Four Soul Calipers, Sir

August 25, 2008 Games for Fun, Gaming 1 Comment

I’m not the biggest fighting game fan. I played some Street Fighter II back in the day, mainly on the SNES. Outside of that, I’ve only really scratched the surface of the fighting genre. I think it’s because I’m not a terribly competitive person. When I play a fighting game I play almost exclusively single player. Sometimes though, you just need to play something different to mix things up. I was watching a few other people play Soul Calibur IV (SC4) around the office and decided to give it a go. Due to it’s buttery smooth frame rate and instant gratification gameplay, I bought it the next day.

Since I’m not much into the multiplayer side of things, it was nice to find so much single player content for a fighting game. Single players modes in SC4 include arcade mode, story mode and the Tower of Lost Souls. The Tower of Lost Souls was a blast to play through. Basically, there are two parts: ascending or descending. The ascending portion allows players to pick a few characters and fight a few floors up a “tower”. As they move up floors, they can do objectives like “perform 3 throws” in a match to unlock a treasure chest. Each chest contains some piece of equipment you can put on your characters. Once you beat a set of floors you’ve unlocked those floors for later play. Descending on the other hand, starts you at the first floor each time and you just go until you lose. Every five floors nets you a chest when you descend; no need to complete mini-objectives here. Going up and down the tower while unlocking items and getting gold was terribly addicting and fun.

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Forever is Composed of Nows

August 23, 2008 Games for Fun, Gaming No Comments

Braid is one of those games that love it or hate it, it gets people talking. People have told me everything from “Braid is pretentious bullshit” to “You owe it to yourself to play this game.”

If you’re unfamiliar with Braid, it’s a 2-d puzzle platformer available on XboxLive Arcade. The art direction is done in the painterly style, which give Braid a really unique look. The major game mechanics involve time manipulation, which I saw from a lot of indie games (for example, The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom) at GDC this year. The music is interesting too, as it features classical and folk music, which isn’t normally found outside of a pub in a Never Winter Nights game.

I just finished Braid (I was home form work, sick and bored and figured why the hell not?) and for an arcade title it’s exceptional. While the price tag of 1200 points ($15 US dollars) might put people off, the game has enough uniqueness, fun, and polish to justify the price point.

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Every Generation Needs a New Revolution

August 23, 2008 Games for Fun, Gaming No Comments

Civilization is one of my all time favorite game series. I have fond memories of playing the original Civ on a friends PC and later playing the graphically superior Mac version for hours on end. Watching the Civ series grow and get better over time has been awesome for me. There’s been multiple ways the game could have been fucked up (hey, lets not make it turn based!), but it only seems to become more fun. Sid Meier rules, and his Civilization games have stolen hundreds, if not thousands of hours from my life. Not bad for what basically amounts to a fancy video board game.

Now that you know I’m fully biased towards the Civ series, you can probably guess that I thoroughly enjoyed Civilization: Revolution (Civ:Rev). However, just like all previous Civ iterations, I was extremely worried that something would go terribly wrong with the next iteration. I feared that Firaxis might make the game too complicated, or that the controls might suck, or that they might over simplify the game for the console. However, Firaxis did a great job finding the right balance of complexity (it’s roughly as a deep as Civ 1 or 2, although some might argue less) and found a control scheme that works really well on the 360.

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