Zero Punctuation: Soul Calibur IV

DiamondJack

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Jul 11, 2008
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great idea-if you like fighting games with eight moves, (roles eyes).
Why should we all suffer because you don't posses basic motor skills?
 

Panayjon

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Aug 12, 2008
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Most of the important points have been made but I only see about 2-3 people defending fighting games so I thought I'd pitch my opinion in:

Skill is involved... if you are getting hit with the same move/combo repeatedly and can't think around it, then you deserve to get pounded into the ground. Since this is a SC4 thread I'll expound on that game (even though I don't think highly of it). You see if someone starts throwing you more than once or twice then its time to use kick. The point of kick in the SC4 series has always been to disrupt your opponent with a quick but weak move. If they start blocking, then you throw. If someone spams a certain vertical move over and over, you sidestep. If they're doing horizontal attacks then you duck or block. For advanced players, parry, in which timing is so critical its not even funny.

What if they're mashing buttons like a moron but can still pose a challenge because their character is busted as hell? Well, even if you haven't played the game extensively it should become clear after a little while when certain swings leave the opponent open. In which you run up to them and pound their face in.
 

kristus

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Jul 30, 2008
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I've had a lot of fun with Tekken 3 and Mortal Kombat 1 and 2 back in the days. But I hear what Yahtzee is saying about them and I agree. I've always longed for more games along the lines of Double Dragon, where you're actually doing something more than just participating in ultra violent kickboxing.

There was a game called Fighting Force released once. It was criminally short, and had it's fair share of flaws I suppose. But it was still quite fun. I loved kicking them in the groin as they were down on the ground. :p

Anyway, the common fighting games are just for casual gamers IMO. Something you throw on when you got a buddy over or sausage party and don't need to impress girls with how cool you are. Which is also why the medium is virtually dead on the PC.
 

Jack_Burton

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Aug 6, 2008
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I have always enjoyed a love hate relationship with the fighting genre. I was in heaven after beating one of my friends 50 times in a row on Mortal Kombat 3, then I was in the depths of despair when I was unable to defeat the 2nd fighter in Dead or Alive 4.

My inability to do anything useful in Streetfighter 2 has led me to believe that I suck at fighting games and therefore should no longer go near them.
 

Korpocalypse

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Aug 20, 2008
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fighting games are weird unless they have a good story mode that makes them more like regular games (usually adventure games). It takes a while to get used to, but if you play for awhile, you can begin to think of fighting games as sport. That's when they become really fun.
 

Samantic

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Aug 20, 2008
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Brief trite comment, because it will be overlooked........(giant ellipsis haha) I have actually attempted to not play fighting games after the painful dead or alive series , this mockery of a real game was no better than its predecessors. I'm content with the notion yahtzee also dislikes the terrible progression arcade games have taken into wastes of money.
 

mflynn

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Aug 20, 2008
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i wrote this to Yahtzee, ended up being longer than I had planned. I thought I might as well post it twice, since I put some effort into it and god knows if he'll ever read it.


"I do realize that you never asked me, but here is a better reply to the question of why ?or rather when-- fighting games are fun.

Fighting games offer you what many games these days, especially rpgs, don't: an extremely robust, well-balanced mechanic of interacting with another player. It's an arena that lets people develop, and show off, a high level of skill. They are not single-player games. They are social games. No fighting game has ever been, will ever be, or SHOULD ever be about the story mode, or about playing against a computer opponent. This is because a fighting game isn't really a fight, or at least it's actually not about the spectacle of the violence. That's just fluff, the eye candy that draws people in. A fighting game is really more like a dance competition, or a debate. You learn a very specific language, and the person who uses that language to better effect, more spectacularly, more gracefully, is the winner. You can't play a fighting game like a single player game. You are not fighting against the game's mechanics, as you are in an rpg or a linear story game. You are using the supplied mechanics to fight against another (ideally intelligent) human being. It's not pinball, but chess.

Some of my best memories of gaming time with my little brother include playing tekken 3, each of us skilled to the point where we could do combo after combo, grab after grab, without touching each other. We'd duck and break the hold, and parry the strike over and over again for minutes at a time, each of us grinning and enjoying ourselves immensely. Why? No one was winning, but it was a pleasure to keep on outsmarting and being outsmarted. It was a pleasure to just be _good_ at it, and to be fighting with someone who was good at it.

