everyday gamer

I find it a little bit funny that it was only a few months ago that Garnett Lee on 1up Yours declared that the summer of ’08 was one that was devoid in software releases after the release of Metal Gear Solid 4.  He later retracted that statement in a later episode; it’s pretty remarkable how many new games were to be coming down the pipeline, particularly in the form of downloadable titles.  Between Geometry Wars 2, Pixeljunk Eden, Galaga Legions, Bionic Commando Rearmed, Castle Crashers (seriously!), is some serious downloadable love in the upcoming weeks.  And Megaman 9 is on the horizon too!

This week’s gaming regiment has consisted of a little bit of MGS4 just to finish my second playthrough no-kill style, my daily dosage of WiiFit exercise, more WoW endgame raiding, a couple of little stumblings through my Pixeljunk Eden garden to L2P, and a lot of stumbling through Soul Calibur IV, my entry into the series.

My first impressions of Pixeljunk Eden were kind of mixed from the demo that was made available last Thursday on PSN.  To say that it’s one of my most anticipated games would be an understatement given the amount of hype I’ve been hearing about the game.  When I actually sat down to play it, I found myself very confused as the game didn’t come with a manual anywhere and I wound up just mashing buttons to see what would happen.  Hey, I can swing in circles!  Hey I can spin in the air!  I knew Eden had a bunch of platforming elements to it from the start, but I found myself just hopping around and spinning around with my Worms-esque ninja rope collecting stuff aimlessly till I ran out of time.  It would take a few more sessions and some scouring on the Eden thread on NeoGAF to learn about what precisely I was supposed to do in this game and how I was going to do it.  Then it hit me: Eden is a total chill-out to the music and casually platform game where you collect plants to create a psychodelic garden.  I had to collect pollen, make plants sprout, and swing higher and higher till I retrieved another plant to move to my garden (the title screen). Yeah, it’s such a hippie game and it sounds very like a game you’d get stoned to.  But it’s very relaxing and is pretty cool once you get past the initial barrier of the confusing, minimalistic controls.  Will definitely pick this up when it’s released tomorrow: I can definitely see this as one of those games I turn on for a few minutes in random fits of boredom.  Not to mention it has the added perk of being to upload video directly to Youtube, which is just neat in itself.

I never really got into the previous incarnations of the Soul Calibur series – I didn’t own a Dreamcast and didn’t really play console games during my college years outside of several Final Fantasy games.  Nevertheless, the thought of competitively playing a fighting game online against human components piqued my interest.  When coupled with the awesome SCIV preview in EGM last summer, I was sold on the idea that this game would be the one to bring me back into the fighting genre.  So when it arrived in the mail yesterday, I was pretty ecstatic: I hadn’t played a new fighting game seriously since Super Street Fighter 2 (ie, almost a decade).   I promptly popped in the disc, picked a character that looked interesting – Hilde, and then just sort of went with it in the training and single player modes.  And boy was it a culture shock.  This game played nothing like Street Fighter 2 – there’s like 8 zillion more inputs!  I wound up looking through the moves list and shrugging indifferently and took the game online to play with the other newbies.

That was a mistake   Those newbies definitely showed me how much I sucked.  Not that it’s a bad thing in any stretch, but rather that I had a lot to learn.  Strange enough, I found Guard impacting a little bit easier to do online (maybe due to latency), but still wound up eating dirt more about 90% of the time.  Still, I had a lot of fun and I’m pretty determined to stick it out and play some good games with people.  And learn how to Guard Impact a-la Daigo parrying in SF3:Third Strike.  Serious.

Maybe I’ll pick up a set of Hori arcade sticks.  Meh.