The purpose of this homework assignment was to create a variation of the card game "War" and modify it to have less luck and more strategy. Here is what I was able to come up with. Note that Pok-War has no affiliation wit pokemon.
War's Original Rules
Players : 2
Materials needed: One standard 52-card deck
Setup: Shuffle the deck of cards and deal out half to each player. Players take their cards in a single face-down stack
Pok-War! The rule changes
All materials required for the game remain the same, the main change in this version of War is that instead of randomly flipping the top card of your deck and comparing it to the value of your opponents, you will instead compare poker hands to declare the winner.
Player Turn
Every turn, players must pick up a hand of five cards instead of just a single card from their own decks.
Battles
In order to win a battle, instead of simply winning by the higher value, you use Poker hand strength instead to determine the winner. If you set of 5 cards in a poker hand fashion is stronger than the opponent’s, you get their entire hand. Place your winnings into your “discard” pile.
The poker hand strengths in order of most powerful from top left, to least powerful bottom right
Two Piles
There is the draw pile which holds the cards you can draw. There is the discard pile holds any cards you’ve won or were discarded to you (more on that in a bit). These cannot be drawn but once you run out of cards in your draw pile then you can shuffle the discard pile and turn it into your draw pile. This is to make sure cards are properly shuffled.
Drawing cards
The catch is that, though you pick up 5 cards from your draw pile, you can also choose to discard some cards after they are picked up. You can choose to discard as many as you would like, the first 2 can be exchanged with your own deck, discarded back into yourdiscard pile. On the third card this card and any other cards discarded afterwards are given to the opponent in theirdiscard pile. In place of the ones you discarded, you can draw a new card from your own deck in its place. This way you can try and form a stronger hand at the risk of giving your opponent more cards.
With these rule changes, players are given much more control on how powerful their “hands” are rather than relying on the luck of the draw. There is still luck in the drawing of the cards but you have complete control over how your hand is decided.
Play Testing
In playing this, it turned war from a completely boring, luck based game to a much more dynamic and involved game. Players might carefully try and build a stronger hand by sacrificing some cards to the other player or go with the cards they have and hope for the best. There is still some flexibility to change your hand, but to change it more requires more risk. This gave a lot of risk and reward choices to make the game more exciting and the choices were meaningful whenever you decided to risk changing your hand.
One of my favourtie turn based strategies games, Heroes of Might and Magic III was the pinnacle of the Heroes of Might and Magic series in my eyes. The art style, battles, factions to play as were among my favourites and I've played it for many years. What made the game so endearing was the music that was present during the game as well. Every theme that represented each of the factions was great and I liked every one of them, though of course I had some favorites.
Though the series has continued to have sequels, Heroes of Might and Magic III still hasn't been topped, to me this game has become an ageless classic and so has it's music.
Back in 2010, Final Fantasy XIII was released after years of waiting. The game was both scorned and praised. It was scorned for its linear paths for most of the game, taking a long time to wait before becoming free world and the fact that it’s “auto-battle” AI was too smart and took away a lot of control for the player. It was also praised by different people for the auto battle mechanic and other gameplay elements but it was most widely praised for its graphics. The game was stunning, its environments and character models were of a very high class. Particularly the environments which should many varied, lush, vibrant colors and effects to truly make each area a wonder to move in, despite the fact the paths in them were linear.
Final Fantasy XIII-2 is the sequel to Final Fantasy XIII, released on January First 2012 which improves upon the first in many aspects, mostly game play wise. It made the game much more open world, instead of the linear path that the original was panned for, and added various other gameplay elements such as collecting monsters and time travel to revisit areas. Much like its predecessor, Final Fantasy XIII-2 maintains the same high quality graphics, perhaps even more so though it’s hard to tell since they both look very good.
