Taking Tekken Online
Yes, it's online, and yes, it kicks ass.
Published: August 22, 2007
In many ways, PlayStation 3 owners have had to serve as guinea pigs; early adopters to a system and games that may not be 100% ready for prime time. Make no mistake about it: Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection Online (yes, that's the full official tongue-twisting title now) is a test. Those who bravely download the add-on that'll hit "in the next few weeks" according to Namco reps that demoed the game for the first time in San Francisco in late August will basically be paying to test out the net code that will eventually make its way in the glorious looking Soulcalibur IV.
The good news? The game plays beautifully.
Not only does it still look good (for those who didn't know, DR Online piggybacks off the original PlayStation Network-only T5DR, which was essentially a hi-res version of the PSP game of the same name), but we managed to play against the Japanese development team (well, "play" may not be the right word, we got our asses handed to us -- by just about every character in the game), yet despite the geographical distance, we might as well have been playing with someone next to us.
In fact, we did that too. The game's sole online mode that we were able to test was played arcade style -- remember back in the day when you threw a quarter up onto the arcade cabinet to indicate you had the next game? Tekken 5 Online operates the same way with one little caveat: if one of us happened to actually beat one of the Japanese devs, we would play a match against the guy sitting next to us, trading off between local and online matches.
Not only was this a great way to let people playing in the same room (though on a different PS3 and HDTV) get in, if they could dethrone the champ, they got to immediately square off against the Japanese devs themselves. It happened that way anyway, but the competition was so fierce that hardly anyone lasted both the offline and online games, so many of us would come in at random points.
Aside from apparently lag-free online (admittedly, we were probably the only people to ever play internationally, and there were only two local PS3s online), the game is a fairly barebones experience. Unlike the PSP version, ghost data from your create-a-character won't be uploaded to freshen up the pool of arcade users that made up the PS3 pool for your ghost fighter to duke it out with. Still, for many the promise of playing Tekken online against people all over the world is all they'll need to hear before plunking down the cash (the actual amount hasn't been decided yet), and after playing, you'll have to count a few of us in the office among them.
The good news? The game plays beautifully.
Not only does it still look good (for those who didn't know, DR Online piggybacks off the original PlayStation Network-only T5DR, which was essentially a hi-res version of the PSP game of the same name), but we managed to play against the Japanese development team (well, "play" may not be the right word, we got our asses handed to us -- by just about every character in the game), yet despite the geographical distance, we might as well have been playing with someone next to us.
In fact, we did that too. The game's sole online mode that we were able to test was played arcade style -- remember back in the day when you threw a quarter up onto the arcade cabinet to indicate you had the next game? Tekken 5 Online operates the same way with one little caveat: if one of us happened to actually beat one of the Japanese devs, we would play a match against the guy sitting next to us, trading off between local and online matches.
Not only was this a great way to let people playing in the same room (though on a different PS3 and HDTV) get in, if they could dethrone the champ, they got to immediately square off against the Japanese devs themselves. It happened that way anyway, but the competition was so fierce that hardly anyone lasted both the offline and online games, so many of us would come in at random points.
Aside from apparently lag-free online (admittedly, we were probably the only people to ever play internationally, and there were only two local PS3s online), the game is a fairly barebones experience. Unlike the PSP version, ghost data from your create-a-character won't be uploaded to freshen up the pool of arcade users that made up the PS3 pool for your ghost fighter to duke it out with. Still, for many the promise of playing Tekken online against people all over the world is all they'll need to hear before plunking down the cash (the actual amount hasn't been decided yet), and after playing, you'll have to count a few of us in the office among them.