Most fighting game fans are likely very, very excited at the prospect of running Street Fighter's Ryu or Ken up against Tekken's Heihachi or Paul in the ultimate cross-over fisticuffs, but given the planes both games exist on, no one has probably given too much thought to the problematic design issue of a 2D Hadouken being translated into 3D, for an easy side-step (or Ha-Ha Step - thanks Bryce).

"Obviously, the Street Fighter characters will have to have their fireballs. Ryu without a fireball just wouldn’t be... right," said Namco's Katsuhiro Harada when speaking with the PlayStation Blog at the recent EVO fighting game tournament which was held in Las Vegas.

"Obviously we’ll need it. When you look at executing a fireball in a 2D setting, it works almost like a jab. It keeps your opponent where you want them. When we bring fireballs into Tekken X Street Fighter, there are two different ways we could go. It could be used as something similar to keep your opponent in the place you want, or it could be some kind of a special move or powered-up version of their techniques. We’ve not decided on what route we want to take with this yet.

"Another element to think about implementing fireballs in Tekken is, how do you avoid them?" he added. "When you play a 2D game like Street Fighter, you obviously can’t go back and forth in the screen — you usually jump over it. But in three-dimensional fighting games like Tekken you can sidestep. So do we want players to jump over fireballs? Or is it okay to sidestep them? That’s something we’re not decided on, we haven’t had enough time to look into it. We have a lot of staff, myself included, who grew up liking Street Fighter. I’m really confident that we can come to a good balance between the two worlds."

It's definitely an interesting point, and one we can't wait to see how they handle in the final game.