everyday gamer

This week in WBP has been delayed a bit due for two reasons:

1. The unexpected amount of time that was spent on the previous blog entry, and
2. The release of Bionic Commando Rearmed on PSN late last week

Seeing as one of these points is rather integral to this week’s WBP, I felt it was appropriate to delay the entry a few days so I could talk about it.  In any case, this week’s WBP consisted almost exclusively of more Soul Calibur IV and the retro remake of Bionic Commando.

This week spent with Soul Calibur IV was a bit different from the previous couple.   Up till this weekend, my main character has been Hilde.  The logic for sticking to Hilde boiled down to the fact that the character was new (meaning less characters would know how to defend against her) and the character design just looked awesome.  One-hundred wins and two-hundredish losses later, I realized that my lack of skill couldn’t be the sole reason I wasn’t winning ranked matches.  Rather, it was a combination of that and character imbalance and internet latency.  Online basically consists of a lot of players who essentially power-leveled their ratings by abusing internet lag and the spam-skill characters (read:Kilik, Raphael, Amy).  My Hilde playstyle primarily consisted of capitalizing on my opponent’s unsafe moves and then unloading a moderately damaging combo and keeping them on the defensive by mixing it up.  The main caveat comes at the start of the match: Hilde does not have too many panic buttons if the opponent gets too close.  As a result, most of my losses come from not being able to get away from the fast attacks of the mentioned characters.  At that 140 loss mark, I figured it was a good enough time to start learning how to play a secondary character.

So I gave Sophitia a try.  I don’t have anything to add except that I have a record of about 50 and 8 with Sophitia after spending a brief session in the training mode.  She’s completely broken; safe attacks and high priority moves.  I’m not going to say that I didn’t have fun winning all weekend, but c’mon Namco.  Could you balance this game a little better?

The other game that consumed a bit of my time over the weekend was Grin’s remake of Capcom’s classic arcade and NES game Bionic Commando for PSN/XBLA/PC.  Although I’ve never played the NES version, I did play the death out of the futuristic quasi-anime Gameboy remake back in the mid 90′s.  My initial thoughts on playing Rearmed were of how my swing-grappling skills have atrophied so much: I did not remember the Gameboy version being so difficult.  The physics of the swing mechanic are more or less the same as the version I played; even so I found myself in a pit of spikes very often.  But that’s not necessarily a bad thing…after all, Rearmed is a remake of a classic Nintendo game.  Meaning that it’s not obligated to coddle the player with modern gaming amenities like dumbed-down casual-friendly difficulty levels.  Instead, the game chooses to kick you in the nuts swiftly and viciously from the get-go with the deviously-tricky ceiling grappling all the way to the purely S&M mobile platform grappling in later stages.  And yes, this is a good thing.

I’ll probably wind up finishing the game this week sometime and maybe a couple of the interesting bonus challenges.  And perhaps write a review, hmm?