Tekken : Dark Resurrection-PSP - My review

The Good: Some of the best graphics to hit the PSP so far; well-implemented ghost exchange systems; lots of modes; plenty of great characters; delivers the same great tekken game play you've come to expect from the series.
The Bad: It can be tricky to hit the D pad's diagonals just right.

The Tekken series has always done well in arcades, but it truly came into its own as a home release on Sony's various video game consoles. The PlayStation and PlayStation 2 have received the brunt of Namco's Tekken series, but now it's time for the PlayStation Portable to get into the act with a port of the latest arcade upgrade for the series, Tekken: Dark Resurrection. This game builds on the content and characters from Tekken 5, adding more fighters, more moves, new backgrounds, new customization options, and more. Plus, it's one of those amazing portable games that raises the bar and resets your expectations about what a portable machine can do.

The largest factor in resetting those expectations comes from the game's graphics. While the PSP doesn't pull off a polygon-perfect port of the arcade game, the characters look and move as well as you could hope. The corners seem to have been cut in the backgrounds, which occasionally sport a grungy texture or two, and in the pre- and post fight animation, which isn't quite as smooth as the fighting. Those things aside--and they don't get in the way at all--Tekken: Dark Resurrection gives off a real "this platform shouldn't be able to look this hot" vibe. On top of that, the game's loading times are pretty manageable, averaging somewhere less than 10 seconds between fights, and even less if it's a rematch on the same background with the same fighters. So the visual quality doesn't come at the expense of speed, which is great.