Just the other day I was thinking, “Street Fighter is a lot of fun, but it sure would be nice to have a Tekken game on the 3DS.”
Little did I know the thought was anything more than absent-minded longing.
Fast forward a couple days and there it is: a product recommendation on Amazon pointing to the forthcoming release, Tekken 3D Prime Edition. And it’s not that far off, either, with a North American release date set for Feb. 14.
It got my attention.
I’ve never been a hardcore fighting game fan, but I enjoy them nonetheless. Particularly on a handheld system, where the often-simplified control schemes and pick-up-and-playability inherent to the fighter genre combine for short attention span-grabbing bliss.
As a younger gamer, I gravitated toward the Street Fighters and the Mortal Kombats in the arcades because that’s what was available. It’s what we played. But I was never able to quite keep up with each iteration of arcade games and the ever-more-complex combos they brought. With the emergence of the 3D fighting games — particularly Virtua Fighter, Soul Calibur and, of course, Tekken — I found something I was more comfortable with: a breed of fighting games less concerned with the complex (dare I say magical) combos as it was with the nuance of fighting itself. That is to say, I like to shout “Hadouken!” as much as the next guy, but I don’t want a game I can beat by hadouken-ing my way through every opponent.
Of course, that all gets thrown out the window when you get a promo video the likes of the one above.
