Soul Calibur 5 - Tale of Connection Errors

Soul Calibur has always been a series I loved while playing Soul Calibur 2...and pretty much just 2. It had an expansive single player mode, a large likeable roster of characters, and heck even my friends liked it and weren't even fighting game fans like myself. Soul Calibur 3 I skipped, and Soul Calibur 4 I only played for 2 weeks straight while I was drugged up after a hernia operation so I don't remember it that well.

What I DO remember is Soul Calibur 4 at least had a lot of characters I enjoyed using and single player options that were decent though nothing like SC2. This game, however, seems to be stripped of just about everything the Soul Calibur series has been known for. It has a stripped down arcade mode, a very short and lackluster story mode, and not much else. There's no challenge modes, no AI tower, really nothing else here.

But of course, we are in the online era of gaming now so the question becomes does the online aspect of this game outweigh the lacking single player content and content overall? Well...my title gives it away but isn't it more fun to read my bitching rants anyway?

Gameplay:

They changed quite a bit in the combat system for this game for those familiar with the Soul Calibur games. They added a meter for characters to perform EX moves that cost meter but combo easier and create more damage. The meter also allows you to guard impact which is a change I feel is for the worse. I loved in Soul Calibur 2 how you could get into these little guard impact wars back and forth but now in this game since it costs meter it becomes a limited option. Furthermore it's actually much harder to land a guard impact in this game which makes it all the more risky to try. It honestly doesn't feel like a viable option anymore as defense which becomes a REAL problem playing online! Also, with that meter they added ultra moves which I like for the most part. Every character has an ultra with the exact same input each. This is great except the disparity in usability for each ultra is quite wide. Like, I would argue Cervantes ultra is flat out useless, but Natsu's is amazing and comboable...AND does more damage than Cervantes! Why then are they the same input or require the same meter when one has WAY more usefulness over the other?

The gameplay has also taken changes for the worse as Namco decided to remove a large amount of the cast we have become familiar with over the last 3-4 games. Characters such as Talim, Yun Seong, Kilik, Takki, Amy, and more are all gone. Well, Kilik is in the game but he is a mirror character (ie he uses weapons of other male characters at random). Honestly the worst offense of this game is the needless insertion of mirror characters. There's like...3 of them! Why? It honestly makes no sense and they are wasted slots. I am also very annoyed 2 characters are only unlocked through pre-orders each at a different location. So there's no way that someone can have both of these unique characters on their game yet until Lameco issues DLC allowing us to buy them. If the game weren't already stripped of characters enough, THIS was a huge slap in the face.

As mentioned before the single player mode is bare-bones but thankfully they included a decent training mode. It isn't as robust as other fighters granted, but it gets the job done and hell we could have been without that as well considering the state the game is in as it is.

I even have a beef with the character creation system. While it is as good as ever in the ability to make just about anything you want, the problem with it is unlocking stuff. As far as I can tell there is no way to choose which items unlock for you. You have to play the game a considerable amount of time to see everything and then once all your options are open to you, you can start making decisions on what character to make. I can't remember how SC4 did this exactly but I do know Tekken just let you purchase everything with in game money. That was a much better system! I could look through and pick shit I wanted instead of playing the game for hours on end and then seeing a message saying "You unlocked more pants!" Thanks? Kinda wanted shoulder armor or belts but oooookay.

I saved my largest complaint for last, the online. When I first got the game I could not finish a match online, not one. Literally 20 matches in a row I got a connection error and the match was dropped. Now, as a disclaimer, I am keenly aware I'm in the general minority on this issue but there are others having this problem too. The fact that a "connection error" occurs at all is deplorable all by itself though despite poor connections. I have literally played EVERY fighting game that exists on the PS3 online barring KoF 12 and none of them disconnected me from my opponent outside of a power outage or rage-quit. But SC5 has that lovely distinction of being the ONLY online game I have ever played that disconnects me at a very reliable pace, as in all the time. While floundering with this game I managed to complete roughly 30 matches over the course of 6 hours trying.

I have recently re-tooled my connection and am able to complete 7/10 matches now. It is still awful that even ONE drops in a 100 matches though let alone 7 out of every 10. The worst offense of all though is how often I get screwed by connection errors. I fully admit I am terrible at this game, Street Fighter is my bag and generally I win there 70% of the time online. But this game I am hovering around 35% but what disgusts me is that this is NOT reflective of how good or bad I am either. I will lose legitimately 7 or 8 times out of every 10 matches because I am god awful, I readily admit that, but when I FINALLY get paired up with a guy as bad as me, and am winning what happens? Connection ERROR! I probably have a good 20 wins that have gone unaccounted for because of this bullshit. I should have a 45% win ratio at least, and yet here I am.