Models and textures
Protagonists Serah (front) and Noel (back) are both exquisitedly modelled
The models in Final Fantasy XIII-2 are of a very high quality. Particular focus was put on the character’s faces, which is very apparent due to the amount of dialogue in the game. All the main characters or any important NPCs that talk can talk while providing very realistic emotion in their faces. This is where the most “vertexes” are located in the model since the Final Fantasy series has always been about cutscenes, and they aim to provide the best viewing experience during these cutscenes. The detail drops off at the hands since they aren’t seen close as much, but every now and then a cutscene may show then in their lower detail in terms of bump mapping and texture.
A look at some of the ground textures
In general, the texture is great all over, however due to the sheer size of the game, on the Xbox 360 version some of the textures have been compressed in order to fit onto a single disc. The textures would otherwise be much larger and would improve greatly in quality if they had decided to try and fit it onto 2 discs. I am not fully sure of the difference in quality between the PS3 version (Since it uses Blu Ray) and 360 version since I have not taken a microscope to the PS3 yet.
The grass flows in a realistic way like the hair does
To go with the realistic characters, Square Enix has worked hard to make the physics of hair very good. Hair flows with wind or bobs around realistically when characters move around. They aren’t static in the slightest, they are some of the best hair physics I have seen.
Particles
A crazy amount of particle effects on screen when many spells were used at once
Final Fantasy has always had magic in the series in various forms, which means particle effects are sure to be used to great effect with them. In every battle you encounter during the game there will constantly be a variety of particle effects. Fire, ice, lightning, strange energies, etc. Every blow unleashes particle effects of some sort and the flashiest spells are combined with cinematic camera views which make the action even more exciting. I can’t even count the number of particles present in this game, it’s abundant with them constantly. Whether in or out of battle, there are constantly amazing particle effects (which of course light up the scene) all over the game. Watch any gameplay and you will see it all over.
Blurring and other effects
Just to note, we also learned about a variety of effects in Computer Graphics, many of them related to blurring effects that are applied after a scene is render. This is known as post-process effects. Basically it would end up blurring a scene by taking the pixels on the screen and average out their values so that pixels would end up meshing together. Pixels contain information about color, so basically nearby pixels would be averaging out the color between them. Looking far away from the screen and at the image as a whole, it makes the image look blurred.
A Blurring and particle effect that occurs whenever you enter batle
The reason I wanted to mention this is because Final Fantasy XIII-2 also uses this, all the time. The particle effects constantly use this, to give the appearance of distortions happening all around. Also used to blur the particle effects of combat spells to give them more of a “powerful” appearance and also because if you take a look at fire for example, the extreme heat causes a blurring effect in real life. FFXIII-2 does this as well and for many different spells.
A bloom effect, which blurs the area from the light of the sun
When running around, if there happens to be a sun in that environment, a blurring effect will also happen should you look in that direction to help invoke a more realistic appearance to looking at the sun. Since in real life we would be wincing a lot of otherwise burning our retinas.
Lighting
Use of lighting in one of the city areas
The lighting is absolutely fantastic in FFXIII-2, I can’t deny it. The use of lighting in many environments lights up the characters just right, maintaining their realism and never making them too dark or glow in strange ways. They always look good and the environments all look good. Not to mention the particles frequently count as lighting sources too.
Environments of Final Fantasy XIII-2 - Featured Video
The environments of Final Fantasy XIII-2 are what truly make the game a really engaging experience. Every locale looks beautiful, with the right amount of lighting and atmosphere that each place sticks out. They choose the appropriate lighting effects in different areas to truly give the correct feeling to every area. This really helped immerse me in the game, probably the major factor for why I was so immersed, the game is just breath taking. This here is the reason why I will relate this post to Game Design as well, since in game Design, the aesthetics are important in immersing the player in the experience. And like I said, this is what the environments did for me.
I know that this blog has been shorter than the usual but that’s because I have focused the effort for this blog post on a video instead. I wanted to showcase the environments of Final Fantasy XIII-2 first hand rather than simply talk about them. Seeing it all in action is much better than simply reading about it.
