Bloody High Claw!!!

Sequels that have reached the 3's and 4's often start faltering and forgetting what makes them great. Luckily Street Fighter has yet to do this, ever. It seems that with each new Street Fighter Capcom gives us something new to enjoy (excluding the EX series). I am proud to say that after 25 hours with Street Fighter IV there is no better game out there with a 4 tacked on the end of it than this game.

Let's first go over what SFIV does right.

Graphics: Outstanding. The graphics in SFIV may not be the most robust. You may not feel like you're playing a fighting game cinematic like you do in Soul Calibur 4. But what you do get is the distinct atmosphere of Street Fighter through and through.

Gameplay: Ah, of course the most important. Veterans of the series will instantly notice SFIV is a slower paced game than previous Street Fighters. This is not a bad thing though as now strategy becomes far more influencing than button mashing which is now all but abolished (thank goodness). Everything works flawlessly, (PS3 version) every input, everything! It feels right. Doing complicated moves, or nigh impossible moves from SF's past like the 360 Gief throw is now effortless. That's not to say, however, that newbies to the series won't be pulling their hair out trying to do stuff. This is not a newbie friendly game in any respect, and that is proven with the online.

Online: Fantastic. I think I've finally cleaned off the muck on me left from Soul Calibur 4 and its horribly laggy online. Street Fighter 4 is nearly perfect online. It is about as perfect as you can get these days. I use Vega online nearly 100% of the time so trust me when I say there is hardly any lag at all as Vega's success revolves purely around perfect timing. But this leads me back into how unfriendly this game is to newbies to the Street Fighter universe. I have probably played 20-30 matches where I have crushed an opponent so badly that I just started playing with them before I finished them. They were clearly new to the game, knew nothing about countering, or about defensive strategies, or about maintaining their zones, and nothing about even simple inputs that could have assisted them. To say the least, some of these fights are embarrasing.

While I don't claim to know all Street Fighter has to offer I will say that I have only been overwhelmed maybe 3 to 4 times. And that's mainly due to me picking the lowest tier character / facing good Gief players and Vega has nearly a 0 chance of beating if countered properly.

Still, online is a wake-up call for new players but also a great learning tool to understand strategies. But anyone complaining about "cheapness" should stop playing fighting games all-together since this is considered to be the most balanced fighting game ever. (review tier lists from other games and prove me wrong).

Story: lol.

Audio: I'm just glad Capcom decided to create new noises for everything unlike RE5 where they rehashed every noise possible from RE4.

Overall: Perfect. With the new additions of EX attacks and Focus attacks SF strategies have never been more diverse. If you buy one fighting game this year, or one game that ends in a 4, make it Street Fighter 4.

*Yes, I know, the picture has characters in it that aren't in SFIV. Deal with it!*

Fable... too?

Now, it's been a good long time since I played a game I liked as much as Fable. I want to make that clear. The last one before that was Dead Space, which, as you all are aware, I loved in ways that are unhealthy between a man and his game system. However, Fable II, though more than a worthy successor, has some MAJOR problems that just can't be ignored.

First, though, the good. It's mostly a sort of hack'n'slash RPG hybrid, where you collect experience orbs in the areas you use more often in order to level them up. The game play has been simplified from the first game. It is very simply a color coded button system. Blue experience orbs and the blue button are strength, i.e. melee, yellow experience orbs and yellow button are dexterity, i.e. guns, and the red experience orbs and button are your will, i.e. magic. Your character and world are exceptionally customizable, with tons of clothes, weapons, hairstyles, tattoos, houses, shops, and pretty much anything else you can think of to buy. This is nothing new, though I feel like all of the mechanics of it have been vastly improved since the first game. Really, that's the name of the game here; improved since the first game. Nothing drastically different or new has been added, but nearly every gameplay issue has been improved, and in ome cases very nearly perfected.

The only really new piece of it all is the addition of the dog, who isn't terrible useful. He finds things for you to dig up, but more often than not, they are useless trinkets. You can train him to find better stuff, but in all honesty, he comes across mostly as a gimmick.

The real meat of the game is found in the CONSTANT stream of moral and ethical choices. Do you sacrifice people to one church or daonate your hard-earned gold to another? Do you kill people and take their homes or do you defend them? Do you gouge prices as a shop owner or lower them, to the joy of all your customers? Do you sell slaves, or free them? I, of course, went through the game being as evil and nasty as possible, enjoying every minute, until I found the two HUGE problems.

