This is why we can't have nice things.
Ah, nothing beats a spot of the old Tekken. Right there, spread it on the lower back, feels good. That's what it's all about. What a relief after a hard day's work not working out right. But this isn't real Tekken, because if it was, it wouldn't be FUNlicensed now, would it?
Tekken 3 Special is not very special, ha! This repugnant five-month-old brie at the back of the cupboard is based off Tekken 2, and much like sweating out-of-date moulded milk, it is an atrocity of sight and sound, and smell. Definitely the smell part, because something indeed smells off about this one. This is far disconnected from the actual Tekken 2 which is unquestionably terrific.
Like a lot of these counterfeit games, it was designed to fool innocent people into handing over monies for a product that isn't what they thought it was — and I assure you, it is NOT the product they thought it was. This particular pirate cart is from either 1996 or 1997, making it quite early in the Mega Drive/Genesis pirate gaming scene. Nobody has even managed to figure out which group are behind this act of console terrorism, and no group has claimed responsibility.
The playable characters, the environments and a handful of the moves come from Tekken 2. The graphics, besides those on the character select screen, appear to have been made by digitizing screenshots of Tekken 2 or have seemingly been hand-drawn over the original graphics.
They look horrid.
This game is just Tekken the mickey.
Like most of the poor excuses for fighting games that have appeared on the Sega Genesis since the dawn of time immemorial, this title runs on the "Mega Drive Fighting Engine", which has a large buglist including broken blocking, incompatible button combos, and a fault where holding the B button makes your character stand still and not do a single damn thing.
If you manage to get through the arcade mode, which took me no small amount of time or lagers to do, the end result is a pitiful "Congratulations!" before being sent hurtling back to the title screen for another go. That isn't going to happen.
The "Protips" on the back of the original game box are related to the PlayStation version and in each case refer to a character not present in this hack. The artwork on the box also features characters who aren't present in this hack. The only playable characters are the base eight from the original game, except for Jack-2, who is replaced by main boss Kazuya Mishima.
Being a 2D version of Tekken 2, this game has no side-stepping moves. The button press timing windows are so shattered that combos just won't happen. Meanwhile, the computer can seemingly attack immediately while it takes a moment for each of my button presses to even consider registering.
I can't believe I'm about to recommend a better counterfeit Tekken game, but the later released V.R. Fighter VS Taken 2 (misspelt, rather than a game based on a Liam Neeson thriller) not only has much better hit detection, combo support et al, it also doesn't run at a slow crawl like Tekken 3 Special. I don't know why I even expected this to be any good, really. We all know better than that.
