Zero Punctuation: Soul Calibur IV

Ford-Prefect

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Xenon Pretzel post=6.69063.652171 said:
Telekinesis post=6.69063.652130 said:
I have to quote Yahtzee here and ask why it affects you so much if you enjoy your glorious game as much as you do - unless there's that doubt in the back of your mind that you're just convincing yourself you're having fun
There are three kinds of people who disagree with Yahtzee.

1- The idiots who disagree because it's Yahtzee
2- The idiots who disagree because Soul Caliber 4 is "TEH 1337357 GAEM EVAR N U JUST SUK LOLOL"
3- The people who disagree because Yahtzee is intentionally ignoring the good points. In a video game review, I expect to see good AND bad. This entire thing was just mindless bashing, it doesn't matter how bad the game is there is ALWAYS a good point, similarily it doesn't matter how good the game is there is always a bad point.

The point is- Yahtzee's stopped reviewing games and started shouting at them.
I have always seen Yahtzee's rants as nothing more than entertainment, enjoy his lambasting of stereotypical games, players and content. Revel in the joy that those niggling game mechanics, plots and supposed content you observed are seen by others.

There has not been one single review by Yahtzee of game that I have played where I haven't experienced the same irritations. I derive entertainment form Yahtzee imaginative scalding of such points.
 

jacodemon

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Aug 19, 2008
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This all puts me in mind of the semi-pro "Eurotekken" tourney in JB's nightclub, Dudley, West Midlands in about 1999. It was those two days that ended my love affair with fighting games, after discovering that there are people who are so dedicated to them it is beyond understanding.

People who spend hours a day - every day - training their hands to pull out one particularly effective joystick command perfectly. People who not only know all the hundreds of moves but exactly how many frames of animation each one of those moves takes to hit, or exactly how many frames of animation each move takes to recover if the blow fails to land, or how many frames if the opponent blocks it, or how many frames if the opponent is hit on the counter whilst between duck and stand position whilst their left-hand is facing the enemy.

They made 2008-era WOW addicts look like pathetic schoolchildren.
 

Woe Is You

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hitheremynameisbob post=6.69063.651349 said:
Everyone remember that he's talking about the single-player with the grab-spamming. If the AI can be beaten by a cheap, repetitive strategy then it has a significant flaw, regardless of how a real person would fare against it.
That's basically the problem of every fighting game ever. You find a weakness in what the CPU does and exploit it till you've beaten whatever single player content the game has. Even if it's as simple as spamming throws, a tactic any human can learn to avoid. You only get to the real game when playing against actual people.

The only other option is basically doing what SNK does and making the AI so hard that it's nigh impossible to get past encounters. They usually do this by giving the CPU moves that are flat out unavoidable, making the CPU itself unthrowable and all sorts of cheap shit just to compensate for this problem in fighting games.

But any genre has its bad cashins and Soulcalibur 4 is exactly what you'd call that. Someone mentioned that we don't really know how balanced it is yet, but we already know that it has infinites for various characters, a sign that it isn't terribly well made. But as we know, THAT didn't stop crappy games like Marvel vs Capcom 2 from becoming popular.
 

Llasnad

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Everything is subjective, and no two people enjoy the same thing. I find SC4 fun, I loved Soul Edge back in the arcades, I played SC2 back on Game Cube (Wish I had gotten the xbox version for spawn) but never played SC3. The Tower is fun to play, and the game has used up various hours of my life and kept me entertained while doing it, and is that not the purpose of all video games? When you get right down to it, the primary end all purpose of a video game is to keep you entertained for a various number of hours. DoA4, by many standards a better fighting game, failed in this respect, thanks to my all around suckyness with Fight Games, and the insane difficulty of normal (with no easy setting). Nothing says fun like having the computer counter half my attacks because they have the inhuman speed of a CGS Player. So I will take the button mashing, less technical fighting game any day of the week, it is simply more fun for me then having to have the ninja reflexes of a god.
 

