This week in WBP has been delayed a bit due for two reasons:
- The unexpected amount of time that was spent on the previous blog entry, and
- 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?
My WBP plate this week has been filled by hearty servings of two games with a little dollop of third.
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.
I am bad at Soul Calibur IV.
My online record as of Sunday night is a pathetic 27 and 118. If I were to rate my Soul Calibur skills on the stink-o-meter, it would be somewhere between a dead whale and a side of ass. Still, there’s something very particular about this game that keeps me coming back online to get my ass handed to me.
SCIV represents my first real entry into the series, not to mention the first 3D fighter I’ve seriously played since Tekken 3. Although I’ve played a tiny bit of the original Soul Calibur, I did not own a Dreamcast nor did I follow up on the series’ further incarnations on the PS2/Gamecube/XBox. As such, I don’t know a whit about the history and evolution of the series. What I do know is that the game plays very differently from all of the other fighters I’ve played: blocking is not back on the directional pad a la Street Fighter 2. Nor is the game a game of simply mashing buttons and making cool stuff happen (I’m looking at you, Eddy Gordo). Summarily, this is demonstrated by how context sensitive all of the characters are – just about every direction-and-button combination has a uniquely named action associated with it. In short, there’s a lot of commands to learn to use for the different situations that come up while battling human or computer AI opponents.
My first actions in the game consisted of going into the training mode and scanning through the characters to see which one looked interesting enough for me to play as a main character. After sorting through (and gawking at) the amazing character models, I decided to stick with Hilde instead of Setsuka, one of the two new characters introduced to the Soul Calibur universe. Then it was off to learn the ropes with the single player game so that I could play against the real competition online.
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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.
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