Firstly, and this is sort of a psoiler, there was no boss fight. That was a elt down, but honestly not that big of a deal to me. There were only two others in the game anyways. It's simply not much of a boss fight game. I got over that one quickly enough.

The second one is the one that really bothers me. After completing the game being bad, I decided to try the other side of the coin. I made up my mind to be the best, most pure, wonderful person I could possibly be... only to discover that the game sports only one save file. Now, I'm not the kind of person who deletes his save games. My red version of Pokemon still has my original Charizard from all those years ago. I simply don't like deleting all the hours of my life I spent playing a completed game. The idea of doing so, especially so soon after beating the game, was upsetting. What this basically means is that if I want to play the game that is literally built completely around choices, and make different ones, I have to give up all the effort I made the first time.

Now, I know I can make another profile on the XBox 360, and have a different save that way, but not only is it a pain in the ass, but I don't actually OWN the 360. It belongs to my brother. I had to fight with him to even be allowed to have ONE profile and the use of it. What I'm basically saying is that, for me at least, the game's setup destroyed it's own otherwise endless replay value. I'm not sure how you can come back from that one, Fabel II.

As a whole, I adore the game, but if I had known that my choices were going to be so permanent, I may not have made some of the ones I did. Huh. Kind of like life. Go figure.

Why Xbox Live isn't Worth $50 a Year

I brushed up on my understanding of what all comes with the Xbox Live and reaffirmed my conclusions of why $50 a year is a ridiculous asking price for the content you actually get. So here's the breakdown folks....

Free Membership:
No Multiplayer online gaming
do I have to emphasize that more?
YES
NO MULTIPLAYER ONLINE GAMING.
No Video Chat
No Parties (whatever the hell that means)
No Netflix Movie Streaming

Let me expand for a moment on the Netflix movie streaming. So here's the deal, you get the Gold Membership (the $50 one) and you are allowed access to the Netflix streaming... As long as you have a paid Netflix account. So you are being charged $50 on top of what you're paying for Netflix? Why the hell even bother?

Free Membership Continued:
Voice Chat
Avatars
Downloadable Content

Wow, so for the free account I get voice chat, (which if you have an internet provider at all is available to you). Avatars (which are retarded in their own right anyway). And downloadable content (which is the single worst new additive in video games since Escort Missions). Yay for the free one.

Gold Service $50 a year:
(Reread what you don't get with the free one and there you go).

So broken down you ARE in fact paying $50 to play online multiplayer games... Let's take a quick look at the companies that do not make you pay for this service.

Crytek: Crysis 1, Warhead
Blizzard: Warcraft I, II, III, Starcraft, Diablo I, II
Valve: Team Fortress I, II, Left 4 Dead
Many many other PC games I've never played.
Any game on the Playstation Network or Nintendo Wii

The only PC games I can recall that require you to pay subscriptions are MMORPG's. And that makes perfect sense because you're paying to utilize dedicated servers which house these massive worlds of gaming. Guess what you're paying with MS? Your own damned internet provider. Seriously, no dedicated servers here. Say you're on Soul Calibur 4, your connection sucks balls, you get lag, that happens anyway right? Right. So paying $50 a year to play online through Live will NEVER EVER solve that problem because your internet connection is dripping from the balls with saliva anyway.

So what's the deal? How are so many people getting shafted by this baseless service? I'll tell you the answer and you won't like it, (but it will be my profession so I know I'm right) and that's Marketing. Microsoft has put it in the minds of consumers that they offer the best service of all the services period. You can't change the minds of those that bought it either because they made the purchasing decision, they are happy with the product and you cannot convince them otherwise. No matter how much you show them a free online game listed above with zero lag, dropouts and so on, they will still say the Xbox Live service is better. It becomes an argument for Coke vs Pepsi even though both will ultimately rot your teeth. That means Microsoft's marketing has succeeded. That doesn't mean the service is actually better, or not even close to being worth the price of a brand new game!

My advice? Buy a new game, you will enjoy it more and be able to visibly see what you bought. If you are unfortunately stuck with an Xbox 360 and want to play online then far be it for me to tell you not to pay the $50 to do so. Just please be aware you're getting ripped off, and do not be ignorant saying it's better than the PSN or Wii's service. Fact is all 3 allow you to play online with your friends with the same amounts of lag and dropouts (usually your providers fault) but only one of them has the balls to charge you $50 for it.

*I said it before and I'll say it again, balls!*