Space World 2001: Hands-on: Guilty Gear X

Guilty Gear X, one of the best-looking 2D fighting games ever released, is currently available in arcades and on the Dreamcast in Japan, and it's coming soon to the PlayStation 2. While the upcoming Game Boy Advance version loses a great deal of the original version's graphical sheen, the game still looks pretty good and, perhaps more importantly, already plays pretty well even though it is currently listed as being 30 percent complete.

Only Ky Kiske, Sol-Badguy, and Millia are playable in the build on display at Space World. The game uses the B button for kicking, the A button for heavy slashing, the R trigger for weak slashing, and the L trigger for punching. While the control took a little bit of getting used to, after a round or two we were pulling off air combos with ease.

Like the rest of the GBA games shown at Space World 2001, Guilty Gear X was hooked up to a special GBA that transmits the graphics to a television. While the characters looked pretty blocky and the backgrounds looked a little washed-out on the TV screens, the images looked just fine on the smaller, darker GBA screen. The characters moved very smoothly, and overall, the gameplay was a carbon copy of its arcade and home-console counterparts.

When completed, Guilty Gear X will allow for two-play link cable play. No release date for Japan has been announced, and no North American release plans have been announced by Sammy.