Showing posts with label Guilty Gear X. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Guilty Gear X. Show all posts

The Dreamcast Legacy - BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle

In a new series of articles (perhaps only a short-lived series, as I only have this and one other lined up), we will be exploring modern games that owe a debt to the blazing trails left by the games and developers of the bygone Dreamcast era. In this issue, we will be looking at the upcoming Arc System Works title BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle, a new 2 vs. 2 tag-team fighting game coming soon to PS4, Switch, and Steam. Apart from the obvious correlations with similar Dreamcast heavyweight titles such as Marvel vs. Capcom 2 and the Capcom vs. SNK series, this new crossover beat-'em up shares a little more Dreamcast heritage than you may initially realise.


A Guilty Pleasure

If you are a regular visitor to the Junkyard you might have noticed that I rather like the genre of versus fighter. I love its immediacy, its shock factor, its brutal disregard to conform and evolve with the rest of the gaming industry. It reminds me of a time now passed, when gaming culture was crafted in the furnace of the local arcade, when "winner stayed on", names were taken and friendships were forged through endless competition beneath flickering marquees.

Its interesting really that right now, after over a decade’s neglect, the versus fighting genre is appearing to be undergoing a small revival. Kick-started by the release of Street Fighter IV, a series of old, battle-weary names have been donning the gloves once more, with Killer Instinct, Mortal Kombat, Tekken and Dead or Alive all returning to the ring. I've played most of them too and, on the whole, they manage admirably to recapture what cemented the genre as a classic in the 1990s.