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?

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.

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.

Ten minutes later, the single player story mode was finished.  Yup.  Easy mode.  Okay, maybe I exaggerated and maybe it was actually twenty minutes.  But seriously now…if the point of this mode to flesh out the lore in the Soul series, it really needed to be longer than 5 matches.  The amount of detail put into the amazing character designs deserve an equal amount of work put into the characters’ stories.  Perhaps I’m asking for too much; it is a fighting game.  But since the actual game does include the standardized 8 or so character arcade mode, I really do not see a reason for the Story mode to exist given its minimalism.  Somewhat confident that I knew the basics of Hilde, I went online challenge some humans.

I was not expecting good things from the online initially: NeoGAF posters who got ahold of the game early slammed the online indicating that the game suffered from some laggy online play, a major no-no for a game archetype that is so dependent on perfect button pressing and directional inputs.  Surprisingly, I found this not to be the case.  Most of my games consisted of 4-5 latency bar opponents which in all cases meant the slowdown from button inputs was not noticeable.  Perhaps the forum goers were playing on the far more congested XBox Live network; the PSN network worked perfectly for me.  I did find it a bit disconcerting that every “Quick Game” match up returned an error message indicating that all games were full, often waiting up to about 5 minutes for a game to match up.  My solution?  Just host my own game and the wait was pared down to a minute at most.

Even though I was able to guard impact (limitedly, due to lack of skill), I found my noob self at an extreme disadvantage against most of the Soul Calibur players online.  Shawn Elliot of 1up.com made an insightful comment on last week’s 1up show that fighting game matches are only really fun when the players are able to condition each other in regards to strategies and counter strategies, often involving several layers of conditioning.  The longtime players I came across were definitely able to do that and the level of skill discrepancy was enormous, exploiting the fact that I did not yet know how to block properly.  The other sphere of players I found focused less on real conditioning and more on unrelenting multihit attack spam.  Almost all of whom played Kilik, Mitsurugi, and Siegfried in decreasing order of frequency.  Defense was almost an afterthought in all of my early games; zerging the opponent down was far more important for most players.  Because I’m exclusively a Hilde player at the moment, I found defending against the zerg strategy very challenging because of the Hilde’s need for space; any opponent in the deadzone usually ends in a loss for me.

Soul Calibur IV comes extensive character builder.  Although you have to buy some equipment with in-game currency earned, I found “money” to never be a problem in single/multiplayer play.  Furthermore, it was also very interesting to me to find a lot of player created characters make their way into the online battles.  Although all characters evolve from the base player character types/weapons, everything else cosmetic is completely customizable.  I have not yet run into the Solid Snake I’ve seen online or the R. Kelly that was posted on NeoGAF, but I did have the pleasure of losing to a pretty awesome Afro Samurai and a Cloud Strife.  My low point of the Friday gameplay was losing to a dude wearing nothing but a butt thong and a bladed hula hoop named Mr. Buttocks.  Twice.  But I suppose that is a valid strategy for playing the game online: make your character’s undergarments as skimpy as possible so that when armor gets knocked off…boom!  Instant play distraction: bra, panties, or butt thong in the face.  Kudos to the geniouses that thought of using human insecurity against other players

I do have some problems with the game though.  The online ranking system is a simple leaderboard where you “gain experience points and level up”.  Once you win a battle while at the max experience points attainable, you can level up and the process begins anew.  The problem comes with the actual matchmaking however: you would think that like leveled players would tend to be matched up against players of similar experience.  However, there was many a time where my piddly level 8 self was matched up against someone as high as level 80.  Now granted, the level 80 had a lot more to lose if he wasn’t able to beat me; the problem comes from the fact that he would get the same amount of points from stomping all over me as he would beating a like leveled player, which does not do a thing in the long run of determining who truly should be at the top of the player standings.  Having a ladder system implemented in a Blizzard Battle.net-style matchmaking scheme would go a long way in determining who the best Soul Calibur player really is, not to mention balancing the game mechanics similar to how the arcade release of Street Fighter IV is being used to balance the home version.

Despite this glaring problem, I did have a lot of fun working myself up from a pretty pathetic 14% win percentage to about a 19% win percentage.  A worthy edition to any fighting game fan.

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.