Salutations, traveler of The Internets! Welcome to William's Bloody Hell, so named after our founder, Sir Bloody William.
He is seen in the likeness above in a rare, 19th century woodcut. This
image was rumoured to have been
commissioned after a bout of unpleasantness
in the White Chapel district of London. Do enjoy your stay and peruse our many, varied offerings, much of which cannot be found elsewhere!
:: Tekken 5 ::
by William the Bloody
Okay, I'm not a typical fighting game lover, but for some reason, I have a weak spot for the the Tekken line. Tekken is the usual fighting game ritual: choose your character from a list of twenty to start with, then fight in nine stages of combat, best two out of three rounds. Tekken 5 for PS2 gives you a few gaming options. There is Story Mode, where you fight the nine stages and a story for your particular character unfolds with why they joined the tournament and a few cinematics are thrown in as they fight a character they have a relationship with and also before and after defeating the last boss, Jinpachi Mishima. There is Time Attack, where you basically do the nine levels without the cinematics and your goal is to do it in the best time possible. There is Survival Mode, where you choose a character and do one round fights against the computer without regaining any health with each fight and your goal is to last as many rounds before you lose all your health. There is Team Battle where you choose up to eight characters to compete either against the machine or a friend to see who will win the most fights before all characters lose all health. There is VS Mode, where you can fight a friend. There is Arcade Mode where you can play either the machine or a friend in best two out of three fights ad infinitem. All of these are fun, but you unlock the most stuff if you play in Story Mode, like the characters' cinematics, which you can watch at your leisure once you've beaten the boss in this mode, and also you unlock more characters this way, too.
The Good: All the classic Tekken characters are here like Nina Williams, Yoshimitsu and King, but also three new ones are added to mix: Raven, Feng Wei, and Asuka Kazama. The epilogue cinematics in Story Mode have astounding 3D animation. The way the characters move, their facial expressions, and overall appearance is just amazing. This goes double for the opening animation which gives the basic plot of the game and a quick run through of all the characters. My jaw was dropping at the quality of that animation. Also, the game play rendering is pretty top notch. It's not on the level of the cinematics of course, but it still gets a wow from me. This new latest version of Tekken has a lovely new feature: character customization! With every fight you win (in every mode except Team Battle), you win an amount of prize money. This money can be used to change the appearance of the characters! You can buy things like sunglasses, alternate hair styles, wallet chains, armor plates, and necklaces, change the colors of their clothes, and even buy whole new "secret" costumes! So, if I want my martial artists all wandering around in black outfits and wearing dark glasses, I can. Very cool. Also, I hadn't realized that special features had branched off from DVDs and onto video games, because Tekken 5 also comes with Tekken 1, 2, and 3 right on the same disc! See the state of arcade graphics from 10 years ago in Tekken 1 and be amazed at what you've got today, kiddies. There is another "extra" game, The Devil Within, which plays like a more conventional game, where you are Jin Kazama and you're exploring G Corporation and have to fight robots along the way. This game is fairly fun, and a nice extra bonus.
The Bad: First off, the new character of Raven looks WAY too much like Blade to be a coincidence. Maybe it'll just take some getting used to, like Law's resemblance to Bruce Lee. Meh. I don't know why they bothered with the "new" character of Asuka Kazama at all. I mean, she simply replaced Jun Kazama. They have practically exactly the same fighting style and moves! Why not just give us back Jun?! Also, I was a tad disoriented to discover that they ever so slightly changed a few trademarked moves of some of my preferred characters. Nina Williams, for example, has a completely different high kick move than what I remember, so that threw me off for a while. And now, the main boss, Jinpachi. He has a tendency to be waaaay too hard! I'm pretty good at this game, particularly when I get back into the swing of it, and this guy can just tick me off. I can usually play the first eight stages in six minutes, with little to no continuing, and then wind up fighting this guy for twenty minutes alone! He's got this giant mouth in his midsection which will sometimes shoot out what I can only assume is acid reflux at you. The ONLY way to avoid this attack is to side step it, which is done by either tapping the up directional or the down one. Side stepping is already difficult to do sometimes because your controller thinks you want to jump or crouch if you're not careful which leads you to being crispy crittered. One zap of this attack can deplete over one third of your health meter, not to mention the other supernatural moves he has like freezing you in your tracks so he can wail on you, or sucking the life out of you to replenish his own health from yours Yes, there were times when I beat him in just one go, but usually not. The Devil Within mini game is pretty minimalist, but then it's not why I bought the thing. Also, I feel like I remember there being more characters than we get to choose from here, ah well.
Overall, if you like fighting games, and especially the Tekken line, then you'll LOVE this. The characters and graphics are gorgeous to look at, and their fighting moves are superb. The end boss is really difficult most of the time, but you didn't want to shoot through the whole game in one afternoon, did you? I can foresee many more hours of enjoyment and wasted time with this game.
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