Update:POLL on right side about using creation tools in games
Well this week was an interesting lesson, we learned something else. It was not so much a new lesson, more of a discussion than anything else. It was how can video games be art? This turned into a discussion regarding what exactly art is and how video games could pertain to that. In a nutshell, the lesson was that art is created not for reproduction or survival, but to express an idea or message to a person. Of course there are all sorts of interpretations for art, and what I just said is simply one form of art. What a person can consider art is up to that person’s judgement. Now I haven’t played many of the games considered “games as art” such as Braid or Limbo. The only one that I can think of that was considered to be a great helper in the debate of “Games are Art” is Bioshock.
Games making Art?
But instead of focusing on Bioshock and how that is art, I wanted to instead explore, how can we use games to create art instead? The best thing that can to mind for me was the tools that the developpers provide games for players to create their own experiences. What I mean by that is things such as level editors, character customization, etc. Some of the tools in games that contain these are very deep and can provide a near limitless amount of possibilities for you to use them and create all sorts of neat and interesting designs. For this particular Games of the Week, I am going to focus on two games instead of one, both of them containing an editor tool of some sort that is very deep. These games in particular are Forza Motorsport 3 and Soul Calibur V.
Rather than delve too deeply into the aspect of each game, I will instead focus on the creation tools that these two games have and how players can “Create art” in the games.
Forza Motorsport 3
Forza Motorsport 3 is a driving simulator, with a focus on real world cars and trying to provide a realistic driving experience. It is available on the Xbox 360, and is a rival to competitor driving simulator, Gran Turismo. The game’s been very successful and the development team has been able to complete the sequels in the Forza series much quicker than Gran Turismo has.
In Forza 3, you can race in any of the available courses with hundreds of exquisitely modelled cars that are comparable to their real counterparts in many real life racing circuits. There is an expansive career mode where you start off with lower cars, earning credits by winning races and advancing up the ranks to participate in various other events and racing circuits with specific classes of cars. For example, a lower end card would be rank D, and only cars that fit within the rank D range can participate in those particular races. Cars such as formula one racers are automatically in the F (For Formula, NOT for failure) rank.
Formula 1 racers in Forza 3
Cars can be improved up to higher ranks and some cars are classified as much higher ranks due to their already superior nature. Besides simply improving parts (which provide non aesthetic changes), you can customize your cars with different paint jobs, and the most important thing, being able to have full control of exactly what that paint job looks like. You’d be surprised with the sorts of things people can come up with this system, but for now let’s explain how it works.
Paint job customization
In Forza 3’s customization system, all tools that you need to create the perfect paint job are laid in front of you right from the start. No need to unlock any specific tools to upgrade the system, everything you need you will have right away. Now for every car, you’re what are known as “decals”. These are basically shapes of various sorts, many of them being just regular geometric shapes but these are a lot of different ones such as arrows, clouds, etc. You are able to manipulate these decals by shaping their size and color, but you won’t be able to complete distort and stretch the shape in crazy ways. Now you may think, that sounds way too simplistic, how on earth could you make something complicated just with this?
Well the true depth comes next from the fact that there are layers. You can have as many decals as you want on a specific layer, the same as you might see in photoshop or other image editing software. With these basic shapes in mind and the fact that you have a limitless amount of layers to work with and that’s where it truly shines. Even with basic shapes, though it will take dedicated time and effort, you can create some truly amazing pieces of work on you car. Since your tools are limited in a sense, you truly have to think outside the box on how you will want ot create your work. Personally I was rather terrible as this, I could only make a basic staff or magic wand, something of that sort. However there are some masters of this craft who, despite having limited tools could still create some truly awe inspiring works.
Here are just some examples of some of the work by some talented folks
To be fairly honest I myself haven’t explained and probably won’t understand the true depth of this system, but I know that really anything is possible in what you can create on the surface of these cars. If look at this link here, this is a tutorial just on making fonts out of decals. A tutorial on fonts! There are many other tutorials out there by forza community members on how to create your own fantastic creations, it’s really awesome how out of these tools that seem so simply at first, that you could create some jaw dropping paint jobs.
