Tekken Hybrid leads the way with a joint Blu-ray movie and PlayStation 3 game on a single disc, and brings back an old favourite to boot.
Tekken Tag Tournament was released 12 years ago, so some readers may not remember it. It was a time when Tekken was one of the finest fighting series around, without the stiff competition of today. As an early PlayStation2 game, it looked gorgeous and played fantastically. Time is a cruel mistress though, and compared to today’s games, the graphical quality is somewhat questionable.
Tekken Tag Tournament HD rides the wave of current HD remakes, and brings the original kicking and screaming into the current generation. The original artists have gone back and redrawn all the 2D textures and images, and the aspect ratio has been increased to 16:9. Amazingly, the models themselves have not been tweaked. This is because in the original development, more polygons than needed were used in the characters, more so than Tekken 4 and 5 even. This leaves the game looking surprisingly smooth, while retaining the exact core mechanics.
However, we all know the reason why this game is important—Tekken Bowl. This game mode has made its way over from the original Tag in beautiful HD, pimp jackets intact. It’s truly worth the price of entry in itself.
The disc will also come with a prologue for Tekken Tag Tournament 2, with exclusive character designs from the 3D movie. This preview contains the full game system and balancing of the full title, albeit with a limited selection of maps and only containing characters that focused upon in Tekken Blood Vengeance 3D.
As well as the exclusive character designs, which look completely bad ass, if you excuse the subjective outburst (Tekken Bowl is objectively fantastic and never forget that), there is a 3D mode that will only make it into the PS3 versions of the game. Whether you care about 3D or not, it looks great, and even with all the fast motion, it never feels like too much for you to comprehend. The number of included characters has not been announced yet, but so far it contains Alisa, Xiaoyu, Devil Jin, and Devil/Kazuya.
Although there’s no price locked down yet (however, it will be in the range of a full game or less), Hybrid will be making its way to store shelves in the coming months and it will work on Blu-ray players and PS3s alike.
Stay Tuned.
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