Are you game?

Mike Hirst explores the world of professional gaming tournaments.

COMPETITIVE GAMING is something that has always fascinated me. It is also something that I have – at one point in my life – tried to claim as my own.  Very few people can say to me that they don’t like the idea of proving their dominance over other gamers, because we are programmed by evolution to become the alpha dogs of our peers.

In the chaos that was the FIFA World Cup, Wimbledon and whatever recent Cricket tournament took place, TV has been full of sports news about national teams duking it out on a variety of battlegrounds, ranging from pitches to courts, but at the Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, 1800 players arrived to pit their strengths in a one on one knockout bouts of fisticuffs for the prize of $20,000. I speak of course of the Evolution Championship 2010, an event where players get to fight other talented fighters on games such as Super Street Fighter 4, Tekken 6, Super Street Fighter 2 HD Remix, Tatsunoko vs Capcom, Melty Blood and more.

Gaming athletes

I watched with awe and amazement at the livestream of some of these fights. None of what I saw performed seemed possible by what I would call a decent player, in fact they were barely human at all, and the guys who I play regularly with simple wouldn’t come close to the likes of Daigo Umehara, the first and now current Super Street Fighter 4 World Champion. They’d get destroyed; flawless victories every time. The competition is fierce, more so than in any other game related tournament, but it got me thinking; Video games are now interactive narratives that are meant to entertain millions of people, but it’s not entertainment to these guys, it’s a sport. It’s these people who are likely to scream down your ear when you FADC into a Shoryuken, ripping apart their guard and potentially wining the match. If you don’t play Street Fighter you wouldn’t have come across that term before, simply put it refers to a way to trick an opponent into making them think you are going to do one thing before cancelling your move with another move and dashing in for that ultra special. It’s an advanced manoeuvre you wouldn’t pull on the CPU in Arcade mode unless you were fighting the boss on the most difficult setting and even then its overkill, but against one of these superhumanplayers, it’s often the only way to damage them.

I’ve not had SSF4 for very long but this competitive side of it has peaked my interest, and as a result I want to get better, if only to match the spamming Ken players online. But when you decide to make that leap from gaming as a form of entertainment to a sport which could possibly be televised, you fall into the pitfalls that you do when you decide to play sports.  If you want to play well and have a chance against other players you will need the right kit, and so begins your search for an arcade stick.

You start to throw yourself into trying to find a more mechanical way to play, creating your own combos, discovering whose fireball would work better in a spam war, how to hold the arcade stick and what arcade sticks use the best methods to send the quickest and most accurate signals to the console, and BAM! That’s all the fun gone. Well not all of the fun, but it reminds me of playing in the IGUK (Interactive Gaming UK) – A union of LAN centres who pool their efforts to compete centre against centre at a variety of games – and their weekly competitions of Dawn of War where you would begin to build a base and get spammed by the cheap units on mass just as you started to get a force together, and suddenly the game is no longer fun to play.

Continues…

‘The End is Nigh’ is a weekly column by Play.tm’s Martin Gaston, pondering the nature of videogame endings and why we do or don’t choose to finish the games we play. This week: Tekken 6, and how to finish a fighting game.

Azazael – the final stage boss of Tekken 6 – is a bit duff.

He’s not the only one, of course – rubbish bosses seem to be endemic to all fighting games. Just snatch a glance of Seth, the billion forms of Rugal, I-No or Gill. Yuck. Tekken 6 seems to pride itself (even more than the average fighter) on having some sort of overarching narrative, which is why you’re forced to watch so many tame Lars Alexandersson cutscenes as you trek through the tedious scenario mode (more on that here).

To help set the scene: Azazael is some ancient towering, 3-person-tall crystallised monster thing. He’s been summoned into existence because of Jin’s (formerly Kazuya’s, I think) Devil Gene, the mystical genetic doodad which allows him to sprout wings and shoot lasers from his eyes by pressing two buttons. Azazael’s presumably nefarious in intent, because everyone in the sixth bout of the Iron First tournament seems to end up smooshing his face into the stony floor of his temple at some point. He also has a temple – blatantly evil.

His purpose is to end a single-player slog with an epic battle against seemingly impossible odds. That’s nice enough, of course; effective, traditional and generally entertaining. It’s served the movies well for decades. But despite Namco’s best efforts to drag the 15-minutes-at-best game out into hours and hours of exposition, Tekken 6 is not a movie, and the way the developers have encapsulated the ‘epic battle’ and ‘impossible odds’ quota is to make the purple bruiser cheaper than a copy of The Office on DVD during an HMV sale.

He can, amongst other things, block high, medium and low at the same time, fire lasers, summon stalagmites, roll up into a ball then fling himself at you, conjure up irritating magical bats, crash into the ground with a hefty wallop and club you with his giant crystal arms. What’s most frustrating, though, is how he takes liberal advantage of a downed opponent’s moments of vulnerability when knocked to the floor, chaining all his grotty attacks together into a combo that can suck off a good third of your health bar. Don’t expect to be able to do the same, either: like all end bosses, he also takes less damage from your attacks.

Confusingly, Azazael is not even particularly troublesome to beat. The easiest way I’ve found is just to jump in and kick him in the head from time to time whilst blocking and waiting for his recognisable double punch attack – which leaves him wide open for a solid counter. Repeat until dead.

