Soul Calibur IV review

One of the things that always astounds me about video gaming culture is brand loyalty. Nintendo fans have a reputation for being loyal almost to the point of obsession, which judging by the rampant sales of old school Nintendo franchises (although the fact these games are usually awesome helps) is certainly well earned. Is it any surprise then, that Soul Calibur II on the GC outsold both the PS2 and XBOX versions despite them being technically superior? The gamecube version of the game traded entirely on it’s bonus character Link despite the fact players were forced to play the game with the by most accounts ‘dodgy’ gamecube control pad. I for one quite liked the old purple box’s pad but I’m the first to admit it wasn’t designed with fighting games in mind, it worked fine with games like Super Smash Bros Melee sure, but Melee was a game that had every special move mapped to one button. I dread to think what playing SCII on the game cube was like. It’d be like trying to play happy birthday on a keyboard imagined by Salvidor Dali.
So if a Legend of Zelda can sell a fighting game surely something much bigger, with a much more rabid fanbase could sell one even better. This was exactly what the developers at Namco had in mind when they phoned Lucas Arts one day and said “Guys. I have a fucking great idea!”

Actually I’m doing the game a disservice by going into detail about the whole star wars character thing first. Suffice to say, yes, Darth Vader, Yoda and a guy who holds his lightsaber backwards are in the game and yes, they’re on the cover art standing next to Siegfried and Nightmare looking all out of place and fanfiction-esque but the effect they have on the game outside of marketing is really quite minimal. If you like Star Wars they’re a nice bonus, and if you don’t then you’ve probably got to this page by accident. Porn is on the next site over.

So Soul Calibur IV, the latest chapter in Namco’s seminal 3d fighter series is here and I shouldn’t have to tell you that the fighting engine is rock solid. Under those nice shiny next-gen graphics is still the same old game at heart and time has been very kind to it, even if the developers haven’t.

Battles still play out in the same way. Characters can attack horizontally (!), vertically (!) or if they really want to mix shit up they can kick, which always seemed hilariously out of place on characters wielding an axe twice the size of their opponent but sometimes there’s nothing for it but a knee to the balls. The attack and defend system, although subtle, works to a great effect. Blocking an attack gives you the advantage meaning your character will be slightly quicker with their next attack than your opponent which thankfully makes the newbie staple of hammering the buttons like a spastic chimp a surefire way to lose the game. To stop the battles turning into turn based affairs with players taking turns to wail on each other’s defense every character has a very tricks up their sleeve. Is the opponent blocking immediately after attacking? Grab him/her and watch something painful happen to them. Conversely if you find yourself under constant attack, a well timed guard impact will leave your enemy vulnerable to a quick counter attack, a badly timed guard impact on the other hand will leave you wide open to an axe in the face and feeling like a complete pillock. This balanced, well designed system has served the series well over the years and even today there’s very few games that have anything near as balanced. Every method of attack and defense has something that trumps it and its a balance of twitch reflexes and long term strategy that separates the crappy players from the good. This iteration though, is a lot like a muffin. A delicious chocolate chip muffin that you just want to sink your teeth into but unfortunately, someone has given this muffin a less than delicious topping of cold lizard semen and called it innovation.

Preparing to Innovate!

A new addition to the series, or at least kind of new, is the Soul gauge which kind of acts like a mixture between the power bars of latter day street fighter games and the weapon gauge from Soul Blade on the PS1. Using one of the special skills (see below) or blocking heavy attacks will cause the gem (which looks like a mood crystal I might add) next to your life bar to change colour slowly from blue to red, likewise if your opponent guard impacts one of your attacks. When the crystal turns completely red your life bar will begin to flash and should you find yourself defending another attack or being guard impacted then there’ll be a bright flash and your character will stagger around like he/she has just guzzled a bottle of paint thinner leaving them open to all kinds of horrible attacks or, if your opponent is quick enough to mash the all of the face buttons on the pad, kill you instantly with a critical finish regardless of how much health you have.

Now this sounds worse than it is. To be honest the soul gauge system is far more useless than it is annoying. Chances are you’ll very rarely see a match end with a critical finish and you’ll never see a player who’s dominating the match fall victim to one of them providing he hasn’t been cursed by a voodoo priest or something. The system is just superfluous. it’s obviously designed to stop players from just holding down the guard button and turtling but the throw button is already the biggest threat to guarding players. The only thing the critical finish really does is distract a player and add another useless icon to the screen (there’s three now), I threw pleanty of sure-think matches by trying to get that last guard impact I needed for critical finish before I wised up.

