Game Design: Gaming - Soul Calibur 5

Seriously, what's a game blog without some actual gameplay to be had? Sure I posted some gameplay videos of myself in various blog posts I have made but I haven't actually made one dedicated to me playing and my experience. So why not do at least a short one, I mean we are in game design now and we were even told to play games and analyze them. So here it goes then.


Let's play Soul Calibur V


So I just picked up Soul Calibur 5 tuesday on opening day and I've started playing it. For those that don't know, Soul Calibur is a fighting game series by Namco and Soul Calibur 5 was just released on January 31st, 2012. I've been playing the single player for a bit and getting used to the system again. I played Soul Calibur 4 and there have been some changes to the system that have made it faster and more dynamic. I've liked it quite a bit so far and I've gotten to use two characters I have used in previous games, Siegfried and Nightmare and just picked up newcomer, Pyrrha.


So far the single player has been, unfortunately barebones, with only arcade mode (3 different routes), story mode (3 hours at most), and Legendary Souls (which is supposed to be unbelievably hard). Previous games had more modes and of course they made the replay value greater but I have always enjoyed the fighting system of the games, so the real deal for me is to go online.


Competition is what this game is all about and Namco didn't pull any punches on this one. There are of course ranked matches to improve rank, player matches for casual fun and the new Global Colosseo (or whatever its called). The Global Colosseo is actually quite neat. You join a server and can match up against any player around, but you can also join and host tournaments. It's like a giant server for people to just gather and talk, or fight a random person. It's really quite cool, nothing like I have ever seen in a fighting game. The connection in online matches is also really really good, I have barely experienced any lag at all. That's pretty much the key to having good online. All the modes in the world won't save you if there is significant lag in online. Soul Calibur 4 had lag pretty badly, it was sad.


Time to play!


Anyways enough about me ranting, it's time to see some actual matches! Day 1 and Day 2 of some Soul Calibur 5 online ranked matches! Note: Probably won't do this every week, probably only this week since this game just came out.

Myself playing as Pyrrha and Siegfried