This dynamic would come to the forefront immediately if you tried to play a fighting game at an arcade, or in any other social setting. No one cares if you can win using only the throw command. That's not really playing the game. It's not engaging the game's potential. Nobody would play with you at a party if you showed yourself to be that kind of player. It's like the bad guy in Karate Kid who breaks your kneecap instead of out-karate-ing you. Who cares if you can beat someone like that? Who cares if you can pull out a shotgun and blow off Bruce Lee's head? No one respects that kind of "play". No one respects that kind of unqualified "win".

If you think about it, it is bringing a single-player attitude to a social game that creates all of the assholes in the multiplayer world, the same ones you complain about encountering in the mmorpgs. These people are in the game to "win", as though it were a single player game. They will grind, and exploit bugs, and kill people indiscriminately to increase their stats, their possessions, or whatever perks the game offers, at the expense of their relationships with other real people. But there are other people who are using the game's mechanics in order to have a relationship with other people, and I would argue that these people are probably having more fun. Or at least, they are having their fun and helping other people to have more fun too, rather than having fun at the expense of other people, aka being a total cock. These attitudes apply just as well to real life.

When you play a fighting game as it's meant to be played, using all of its subtle grabs, escapes, parries, jabs, and reversals, against an opponent who is interested in engaging the fight as fully as you do, that's what really makes a fighting game fun, both to play and to watch. Not the violence, not the win, and for gods sakes not the story mode. It's about the skill, the memory, the quick thinking, the intelligence and cleverness of yourself and your opponent."

cheers,
flynn
 

Archedgar

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May 7, 2008
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I played Soul Calibur 1 and loved it, I played Soul Calibur 2 and thought it sucked, it really dumbed down the fighting engine and made an already simple game into basically a button-masher at it's finest.

Soul Calibur 3 was worse and I can only assume that SC4 has followed suit.

...

That being said, I enjoyed the review, I'm glad Yahtzee is reviewing *games* again, that's what he should stick to doing.

I was disappointed with the EXTREMELY massive sell-out path that the soul calibur developers took with the gigantic breasts and focus on boobtacular gameplay, along with Yoda and Vader to just try and sell, without addressing any of the already glaring and retardedly game breaking issues.

Oh well, it will sell a lot and I guess that's what matters.

PS:
The tekken series has always been garbage.
 

The Gil-Monster

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Nov 26, 2007
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In my house we call that chicken fighting. Backing the opponent into a wall and performing the same move or repeatedly doing any move over and over again just because it works, vs. human or cpu, is just plain wrong in the true fighting game player's book of morals.
I call it Uno-Move style myself. :)

I'm giving the Soulcalibur series a pass this time around. I've given Namco my money twice now for essentially the same game, and if I really want to play Astaroth again I can just drudge up my old copies of II and III to slam around some chump. (Especially if they've nerfed him beyond belief, which is what happened to Ivy between II and III.) That, and I'm sick to freaking death of Star Wars.

It's hard to disagree with Yahtzee about the character creation in fighting games. MK: Armageddon gave us like what; 60 players, and I find myself putzing around more often with the dreaded wicker-hatted claw-handed cyber-ninja WARBASKET- Master of Stab Fu! But that was an excellent creation engine; hell the only thing it needed (and how hard would this have been) was a color pallette for the special moves. I'm not asking for individual special moves, I just want to make the Shadow Kick purple instead of green, so it feels more like mine and not Johnny Cage's.

I've always been attracted to fighting games for the large sprites/characters filling up our screens and/or the crazy amounts of excessive violence. And I love Mortal Kombat for this, because I'd much rather see ninjas throw each other into spiky rock crushers than bear witness to chirpy teenage twerps telling me how they "zinged" my skewered corpse.

And as for my opinion on merging licenses...

[http://www.flickr.com/photos/39627156@N00/2733185544/]
 

jacobschndr

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Aug 15, 2008
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I for one am a fan of fighting games, but these days games like the soul calibur series just sort of ruin the genre. a fighting game has to be perfect like the street fighter series (that's 1,2,3 and hopefully 4 I don't count alpha or beta or whatever the hell they are).