The skill system is another new addition that sounds great on paper but doesn’t really work out in game. Each character has a group of attributes that are effected by their equipped gear and these attributes allow them to equip certain skills. It’s a nice idea in theory and allows for a kind of RPG like character customization which coupled with the fact you can level up character styles by playing as them and thus unlock better skills, makes for a very interesting idea. Sadly however the skills available tend to vary between balance breaking random chance bonuses, absolute uselessness or game destroying cheapness.
Invisibility for example, is a skill Taki comes pre equipped with. When you hit the taunt button (or ABK as it’s mapped in game) she’ll quickly become invisible to both you and your opponent. This sounds awesome but what it means is you can’t tell where Taki is, the range of her attacks and nor can you time your combos correctly, coupled with the fact the A.I always knows where you are and player controlled characters autoface your character when they attack anyway kind of makes the move redundant. Plus using the skill uses up part of the soul gauge, increasing the risks of you being killed by a critical finish. It’s hardly a special move if all it does it make you worse off than you were before.

On the other end of the spectrum are abilities like HP burst which gives your character a big old bunch of healing right then and there which comes in handy regardless what type of character you’re playing. Some of the skills are automatic and activate in a certain situation. ‘Throw cancel’ is probably the cheapest of these as it renders 90% of your opponent’s throws completely useless. See how this might break the delicate balanced I was talking about earlier? Oh and there’s a skill that automatically stops you from being knocked out of the ring. Which is bullshit.

The most annoying set of skills however, are the ever present random chance attacks. With ‘auto unblockable B’ equipped every so often your opponent’s vertical attack won’t just bounce of your defense as it should, instead it’ll come smashing through your guard like your sword is made of toothpicks and crush your skull like a watermelon. It’s the fighting game equivalent of the Blue shell, there’s no defense against it and all it does is take the outcome of the game out of the player’s hands and puts it into the cold calculating claws of your 360 which doesn’t give a toss if you’re the better player or not. This is hardly a step forward.

shit dude, i just pressed Y

It’s not all bad though! Another new game mechanic is multiple character battles which we’ve been waiting for with baited breath ever since Dead or Alive 2 did it on the Dreamcast about a hundred years ago. The switching mechanic is solid, but not spectacular. A quick press of a button and your character is replaced with your second, third or even fourth choice with only a brief flash of light to signal the switch. There’s no hopping back and forth from the edges of the screen and no dual throws or specific combos for pairs of characters. The amount of switches you’ll be making is governed by yet another power bar, this time on the bottom of the screen. The bar does refill but at a fairly slow rate so you’ll be using the switch more to heal wounded characters than you will to perform combos with multiple characters like you could in Dead or Alive. Still, it’s a welcome addition which adds a lot more depth to an already deep game.

It’s worth nothing that all of these new mechanics are mapped to the shoulder buttons which hamperes the control somewhat. Most Soul Calibur players end up adding throw commands to the shoulder buttons and use the actual face commands for things like taunt and Soul Charge (X Y and B on the 360 controller). Namco however didn’t see fit to add an actual face button command for switching characters meaning one of your shoulder buttons will need to be set to switch character which is aggrivating when you’re playing without a team and could really do with that extra button real estate.

Single player has never been the point of the series but the original game had a relatively strong single player campaign. Like the games before it SCIV doesn’t quite live up to the original but it’s certainly a step forward from the single player in SCII and III. The usual Arcade mode has been replaced with ‘Story mode’, which, after a particularly badly translated text splash screen, pits you against five stages of three or four enemies each. Generally you’ll be outnumbered and taking on multiple enemies with a single life bar. Thankfully usually only one of your opponents will have a decent skill set, most of the other opponents you face off against will be henchmen thrown together in the character creator. The stages can get incredibly frustrating though and you will especially come to dream stage 4 which usually requires you to take on Siegfried, Nightmare and Zasalamel with one life bar. The story is throw away of course, the same convoluted fluff they felt necessary to bog the last three games down with but thankfully the unskipable quick time events cum cutscenes that made SCIII’s story mode such a chore have been dropped in favor of repetitive but thankfully skippable CGI cutscenes.
Story/Arcade mode was never the main draw of Soul Calibur Single player though and there’s always been an extra mode that proves far more satisfying than the regular trudge to the last boss. Soul Calibur III was probably the weakest example of this when it tried bravely to inject a kind of limited RTS vibe into the storyline. It didn’t work at all and thankfully that particular mechanic has been dropped in favour of the much more streamlined ‘Tower of lost souls’ mode.
In the ‘Tower of Lost Souls’ mode the player is tasked with either ascending the tower floor by floor, usually fighting two or three enemies per floor usually under certain special conditions, until you reach the top, or descending into the dungeons which acts as a kind of survival mode. Some of the enemies you fight in the dungeon are hilarious so it’s well worth the effort, I hadn’t gone 5 floors before I met a woman dressed in a cat fur suit who proceeded to totally ruin my shit with a corndog on a stick. The best part of the tower though is that each floor will grant you a treasure chest, usually containing an item for character cutomization, art work, weapons and other bonuses, if you fufil certain secret conditions. Once you’ve completed a floor the next time you play it a small riddle or hint will appear at the start of the match. Some are very easy to figure out, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what you have to do when ‘Lure them into the abyss’ appears on screen, but some are incredibly cryptic and will take determination and a little luck to unlock.
Unfortunately there is one little flaw with the treasure chest system and it’s one I can’t figure out for the life of me. For a reason known only to the staff at Namco you can’t tackle the floors one at a time to get the treasure chests. They always comes in groups and you’ll quickly go from two or three floors at a time to four or six. Some of the criteria can be incredibly hard to meet, such as finishing a fight with a perfect or using kicks only and there’s nothing worse than having to fight six guys to get to the point where you can try again. What’s worse is if you finally do manage to unlock the chest and then die on one of the subsequent floors in which case you don’t get the item, a design choice that borders on sadism.
That being said you will keep coming crawling back to the tower of lost souls if only because the character customization system is absolutely perfect.

