Soul Calibur XBLA – Review (Xbox 360)
9 September, 2008 at 7:35 pm | In reviews | Leave a CommentTags: Live Arcade, Soul Calibur, XBLA, Xbox
In the build up to Namco-Bandai’s fourth installment of the Soul Calibur franchise, they’ve decided to release the original Soul Calibur onto the Xbox 360 Live Arcade (XBLA). Soul Calibur was originally an arcade game at the turn of the Millenium before it was given a new lease of life on Sega’s Dreamcast. This home version was a complete remake, boasting new groundbreaking 128bit graphics and an exclusive character, Cervantes – an undead pirate and the boss of Namco’s Soul Edge (released on PS1 as Soul Blade).
But enough of the history lesson! How does this XBLA game play? In short, extremely well. Its easy to understand why the original Soul Calibur is rated as such a balanced and polished game when you can revisit it the best part of a decade later and still find an amazingly playable, fluid, deep fighting experience.
To the utterly uninitiated, Soul Calibur is basically like Namco’s Tekken fighting game franchise but with swords and set roughly around the 17th century. The characters use a range of edged and blunt weapons ranging from a hulking battle axe to an experimental mechanical sword that can break apart into a whip.
An inviting thing about Soul Calibur are its controls: there’s 1 button to block, 1 button to kick and 2 buttons to swing your weapon either horziontally or vertically. Like all brilliantly designed games, its easy to grasp the basics but will take you a long time to achieve mastery. This is aided by some well thought out mechanics.
The 8 way diagonal running system meant that for the first time 3D fighting games authentically ventured into the third dimension as you side stepped and danced around your enemies. Also, the fact that every single character in the game was able to interrupt their opponents attack with the correct timing made for some very deep tactics as players thought many moves ahead.
Visually its still very much a pretty game, and it feels very authentic – complete with slightly dodgy physics when people bounce off the edge of an arena during a ring out. A virtual museum in the game also allows you to read character biographies, browse concept, developer and fan art and look at some impressive weapon demonstrations as each character fluidly shows exactly what they’re capable of doing with their weapons of choice.
The XBLA version comes with all of the secret characters, costumes and arenas of the Dreamcast version unlocked so you can get started straight away. Although the scoreboards have online functionality, there is no feature to play against other people over Xbox Live. A lot of people may find this disappointing, but given the rushed and totally flawed online experience of other XBLA fighting games (Streetfighter II Turbo, I’m looking at you here!) I’m actually quite glad they haven’t tainted an otherwise fond memory of this fighting classic.
9/10
Battle of Destiny
9 September, 2008 at 7:22 pm | In blogging | Leave a CommentTags: Battle of Destiny, Neoempire, Streetfighter, Tekken
Only a competitive hardcore fighting gaming event could get away with being called the ‘Battle Of Destiny’. A dramatic name like that is reinforced by the actual tournament games they’ve picked out: ‘Capcom versus SNK 2: Millionaire Fighting 2001′, ‘Streetfighter III: Third Strike’, ‘Tekken 5: Dark Ressurection’ and ‘Hyper Street Fighter II Anniversary Edition’.
This attracted lots of hardcore gamers from across Europe, a lot of them wearing self referencing fighting game T-Shirts and carrying their own custom modded arcade sticks with all sorts of colours, buttons and artwork that they used for their tournament games.
The actual area was in the Rocket Centre, the metropolitan University student building. Reinforcing the negative videogame stereotype, most of the rooms were very dark with the display screens being a helpful source of light to navigate your way through the building.
Before each tournament match, the players go through something of a ritual which is akin to martial artists bowing to each other before battle. They go to the options screen, and make sure that their opponent has set all the controls and configurations to their preference. Its almost like a digital shaking of the hands and chanting something along the lines of “may the best man win”.
The really interesting thing about this event was the hype surrounding the grand finals. All of the machines were shut off and we were asked to leave the premises for half an hour. I thought that all of the staff were having a syncronised break, but when we were allowed back into the hall it now resembled a cinema theatre with lots of chairs laid out in long rows, and a grand huge screen displaying the final rounds of the competition, with a beefy sound system to match.
The level of energy and excitement in the room was incredible. Because everyone there was competing or at least knows of Streetfighter and its fighting game kin, the entire crowd would react collectively to someone performing a string of special moves or interesting playing styles.
It was an incredible experience, and I have never seen so many people in a single room who are so into their fighting games than at this event. If you’re a big fan of fighting games, I would definitely recommend it. I know that I’ll definitely be going along to their next event.
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