The first game on the menu is Soul Calibur IV, which I’m still finding completely addicting to play despite the fact that I’m still pretty bad at it.  My previous PSN account has a masterful record of 30 wins and 128 losses, of which at least 70 of said losses came from players spamming one button with Kilik/Mitsurugi/Siegfried and me failing to defend against that spam with my Hilde character.  The other 60 I would probably attribute to misplays and other general noobishness.  Despite this, I don’t consider losing matches a bad thing as practice against better opponents is the only way to get better.  My new PSN account in about 50 games is at about a 28% win percentage, markedly better now that I’ve learned to play a little bit.  And no, I didn’t change my PSN account because of my previous bad record in SCIV

While we’re on the subject of PSN accounts, I’m going to take a little bit of time and agree with Garnett Lee on last week’s 1up Yours podcast about not being able to change the online handle of the account.  I should not have to register a new email address to get a new handle.  Period.  This is pretty trivial database work.  Seriously Sony, you need this option here.

The second game on the plate is the remake of Final Fantasy IV for the DS, a game that holds a very special place in my heart as the RPG that got me into the genre.  This is the third release of the game I’ve played and the second time I’ve purchased it (I picked up the GBA version a few years ago as well).  And the game is still awesome, though admittedly I am still a part of the problem for purchasing yet another Final Fantasy remake.  This incarnation of the SNES classic features a full 2.5D reinterpretation of the old game, voice acting (which is ok, I suppose), and in-engine cut scenes that are pretty decent despite the hardware limitations.  What I like most about FFIV this time is how the game manages to take the memories I have of the old 2D environments and rendering them in such a way that allows them to keep the charm of the old game yet at the same time look modernized.  The game also features a solid retranslation, though I suspect some things were kept in (You spoony bard!) for the older fans of the game.  Jeremy Parish of 1up supports this assessment, stating in his review that the game is mainly marketed at the older fans of FFIV.  As such, the game is also a bit harder than I remembered: I’ve already lost my party a few times to former pushover bosses.  Regardless, I’m enjoying myself.

Pixeljunk Eden has been my post dinner snack game.  As expected, once I got past the initial control barrier the game got a lot more interesting.  I wound up spinning and jumping through the first garden collecting all six spectra and starting the second and third gardens.  Honestly I haven’t played much more of this to say anything more than it seems to be one of those games that you play for short bursts in spare moments.  That’s not to say that Eden isn’t a good game, but rather I wanted to savor the flavor of this dessert for a long time.  Perhaps I’ll find some more time to play this week before Bionic Commando gets released.

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.