Excellent news for that one guy making a Street Fighter X Tekken stop-motion animation film based on the one fanfic he wrote, as well as regular people with cubicles that need decorating: Namco Bandai will be releasing two new series of SFxT Minimates figures, with the first wave arriving in November.

Regardless of which wave they're in, characters come in fixed packs of two: Ken vs. Steve, Cammy vs. Nina, Poison vs. Lili and Sagat vs. King (above) make up November's offering. Wave two, said to release sometime in February, pits Chun-Li vs. Hwoarang, Abel vs. Kazuya, Ryu vs. Yoshimitsu and Rufus vs. Julia, all of whom can be seen after the break. No word on pricing, but we do know that some pairs will be more rare than others.

Lee Abrahams over at Xbox 360 Achievements wrote up a great Tekken Tag Tournament 2 preview from Gamescom 2012. In this article Abrahams recaps a presentation given by Tekken director Katsuhiro Harada at the event and provides details on such topics as the Tekken Tunes feature, World Tekken Federation, Fight Lab and more.

Below is a bit from the article.


Each time you clear certain stages in the Fight Lab you will be assigned a ranking, which in turn will unlock new moves to purchase and also mean that you have a bevy of points to spend on said moves. The idea being that players can constantly challenge themselves and always have a new goal, or series of unlocks, to strive for. “So it’s not like you can just play through once and be done with it,” Harada states, “As there is a lot on offer here so you can continue to play through this mode to unlock all of the content.” It’s clear that the focus is on creating an array of modes and content to keep hardcore players happy while also appealing to relative newcomers.

He also mentioned the new Tekken Tunes feature which lets players chop and change the in-game music as they see fit, or even introduce their own music to play over the menus, stages and so on. He immediately brandished a Red Hot Chili Peppers CD with a grin and popped it into the console to import 'Give it Away' over the action. It’s a neat feature and an example of the level of interaction Harada hopes players will come to enjoy. “You can also put your own music and soundtracks in there,” Harada continues, with a glint in his eye, “Or as a parent, you can leave messages to your kids to tell them to stop playing games and do their homework instead. So that when they clear the final stage they get yelled at for playing the game.” A novel approach to selling your game to be sure, but it shows the sense of humour on offer and that Harada is prepared to embrace a variety of ideas to make the game as unique as possible.

The Entertainment Software Rating Board has revealed their rating summary for the upcoming multiplatform title, Tekken Tag Tournament 2. The Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 versions of the fighting game got tagged with a T (for Teen) rating due to contents relating to alcohol reference, crude humor, mild blood, partial nudity, sexual themes and violence. Furthermore, the user-generated content will be unrated while the DLC music tracks may also be inconsistent with the rating. You can check out the full summary from the ESRB below:

"Includes online features that may expose players to unrated user-generated content (Xbox 360, PlayStation 3)

Features downloadable music content that may be inconsistent with the ESRB rating (Xbox 360, PlayStation 3)
Rating summary: This is an arcade-style fighting game in which players engage in hand-to-hand combat with a large cast of human, animal, and supernatural characters. Players use martial arts punches, kicks, and throws to drain opponents' health meters. Some fighters also use melee weapons or laser blasts to knock characters across the screen or to the ground. Some attacks reference alcohol (e.g., Wine Opener, Tequila Sunrise), and one character uses “drunken” fighting moves. Matches are accompanied by cries of pain, punching sounds, and impact effects. Cutscenes depict additional acts of violence/blood: a man getting shot from a rooftop by a sniper; droplets of blood falling from a wounded fighter. During the course of the game, there some references to sexual material: a fighter arrested for “voyeurism” after spying on a woman; a red-light district (neon signs that read Sexy Cats, Sexy Rouge, and Girls Paradise appear nearby); a fight stage with women pole-dancing in the background. During one cutscene, a woman appears partially nude as her ink-like costume dissolves underwater; in another, a character is shown covering her breasts after a shower. In one comedic scene, two fighters eat pizza that has been laced with laxatives; gurgling/flatulence sounds can be heard as they race to the bathroom."

Some games will throw you into the action with no instructions at all, expecting you to adapt and learn how to play the game as you go along. Other titles will hold your hand and take you through specially-designed tutorial stages, where the risk of failure is more or less nil, and you can learn the game at your own pace.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, however, gives players an irritating fairy called Navi, who follows you constantly and tells you what to do; throughout the entire game. Every time you reach a new area or come across something you haven’t discovered before, she will yell at you and explain what you should be doing. “Hey, listen!” quickly becomes the most annoying phrase you will ever hear, as she won’t leave you alone or let you explore and take things at your own pace. She wants to tell you what to do, when she wants to. Of course, she is a big help for targeting enemies you are fighting, and she is certainly useful for first-time players, but Nintendo should have scaled back her involvement as you progress through the title. As Link gets better and learns new things, Navi should appear less often. Otherwise she just becomes an irritant, who won’t leave you alone.

