Namco Bandai Editor's Day: Tekken 6

For a company to have a best selling fighting game franchise is remarkable. Namco however, has managed to have two of the three best selling fighting game franchises and that's pretty amazing. Not only are Tekken and Soul Calibur both top sellers, but are different enough to each garner their own rabid fan bases. Personally, I am a Soul Calibur man while my buddy Sid Shuman over at GamePro is crazy ape bonkers over Tekken. I was hoping to engage him in a few rounds of Tekken which was on display at Namco's Editor's Day, but alas, he wasn't there. I daresay he was afraid I would kick his ass like I did in Soul Calibur at last year's event. But, I digress...

Tekken 6 is launching on the seeable horizon and the build I played is looking really sharp. There were only four playable characters, two classics and two of the six new characters. I wanted to check out the new folks so I went with Zafina. After choosing her the fellow demoing the game told me she was the character with the highest learning curve as she had thee stances, each with their own moves. "Ah, so she's sort of the Ivy of Tekken," I asked? He nodded his head enthusiastically and I knew I had made the right choice since Ivy is my main fighter in Soul Calibur. The other choice was Bob, a rather portly fellow who while large, looked like he might be a bit slow.

So I went a few rounds against the AI with Zafina and was impressed with how smooth and easily I managed to pick up her moves. Tekken certainly doesn't have the depth of moves of Soul Calibur but I found the experience just as satisfying. At one point the opponent almost had me. My health bar had gotten down to 10% or so and my character went into a Rage Mode (new to the series apparently) and with a sudden burst of strength, went nuts all over the enemy, kicking his highly stylized ass.

Tekken 6 is all about the HD, with super crisp graphics running at 60 FPS. Ther are a total of forty characters and as I mentioned before, six of them are new to the franchise (Bob, Zafina, Leo, Lars, Alisa and Miguel). There is also a character creation mode where you'll eb able to build your own badass fighter which you can then take onto the online vs mode and show the world what you're made of. The various levels will feature destructible environments so you can take that jerk from the other side of the world and smash his or her face through a wall or the floor or whatever your evil little heart desires.

While there is no hard release date at this time, you can expect to see Tekken 6 smashing its way on to your Xbox, PS3 and yes, even PSP this fall.