After about umpteen kajillion attempts at making a Dragon Ball Z game, last year's Budokai Tenkaichi was the first to really get it right. Unfolding from a third-person perspective, it captured the feel of the mega-popular anime almost perfectly, enabling players to freely fly around a huge, 3D battlefield while beating the crap out of a super-powered opponent in lightning-fast aerial fistfights.
The sequel - imaginatively titled Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 2 - is poised to build on the success, giving players 70 different fighters to choose from (or 120, if you count all the transformations each character goes through) and adding a whole slew of new moves for each. There are five new battlefields to mess around in, too, and the ones that were already there have doubled in size. What's more, the game looks absolutely fantastic - to see for yourself, just hit the Movies tab above.
Sweet visuals aside, we've finally had a crack at the PS2 version of the game, and it plays as smoothly as it looks. The simple controls will be instantly familiar to anyone who's played a DBZ game, and with a few seconds of practice, we were able to easily power up and toast our opponents with gigantic, mile-long fireballs. It felt great, but not as good as "dashing" - by which we mean "flying really fast" - toward the other guy and slamming him in the chops with a rapid punch-kick combo before stomping him into the dirt.