To its credit though, while I am in a match the game is relatively lagless. Sure there are a couple matches where there is noticeable input lag, but as a majority it feels quite nice online while you are in a match anyway. I still find SF4's online better in the lag department overall but for a 3D fighter this is by far the best quality barring the constant connection drops.

Graphics:

The Soul Calibur series has been widely known to push the boundaries of fighting game graphics and while Soul Calibur 5 looks great, it doesn't do much more than what SC4 did. I can't fault the game for not improving upon 5 year old hardware though. It still looks great however.

Story:

??? ......... ??? .......... uh..... yeeeeah....

Sound:

Probably the best part of this whole game is the music. Every track in this game is incredible and amazing. Even the Assassin's Creed remix is a joy to listen to and I have a track record of hating remixes. The only real downside to the audio is the lead female character has the most annoying voice of all time.

Conclusion:

Soul Calibur 5 does everything right when it comes to having an offline versus mode...everything else is utter garbage. From removing characters in place of mirrors to the atrocious netcode and lacking single player modes Soul Calibur 5 is rather offensive to every ounce of me that loved SC2. I bought the game already knowing the content was lacking, but I was unaware of the character roster being shitty and the disconnecting online. I had planned to enjoy doing marathons the game online and then the experience is so atrocious I just don't think I can do it. Which is really sad considering that was my plan for the game, and now it has become all but useless. I really thought it would be a worthy $60 purchase but like all Namco fighting games just wait a few months for it to be $30. Oh, and don't expect any netcode patches either....it's Namco we're talking about here.

*I was going to win a battle of SC5 online, but then I took a network error to the knee.*

Dead Island - Fetch me a Slurpy!

Dead Island offers the promise of exactly its title, dead things on an island. With a premise as simplistic as this it was a little jarring to get the amazingly deep trailers we got for this game before it came out. Our hopes were then heightened to believe this game would now contain some semblance of plot and character development. Sadly the game itself is designed around fetch quest systems that seem to follow me between nearly every game I play these days. With that in mind it must be understood that any game designed this way inherently loses any hope of having a decent plot, developed characters, or anything that could possibly live up to the 40 seconds of artful rewind death we got from the trailer. No, instead we have two meat-head male leads, and two female leads who I swear have two lines each in the whole game....but we'll get to the failures of the plot in its appropriate section later.

Gameplay:

Dead Island plays exactly like Borderlands...that's the game. For those of you who never played Borderlands here's the rub. You select from 4 characters who each have specific abilities that separates themselves from each other to slay hoards of zombies. Hilariously, caught in a Zombie Apocalypse the 4 people who are immune to the disease also are the same 4 people perfectly equipped to handle just such an occasion. Plot devices aside, you gain experience doing missions and slaying zombies and then putting points into a skill tree further customizing your character and enhancing their zombie slaying prowess.

Also, just like Borderlands the enemies scale with you, you collect countless weapons with multicolored titles relating to their strength and rarity, and each character has a special "rage" ability which acts as a sort of limit break allowing your character to briefly be the most efficient zombie slaying bloodthirsty thing on the island. Needless to say, also just like Borderlands the entire game is based around collecting sidequests from countless NPC's. The only real difference between the two games is you mainly use fun and interesting weapons in Borderlands and in Dead Island you use...a baseball bat perpetually and thus magically on fire? So yeah that's really it, one game's combat focuses on guns the other melee weapons.

Ok, well the fetch quest mechanic isn't always bad right? Sometimes they offer interesting quests like Skyrim that has like 4 or 5 quests that make you go "oooh, I'm glad I did that instead of deliver 12 wolf shits to an old lady." But in Dead Island do we get any of those? No. And what's worse is the quests in this game are so mind blisteringly boring you start WISHING for that old lady and begging to fight zombie wolves and playing a mini game where you fish around in their zombie wolf anus to acquire shits for her.

I mean let me set it up for you...you're in a ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE right? People are aware you're in a zombie apocalypse and yet their worries that they hire you to solve are not life or death, are not do something of vague importance to survival, no, some of these people ask you to do inanely stupid things like solve my marital dispute, or slay my now zombie husband for me, or find my priceless heirloom in the midst of hoards of the undead...ARE YOU PEOPLE FUCKING NUTS?

Ok I get I've landed in the middle of Night of the Fetch Quests, so of course I should be expecting this kind of shit but I mean come on! You seriously expect me to risk my life over an ancient wind up pocket watch? In the middle of the end of all things your world will somehow be cohesive and calming if you are reunited with your grandfather's pocket watch! This is one example of why Skyrim is at least better fetch questing as I would have the option in that game to lay waste to these fucktards and feel better.