As can be seen, Forza 3 definetely provides the tools for an artist. It many not be “Games as Art” but it’s a Game that creates art for sure.
Soul Calibur 5
By Namco Bandai, the same company that brought the Tekken series to the scene, Soul Calibur 5 is the newest entry, only released a week ago, it’s not the best in the series (in terms of content) but brings exciting new gameplay additions to the base fighting system. The game takes place in 1607 AD, so that means all the characters have weapons of some sort and the style is obviously… that of 1607 AD so no modern clothes.
The game works similar as Tekken, fighting in a 3D plane rather than 2D and winning the battle by beating your opponent 3 out of 5 rounds by depleting their life. Of course it’s not exactly the same as Tekken and a very different type of play but I won’t delve too deeply into it. The basics of mixing up your opponent and using mind games to keep them second guessing or taking opportunities of their mistakes is key like any other game. Of course most character’s reach in this game is much larger due to their possession of weapons. What makes this game at it’s best is the depth of it, which is what every fighting game strives for.
The small number of options in single player
Unfortunately unlike previous Soul Calibur games, the amount of single player content was cut significantly. There was only a story mode, arcade mode, legendary souls (BRUTALLY HARD arcade mode) and quick battle to earn titles to your name. Multiplayer mode consisted of a fair number of cool new options. Of course there was the usual ranked matches to increase rank and status, player matches for fun, and the new Global Colisseo, a large lobby where you can go to talk to others, challenge them to matches or join tournaments. I Haven’t seen anything like that in a fighting game before. Anyways the problem is the lack of single player, there used to a more modes such as survival, longer “adventure modes”, towers with unique challenges to help change up the gameplay. However the one redeeming feature that applies for both single player and multiplayer is the game’s in depth customization mode!
Create a Soul – Character creation
Also known as create a soul in some games, character creation mode has been in the Soul Calibur series since the third game. Over the course of the 3rd, 4th and finally 5th game, the options for customization have expanded over and over. I’ll explain some of the options you have and which ones weren’t available in the older games.
Trailer for character creation, see what I am talking about in action
Body
Adjusting body proportions – A feature only available in Soul Calibur 5, you can adjust the size of biceps, thighs, hips, waist, arms, umm… chest, etc. You can even adjust the height of your character as well (though it won’t affect gameplay for balance reasons). In SC IV, you could only adjust overall size, even big strong person or thinner person. You now have full control of the size of your character.
A few of the options you have to change the size of a character's proportions
Changing your Head – You have the option to choose from a wide array of different faces (You can’t make one unfortunately). The number of options you have has expanded considerably from SC IV, almost tripling in the number. You are also now able to choose eyebrows as well, a SC V only feature. You can choose from different hairstyles, all games had this but of course SC V has many more available and also more realistic hair physics doesn’t hurt either.
Options to select from for faces
Hairstyle choices
Changing muscle tone – A feature available in SC V and IV, you can change how muscular your character looks. It’s simply a change in texture however but it helps to define the look of your character even more.
You also can fully change the color of hair, body and eyes, so you could make someone hulk green and in fact make the hulk if you wanted. You can also apply a face paint on the character’s face, ranging from a wide variety of different paints but the most obvious one is to make someone into a nightmare clown.
I'll be showing this all in my video down below.
Equipment
That’s pretty much it in terms of the character’s actual body, the fun part is dressing them up. You have access to a wide range of equipment on different areas of the body. You have headgear, face gear (such as eyepatches, glasses, etc), undergarments (undershirt, chainmail, etc. Apparently I just unlocked chest hair for males as well), upper body equipment, upper body covering (covers upper body equipment, will usually show the upper body equipment still), lower body equipment, hip equipment (same as upper body covering for lower equipment), neck and back equipment, arm equipment, shoulder equipment, ankle equipment, feet equipment, and specialized equipment that can be put anywhere.