While soul calibur III allowed you to customize characters and create new ones with badly cobbled together move lists that kind of played like cabbage patch babies versions of the main characters Soul Calibur IV gives you a much more versatile character editor. You can, if the mood takes you, create a character that looks exactly like Rock, then give him Talim’s movelist, creating a horrifying man child. Or you can give Siegfried a giant purple afro and a pink shirt. You can (get this) make Ivy’s tit’s even bigger. The possibilities aren’t endless exactly but there’s a lot you can do.
Regular characters can have their equipment switched in and out and you can change their hair colour and eyebrow colour but the real meat of the editor lies in character creation. You can select all the usual variables, skin colour, hair colour, eye colour etc etc but you can also change your character’s bodytype by moving points around a scale, you can’t make a huge fat guy but there is some degree of freedom. The system is streamlined and easy to use but lacks the depth of something like Oblivion. You won’t spend hours trying to find the right width for your character’s eyebrows but you will spend a few hours picking out pants for him.
All of the clothing in the game, including that worn by non custom characters can be bought and applied to your own characters. Like siegfried’s breastplate and Nightmare’s shoulder pads? You can use them both together. You can then switch the colour and shine of each item until you finally have the neon green Disco knight of your dreams.
One small problem this system has though is that your item selection affects your character attributes in a lot of modes. Sure that breastplate may look awesome but it won’t allow you to equip the skill you want. Sometimes you’re going to have to make a choice between the skills you want and the look you want. Sometimes a man just has to wear pantyhose to get that healing skill. You can still use your characters in regular mode though so I would suggest keeping two groups of custom characters, one group that look exactly how you want them for regular play and another with a varied skill set for special play.

Multiplayer is a mixed bag. The same awesome Soul calibur fun is there to be had but it’s hidden under the same slimy film of weird design decisions that single player is.
Obviously a lot of work has gone in the Live service and it’s good, very good for an online fighter. But to be honest fighting games really do not work over the internet. Sure you can sometimes get a semi decent game but there’s always going to be just enough lag to make high level players rip out their hair in frustration. For that reason I avoided Live play in favor of playing with a real person in meatspace. Which is unfortunate because Namco seems to have forgotten about us people who actually have friends.

The versus menu consists of two options. Versus and special versus. Yeah I know, where the fuck is team battle? Why can’t I play tournament mode? Why can’t we fight with more than one character at a time? These modes should be in there from the get go, I don’t want to have to play the single player campaign on hard and meet a bunch of criteria that in some cases border on the impossible to unlock game modes that were available from the start in the earlier games.
Special versus which is just like regular versus but with customizable equipment and skill effects, suffers from the same problems I talked about earlier, namely balance destroying skills.
It doesn’t help that Namco seem to have gone out of their way to make selecting and editing a custom character as difficult as possible.
The only way to customize a character is to go into the character creator (which is a separate menu) and create a character through there. You then have to save said character to your roster and select him in versus. You can’t for example, select Siegfried and select a different sword for him as you could in the earlier games, you have to actually create and save a version of Siegfried with that sword. Since you can’t rename main characters either you’ll have to rely on the pictures and your memory to figure out which custom characters have what attributes. It’s an incredibly roundabout and frustrating way of doing something that should be incredibly simple.
The frustration is then doubled by the fact someone on a different profile can’t select their own custom characters. If you go round a friend’s house with your memory card, chock a block with versions of Astaroth in a tutu you can’t actually load any of those characters in Versus mode. Only one person can be logged in at a time meaning you’re completely at the mercy of the host and his custom characters because you won’t have the faintest idea whether or not the version of Maxi you selected is wearing totally bad ass underpants of strength plus 10 or the women’s tights of fail which halves his health (I’m not making this up)
Regular versus, though, is the shiz.

The new additions to the character roster are generally not worth the effort with a few exceptions. Hilde in particular is the standout addition. Her attacks are a kind of half way point between Killik and Seung Mina’s long range verticals and sophitia style short horizontals. She controls well and makes a satisfying counterpoint to the rest of the female cast because not only are her tits not hanging out she is actually one of the most heavily armored characters in the game.