Oh yeah and for the record, MK vs. DC does look retarded, it makes me think that developers asked each other that old question "who would win in a fight?" and they came up with this crap, but I'll still play it just because I wanna see some DC characters get their heads ripped off DC COMICS SUCK!
 

Xenon Pretzel

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Mar 20, 2008
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*Sigh*

I'm sorry. But notonly did I not find this very funny, I also disagree with a few points.

Number one: I'd prefer to play as canon characters than Vader or my own custom characters. The few times I do play as my custom characters it's either to test them out or in versus.

Number two: Stats and armor effects do make a hell of a difference. Let me put it this way-

Level 9 guy with my favorite moveset

Level 3 guy with a crappy moveset

The level 3 guy has his weapon and armor set up in just the perfect way that he is the most powerful character in the whole. Fucking. Game. And the best part? HE WAS AN ACCIDENT.

Personally I like the story, but if you don't that's ok.

Here's a random idea you've only done once, and by accident - Review something you like. I want to see you try to redeem something rather than bashing it. You've lost the ability to see the good side in gaming, this game has ALOT of upsides- The first time when pressing the same button over and over is bad- The first time button mashing randomly is bad (Try it. You will die.) and the first time an enemy has given me an actual challenge without being a boss. (AKA: The motherfucking apprentice.)

Last but not least- DC vrs MC looks fucking retarded.
 

Balmung7

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Apr 23, 2008
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Once again, you do thrash the game fans with the the truths they've been overlooking or trying to ignore. Well done. And the 'Technical Difficulties' screen was amusing.
 

irrelevantnugget

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Mar 25, 2008
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Irysa post=6.69063.649061 said:
JakobLogan post=6.69063.649026 said:
Shinkada post=6.69063.649014 said:
I like Soul Calibur/er but I can't defend it.

I can defend the general fighting genre, though.

They're only just behind FPS games when it comes to a pure match of skill, so those who like actual competition are the ones most drawn to it.
Are you kidding me? Fighting games are pretty far away from games of pure matches of skill
You clearly have never played a proper fighting game.
Indeed.
3D Fighters have a tendency to buttonmashing, but some games do it right (DoA, for example, if you look past the T&A).

2D Fighters are a lot less about buttonmashing, and Guilty Gear even "punishes" you for it: Using the same move over and over will weaken it with each successive use (e.g. if you used the Punch command 5 times in a row, the damage will get tinier with each hit). Then you can Roman Cancel out of a combo (in the middle of it), break someone else's combo with a Burst, use Dead Angle Attacks, simply guard or guard with faultless defense, etc. etc...

... be back later, I'm off to play some GGX2:#Reload.
 

[email protected]

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Aug 20, 2008
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This game is not in my buy list..no offense to people who have payed good money to play.

I shall be renting it soon tho... I Shall post further opinion sometime in the future.
 

metagaia

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Jul 23, 2008
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Wow, no-one has been banned as a result of this thread. I am almost missing the person who say "FIRST" without waiting to actually watch the video.
 

drawthreecards

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May 16, 2008
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The main difference that fighting games have from other multiplayer genres is that FG's are meant to be more personal. A 5v5 team match on Halo is fun, but at the end of the day it's just 9 random people playing with you. In a FG, it's 1 person. A friend, family member, or a person who just walked up to the 2P side of the arcade machine you were playing at. This invariably creates relationships, and since the game is the common thread in those relationships, talking will lead to discussion about the game and its intricacies. If we can assume that the two players continually strive to improve, this will make both players' skill levels increase (and by skill I mean knowledge of the game coupled with adaptivity and consistent execution of difficult moves).

The problem is, FG's actually require a work ethic before you get anywhere, and that's why you hear a lot of "this game takes no skill/button mashing is all you need/X or Y is broken/etc." Granted, not every FG is balanced well, but then again very few games in any multiplayer genre are. If you keep an open mind and assume that you DON'T know a lot about the game, then you will learn more from the internet, your friends, and the rest of your FG community.

But yeah, I don't like SC4 yet because it hasn't proven to be as deep as SF2 yet. maybe later.