Unfortunately, dramatic films, television shows, and now games, often need a character like Roman Bellic. Someone who is close to the protagonist and who means well, but whose stupidity leads the main characters into dramatic situations. Roman is the only person in America willing to give you a chance, and he puts you up and helps you get on your feet, but from day one, you can tell that he will lead you into a lot of trouble throughout the title.

Roman moves from one disaster to the next, dragging Niko along with him, most of the time just to bail him out. He is the reason for most of the suffering you will go through during the game, so predictably, you will begin to wish that your idiot Cousin never existed. To make things worse, the friendship system within the game means that Roman will keep calling you up, wanting you to take him halfway across the city just to play some pool, or have a drink, and woe betide you if you don’t, as he will get all pissed off with you and not want to talk for days. Which isn’t actually an altogether bad thing…

Rather than being an incredibly irritating character himself – Tekken is a fighting game so the characters aren’t that well developed – the Capoeira fighting style employed by first Eddy Gordo and also his devotee Christie Monteiro is what makes this pair annoying. Tekken is a game based around combos, so much more so  than Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat, where you really need to know all of a characters special moves; Tekken is kinder on beginners.

As such, being combo-based, Tekken is also a good game for button-mashers and people who just tap and hope, and that is where Capoeira steps in. You don’t really need to know any of their actual combos, as you can just press their attack buttons randomly and their attacks blend together so quickly, and the attacks are so un-balanced, that is makes it very hard for an opponent to even pull off a move against them. Being based around dancing, the fighting style is so quick and smooth that each attack flows together before you can even blink an eye. You will be able to juggle enemies to your hearts content and irritate them no end. Play as Eddy or Christie if you are playing someone you don’t like; or if you are fighting a player who is much better than you, but you want a cheap win.

Goro is a great character in terms of design. playing through Mortal Kombat, almost all of the competitors look more or less the same. All humanoid, all around the same shape and size. Then you reach the boss and “what the hell is that?” A four-armed monster of a fighter appears, and before you know it he has beaten the living snot out of you; possibly beating you with only two or three moves. He is incredibly intimidating and a very original boss character.

However, he is just so over-powered. Goro is the epitome of the lazy, cheap boss battle in a fighting game. You could be pulling off all of your special moves and battering him for the whole round, without even making a dent on his energy bar, but one throw and stomp from Goro, and your fighter will be on their last legs. Whenever you have him on the ropes, with victory in sight, he will pull off a chain of unblockable moves and smash all of your dreams of victory. Of course you can beat him, but prepare to be frustrated; a lot.

In a toss up between the most annoying cute animals in gaming, it is really hard to separate the two characters from Animal Crossing shown above. They may look funny, and t may be hard to take them seriously, but this pair of creatures will take what should be a relaxing game and make it a long, hard slog. Why these two? What do they do that really ticks us off?

Firstly, Mr Resetti (clever name, incorporating the word RESET) is the most pointless character in the entire game. His sole purpose is to follow around any gamer who is silly enough to turn off their console, or reset the game, without first saving. He will bug you and nag you, making you suffer through pages and pages of text when you load your console back up again, before you can get back to playing the game. Sometimes, if he is feeling especially vindictive, you will have to type in an apology to him in the game, letter by letter, to say you are sorry for turning off your console. What a pedant!

And Tom Nook, what does he do that is so bad? Well for a game which is meant to be about moving to a new town and making friends at Animal Crossing, Tom Nook is the equivalent of an evil banker. Rather than just get a house when you start the game, Nook will lumber you with a huge mortgage, for which you will have to working every day catching butterflies and the like, just to pay off and survive. Forget about improving your house or buying new furniture for quite some time; you now have the chains of a mortgage to worry about. In a kids game, with talking animals and butterflies, you have a mortgage! Now if that isn’t annoying, I don’t know what is. Surely you play a game like Animal Crossing to escape the real world and its responsibilities? Not if Tom Nook has anything to say about it you don’t.

Nintendo selected Namco Bandai as the developer of the Wii U and Nintendo 3DSSuper Smash Bros. title. That coveted contract could have gone to a number of different publishers, so why did Namco Bandai get it?

