Samurai Shodown Sen shows up March 30

When XSEED announced that it had picked up SNK's latest Samurai Shodown game, Samurai Shodown Sen, we didn't know just how soon it would bring the 3D samurai combat to us. And after waiting a couple of years for this game to show up -- and after seeing it at E3 last year with no word of a release date -- we're kind of shocked to see the game coming out so soon, on March 30.

There's a weird kind of parallelism in the design and the premise of the game: Sen is about the period when Western culture began to enter Japan, bringing foreigners in contact with samurai -- and the game is a high-definition 3D version of an SNK classic. So, if we were going to overthink this (and we are), we could see the game's samurai as a metaphor for classic 2D fighters, with the Vikings and other foreign elements representing the unstoppable influence of 3D.

Then they all hit each other with swords.