Here is just some of the equipment you can get.
Extra equipment to be placed anywhere
Lower body equipment
Upper body equipment
Head equipment
There are a TON of different equipment parts for each section so you have a wide variety of different ways to create your character. The specialized equipment is the only one you can move to any location (beware of people who will create characters that try to make characters look “Rated M for mature”). You have the ability to full edit the color of the equipment and you can even make patterns to define the look of equipment even more (patterns are new to SC V).
More editing options!
Further for editing you can add decals (just like Forza 3!) onto your character’s bodies or equipment. You have access to wide variety of different shapes, however you don’t have many layers to work with, having only up to four but we will see if anyone can come up with anything very nice looking.
Decal placement
You have to choose a base fighting style from the existing characters however, so your character will possess that characters weapons and stance. So any animations that character has, your newly created character will possess. You also have the ability to fully customize any existing characters to nearly the same extent (with the exception of Ezio Auditore, the guest character of Soul Calibur V). The only thing you can't change is their face and eye color.
Let's create something!
Now these are a lot of features and people can really go all out to try and create some of their favourite characters. They could try and create neat looking original characters but I have seen a lot of people trying to recreate all sorts of characters so I thought, why don’t I do this for the blog too?
I decided to try Albert Wesker (from Resident Evil) , here are the results in 9 mins. Not too hard to make him, there are of course much harder characters to try and make and there are others out there who could make a better looking Wesker than I can but that just to give you a taste of what can be done
Albert Wesker in Resident Evil 5
Creation of Albert Wesker in 9 minutes
The game only came out so there is still a lot of potential for people to make unique characters or paying homage to existing characters in such an easy manner. It was not hard at all to make my Hulk and Wesker.
Conclusion
So when I say, Games can create art, I mean it when people are able to freely make their own creations to their hearts whim, using tools that the game has provided. I feel like Forza 3 definetely has more potential than Soul Calibur V for artistic creations but that doesn’t mean Soul Calibur V created characters can’t have some artistic merit to them. We still have yet to see the best characters.
Point is, both games allow the creation of whatever ideas come to peoples minds. Plenty of other games have these sorts of features too. I believe that games can create art and there are games with even more tools to show this.
Considered the pinnacle of the Soul Calibur Series, Soul Calibur II also had some of the best music in the series. Many of it's themes represent very inspiring and engaging the music that really helped make the game oh so great. Without the extremely well done pieces composed for the title, the entire experience of Soul Calibur II would have been nearly as exciting without the great music to go with the great gameplay. The song's composed back then are still great and some of them I still prefer over the newer song's in Soul Calibur IV and V.
Also I realized all of the Tunes of the Week games featured have all been Japanese games. That goes to show the strength of their composers. Be sure to check out the rest of the soundtrack.
Character select theme
"Confrontation" one of my favorite songs
"If there were any other way" a very good piece to build up tension
"Quest for Glory" one of the very good menu theme songs
Lighting is by far, one of the most important aspects of creating a great looking game. This week in Intermediate Computer Graphics we learned more in depth, the techniques that are used to create all the lighting effects in games. Many different lighting techniques and algorithms are used in a single game in order to give the desired look and feel of the style of the game. Since lighting is such a broad topic, I will focus on pointing out the use of lighting for a particular game instead. This week I will be focusing on the newly released Soul Calibur 5 and pinpointing it’s use of lighting in the game as well as other things relating to computer graphics.
Soul Calibur 5 is the newest entry in the Soul Calibur series, released on Xbox 360 and PS3. It’s predecessor, Soul Calibur 4 was also released on these platforms and used an older engine but that still looks very good. Soul Calibur 5 improves upon every aspect of Soul Calibur 4’s engine, with more dynamic lighting, smoother animations, better looking textures and models, enhanced particle effects, etc.