"I think Nintendo chose us just because Smash Brothers is a fighting game. We have over 17 years of continuously developing titles in our franchise [Tekken], I think they felt we were a choice for that," answered Katsuhiro Harada, Tekken series producer."

"Also, we’ve continually developed a very good relationship with Nintendo," Harada continued. "Maybe not necessarily in the public spotlight but kind of behind the scenes. We have established a very good working relationship with them. Not just Nintendo, but as a company, we have a very good relationship with Sakurai-san at Sora as well. I think that we are in very good position to make a great game for theSmash Brothers series."

Earlier this year Namco Bandai released Tekken 3D: Prime Edition for the Nintendo 3DS and have a Wii U version of Tekken Tag Tournament 2 with Nintendo gimmicks like the Mega Mushroom.

A new Street Fighter X Tekken developer blog has been posted on Capcom-Unity today. Ayano mainly focuses on the PS Vita version packaging, giving detailed descriptions and showing images of the proofs.

Ayano also gives a small update about the iPhone version of Street Fighter X Tekken, telling everyone to expect big tings.

"I got word from the mobile development team that the iPhone version of SFXTK is “almost ready to go” -and come to think of it, the mobile team was cheering about something; they must have finished their master submission! Definitely expect big things from SFXTK mobile!"

The NamcoBandaiGames YouTube channel has posted a video taken from the Tekken Tag Tournament 2 Xbox party at San Diego's Comic-Con. There isn't really any new information given but Harada talks a little about the Fight Lab.

"All party goers taking TEKKEN to the next level experiencing Fight Lab, Pair-play, and a taste of the online mode. We were also treated with the visit of Tekken Series director Katsuhiro Harada and the girls of Tekken Tag Tournament 2."

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE VIDEO

Street Fighter X Tekken on the PlayStation Vita has the same feature that’s popular in other recent portable fighting games—the ability to fight AI versions of other players you’ve encountered.

In Street Fighter X Tekken, this feature is called “Ghost Tag”. You can fight CPU teams based on opponents (ie; actual players) you’ve encountered online. Capcom say that you can still keep the Fight Request feature turned on to hop into an actual online battle partway, should someone challenge you to a match.

Another feature related to Ghost Tag is called “Swap Switch”. Street Fighter X Tekken lets you customize its characters with different colour schemes. If you encounter another player online with an outfit and Gem loadout that you like, you can challenge them in Ghost Tag. If you lose to the Ghost Tag CPU, you’ll then be given a chance to control their team, complete with their costumes and Gem sets.

Additionally, Capcom also say that if you own Street Fighter X Tekken on both PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita, data between the two versions will be synced between the two systems, provided you use the same PlayStation Network account. You can read about more of the Vita version’s features here.

Street Fighter X Tekken for PlayStation Vita will be released on October 23rd.

Of all interactive entertainment genres, the fighting game seems to provoke the strongest sense of community and identity from its fan base. While first-person shooters attract a larger competitive audience, the likes of Street Fighter, Tekken and Virtua Fighter seem to inspire something more, something akin to a true subculture, with its own language, meeting places and sense of visual style.
Publishers like Namco and Capcom are experts at capitalising on this, hence the "We Are Tekken" Instagram competition, which is running throughout August. UK gamers are being encouraged to send in snapshots of what Tekken means to them. The best images are then to be displayed at Shoreditch's Protein gallery from 13-16 September.
The photos are pretty interesting, ranging from little pieces of Tekken art to photos of people playing the game. The image above, submitted by cy4n1de, shows a doodle drawn by his girlfriend while he and a friend played Tekken 6.
You can find out more information about the competition and the exhibition here, and you can check the #wearetekken Instagram gallery here.

Well, this is an interesting turn of events. Over on the Shoryuken forums, a well established community site for fighting games, it was revealed that Street Fighter X Tekken would not be making an appearance at the Evolution fighting game tournament in 2013.

Evolution, otherwise known as EVO, is quite possibly the largest fighting game tournament in the world, spanning many games over the course of three days in Las Vegas. A user by the name of “Mr. Wizard”, who is one of the organizers for EVO, announced with very little fanfare in a forum post that the game wouldn’t be making a return appearance, saying only that “SFxT will not be back in 2013.”

No explanation has been provided, only the message that Street Fighter X Tekken will not be back. Mr. Wizard has been very vocal on his negative thoughts pertaining to the game, and considering he has yet to make any other posts since the one in question, many people are waiting on an explanation or more information.

We have reached out to the people behind the Evolution tournament series for an explanation and more formal confirmation of this information, and this story will be updated as we learn more about the situation.