Rispon Avenue

It’s amazing, but Tekken 6 really does suck. I really tried to like it, but I just couldn’t.

So, wow. Just wow. How hard can this game possibly lose? I’ve played the Tekken series for a long time now, I think I first began on Tekken 2, then owned 3, and 4, though I don’t think I played the fifth version. I really enjoyed those games, so very, very much. My SO and I bonded whilst playing Tekken 3 on the PS One; ahh, fond memories. That was a good decade ago, and now here we are with a sad, sad, version of a much loved series.

Tekken, for those who’ve managed to not hear of the game, is a fighting game which came out in ‘94 as an arcade game, but then was moved over the the Playstation for the next four iterations, and then finally was ported to the Xbox 360 for Tekken 6 as well as the Playstation 3. It’s been one of the best fighting games for the past fifteen years, and I was sure that it would continue to be so. However, the sixth sequel is just… just awful.

Okay so I played it for two days, on and off, so I gave it a fair chance. My SO and I happily placed the disc into the 360 and started the game up. We knew the music was going to be less than great because of the IGN review, and they also mentioned the lack-lustre sound effects. We said we could deal with that and away we went.

We picked some of our favourite characters straight up, and it was nice to see so many characters available for use straight away. I fought as Bryan Fury, and my SO fought as Ling Xiaoyu. Okay, here we were, and yeah, the music wasn’t great, but I could deal with that. My SO absolutely hated the poor fight sound effects, saying she never felt like she landed a proper attack because the sounds were so muted.

The controls of the game were poor to say the least. I’m a good fighter, but it felt like the only way to play this game was to button mash, and then we actually tried the single-player modes; up until this point, we’d only been fighting each other.

So I tried arcade mode, hoping to unlock more content. I got to the third fight and was then faced with ‘*Oops*’ the bear. A blue version of Kuma with gold wrist braces and paw-pads. This ridiculously difficult opponent took me thirteen attempts to beat, in spite of being able to get through every other arcade/single-player mode in a fighting game pretty straight forwardly in the past. There was no learning curve, the AI went from complete dunce that will allow you to throw them over and over, to nigh-on unstoppable knows every attack in the catalogue kind of opponent in only three rounds. I mean, what the hell’s with that?

Then we tried the ‘Scenario’ mode as a cursory glance online suggested this was the way to unlock content. It was terrible. A strange strolling along a path fight were you were stuck with an annoying android who’s trying to explain the abstract defunct story-line. I couldn’t stand this style, it was very unintuitive.

Combine all of this with some seriously ugly character models and the worst fractured storyline you could imagine, we ended up taking it back and trading it for Soul Calibur IV. Sheesh.

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When I have a bit of time to kill, and have exhausted all my favourite humorous blogs, I sometimes set my sights to games on IGN that received very, very, poor reviews. I find it very, very, funny to see what’s been offered up in this select niche part of the gaming market… the ‘I’m not even trying’ part. Both of the following games fall under that category, and both received 1.0s as scores.

First up we have not only Elf Bowling 1, but Elf Bowling 1 & 2! The premise behind this ‘game’ is that you are Santa, and you hate elves, so in the first game you’ve got them set up as ‘Pins’ and you ‘Bowl’ at them. See all those loaded words there? That’s because the sprites look so bad, that calling this a game is really being too generous. All you do is tap once, that’s it. You can’t aim, apparently, or do anything, really. You just have to tap the screen. And that’s just the first title, wait, there’s more! The second title is supposedly worse than the first! In this one, hateful Santa and his elves are in ‘Paradise’ and Santa’s now using the elves to play shuffle-board with. According to the review, there’s no animation of the elves, they just sort of bump about. This game originally made the rounds on the web as a free flash-game. Somehow it was made into a DS title that you’re supposed to actually pay for!? Apparently there are songs in there, too. “Elf, Elf, Baby” and “Who let the Elves out”… I shudder at the thought. Ahh, how funny! Looking at the video, this is, by a very large margin, the worst looking DS game I’ve ever seen.

Second abysmal game is simply called Aquarium. Now, the cover art actually looks kind of intriguing, in a DS game sort of way. When you look at the clean, nice cover, you think this must be an interesting, though perhaps short lived, game, but you’d be so very, very wrong. Aquarium is a, well hang on, is meant – sort of – to be a game where you put fish in a tank and feed them some stuff that they don’t actually eat, just swim back and forth and the food disappears, and you’re supposed to find this relaxing. There are unlockables, though it’s not explained what unlocks them – probably just sitting through more of this horrible little game – and you can ‘decorate’ the tank with scenery and what not, that apparently looks hideous. Wow, this is so bad it may have passed funny and gone right to “Why?” Here are some screens if you would like to subject yourself to the funniness, because the screens to attain that level of so bad it’s bloody hilarious.

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