I'm getting the 360 version personally, just because of Xbox Live. I don't know many other people who own PS3's at this point. Luckily, I own an arcade stick, so I'm not too worried about the d-pad. I guess that will give me a bit of an upper hand against those that don't. I'll take it ;)

The d-pad is really, really horrible though. I think I'll try Plumb's suggestion ASAP. I was playing a little Pac-Man CE tonight, and it was driving me crazy. I haven't yelled so many profanities at my television in a long time... there's no doubt that the six-axis is a better controller (stock, at least) for digital inputs. I wish someone made an awesome 360 d-pad. I need it for my XBLA games.

"FUCK I DIDN'T HIT UP YOU MOTHERFUCKER FUCK YOU BLINKY!"

I'm pretty jealous that people have this already.. but soon enough!

This is true. I saw the schedule and the suggested price but as it could change, I won't share it with you. The game is great fun if you're a fan of Soul Calibur and much better than the third one. There are tons of characters, you certainly don't need to play with the guest characters to get your money's worth.

Vader reminded me of Spawn from the Xbox version of SC2, i.e. dramatically overpowered. Fun for a while but you would be banned from playing by your friends if you kept using him. Yoda....well I'll be polite and say the game was a couple of months from release with much under the bonnet tweaking to do.

Ah didn't see that you had played it.

He hasn't been nerfed in the last couple of months then :P I used to piss my mates off something rotten with Spawn but he was the only character I was any bloody good with! Will be making an effort to get better with this one hopefully :)

I wish there was a way to disable coke and pepsi from the online mode all together. I hope you can at least play in some kind of "pure" lobby, without create a characters and generic anime guest no. 512.

pepsi can't be thrown :(God, I hate these characters. It doesn't matter if people don't want to play with you, since if they can't be completely disabled online, you're going to have to avoid pick up games all together. I've seen people defend this on GAF by saying that, "grabs are overrated"--holy shit--they're part of the fucking game! You might as well make an unblockable character, and respond with, "blocking is overrated."

Fuck stupid ass broken marketing characters. They're so damn lame.

Don't know. I'm not in for a week otherwise I'd see if I can check.

I have nothing but apathy for the create a character mode either to be honest.

Yea, I hate all these stupid gimmicks in Soul Calibur now. It started with Soul Calibur 2, really, with the guest character marketing.. but that game wasn't heavily influenced by their presence at all.

Things really started to go down hill in SC3. All of these silly additions just take away focus from the core values of a fighting game. You can have customization without breaking character balance, but Namco doesn't seem to understand that at all.

SC4 is all about guest characters and custom characters. It's pretty disappointing. I'm still hopeful that when you remove all of those extra layers, there's still a great fighting game underneath them, but as a long time fan of the franchise it's still very disappointing.

They've gone so far as to port the game to the arcade months and months after the console versions come out. The arcade was always a test bed for compeditive players, and the result was a console game that was a fine representation of something that was ready for tournament play. Who knows if they'll even bother porting SC4 to the arcade at all. After all, what's the point of SC4 without the virtual dollhouse?

You can't throw Yoda.. just.. wow. Shame on you, Namco.

...and... I'm still buying it :(

Those sound sort of like the special weapons introduced in SC2. In that game, there was a sort of "pure" mode where you couldn't play with weapon modifiers, so I hope there's something simular here. I have a feeling that even if we're given that option, you'll still be able to use Yoda, and the other guest characters. That's pretty disappointing in itself.

Not sure.. but.. if you pick one up, let me know the results. I could really use a better gamepad for the XBLA games I already own. I don't plan on purchasing many more, but Pac-Man CE is impossible. I guess it would play pretty damn well with my arcade stick though. I mean, it is Pac-Man after all.

PS. The box art is also really ugly. I'm not just saying that because of Yoda and Vader either.. but they're not helping any. I suppose that's par for the course though. It's ironic that the best box art in the franchise history is the worst game in the series!

It strikes me as a big ridiculous that they haven't. It's a fucking defect. I'd hate to get into an argument over that again. Last time we had this discussion I was assaulted by people who insisted that it wasn't defective, it was designed in such a way that it's not supposed to work!

I'm pretty sure it's probably more like SC3 than any of the other previous games. All move sets, the overall gameplay systems, etc. are all based in Soul Calibur 3 and then expanded upon from there. I actually quite liked SC3, outside of the gimmicky create a character bullshit. There were some pretty obvious character balance issues, which probably makes it the worst game in the series, but some of the extended move sets were tremendously fun to play. I find Cassandra and Sophitia pretty difficult to go back to in SC1/2 after playing SC3. The only major character revision that I didn't care for was Ivy.

I'm actually glad there's no versus tag mode. It changes the gameplay quite a bit.. which isn't necessarily a bad thing, I just generally prefer your typically 1v1 game, most of the time. Then again, I love the Capcom versus series, so who knows.. maybe I'd welcome it in practice.. the idea just doesn't sit well with me on the surface.

SC2 was fantastic though.. and personally I think that calling SC3 terrible is a huge stretch. The new characters sucked, for the most part (but Setsuka owns), and there's far more flash than substance in some ways.. but there's some really good stuff going on underneath all of that. Soul Calibur was a great game, but it's a bit like Street Fighter 2. As good as it is, it just seems a little basic compared to its sequels. Sophy simply isn't as fun as Cassy.

If they charge for anything I reckon it will be additional create a character features and/or Vader/Yoda. Frankly, they can keep all of that. I'm not buying the game for its casual appeal or marketing gimmicks.. but a sucker is born every minute, so I'm sure they'll sell that stuff by the truck load.

On the other hand, if Sega released the revised version of VF5 as DLC I probably would buy it. After all, I bought two entirely different hard copies of Virtua Fighter last generation. I sort of expect they'll release VF5:R as a separate, discounted release, and I'm okay with that too. I feel guilty for not getting into VF5, but I still intend to.. I'm just going to get SC4 first so I don't arrive to both parties late.

As much as I don't care for or about the character creation, I do think it's pretty cool that we get to play dress up with our existing characters. A simple palette swap would have be fine, but I can't not see the humor in something like this:



Hilarious.

1) I don't know if those rumors are true or not. I guess we'll find out soon enough.

2) I agree with you, to some degree, that customization took too much of the focus in SC3 and perhaps in SC4 as well.. I just don't think it automatically has to make them horrible games. We'll see how it all plays out, but I'm hoping that SC4 takes into consideration the problems SC4 faced. It is discouraging that up until now, the focus in the media has been on customization and marketing characters.

3) Yes. :P