13-Aug-2001 Patrick McCarthy often entertains close friends by shooting fireballs from various bodily orifices. Except on Holy Days, when he opts for ping-pong balls instead.
It's slap 'em up time. Toshinden's premise is the usual one of the world's greatest martial artists gathering together in secret to see who's the hardest - except it's not that much of a secret or we wouldn't be watching. There are all the usual ways to play - traditional arcade style one-against-the-world; a practice mode; and options for two-player action on one machine or over a network. There are five levels of difficulty, plus ways to further customise a game - relative strengths can be adjusted in two-player games and you can even switch an auto-defence mode on.
PlayStation game alert
It looks nice enough, among pretty backgrounds in small playing areas set on high, which are easy to fall off of. But you should bear in mind that it's slightly jerky at its maximum 640x400 definition on a p90, with 16mb ram, and still not smooth at 320x200. You can adjust detail settings to smooth things out, but given that part of the game's appeal lies with its graphics, this isn't a satisfactory solution. Buying a p133 just to play it also seems a tad excessive.
There are the usual control problems of all psx-to-pc conversions - after all, going from an eight-button controller to one with considerably fewer is never ideal. In practice, it works reasonably well with a six-button pad or a keyboard, but a two-button joystick is a non-starter and of course, even using keyboard controls makes some of the fireball facilities difficult to activate.
Fireballs?
Yup. Firstly, Toshinden differs from most beat 'em ups in that it's more of a sword and sorcery special effects movie: these 'unarmed' combatants seem to carry an awful lot of pointy weaponry around with them, ranging from gigantic two-handed swords, to a couple of titchy knives. It's also jammed to bursting with special moves, including rapid-fire hits, a huge range of combos, and the ability to leap small buildings in a single bound - when you jump in Toshinden, you come down with snow on your shoulders (despite that anti-dandruff shampoo you paid so much cash for). Combine all this with the aforementioned fireballs, and you have fights that stop being fights pretty quickly, and become something more akin to ooh... let's see... a Royal Ballet production of the Gulf War.
I want a real fight!
At first, this is all very spectacular and impressive, but after a while you long for a bit of simple hand-to-hand violence, instead of people stabbing each other with 70-foot pikes and shooting exocet missiles from their arse. It's a bit too easy to hit people from miles away and the fireballs are relatively easy to set off, and a bit too effective. This might be just fine and dandy as far as you're concerned, but really they might just as well carry guns and be done with it. This is true to the original game, of course, but it still leaves something to be desired as a beat 'em up. If they'd just left it as a no-frills sword-fighting game, it would have been a lot better.
As far as pure 3d beat 'em ups go, the superior Virtua Fighter is already available, and the excellent Tekken is on its way from the PlayStation.
One point to bear in mind though, is that both of these need some kind of 3d graphics accelerator card - and the price of one of these marvels of modern technology isn't actually much less than that of a PlayStation. And I suppose that while we're banging on about the psx, it's also worth mentioning that far superior sequels have already been released for all three games. It makes you think, doesn't it? Z
// Overview
Verdict
A pretty good conversion of a pretty good game. But check the recommended hardware specs.
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