Tekken 6

The King of Iron Fist makes its much awaited first appearance on the current generation of consoles. Things have come a long way since the much hyped teaser in the Sony presentation at E3 2006, where they showed a photo-realistic Jin Kazama practicing his moves and working out a mean sweat.

Of course a lot of things have changed since then - people have realized that the Sony PS3 demonstration was nothing but a series of lies, and Tekken became a multi-platform title, by simultaneously releasing on the Xbox 360 as well. Oh and no, Jin Kazama looks nothing like he did in that trailer.

From the recent trend I've noticed, fighting games are trying to move away from the regular arcade fighting mode, which is evident in a lot of recent fighters I've tried out. This also holds true for Tekken 6, as the first option that you're encouraged to try out is the story mode.

The story mode plays out like an oldschool brawler like Streets of Rage, or the Fatal Fury series of games, where you control a single character and face a good number of evil henchmen in multiple levels, all of which end up in a boss fight. As the name suggests, the story aspect of the story mode is quite strong. If you have the patience for it, you can watch the history of the entire Tekken series at the start of the story mode, before the current event kicks in.

You play the Story Mode as the new console exclusive characters Lars and Alisa, but you do get the option to unlock other fighters as you play through the campaign. Switching from one character to the other does have a novelty value to it, but frankly I thought that they all were just about equally effective. The controls tend to suffer a bit in this mode (just as many other games that have tried to bring the brawler genre to 3D), and the special moves and combos are not too easy to implement.

But all's not bad. The rewards come easy here and the story mode is kind of fun if you want to take a break from the other modes. I just think that Mortal Kombat did a better job at bringing in a story mode in Mortal Kombat Deception and Armageddon.

Though the biggest draw of the home console version of the game is the Story mode, it's the good old one-on-one fighting that's more of my cup of tea.