run of Microsoft exclusive games from Team
Ninja that includedDOA 4,Ultimate(DOAs1
and 2), and, um,Xtreme Beach Volleyball, until
Dead Or Alive 5broke the Microsoft exclusivity.
Over the years, Xbox has welcomed a
number of classic franchises, including
Street Fighter(though sadlyVdidn’t make it
to Xbox) and Rare’s own take on the genre,
Killer Instinct. Rare originally made itsMortal
Kombat-influenced fighter, with some unique
attacks, colourful characters including their
own Sabrewulf, and a style that can only be
described as ‘loud’, for Midway, and the game
appeared in arcades in 1994. You can playABOVEKoei
Tecmo’sDead Or
Alive 5: Last
Round.
LEFTKiller
Instinctwas
Rare’s own entry
into the
fighting arena.the original as part ofRare Replay. Rare later
remadeKiller Instinctas a free-to-play Xbox
One launch title (you buy the fighters), and it
was one of Xbox’s cooler early exclusives.
In the next couple of months we’re going
to see brand new entries into theDead Or
AliveandMortal Kombatseries, proving that
the fighting game formula is as relevant and
popular as ever – alive and kicking, you might
say. And on the X, we’re expecting these titles
to really punch out, too. In the meantime
though, over the page we’ve rounded up the
best fighting games you can currently play on
Xbox One. Happy scrapping!Qpopularity of arcades, but we’d argue that it
helped the new generation of home consoles
such as the SNES and SEGA Mega Drive
become popular with a more adult market,
paving the way for the PlayStation and
eventually Microsoft’s entry into the home
console market. Let’s face it, Mario Kart is fun,
but there’s nothing better than ripping out
a spine from the comfort of your sofa. In the
late ’90s, the perspective shifted... slightly.
Where fighting games had always been 2D,
or in the case of Mortal Kombat, ‘2.5D’ (3D
characters moving two-dimensionally), 3D
fighters such as Virtua Fighter and the now-
long running Tekken series allowed your
characters to side-step and feel as though
they were fighting on multiple planes.
Dead or alive and well
Of course, fighting games were a mainstay
of arcades for many years – and there’s no
doubt that the multi-button, chunky stick
controls of a good arcade fighter take some
beating, but many of those games that had
their origins in the arcades have enjoyed a
good couple of decades of new versions,
each one pushing the graphical capabilities
of successive generations of console – while
remaining true to the core mechanics of the
classic fighting game.
The first fighting game to make it to the
Xbox was Tecmo’s Dead Or Alive 3 which was
one of the console’s launch titles. It began a
More Xbox news at gamesradar.com/oxm THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAZINE 067