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.

The Media

There are a million different reasons to rant about the media.  Today it will be about the way that they twist headlines.  Looking at MSNBC's front page there is a bar on the left with headlines under "Economy in turmoil." Below that are the following headlines:

Harder times mean softer paychecks
White House to banks: Stop hoarding money
Home prices fall by sharpest annual rate ever
Consumer confidence at lowest ever
Wall Street rallies despite bleak news

It's the last headline that bothers me, because on a daily basis the Dow is up or down 2% as many things in the world are being factored in.  To suggest that Wall Street is rallying because there happens to be a modest upswing today that coincides with this other negative news is silly.  Wall Street is down 20+% from where it was.  Slight ups and downs do not change the fact that we're no where near a rally, we're just wobbling on an uncertain base and will continue to wobble until all the current factors in our new reality settle.  The news is no less bleak because Wall Street is up 2%, and Wall Street isn't excited about the bad news, and it doesn't suggest that Wall Street expected the news to be worse.  It's more reasonable to report these as unrelated event but that's not like the media, so why have high expectations.

Gamerscore Guilt

I have to make a confession about my gamerscore that I feel guilty about.  No, it's not the fact that I rent games, rack up as much score as I can efficiently and then send them back.  What I feel guilty for is that I have formed a band with Loddie in Rock Band 2, and we had been earning gamerscore points together as our band progressed.  So yesterday when I was trying to make the microphone work properly I picked an old song that we had done before to test it out and a screen asked me if I wanted to make a music video to get more fans.  I of course said yes, not suspecting the consequences.  At the end of the song an achievement popped up for making a video.  Now I feel guilty, and my only hope is that these video opportunities come up multiple times because otherwise I'll feel really guilty if this was our band's one shot at making a video.  At least I've gotten that off my chest.

Anonymity

"A person familiar with the case provided the number of players involved Monday, saying estimates of a higher figure were untrue. The person spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the players are appealing the findings."


The rant today will be on anonymity.  While the above quote isn't as heinous as some examples, it does highlight the issue I have with the media and anonymous sources, because in the case above, the source could have given the names of the players, which the media would have quoted, regardless of the fact that appeals and due process are ongoing.  There is no personal protection from an inside source blabbing anonymously and the media will jump on that source any chance they get.  Since it is completely unethical for an inside source to utilize that information and disclose it to the media, why is it ethical for the media to print that information? (answer: it's not)

Which would you buy?

In April of 2008 Hasbro made 1,000 copies of Risk: Black Ops and sent them to various game outlets.  It was a reinvented Risk with easier rules that allowed games to take less than 2 hours, much shorter than the previous versions.  In addition to the revised rules, it looked like this:

It came in a slick black box and had a style that showed it was very different from the prior Risk.  Many were excited, until Hasbro mentioned that the new Risk wouldn't look like this.  It would look a lot like the old Risk.  And then the proceeded to follow through with Risk: Reinvented, which looks like this:

Bright, colorful, arrows?  Definitely not slick.  I honestly had the expectation that within the 8 months before Christmas they would see the error in their ways and release the Black Ops edition.  Today I sent an angry e-mail to them since they still have not seen the error in their ways.  I know that angry e-mails to customer service of big companies don't actually go anywhere, but it's therapeutic to fire one off sometimes.  I've sent many angry e-mails and this won't be the last, that's for sure!

Stimulus Package

This time I'm really going to spend it!  No, not really.

From MSNBC: "Democrats in Congress are also pushing efforts to assemble a second economic stimulus program that could total $150 billion or more. On Monday, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said a “significant” stimulus package is appropriate. The White House has yet to endorse the idea, but has said President Bush was at least willing to consider a second stimulus measure."


Of course it goes without saying that I think this is stupid, and that the government is wasting its money.  In case you're not aware with the specifics, the last round of $600 checks cost around $150 billion total to send out, and congress is thinking about another one.  Of course this is an even bigger waste than the $700 billion bailout package, but really, people need to spend, right?


Where I'm really torn is that when everyone was living above their means at least my stock portfolio and 401k were doing well.  I was even profiting on high gas prices.  Now, in order for other people to start living within their means my portfolio has to take a hit, and I don't like that one bit.

Lamenting over what used to be is a lost cause so now I'll just continue stockpiling cash like the rest of America, cross my fingers that the US doesn't do something to make all that cash worthless, and wait until brighter days.  At least if we have a 2 year recession then I'll feel like I've got some safety net for the next 20-30 years.  If it turns around in a few months then I won't feel very comfortable putting cash back in to the market right away and will miss the opportunity.

Bad Company: Final Thoughts - 8

I wrapped up the single player campaign of Battlefield: Bad Company after giving it a long rest and focusing on the multiplayer battles.  The multiplayer is fast paced, has (limited) character progression, stat tracking, etc.  The fast pace is what really made it enjoyable, because there was always some new opponent with some different tactic coming to try and kill you before you killed them.  The single player campaign lacked this for the most part.

In my review of the game I would have to say that if the other chapters were anything like the pace of the final chapter then it would have earned a higher score.  The 8 was the averaging of a 7 single player campaign with a 9 for multiplayer fun, but the final chapter was also a solid 9.  It changed things up, going from tank battles to artillery to blowing up bridges to riding in a vehicle shooting at enemies... a lot of variety.  It proves that they held back on the creativity trying to stretch out the game earlier and only when they were ready to wrap it up did they put some effort in to the level design for the ending.  Coming after Call of Duty 4 one would say they should have known better than to make long repetitive levels over tight entertaining levels, but some game designers still have not learned their lesson, or simply come from a different school.

As for the multiplayer and the 9 that I would give it, were it stand-alone, the only flaw I see in it is the limited weapon selection available.  The main game had such variety that I was surprised at how few weapons were available and even fewer options to customize your character within whatever class you chose to fight in.  I also question a spawn-on-teammate option that sometimes left me dead shortly after the teammate I spawned on was killed or let me kill 2-3 people that just appeared in front of me as I was tracking down an opponent.  But regardless, the battles were always tough and entertaining.  It was always rewarding to sneak up and take someone out.

It's unfortunately not a must-play, because better experiences can be had in other games, but it's not a waste of time if you enjoy FPS war games and especially if you like Battlefield multiplayer games.