Note to developers. Chicks are just as hot in clothes as they are out of them

Sadly the rest of the character additions are almost uniformly mediocre.
Yoda, the token character for the 360 version is an annoying mix of shittiness and cheapness. He’s so slow on the ground any character with a big swooping low attack is going to wipe the floor with him before he even gets close but should he manage to close the distance without getting his little green ass nailed to the floor, his annoying habit of staying so low you can’t hit him coupled with the fact he can’t be thrown makes him an incredibly aggravating opponent.. He plays a lot like Gon in Tekken 3. An interesting diversion but ultimately lacking in long term appeal.
Long time background character Amy is reborn as a kind of teenage renaissance goth who plays like palette swap of Raphael who himself is very close to Xianghua in terms of his movelist. She really begs the question ‘Why?’ we tolerated Raphael even though he was essentially Xianghua in a waistcoat because the series was conspicuously missing a fencer character. Do we really need another almost identical character, particularly one with victory quotes such as “Sigh” and “Words of a loser mean nothing?”? I don’t think we do.
The ‘bonus’ characters, all designed by relatively famous manga and anime artists are all dragged kicking and screaming from the big book of anime cliches. It doesn’t help that they’re all simply palette swaps of other characters. Oh and one of them is a fencer character. Putting the total number of fencer characters that control exactly the god damn same at 4. Christ.
The new boss character, touted as ‘the strongest soul calibur boss ever’, looks, acts and plays a lot like a bad anime villain. He floats around the map, firing bubbles at your out of his gun arm and occasionally stabbing you in the face with attacks that cleave your life bar in half. He’d be far more at home, I think in a 2d fighting game where character who summon thrones out of mid air and fire lasers out of their eyes are far more common. In Soul Calibur, he just seems out of place.
Older characters suffer from a slightly sub par art direction as well. The design team obviously took more interest in certain characters (read: female) over others. While the female characters are all sporting well designed if bordering on hookeresque skimpy costumes many of the old series staples have either no updates at all or are sporting the latest line in half assed design. Astaroth in particular looks like a gundam and he’s wielding an axe that looks like a mound of horseshit held together with strawberry jam. Even Voldo, once the series’ most varied and unique character is saddled with rehashed costumes from the last two games. It’s really just not good enough.

Not shown: Astaroth firing laser beams from his chest and turning into an aeroplane

Now it may sound like I’m giving this game a bad review. I’m not. I’ve gone into more detail about the bad parts of the game than the good sure, but I don’t really need to go into the good. If you’ve ever played a soul calibur game or if you’ve ever read a review of one then you know what’s good about this game. Tight controls, varied characters and deep combat, it’s all there but it’s unfortunate that the majority of the new content simply doesn’t mesh with the game or suffers from big design flaws. The robust character creator and updated graphics generally aren’t worth the price of admission for someone who isn’t a raving fan of the series. If you’re still playing Soul Calibur III multiplayer with your mates or if you’re not because you can’t stand all the jaggies on your HDTV I heartily recommend the upgrade, if only for the updated graphics and (if you can stand it) live play. If on the other hand you’ve burnt out on the series or you’re looking for something new in the single player department, I’d advise saving your cash.

Pros:

*Fantastic Graphics
*Core gameplay is still great
*Character customization is limitless and fun
*Local multiplayer although crippled, is still great

Cons

*Some bizarre design choices
*Very few actually new characters
*Still a lacking single player experience
*Character design is lopsided and generally not on par with the previous games.

Sonic the long range weapon.

Although not strictly game related I felt I really had to share this.

Dude nails 15 year old kid with hedgehog

Police said William Singalargh, 27, had hurled the hedgehog about 5m (16ft) at a 15-year-old boy.

“It hit the victim in the leg, causing a large, red welt and several puncture marks,” said Senior Sgt Bruce Jenkins, in the North Island town of Whakatane.

I mean what kind of situation could possibly warrant a projectile hedgehog? What could that kid have said? I don’t know what’s worse, the fact this guy was pissed off enough to pick up a dead hedgehog or the possibility that the hedgehog was alive and he was too hulked out to care.

three video game outrages that never happened

Do you remember a time when it was just the non gaming public that got itself whipped up into a whirlwind of outrage every time a new game came out? When a hack newspaper called Grand Theft Auto a ‘columbine murder simulator’ or whatever phrase was being bandied around at the time it was easy to ignore them because they don’t have a clue what they’re talking about right? That’s still the case. We can laugh at crazy right wing bloggers claiming Mass Effect is some kind of alien butt rape adventure because, hey, if fark has taught us anything (aside from the fact that putting your name on everything is incredibly irritating. Something graffiti taught us long ago) it’s that the hysterical mass media is here for our own personal enjoyment. But now it seems the garden variety gamer, once happy with simply a new Mario game every few years and enough cheetos and mountain dew to keep him/her alive has now decided that ‘they ain’t gonna stand for it anymore’, ‘it’ in this case being any and every issue they can get their grubby little minds round.
All of a sudden Resident Evil 5 is racist because it’s set in Africa, Ubisoft is the new face of misogyny for marketing games about babies and horses to little girls (common mistake, little girls hate babies and horses), and, of course, Fat Princess has portly feminists up in arms because it has the gall to feature a character that is both a girl, and fat. The humanity.
Now don’t get me wrong. There’s plenty of things wrong the gaming industry today, especially on the gender front(literally ‘front’) . I mean at the current rate soul Calibur’s Ivy won’t actually be wearing any clothes by the 5th game and sure, just about every game marketed towards girls happens to be complete crap but I can’t help think that perhaps we’re… you know… taking this all a bit too seriously.

