Sweet! This is post number 50 already. It seems like I just started doing this blog. Today I’m revisiting another one of my favourite PlayStation 2 games, Tekken Tag Tournament. This is a one-on-one, or two-on-two tag team fighting game originally released in the arcades by Namco in 1999. A year later a graphically improved port was released as a launch title for the PlayStation 2. The Tekken series was one of the early 3D fighting games meant to take on Sega’s Virtua Fighter. The tag team mode works similar to professional wrestling. Only one fighter per team is allowed to fight at a time, and you press a button to “tag out” when you feel your health is getting too low. If one fighter on a team is defeated, then the team is defeated.
Kind of a laid back cover. The game itself is excellent though.
The control scheme is simple. Each of the four face buttons on your PS2 controller controls a limb. Two buttons for punching, and two buttons for kicking. The style of this game is fast action, and combo hits. There are 32 different characters to choose from, and naturally each have their own fighting styles. A few of the characters sort of repeat, such as King, and Armor King, but they play just different enough to warrant their inclusion in the game. The modes you get to choose from are arcade mode, survival mode, one-on-one, team battle, and time attack. My favourite mode is the arcade mode, because I like the montage of your knockouts it shows at the end. The game difficulty has a wide range of difficulty settings, and I was quite happy to play the CPU on easy. I love fighting games, but not enough to care about frames, or cancel-block-super-tech moves and such. I like my fighting games to be fun, control well, not have cheap bosses, and to have style. Tekken Tag Tournament has all of those bases covered. It’s simply fun to control, and play. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, and has a subtle sense of humour to it. Evidence of this sense of humour is the unlockable bowling mode called Tekken Bowl. It plays a great game of bowling, and it’s just funny to see fighting characters do something totally random like this.
I actually played the arcade version of Tekken Tag Tournament in the arcades, and I was surprised to see that the PlayStation 2 version looked so much better. Today it doesn’t look as hot, but the characters do looks good, and the backgrounds are interesting. The music sounds great, and some of the tunes are really catchy. Overall Namco has made a very fun, and accessible fighting game that still holds up today. If you have an Xbox 360, or PlayStation 3, you may want to check out this game’s sequel Tekken Tag Tournament 2. The original however you can probably find for a couple of bucks, and you can’t go wrong with it.
TheBandit2006 
Leave a comment