Dragon Ball Z: Shin Budokai Another Road - hands-on

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We button-mash our way through fully 3D, fireball-filled aerial beatdowns

The screaming, spiky-haired Dragon Ball Z anime series concluded years ago, but the torrent of games based on it is still going strong. That probably has something to do with the fact that flying around and smashing things as fireball-tossing kung-fu aliens never really gets old, and the DBZ games have done a fantastic job of not screwing that premise up, especially lately.

Dragon Ball Z: Shin Budokai Another Road, despite having a really unwieldy title, looks to continue that tradition. We've only spent a short time with the title, but it's already an impressive piece of work for the PSP; unlike the first Shin Budokai, which was a more traditional, side-to-side fighter, Another Road steals its setup from the Budokai Tenkaichi games. That is, you'll fight over huge distances from an over-the-shoulder, third-person view. The fights are fast, button-mashy and addictive, and they look great, with smoothly animated fighters that look as though they just stepped out of the anime.

Another cool addition brought over from Tenkaichi 2? Non-canon "what-if" storylines, one of which forms the basis for Another Road.

Mikel Reparaz
Mikel Reparaz
After graduating from college in 2000 with a BA in journalism, I worked for five years as a copy editor, page designer and videogame-review columnist at a couple of mid-sized newspapers you've never heard of. My column eventually got me a freelancing gig with GMR magazine, which folded a few months later. I was hired on full-time by GamesRadar in late 2005, and have since been paid actual money to write silly articles about lovable blobs.