Soul Calibur IV

"Righteousness is on my side, victory will soon follow."

I started playing a bit of Soul Calibur IV on the 360 and it's been pretty fun. There is a heck of a lot of detail in these fighting games these days, eh? I like the multiple fighting stances with multiple sets of specials, activated with different stick/button combinations. Its a pretty steep learning curve but fun.

At the moment all I really do is a few special moves and when it gets tricky I end up button mashing, which still works.

One of the nice options is the role playing game style ability to create your own character, that uses any of the fighting styles found in the game. Its complete with gear purchases that grant various bonuses, and you can select what sort of special effects you want the character to have, such as chance for unblockable attacks, health leeching, higher tick damage against blocking foes etc.

You can find this one used for a pretty good price these days - I picked it up for $25 Canadian, compared to the original $59.99 msrp.

Here is a place where I found some nice SC4 wallpapers.

As an aside, my favorite swordfighting video game was Bushido Blade, which interestingly enough, had multiple stances, with different moves and weapons too. Ditto for the multiple play modes too, such as a story mode, endurance mode etc.

Most interestingly, Bushido Blade had the "one hit kill", if you get in a good, solid sword strike to, say, the head or chest. I think it should be more common in swordfighting games with all that sharp steel swinging around. :D It made the endurance modes really challenging and lent a completely different sense of urgency to the gameplay, since fighters are always one (good) hit away from death. Generally this means I never reached a low-health desperation attitude, and could look at the game with a more calculating eye. After all, your foe is in the same situation, where they could die from one good hit from you.

Upsen.