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"Enter the Tekken........stage left"

Tekken 2 is a fun little fighting game, and was considered to be the top Playstation Beat 'em Up on the market until it was overshadowed by its own sequel. It was the middle stage of a PSX series that improved in considerable leaps and bounds every time a new installment was released. It is a game that is far superior to the original Tekken, but just as inferior to Tekken 3, it certainly doesn't stop this game from being awesome in its own right though! A lot of everyones favourite characters from Tekken have found their way onto this game, and they're joined by some fresh exciting new faces. Throw in an interesting storyline and classic gameplay to the mix, and you've got yourself a great game, it's just a pity that Tekken 3 made this title a little bit redundant.

GAMEPLAY
The gameplay of Tekken 2 is classic fighting stuff, despite a few chortcomings that make the game a little bit less fun to play. You've got a nice range of modes to test your skills on, there's the tournament mode in which you fight off ten opponents and the bosses to become the champion, there's a survival mode in which you just keep fighting off opponents until you're finally taken down, there's also a team mode where you get to pick up to eight characters and take out a whole other team with them, there's a few other modes that will test every different skill you've learnt in the game! All of these game types gel nicely to make a very complete and time consuming game, you won't tire of a single one of them in a hurry, always striving to sharpen your skills or best yourself!

The controls of Tekken 2 are insidiously simple, each of the four action buttons are used to control one of the limbs, and the four buttons up the top can be programmed in to be a combination of any two of the action buttons, this is a very helpful thing for inputting those tricky moves. Most of the moves on offer won't require button mashing as frantic as that seen in other fighting series' but still will require a little bit of practice. The less powerful moves have commands that are pretty simple to do, whilst the tougher ones often have a really long string of buttons required should you want to do it. The attacks themselves are varied things, you'll get attacks for all the different areas of the body, each one having a varying amount of lethality and blockability.

Blocking is a very simple thing to do, you pretty much just have to stand there and your character will deflect the attack of your assailant. All of the the stuff listed above makes this game very simple to play and easy to get into for beginners. The main problem with the gameplay is the speed of it all, it can be tough to follow up an attack quickly, making it easy for your opponent to slip a punch or two in, but when you get knocked down is when the worst of it is. Rather than just letting you get straight back up you have to lie there for a few seconds, making the fights stilted at times and less enjoyable than they could have been. Play Tekken 3 (in which this problem has been rectified nicely) and then go back to this, and you just won't be able to stand the speed of the thing!

Another thing that brings a bit of a new dimensioln to the fights is the countering, not only can you stop the opponent from dealing you damage, but you can it right back on him! All it takes is a little bit of know-how about the game, and some good timing and you can be countering with the best of them! For you see, whilst it appears to be a reasonably simple game on the outside, there are many intricacies to be learnt, all sorts of different commands can be learnt to put you above the rest of the competition.

There's a lot of stuff for you to unlock in this game, for a start you're only able to access half of the characters. When you win the tournament with a person, not only will you get to see their ending movie, but you'll also unlock another character who is usually involved with the characters you used in some way. There's probably also a costume or two in there for you to get, but what they've got is certainly enough to keep you playing the tournament mode for a long time. If you get the Tekken 3 CD, you're also able to see the Tekken 2 movies whenever you want, which was very considerate of Namco!

Overall, the gameplay has a few little niggling flaws in its setup, but you should be able to have a lot of good times with this game! A lot of modes, one of the best fighting systems out there and a lot of in-depth stories to go along with it all point to a top class game! If you know the right code you can even have a fight or two in first-person mode, the game is just stacked full of goodies that make it a little bit of a pleasure to play. Not quite as good as the sequel of course, but still darn good.

GRAPHICS
The graphics of Tekken 2 are reasonably gorgeous, having a lot of positive features along with a couple of detrimental aspects as well. One great thing about the graphics is how realistic the movements of all the characters are, this realism is one thing that puts the Tekken series in the top echelon of fighting games. The majority of the moves done by the cast look like they could actually be done by a person with the appropriate amount of skill in real life. There's none of that projectile crap and its associate moves that are abundant in the Mortal Kombat series, it's just good old face to face movements. All of the animations done by the characters share this realism, you can always picture somebody really moving around like that. The designs of these characters are pretty good, all of them are realistically modelled and well proportioned. They do look a little bit rough-cut, you can make out quite a few of the polygons tha they're composed off, which is a little bit of a downside. Their apparel is very interesting, you'll get to see all sorts of outlandish clothing that suits the people wearing them perfectly (except King in his business shirt and tie, that's just ridiculous). There's good amounts of detail on the characters, you can make out things such as facial expressions and the like. The characters overall look pretty good and don't give you too many things to complain about.

The surroundings that the characters have to battle it out in have a good amount of detail, you're taken to a lot of varied places to do battle. You might be fighting it out at a waterfront, then move straight to a luscious meadow or even the top of a skyscraper. In all of them there are nice effects, these might be things such as spotlights illuminating the sky or the grass of the meadow blowing back and forward serenely. None of these scenes ever really get boring, in fact you'll hardly even notice the backgrounds you'll be concentrating too much on the battle, but it's always relieving to know they look good anyway! As you move around these areas, the background will adjust accordingly to make it look as if each scene never has a beginning or an end, this scrolling is used to great effect and makes the scenes far more immersive. The scenes generally do a great job of creating atmosphere in the game, their aren't too many faults with the techincal or aesthetic sides of them. Not a bad job at all has been done in this section!

