessors, as hordes of obsessed fans in Japan suggest, than BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger is definitely going to be one to watch for.