YukoValis

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Actually this is the 5th game in the series, the first one Soul Blade although a lot more "out there" with the 20 foot jumping, and still huge swords was a good game. better story and not all those stupid gimmicks to get it to sell.
 

The Blue Mongoose

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rightwingisgood post=6.69063.648832 said:
This seems to be another area where Yahtzee and I disagree. Though I understand the fact that if he doesn't get a game he can hardly stretch himself for a review he seems to have a direct hate to fan base ratio in his reviews that shows here. He also seems more arrogant then usual by using his own lack of connection with the genre to claim that it is no fun for anyone where others who actively enjoy the genre have prased it as a complete fighting experience. I will however conceed the point concerning the story in that I've never taken it too seriously where Soul Calibur is concenred and in general it never seems as "serious" a series as Mortal Kombat or Tekken. To finish I say MK V DC looks awesome.

P.S If anyone has a problem with the inclusion of Yoda, Darth Vader or the Apprentice it can be solved with two very easy words "non cannon"
plenty of people hate fighting games... i happen to be one of them...

i liked the review, i like them all.
 

Rogthgar

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Aug 18, 2008
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Like mentioned erlier, story isint there to fill up anything, it just a reason to beat ppl up.
 

Odjin

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Post is somewhere in this thread... no will to search ( too many posts ). I stick to it: FG are not about skills maybe reflexes but not skills. Like mentioned reading an opponent in a 3 to 5 seconds match... don't make me laugh. This is like driving a sports car at 10km/h and showing off how you can drive around a narrow zigzag course. Furthermore you don't understand "button mashing". We do not talk here about randomizers ( people pressing various buttons randomly ). Button mashing means to use 2 or 3 basic moves which have high priority ( usually weak ) and spam those in a random order. All FGs I've played so far are prone to this technique. The high priority prevents people using combos or bigger hits from getting anything done ( no matter how pro they are ) and due to the random execution a successful block and counter is pure luck. This is the main problem of those games: totally and utterly unbalanced. The button mashing technique exists in various ways depending on the game: quick jab/kicks or chaingun syndrom ( a quote as example "standing in a corner death-raying your way to victory" ) as example. Also another problem are cheap characters. All FGs I came across have a character with is ( more or less ) overpowered to the rest. And yes, it is memorizing even if you don't think so. Stringing 20 input combos together is a nice thumb-twiddler skill but no combat skill at all.

But any game can be taken "artificially" to higher levels by disallowing certain moves or actions. But if you need this in a game to get things funny with your pals ( and not because you have a nice time, some beers and suddenly funny ideas ) then the game failed, as simple as it gets.
 

laikenf

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Odjin post=6.69063.652510 said:
Post is somewhere in this thread... no will to search ( too many posts ). I stick to it: FG are not about skills maybe reflexes but not skills. Like mentioned reading an opponent in a 3 to 5 seconds match... don't make me laugh. This is like driving a sports car at 10km/h and showing off how you can drive around a narrow zigzag course. Furthermore you don't understand "button mashing". We do not talk here about randomizers ( people pressing various buttons randomly ). Button mashing means to use 2 or 3 basic moves which have high priority ( usually weak ) and spam those in a random order. All FGs I've played so far are prone to this technique. The high priority prevents people using combos or bigger hits from getting anything done ( no matter how pro they are ) and due to the random execution a successful block and counter is pure luck. This is the main problem of those games: totally and utterly unbalanced. The button mashing technique exists in various ways depending on the game: quick jab/kicks or chaingun syndrom ( a quote as example "standing in a corner death-raying your way to victory" ) as example. Also another problem are cheap characters. All FGs I came across have a character with is ( more or less ) overpowered to the rest. And yes, it is memorizing even if you don't think so. Stringing 20 input combos together is a nice thumb-twiddler skill but no combat skill at all.