There's not much else to say about the gameplay other than the very nature of the combat system which is exactly what you'd expect it to be. First person melee combat, the most perfected and greatest form of video game combat...or...you know...not... At the very least I do admire that they focused on melee combat in a zombie game since they are on a beach resort of an island where finding munitions would indeed be a rare thing. Amazingly though this is where the developers decide to use their realism, you know not on the characters, not on the really weird enemies that don't resemble humans or the effects of the virus as explained by the scientists in the game...No they want to play the realism card on the combat system which inherently causes it to be as mundane as humanly possible. I'm sorry, but a ZOMBIE game that makes me play 30 hours before I can use a shotgun is a very poor zombie game indeed. What's worse is one of the 4 characters you choose has a specialty in guns...I didn't pick her but I can't imagine how boring the game must be if you do as you hardly find any weapons or ammo in the entire game. The only use the firearms ever have are on actual people and NOT zombies as they don't provide more ammo when you kill them unlike humans.

And the survival aspects of the game are nullified considering when you DO die you just lose money, like Borderlands, and are respawned a few feet away to try again. Admittedly, though first person melee combat is awful no matter how you do it (and yeah there's no blocking in this game either) the satisfying blows you land on zombies is fun and even addicting at times. You can break their arms, cut off limbs, smash their heads in, huck weapons at them with satisfying sounds. It's honestly the only thing that kept me playing that whole time. It goes without saying that this isn't something that would keep the average gamer involved however...just a masochistic one like myself.

Story:

As mentioned earlier there is no story, not like the trailers lead us to believe. You get drunk at a party, and then wake up to a zombie apocalypse. Now don't even get me started on the zombie apocalypse scenario since it never makes sense in the first place. I mean I can accept the reanimation of the dead and even a fast spreading virus by means of biting of others and such...what I can NEVER grasp however is the widespread nature of the "zombie" disease. The very disease requires that an already infected zombie bites or claws a human to eventually become one too. But how it gets further than a few dozen people blows my mind every time. I mean here we have infected people who's only goal is to fully consume all they come into contact with right? It's a mindless all encompassing consumption of others right? So how are MORE created? It just so happens that hundreds of thousands of people only get minor scratches and get away only to become zombies JUST for the sole purpose of having more zombies? I mean basically what we have here isn't so much a widespread disease, it is instead just a whole fuckton of people who "barely" got away thus creating the apocalypse scenario. And apparently it ALWAYS happens this way. I was honestly looking forward to seeing a zombie story take the idea of the zombie apocalypse in an intelligent way making it somewhat believable...sadly that's not the case.

And yes my rant about the logistics of a zombie apocalypse is a far more involved story than the one we were given. Yeah I already covered the story believe it or not. Oh what happens at the end you ask? You leave the island...

Graphics:

The graphics are half the reason I kept playing. Seeing the smushyness of the zombies was endlessly enjoyable for me. I played on the PC version so the game looked just fine, though I hear the console counterparts have some pretty terrible glitchyness about them. Still my fetch questings looked fine, great lighting effects, varying scenery, and competent character models and textures. Nothing to really complain about but also nothing much to overtly praise either.

Music:

There are some very minor pieces of music here but they serve the mood well enough. Weirdly though there are some heartfelt piano melodies strewn about in the game as if we're to give a damn about any of the characters involved in the game and their zombie plight. We don't...but the music is good either way.

Conclusion:

Dead Island drew me in for 40 odd hours in the exact same way Borderlands did. The constant upgrading of your character, finding better loot, and being led around for hours on end by the little red map marker is really all that kept me playing both games. I can't really admit that I was having fun in either game, more like I was enamored with idea that I was progressing in it and completing things. The quick satisfaction of tallying another notch in your questlog, or getting a new weapon that did 50 more damage only to see how many less hits it took to take down a zombie are just two of many psychological tricks these types of games play on the user to goad them into playing more. It's sad that most games have now adopted this type of gameplay, hell even first person shooters like Modern Warefare are guilty of this formula.

In the end I'm really not sure exactly how, as of late, I have fallen into playing games with endless amounts of meaningless fetch quests whether it be Skyrim, Zelda Skyward Sword, Fallout New Vegas , and now this...but I am starting to believe that I have been cursed by the gaming gods over some offense I committed against them. I can't specifically identify what I have done to disgrace them so...but to hopefully alleviate this in the future I'm going to sacrifice a good game to them. Now with their grace on my side, I shall venture forth and play Rage, ID's latest shooter. A classic style shooter game in no way could possibly hinder me with more fetch quests.....

....

....

GOD DAMMIT!

*"SQUISH" Haha...his head went splat....oooh look another zombie to splat....*