So before we all march down the avenue of no return and end up with T shirts that say shit like “The princess owns this castle Sister!” or we all join the goombah suffrage movement let me give you a few examples of issues that weren’t accompanied by an explosion of internet rage.

1:So you want to talk about unrealistic body types…

Ok. So porn gives young men a very distorted version of an ideal woman about as far from an actual woman as it’s possible to get without the use of electrodes and rubber skin. I agree. I watch a whole shitload of porn but I think I I understand that perhaps what I’m seeing isn’t exactly ‘reality’ per se (although I challenge you to find anything more horribly ‘real’ than 2 girls 1 cup) but plenty of guys seem to think it is and honestly expect the hot chick they met at the office dance to be perfectly happy about being anally ravaged by four guys then thrown out of a moving bus. I also agree that the images in pop magazines give young girls very bad examples to follow.
But it works both ways.
Unfortunately we club swinging males either don’t care or we’re too stupid to notice.
Now I’ll be honest, I’m closer to this than I am to the ruggedly handsome stars of my favourite action games but I’m god damn lightyears away from the guys in the ever popular Gears of War

Even if I was a perfectly healthy, slim young man rather than a gelatinous swamp creature there’s still no chance in hell of me looking even remotely like a character from Gears of War. Yeah, teenage girls going for waist measurements that sound more like wrist measurements is terrible but Jesus, Marcus Fenix’s forearms are thicker than his god damn head. Hell even if I loaded myself up on the juice WWF style and lifted a couple of Volkswagens a day I’d be nowhere close. I could have testicles the size of ball bearings and acne so bad It looked like I had the black death and I’d still look like Christian Bale in the Machinist standing next to one of these guys.
Unrealistic body shape? They don’t even have shapes. They’re just quivering masses of muscle. Living billboards for steroid abuse that whisper sweet nothings into young men’s ears in the universal language of testosterone. We can’t even to begin to imagine the effect this has on a developing teen’s mind because we’re too lazy to do any tests because we’re too busy chainsawing equally muscled monsters in half. Damn.

2: Feminists do the smart thing and ignore japan.

If you just happen to believe in gender equality then congratulations Luke, you’ve just found your Deathstar. It’s a small island in the pacific, home to about 127,433,494 people, at least half of which is gainfully employed making games about Octopi (not to be confused with the wild Doctorpus PHD) having forceful sex with pre pubescent girls. And often pooping on them.

Japan has reached that perfect critical mass of horrifying weirdness where they’re so bizzare people aren’t actually surprised by this stuff any more. So when we’re confronted with a game that offers us two options, RAPE/DO NOT RAPE (jokes on you though, if you select DO NOT RAPE you get a short cutscene and are brought back to the same menu) we just kind of shrug and think “Those crazy Japanese people. What will they think of next?” World domination probably.
Now I could go on about the adventure game market forever, because there’s just a billion and one little horrors in this particular toybox. From games that are all about peeing on people to games where you get turned into a girl by a random chemical spill in your highschool lab and subsequently end up raped horribly by like a hundred guys on a bus. But in the end what’s the point? This is a purely Japanese thing right?

Wrong. Plenty of companies are hard at work translating and exporting fine titles like this to the west where they’re finding larger and larger audiences (not to mention the already large audience that already download the games illegally and use fan made translations) and judging by the west’s newly found obsession with all things Japanese it won’t be long before young Jimmy down the street trades in his copy of GTA 4, in which you can beat a prostitute to death in order to get your money back, for Lovely selection 3, where you have to rape a girl until she submits to your will and convinces herself that she loves you.

Great…

3: Heterosexuals and old dudes not offended by JRPG stereotyping

Go play a couple of JRPGs. See you in a few months.

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…

Ok you’re back. Now you might have noticed a few details about all the protagonists and antagonists in the games you’ve just played. Long wispy hair, slim borderline anorexic physiques, feminine features, a lack of body or facial hair and a snazzy brightly colored wardrobe that matches anything you’ve seen on Queer eye for the Straight guy. Yes sir. They’re all metrosexuals. Not a plaid shirt or a hairy back in sight. In the land of JRPGS the classic heterosexual hero has gone extinct.

