Dead to Rights [PS2]

Some of you may remember the great Street Fighter II craze of the early 1990s. The biggest, most popular game in the arcades for an unfathomable amount of years, SF2 was a sought-after property for both Sega and Nintendo as they battled for the hottest franchise around. Eventually snagged by Mario and company, Street Fighter II and Street Fighter II: Turbo Hyper Fighting went on to become some of the successful and popular Super Nintendo assets there were. For the longest time, gamers who craved their own brand of Ryu justice had one system and one system only to turn to. That is, until the Genesis finally got its own platform-exclusive edition touting specific gameplay additions, graphical tweaks, and option changes that the SNES cartridge didn't have. For the first time in the game's illustrious history, player's had a choice as to where they could fight --and they were happy about it. Funny how history repeats itself...

And repeat itself it has. Though the major console players are different and the developers just as diverse, Namco's Xbox action piece Dead to Rights finds itself in a similar position to Capcom's Street Fighter II from all those years ago. No longer exclusive to the system that bore it and a free agent in the land of available platforms, the wildly popular and violently epic tale of a K9 officer's quest to clear his name has finally arrived on the PlayStation 2 and GameCube. And while the game is still not as polished as it should have been (especially in terms of the hand-to-hand combat and animation), the system-specific enhancements and play-oriented changes that Namco have put into this newer version definitively warrant a second look; or first look, for those of us who haven't played it before.

Features Surprisingly there've been a large number of alterations and changes made to accommodate new players, and depending on your point of view it can be either a good thing or a bad thing. The most immediate difference is the alteration of the game's difficulty. Previously set to a single challenge type that pushed gamers to their maximum limits, the PS2 and Cube version of Dead to Rights has been made a lot easier. Rather than slug your way through multiple cellblocks and several mini-games to make it through the prison level for instance, gamers can now simply battle through the initial block with no need to participate in the sub-games for advancement. And though you can select from four separate challenge levels, none of them, not even "Super Cop" mode, match the same level of difficulty that the original Xbox adventure provided.

But there are other changes as well. Various tweaks to the speed of your character when he's using a bad guy as a human shield and the addition of hot keys for use with your weapon and trusty mutt Shadow have been included to eliminate the nasty directional cycling we had to trudge through on Xbox. Additionally, the targeting system has been modified to automatically focus on more immediate threats rather than proximity, and an inverted camera option was added for increased performance for those backwards control freaks. One of the coolest new goodies however, has to be the earlier access to some of the more complicated disarms. Originally unlocked by performing three disarms of the same type within a given area, the more spectacular moves are now much easier to come by (in other words, you only have to do them twice instead of thrice).

Even the hand-to-hand combat system has been somewhat refined. As the types of moves certain enemies perform are based on their ranked position in the game. In the Xbox version of Dead to Rights any opposing character could dodge and block an attack, making every opponent a serious danger. With the new treatment given to the A.I. however, the lower-class enemies will only block instead of dodge, and the main character Jack can no longer be knocked to floor by any move other than a throw. Finally, the camera pans further back from the action when Jack is surrounded so as to provide a much better vantage point for the battle.