Fighting

Nintendo incites a "teddy bear" complex for me. I started playing video games with the original 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System. Fifteen years later my matured taste in games led me to buy a Playstation 2. However, I keep coming back to Nintendo. I have an attachment to it, much like people are attached to their old teddy bears.

According to ESRB, this game contains: Comic Mischief, Mild Violence

Game Description: Super Smash Brothers Melee is a great fighting game where you put your favorite Nintendo characters against each other, to find out who's the toughest of them all!

Chi has already touched on this in his main review, but I feel compelled to emphasize it even more. The amount of detail, especially historical detail that has gone into Dynasty Warriors 3 is simply mind-boggling. I can think of no other game that offers a database of information about people and events in the game as an option to select from the main menu screen. During the briefing before every battle, one of the options you are given is to read a brief historical context of the battle you are about to fight. The characters and battles in Dynasty Warriors 3 are based on a famous Chinese historical novel, The Romance Of The Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong. (It is worth noting that those of us used to the Yale translations of the characters names will be confused at first, as Dynasty Warriors 3 uses a more modern translation (Cao Cao instead of Tsao Tsao, etc.)) Not only are you offered an incredible number of characters to play with, but no matter who you choose, you will be playing as a historical figure from one of the most interesting periods in China's rich history. Quite simply, Koei has created a game that is not only addictively fun, but educational.

Game Description: The popular Dynasty Warriors tactical action series is back. Dynasty Warriors 3 has tons of new features and environments, adding 10 levels to the original eight and new troop types, including the terrifying elephant cavalry. You can command your bodyguards with squad-level commands, and take advantage of the improved Musou attacks. The game also features brand-new two-player cooperative and versus modes, along with endurance and time attack modes. And now, if players are caught in a combo, they can evade attacks midair. The greater variety of play modes amd moves means this version moves past the kill-or-be-killed approach of past incarnations, giving you more freedom to explore and pursue a wide variety of goals. And where in the past many scenes were available only with subtitles, the entire dramatic content of Dyanasty Warriors 3 has been dubbed in English, with an ear to psychological realism.

Dynasty Warriors 3 is, at its core, what many old-school gamers call a beat-em-up. In the tradition of coin-op classics like Double Dragon and Final Fight, a beat-'em-ups most distinguishing characteristic is usually the endless hordes of computer opponents a player must combat (usually with fists, weapons and anything else a player can get his hands on) and the repetitive nature of the gameplay which is usually tantamount to a wholelotta button-mashing.

According to the ESRB, this game contains Mature Sexual Themes, Violence

Game Description: Dead or Alive 3 gives gamers the ability to enjoy a richer, more intense, action-packed experience than was previously possible on a video game system. Dead or Alive 3 is a 3D fighting game transplanted from the arcade to home, specifically for the Xbox. Tecmo has done extensive research into the technical capabilities of the Xbox and is convinced it is the ideal platform on which to showcase the latest entry in its extremely popular franchise.

Tecmo's Dead Or Alive series has, unfortunately, always been the Frank Stallone of fighting games. The original was released to a small Japanese audience on the short-lived Sega Saturn, and its subsequent 1998 release on the Playstation played second fiddle to Namcos blockbuster Tekken 3.