Seriously. In a JRPG this guy would be so badass he'd be able to cut the moon in hallf.

Seriously, do a quick check here. Do you have a six o’clock shadow? Short hair? Deep Voice? If so run like a mother fucker because you’re probably about to get killed by the bishonen villian so he can show the protagonist how powerful he is. If you happen to be on the other side, chances are the hero will turn up and murder you as you’re busy raping/pillaging/whatever it is us straight people are supposed to do in these games.
Oh and god fucking help you if you happen to be over 20, you’re just as screwed as the straight guys are. The only chance you have of living longer than 20 seconds past your introduction is if you happen to be both old and incredibly hairy. Old guy with beard is proven to have a much longer life than generic masculine henchman. Chances are you could live all of oh.. 20 or 30 minutes until the villian kills you to set the plot moving again.
I don’t know who these JRPGs are aimed at. The smalll homosexual gaming community maybe? Or just girls? Because they sure as shit aren’t aimed at me. (The harry footed Neanderthal demographic that makes up most of the world’s gamer population) I mean am I actually supposed to identify with Tidus from Final Fantasy 10? I identify more with the square brick from tetris than I do with Tidus. Now I know how women feel when they play tomb raider. Or black people when they watch horror movies.

Disclaimer: This article is meant to be taken with a pinch of salt. Just because these issues may seem ridiculous doesn’t mean others in gaming aren’t. Oh and before you start sending me links detailing a 300 page debate about Male stereotypes in games on a political website of your choice remember, these are just issues that I think don’t have much of a hubub about them. Still I’d be glad to see any links where these issues are discussed in a civil manner. Peace.

Extra special Bonus! Rorschach dating sim by Atlus!

Watchmen the game: Addendum

Ok. Go back a page or so and look at my post about the inevitable Watchmen game, then take a look at this link right here . Look at the dates.

I am forced to come to two possible conclusions.

1: I have the gift of prophesy
2: I control the game industry with my mind

One seems a lot more attractive than two because two would imply I’m somehow responsible for stuff like ‘Alone in the Dark’ and I’m not, honest. Unless it’s some kind of horrible Silent Hill manifestation of my hateful subconscious like a video game form pyramid head.

Edit: Escapist forum user Mstrswrd pointed out that an article detailing the watchmen game was already available on The Escapist here but I swear to god I didn’t read it until now.

On the brightside this means that the next Mario game isn’t going to be a First person shooter with bullet time like I dreamt last night. Thank god.

Three unusual developer unions and how they just might work out

My mum knows a man, a real man, who was born from a pairing between a Welsh Psychologist and a French social worker. His name was…. no they didn’t walk into a bar, this isn’t a joke, I swear to god this is a real person. Anyway this poor young man was given the common Welsh name of Hidreous which didn’t go so well with his family name ‘Bastarde’. ‘Hidreous Bastarde’. No seriously, he’s a real person, I’m not making this up.
This is one situation where an unusual coupling went horribly wrong and resulted in the kind of name that borders on child abuse but sometimes, against all odds, the odd pairing that no one saw coming works turns out to be a big hit.
For example could you have guessed that Square, a company known mostly for high resolution cutscenes of effeminate men beating the crap out of people, and Disney, a monolithic corporation known for an animated mouse and clandestine attempts at world domination, together could end up producing a game that was not only playable, but actually pretty good? Probably not. Lego Star Wars was another weird idea that sounds, on paper like something only someone with a crippling addiction to illegal plant life could come up with, but to everyone’s surprise (I’m thinking especially to the guy who came up with it, who probably did so as a joke) it was a fairly reasonable hit and spawned it’s own mini franchise.
Now with the announcement of ‘Mortal Kombat vs DC’, as unlikely a combination as any we’ve seen before (Superman in a series so violent it pretty much invented the need for video game ratings in the first place? Wow) we’ve got to wonder what other unusual unions could strike gold in the world of video games?

1: Nintendo and Sony computer Entertainment International Production Studio 1 team up for a new Mario game

Now the first developer you should recognize, they made Mario golf after all, but the second might not ring a bell. Think Shadow of the Colossus. Think ‘ICO’
Now I’m not saying Nintendo can’t make a damn good Mario game all by themselves. In fact they have, with the exception of Mario 2 (which wasn’t a Mario game to begin with as any Mario buff will tell you) and Sunshine (which had it’s greatness hidden behind a veil of gunge cleaning nonsense) each and every Mario game has been grade A gaming gold.
But let’s be honest here, with each incarnation the Mario Storyline becomes just a touch more convoluted, strays just that little further from ‘the princess is in another castle’ and more towards ‘giant tortoise convinces smaller giant tortoise that a human princess is his mother despite the fact any idiot with a basic grounding in biology could point out the flaw in that claim’. I’m not saying Mario is going to turn into Metal Gear solid 4 but it’s only going to get worse with time.
So why not give the story elements to a bunch of guys who’ve proven they can do a whole lot with very little? ICO managed to convey it’s entire story in about 5 lines all of which were in a fictional language that no one understands so why not give Mario the same treatment?
While we’re there why not a small graphical change as well? Wash out the colours on some of the levels, make them a little more huge and lonely, add some bloom and make Mario a touch more realistic (But not too realistic, that’s the stuff of nightmares) . It’ll make a nice contrast to the usual neon soaked eye burning bee hives and castles we’re used to.
Oh and instead of swinging Bowser around by his tail in the last boss fight, Mario climbs up his body and stabs him in the brain with a sword. Roll Credits.

