When the consoles got Tekken 6 a few months ago, the PSP version was not far behind. Tekken 6 on the PSP is a straight up fighting game with your standard modes: arcade, story, ghost, and challenge battles. The meat of the game is in the first two, arcade and story, while the last two offer more of a "compete against yourself" vibe.
Arcade battle attempts to simulate the experience of fighting human opponents with some pretty realistic player names and tactics. I gave it to my younger cousin to play and he believed he was fighting against other players on the internet. I let him believe that because hey, why spoil the kid’s fun, right?
Story battle was what I started off with, being new to the Tekken series. It lets players go through the game while following a character’s story line. With the game having over 40 characters, that’s a lot of stories to go through.
The game’s mechanics seem suited for both extremes: the novice masher to the crazy-combo-crusher players. The face buttons are mapped to different limbs and individual combos are simple to pull off with a few button presses and a directional poke. For the more experienced, there’s the aspect of juggling opponents who get knocked off their feet and stringing together multiple combos.
Although the graphics are not as sophisticated as its HD console counterpart, Tekken 6 still manages to play smoothly on the PSP and look good while doing it. Sure, if you look closely, you’ll notice some lower-res textures, but who really pays attention to that stuff while beating an opponent into submission?
Tekken 6 on the PSP also provides ad-hoc play, but unfortunately requires both players to have their own UMD. This makes it tricky to look for real-life opponents. Longevity in fighting games rests on the ability to easily find opponents to beat — considering I can’t easily find anyone within my vicinity to play the game with, I’ll unfortunately stop playing once I explore some characters’ story battles.
Published: Dec 29, 2009 12:50 pm