SoulCalibur IV - The Experiment

Having a rental service like Gamefly allows one to experiment with games, much like Netflix allows you to experiment with movies.  SoulCalibur IV was purely an experiment on my part.  I haven't played a fighting game since the 2D fighters like Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter reigned supreme and I was curious what a current generation 3D fighting game would feel like.

I knew I'd never get so far in to the style that I'd be challenging people online and mastering my moves and timing.  Things have gotten a lot more complex than the days when most moves were accomplished by quarter-circle movements on the joystick and the press of a button.  One look at the move list for a character showed pages and pages of combinations of buttons and directions, all of which accomplish a similar but subtly different action.  The beauty of dabbling rather than studying these games is that mashing your buttons can get your character to do crazy and unexpected moves and the surprise may possibly be more enjoyable than doing something on purpose.  In any case, once you've seen a fair variety of back flip/slash/spin/throw moves my entertainment of the theater waned and I moved on to my focus on achievements.

SoulCalibur IV has done an evil job of stinging the achievements along a timeline so that I'm always an hour or so away from the next few achievements.  Without any context I thought that making 10,000 attacks, walking 10,000 meters, blocking 1,000 times, etc. would take a long time but they're all fluid within battles and my progress towards all of these achievements seems to be pretty constant based on my playing style.  So I'm 80% done with one, 70% with another, 55% with another, and so on, so that I'm always getting rewarded for playing just a little bit more.  As I said, this is cruel because if all achievements had been a good distance off then it would already be in the mail headed back to Gamefly to be replaced.  It's a struggle to weigh the benefits of spending more time vs. progress in another game.  Well played.