2: Square/Disney meet Team Ninja (the original team Ninja, not the two dudes that are left now that everyone has decided to leave because Tecmo wasn’t paying them)

Ok. So the Square/Disney team Rocket thing kind of worked out. Kingdom hearts is wildly popular for a game that forces you to play as goofy without letting you kill him, but when you get down to it, the combat is kind of dull. Yes it’s better than the tripe most ‘action’ RPG’s force down our twitching throats but It fell way short of convincing me that turn based combat is a thing of the past.
So why not invite Team Ninja, the guys behind what can only be called the most refined action game ever committed to disk, Ninja Gaiden Sigma, to do all the fiddly combat bits?
Ok I’ll admit Ninja Gaiden 2 wasn’t as good as sigma and you’d have to keep an eye on Itagaki to make sure he doesn’t get the modelers to add a giant pair of knockers to Kairi or give goofy knives for hands or something. You’d also have to push pretty hard to get Disney to Ok a development team known mostly for detailed scenes of horrendous violence and games that are entirely about tits, but in the end it would be worth it when cleaving through heartless becomes a joy and not a chore you have to slog through to the see the next bit of nostalgia. But don’t let Team Ninja anywhere near the difficulty settings otherwise the kids the game is aimed at will never get past the first level.

3: Bungie and 2K combine to make Halo 4. World catches fire.

Ok. Now everyone has a different opinion about the Halo series when it comes to gameplay but one thing anyone who’s over the age of 12 and actually played the game can agree on is that the story isn’t exactly Shakespearean in it’s execution. Horrible stock characters taken straight out of 90’s TV movies and dialog often so bad it strolls into ‘funny’ territory really put the dampeners on a story, which when you look at it, could have actually been pretty good. Now while Bungie was going to ‘Making your rogue A.I seem menacing 101′ 2K (then irrational games) was teaching the class. Sure Bungie has Marathon and it’s sequel Durandal to it’s name but neither even come close to matching the sheer menace of Shodan in system shock 2.
The main Halo trilogy is over now and Bungie are apparently done with Master Chief so why not bring 2k in and tone the whole thing down a little? Have the player play as a marine with upgradeable skills, weapons and armour. Bring back the flood but this time make them scary rather than just cannon fodder (they ripped the flood straight out of system shock 2 anyway) oh and let’s have an end boss we actually fear rather than the floating equivalent of Johnny 5 from short circuit that acted as Halo 3’s last boss.
” Look at you hacker, a pathetic creature of flesh and bone”
And plasma grenades Bitch” Pew pew pow!
It would be so awesome.

Super Special Bonus!: Rorschach: the game by Bioware

The inevitable Watchmen video game tie in and how not to make it suck.

One of the biggest surprises about the long awaited movie adaptation of Alan Moore’s seminal ‘V for Vendetta’, aside from the fact it was to be directed by two directors known less for their apt handling of complex moral intricacies and more for stilted dialog and scenes of people being shot in slow motion, was the lack of a video game tie in. The movie (as opposed to the comic) just seemed ripe for a quick and dirty cash in. Squatted out quickly by an overworked development team (probably working for E.A or working for a company that’s working for E.A or working for a company that’s working for a …. yeah) and quickly shoveled onto 360, ps3, wii, ds, psp, the ngage or anything else they can shoehorn it into with as little trouble as possible. Just imagine it. The lithe, easy to render, figure of V complete with regenerating health and a rocket launcher stalking around London murdering vaguely Orwellian thugs and dishing out his odd brand of rhyming one liners as he goes. It would have been a travesty yes, but perhaps a profitable one.
Now with the release of the saliva inducing trailer of Moore’s best work to date ‘Watchmen’ I can’t help but think while the publishers took the subtle route with the marketing for V perhaps Watchmen won’t be so lucky.
Now don’t get me wrong, not every movie tie in is terrible. There’s Chronicles of Riddick which was okay and uh… well Quantum of Solace looks pretty good I suppose, but if they were going to do a Watchmen game right, they would have done it long before now.
So this is to whichever 3rd string development team that gets the uneasy task of taking a much loved franchise and turning it into a gross Frankenstein monster at the behest of an unfeeling corporate giant. Follow these guidelines and the game might not suck. That much.