When you finish off a game, you'll get to see some nice little FMVs. These videos are of a very nice quality, they're not quite as clear as they could have been, but they should suffice. There's also some nice little flashes of lighting, and other quaint little effects smattered through the game, there's enough eye candy in this game to keep most people out there happy.

Overall, the graphics have been done very professionally. They don't suffer from slowdown or anything else like that, and still manage to have good amounts of detail. You won't have any problems putting up with these visuals, it should be a pleasure viewing them most of the time. They can appear to be a little bit blocky here and there, but it's not enough to impact on the overall quality of them!

SOUND
The sound is used to great effect in this game, it's easy on the ears and accompanies the graphics very nicely. The background music is pretty darn cool, there's a wide range of tunes with most of them proving to be pretty catchy. Each scene ujsually has its own musical piece, and they've been chosen wisely, as they fit their specific scene ridiculously well. The quieter. more serene scenes will have soothing tunes, whilst a scene with a little more aggressive design will have music that is louder and also of a quicker pace. A couple of the themes can prove to be very memorable, and you'll start up a certain level just to hear the music that goes with it. You won't tire of this music in a hurry, it won't grind the nerves or anything like that, it's just been done very well.

The sound effects also have had a large portion of quality dished up onto their plate, being the perfect Costello for the music's Abbott, or something like that! There's a lot of different sound effects, particularly of the punch and kick type. Each different attack will have one or two contact sounds, this is great because hearing the same WHACK over and over again in other fighting games has almost turned me insane at times. Despite a noticeable lack of speech in the game the ''voice acting'' is very good. The only discernable noises that they make are cries of attack and cries of pain, all of these sound very realistic and sometimes you can't help but feel sorry for the fighters as they cringe in pain from a kick to the mid-section. There's a high quantity of sound effects as well as a large quality, what more can one ask for?

Overall, the sound rounds out a superbly designed game. Both the graphics and the sound go a long way to making Tekken 2 the classic at it is, and neither of them are ever really hard on your senses. The background music and the sound effects blend very well to make a very complete audio package, it's a game that you can turn down the sound on if you want, but you'll probably find yourself leaving it on due to the quality of it.

LIFESPAN
The lifespan of Tekken 2 is fairly lengthy, of course there's a large number of modes for you to have a go at, and they're good modes, not those cheap rubbishy modes they give out in cerial packets! Each mode adds a new dimension to the game, each one will get you hooked in for some period of time, no matter how small it is, and each one adds up to a very large lifespan. It's a very good multiplayer game that Tekken 2, you'll be beating the heck out of your friends (ON THE GAME DARN IT! YOU VIOLENT LITTLE MONKEY MAN!) a year or so down the track. You won't play the game nearly as much if you have the sequel, but on it's own this game will keep you enthralled for your moneys worth of time, or something like that!

FUN FACTOR
The fun factor is just a little bit above average, the problems with the stilted gameplay and some other stuff stop the fun from reaching its full potential. The style of the fighting might mean that the game is better than a Mortal Kombat, but it's seriousness might not make it as fun. You do get a good deal of satisfaction from taking out devil and winning the tournament, especially on the hardest setting, but the novelty will soon wear off once you beat it a large amount of times. There are games that are more fun, and there are games that are less fun, Tekken 2 just seems to sit nicely in the middle of them all.

CHALLENGE
There is a great range of challenge in Tekken 2, you can choose from a range of difficulty settings, and in the tournament mode as you progress the enemies will become increasingly more difficult. This means you'll get to play against enemies from both ends of the scale, and of course you can always just play against your friends! If you don't like being knocked out all the time you can always just try the Practice mode anyway, there's something in this challenge range to appeal to everyone except the tiny little people who play games like Rugrats. A very nice challenge indeed, if you can understand this sentence, it'll suit you!

THE FINAL PARAGRAPH
Tekken 2 was once the best fighting game out there on the Playstation, some people say it has been knocked down to second place whilst others argue it's slipped even lower, it doesn't really matter, it's just a darn good game. It has enough depth, variety and all those other good things to keep the majority of the gamers out there playing for a long time. If you've never tried yourself a Tekken game, it would be best if you look over this and go straight to the third installment, of course there might just be something about you that makes you enjoy this game more, who knows? Tekken 2 was a great game in it's own time, but it started to show it's age a little while ago now, try one of the newer games out there!
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GOOD POINTS
- Improves immeasureably over Tekken
- Has a lot of modes and a lot of characters to go with them
- A very impresive challenge range that appeals to the masses

NOT SO GOOD POINTS
- Not many people will play this, because of sequels and stuff!
- It does play a little slower than I'd like
- There's a boxing kangaroo, I dislike boxing kangaroos
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GRAPHICS - 8/10
SOUND - 9/10
GAMEPLAY - 7/10
LIFESPAN - 9/10
FUN FACTOR - 6/10
CHALLENGE - 10/10
OVERALL - 8/10

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 12/02/00, Updated 09/10/01