This isn’t Tekken, though. By tinkering with the otherwise balanced roster to create a boss artificially boosted in offensive capabilities, all Namco have done is created a final event that’s little more than looping through the same banal cycles of defending and countering. It completely misses the mark of a grand finale. And whilst defeat is guaranteed to instil frustration in the player, victory delivers no sense of satisfaction or achievement. It’s all messed up.

It could easily be pointed out that I’m approaching it from the wrong angle, and that Tekken 6 is not meant to be played in single-player at all: it’s not even supposed to be played on a home console. That’s a fair evaluation. Tekken 6 is, of course, a competitive versus game by design, and in that mode it positively bedazzles – put two ardent fighting fans in the same room and they’ll almost definitely give it a go after exhausting Street Fighter IV.

But, at the same time, it’s always been a staple Tekken tradition to plough through the single-player modes to watch the then-impressive CGI endings – who in their (now) twenties doesn’t have fond memories of doing that in Tekken 2 or 3? There’s also a whole market of casual Tekken players who never much cared for versus, wheeling the game out every now and then for a stress-relieving kick about and the occasional tussle with a mate. As a quid-engulfing source of arcade frustration, Azazael is indubitably perfect. He doesn’t translate well to consoles.

At the same time, fighting games do need something, though, to throw at players as one final last-ditch attempt to stop them from seeing the CGI movie and the end credits – otherwise you just end up with the lame duck attempt of KOF XII. And we can’t have that.

I don’t have the answer. But I know Azazael isn’t it.

By Daniel Lipscombe

The Tekken series has had a rough time over the last few years.

Issues with the franchise have been simple ones, and the main one has to be its reluctance to change. Only really standing by the classic arcade mode, stopping mid-series to squeeze in a Streets of Rage-style mode called Tekken Force, there has rarely been a gamble – and when there has been, it hasn’t always panned out. Tekken 6 is an attempt to stand tall with the biggest contender of them all, Street Fighter 4. With Tekken previously being one of the strongest fighting games on the market, can it still hold its own?

The answer is… kind of. As a fighting game, in arcade mode Tekken 6 is as good as ever. When simply picking your favourite fighter and taking on a series of opponents, the series hasn’t really changed. The options are still the same – changing the amount of rounds, difficulty and so on. However, whereas that would have been the core of previous iterations, this time round the arcade mode feels tacked on, as if it was a mere afterthought – so much so that even the graphics are sub-par compared to the rest of the game. Instead, Tekken 6’s “real” game lies in the scenario campaign.

The scenario mode is basically a step backwards to Tekken Force again, but this time a little more involving. Or, you might say, dragged out. The mode is very simple: you move through each level in a manner akin to Double Dragon, defeating fighters, picking up health and power-ups and eventually fighting a boss character.

//Style over substance
The issues with this mode start with the intro. Namco seem to have leant how to construct their cinematic scenes from Hideo Kojima, but haven’t learnt to master his substance. It’s all well and good having a long cut-scene, but when it tells very little story, there is a want to skip subsequent cinematics. These tiresome cut-scenes aren’t overly interesting, and the story itself is as contrived as any other in the franchise. In fact, every inch of Tekken 6 feels ludicrous, even for a fighting game. As evidence, look no further than the ability to pick up and use mini-guns and flamethrowers while fighting.

But the issues don’t end there. There are problems with the camera, which doesn’t always point in the direction you want; the levels are linear and basic, usually involving just one road with a few corners; and worst of all are the fighting controls themselves. Although there is a button to lock on to a specific enemy in a group, you often find yourself still kicking and punching to the side of them. Even the simplest of actions – breaking open a box for an item – is difficult, as you spend so much time moving into the right position to kick it open.

Playing through this mode does eventually take you to the best part of the game, an arena in the scenario mode. In this arena you can use any characters you unlock from the scenario chapters and experience old-school Tekken. Choose a fighter, read some charming intro scene dialogue that features truly wonderful anime artwork, and once you’ve defeated your opponents, you can enjoy a terrific ending cut-scene. This, to me, is what the genre is about: fighting for what your character believes in and living their story. It’s a great addition; it’s just unfortunate that you have to suffer through the chapters of the scenario to unlock the characters.

//Bossed around
What’s most surprising about Tekken 6 is how inaccessible it feels. The difficulty, even dropped down to easy, feels alarmingly steep. Playing in either the arcade mode or scenario mode is frustrating, particularly when you’ve played so well for all of your rounds and then arrive at a boss that can only really be described as cheap. This seems to be a problem in many fighters nowadays, but when a game breaks your spirit after such hard work, it leaves you wondering if it’s worth it.

The disappointment that Tekken 6 provides is carried through to the online play, which suffers from so much lag it’s barely playable. As it would be in any fighting game, this is a real shame, as this is where you would likely spend time with friends, proving your worth.

Although this version of Tekken has a great number of fighters, is visually stunning in places and holds onto the mechanics it’s famous for, there are so many issues that outweigh these triumphs. The scenario mode feels forced and is a slog to play through, despite holding the true gem of the game inside it. The difficulty spikes are depressing and rob you of your will to play. It’s a shame that Tekken 6 didn’t venture back to its roots in classic fighting, as that’s where its strengths always did lie.

5/10

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