1: We want to play as Rorschach. Not the Night Owl, not Dr Manhattan, certainly not the Silk Spectre Ozymandias, maybe the Comedian, but especially Rorschach.

Let me share something with you here. Rorschach is the best character in the series, bar none. Two parts batman to one part Charles Bronson in death wish Rorschach is the very definition of badass.
Now you may be tempted (or pressured by management) to include all of the active heroes in the series so you can please all of the fans at once or at least sell more action figures. Take my advice and make a stand on this one. One of the things Watchmen established early on in the series is that the masked heroes of the story are fallible, neurotic and ultimately, with the exception of Dr. Manhattan and perhaps Ozymandias, fairly ineffective. By the time the story of the Watchmen takes place the heroes, who were never exactly supermen to begin with, are made even less useful by old age, weariness and in the Night Owl’s case, a hefty paunch.
Not so with Rorschach.
While all the other characters wax lyrical about the human condition Rorschach is busy throwing people out of windows, breaking fingers at random and just generally being a vicious psychopath. Essentially, he’s like Batman if he were real.
Can you even imagine what the tutorial would be like for a game featuring Rorschach? Press A to enter the fridge. Press Right trigger to leap out of the fridge and punch and old man in the face. Press B to shoot a policeman in the chest with a god damn grappling gun. Press Y to kill a man with a toilet seat.
It would be awesome.

2: It must be a Brawler

Now don’t get me wrong, sneaking up on people is great and Rorschach (we’ve already established that we only want to play as Rorschach) often sneaks up on people, but only so it hurts more when he punches them in the face.
Forget sneaking past guards or driving cars in a sandbox environment. Those are obvious examples of features that look good on the back of the box but actually irritate the crap out of gamers in practice. What’s needed are nice big stretches of new York with plenty of walls to climb (a little bit Assassin’s Creed climbing is fine, as long as we get to measure the distance we’ve climbed by how long it takes a random person to hit the ground when we throw them off a building) and most importantly, a never ending stream of victims. Rapists, Muggers, Serial Killers, Parole Offenders, people with traffic tickets, any kind of criminal will do.
Make sure the world is populated with plenty of environmental and makeshift weapons. Think Assasins creed meets ‘The Warriors’. I want to be able to beat hilarious dressed 1980’s thugs to death with busted TV’s, lampposts, cricket bats, toilet seats, other thugs and anything else I can get my hands on.
You could throw in some God of War style minigames while I’m breaking someone’s fingers or throwing them down an elevator shaft if you feel the need to but make sure you get the ‘hurled through a window’ physics right first.

3: You must not follow the plot of the comic too closely

This one sounds a little odd I know as most comic book adaptations make the mistake of abandoning the plot of the comics in favour of a back story more suited to slowmotion gunfights and adverts for Nike shoes. ‘Watchmen’ on the other hand judging from the trailer and the Director’s treatment of ‘300′ (which did happen to get a crappy tie in) the movie will stick quite closely to the story of the comic book. Which is great. But chances are, being a games developer, you’ve read the comic and you’ll know that the series wasn’t exactly action packed. Sure we had Rorschach doing all this cool stuff, but a lot of the truly awesome stuff he did was done off panel or merely talked about in hushed voices by the other characters. The series as a whole was more about the human condition and perceptions of morality than it was about awesome violence. Rorschach himself was supposed to be the human embodiment of Objectivism rather than the human embodiment of Defenestration as I’ve made him out to be. Now while this makes for great reading in comic book form it does not make for a particularly exciting video game So how about setting the story a few years before the events of the comic? In the so called golden years of the heroes. Not only would this give you some freedom in terms of storyline (you would no longer need a weak excuse for having Rorschach say, travel to Nepal and throw someone off of mount everest) and allow you to add in some of the oft mention but never seen Villains present in the series.
Also you may recall that the original story does not end all that well for our intrepid hero when he’s forced to make a choice between his principles and the future of mankind. Again fantastic on paper but very unsatisfying when you’ve just fought your way through a million bad guys only to (spoiler) have your character killed by a bright blue Yule Brenner (end spoiler)
Remember how one of the Matrix game tie ins (the one that didn’t suck) Shiny’s ‘Path of Neo’ completely did away the dodgy ending of the film series and added a bizarre completely non canonical end boss battle with a giant Agent Smith composed out of lots of smaller Agent Smiths and bits of breeze block. Neo then got to beat the crap out this giant Mega Smith and rock out to ‘we are the champions’ an ending that not only made the game a better experience, but actually delivered a more satisfying conclusion than the movie did.
Now I’m not saying you’re going to out write Alan Moore because let’s be honest, there’s no hope of that even on one of his bad days (Promethea) but perhaps the watchmen game could try something similar. Instead of being rewarded with the thought provoking and morally grey original ending when the player finally beats the game he/she is instead greeted by a quick interview with the developers detailing what they changed and why. Then Rorschach beats Ozymandias to death with a coffee table. Roll Credits.