But any game can be taken "artificially" to higher levels by disallowing certain moves or actions. But if you need this in a game to get things funny with your pals ( and not because you have a nice time, some beers and suddenly funny ideas ) then the game failed, as simple as it gets.
Try button mashing in Street Fighter or Virtua Fighter, and good luck.
 

BladesofReason

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It seems I'm disagreeing with Yahtzee more and more over the past few weeks. I love this game. It's a good return to form for the Soul series after SCIII. I disagree with the button mashing thing. If one knows what one is doing you will not beat him with button mashing, but that's just what my friends and I have seen. Condemning Soul Calibur for its story is a little stupid as well. As has been said already fighting games are not renowned for their stories and I personally think that the story is a pretty cool concept. I have no problem with a character doing whatever the bleeding hell he/she wants with their shiny super sword when they win. I'm sorry, but it makes sense to me that a person would do what they set out to do.
I've done a lot with the create a character, there are a lot of options and ways you can come up with to make your character different. Ok so the custom movesets were taken out but half of them felt unfinished and underwhelming anyway. I've made Iron Man, Sephiroth, Aerith, Squall, Dr. Doom and many many others and the mode hasn't gotten old for me yet.
As for the game getting sexier every installment I can't really argue except by saying it's an upward trend in some cases (Ivy most notably) but the developers addressed this very concern when they created Hildegard Von Krone. In my opinion she is the best female character in the game, she is also one of the most heavily armored characters in the game.
Lastly, and most gratingly I'm a little tired of Yahtzee panning an entire genre of game under the pretext of "reviewing" a specific game. It's fine if you do not like fighting games or JRPG's but it detracts from your review of a game for the sake of trying to slam an entire genre for no reason. Eh, the review was funny but he seems unable to see past the genre, which he admittedly doesn't "get" so it makes what he says about the game he's "reviewing" (In this case Soul Calibur IV of course) a foregone conclusion. It's just annoying to me.
 

Woe Is You

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Odjin post=6.69063.652510 said:
But any game can be taken "artificially" to higher levels by disallowing certain moves or actions. But if you need this in a game to get things funny with your pals ( and not because you have a nice time, some beers and suddenly funny ideas ) then the game failed, as simple as it gets.
And here is where your post falls apart. A good fighting game is one where no move or character has to be disallowed (barring obviously hidden boss characters), because there's always a counter to what a person is doing (try Third Strike or Virtua Fighter 5 for instance). If you end up being beaten in the corner with your opponent jabbing you and chipping at your life, you've done something wrong to end up there in the first place.

And I have to ask what the definition of a pro here is. Does the pro you beat by button mashing consistently do well in big tournaments? If not, then the person you're beating is not a pro.
 

Barciad

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Never got the point of fighting games.....ever.
Good for a quick laugh with a friend, but nothing more.
No depth, no substance, no real distance.
Yahtzee calls a spade a spade, so go sue him them.
 

THEFIRSTPRIME

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Aug 21, 2008
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I have to agree with the point of needlessly cramming 2 franchise's together to cross promote and sucker people in. I do wonder what he'd have to say about Marvel vs. Capcom then.
 

andsoitgoes

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This is still killing me, WHO the hell is the guy in the picture? I know he's used Tony Blair in the past, but this guy /= tony blair.

WHO, WHO I say!?!?!
 

Arichan69

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Aug 13, 2008
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Lovely review. I've been having to live with two SC4 freaks for quite some time now, but could never quite understand the obsession, because I require games to have a bit more structure than punching about on some pretty-colored platform. From what I can tell though, for SC4 for the Xbox anyway, the obsession is fighting with your custom characters online against other custom characters. I know Yahtzee might have overlooked this, primarily because he tends to dislike that aspect of Xbox gaming. But according to my zombie sources, the thrill of fighting a thinking opponent is what this game is primarily about for a lot of multi-player versus obsessed people.