Soul Calibur V in action
As a fighting game, Soul Calibur like all other fighting games strives for that 60 frames per second milestone and even with its gorgeous graphics in manages to deliver. There isn’t a moment when the action slows down no matter what effects are on the screen at a time. And I can say this is easily one of the best looking fighting games to date, and one of the major factor is its use of lighting.
Before we delve into Soul Calibur 5’s lighting and graphics, let’s quickly talk about what kind of lighting there is.
Lighting Terms
There is ambient lighting (which is the amount of available light in a scene), so it essentially means the amount of light normally in the world. For example, taking a photo without flash is only using the ambient lighting available in the room. Taking a photo with the flash is adding a non ambient light to the scene.
There is diffuse lighting which is the reflection of light from objects and scattered in various directions. Depending where the viewer is and where the light is, you will see a different amount of lighting on an object. The only reason we can see an object is because light is reflected off of it, to our eyes so we can see it. If we stand in one position then move to another position, the object may look slightly different to us since the light being reflected scatters to different positions.
Specular Lighting is the main source of shininess we see in objects. Where as diffuse lighting refers to light scattering in various directions, the specular light is more focused reflection. This gives a very strong sheen of light in an object and al the shiniest objects have the most specular lighting. An object can have both diffuse and specular lighting, which will change the shininess and lighting of the material.
And finally there is shadow mapping which is of course, the creation and mapping of shadows. Shadows have to be calculated based on the light sources in the area onto an object. It is easily one of the most important aspects of lighting as they truly define something to look 3D and realistic. Without shadows or bad shadows, an object simply won’t look right.
Soul Calibur 5 Graphics
So with that out of the way, we can finally look into the actual graphics of the game. Soul Calibur 5 boasts an impressive amount of texturing in the game. Bump maps are of course applied to give that 3D look, as can be seen with various characters armour and outfits.
Pyrrha, one of the leading characters of Soul Calibur V. A lot of effort was put into the detail of her outfit.
The best example of this is in the create a character mode, there is a slider which indicates muscle tone. Here, you can actually see it’s just the texture and bump map on a character’s skin being changed. That way they do not even have to change the size of the model and can still show muscle. However the create a character mode also allows one to change the size of their character too, from arms, legs, chest, hips, waist, and so on. They are actually changing the size of the model by doing this. So Soul calibur 5 allows you to change a character’s size in real time, and choosing different bump maps to define that character. Pretty neat in my opinion.
Comparing textures from the old game to this one, it’s easy to see that they have improved quite significantly. The amount of detail in every character’s outfit has been upgraded quite a bit from it’s predecessor, thank goodness for bump mapping.
A trailer showcases the features of Creation mode
With Soul Calibur 5’s use of lighting, things have greatly improved. In playing Soul Calibur 4, I could see that the lighting was actually too strong at times. In some cases it would shine strangely on a characters face and body, in a way that would actually make them look like a different person. In a stage with a strong sun, the amount of diffuse lighting coming off a character was extremely bright, too bright in fact. However this stage was an exception, most of the stages looked good with the lighting.
Lighting in Soul Calibur IV
I revisited a similar stage in Soul calibur 5 and was pleased to see that the amount of diffuse lighting had been reduced significantly. Characters weren’t “glowing” from the amount of lighting in the scene, they looked more natural in the scene now. In looking all over the other stages, it’s easy to tell that Soul Calibur 5 has easily improved in diffuse lighting.
Lighting on a very similar stage in Soul Calibur V.
Specular lighting was pretty good in Soul Calibur 4, many characters had the right sheen to them. But of course Soul Calibur 5 has been able to ace it again, making characters look more detailed, with the right amount of specular lighting in the weapons and armor of various characters. The combination of the right specular and diffuse lighting makes it easy to tell what kind of material you’re looking at on a character.
The character, Nightmare's apperance in Soul Calibur IV
His appearance in Soul Calibur V
But over the course of both games, the use of lighting has always been great, Soul Calibur 5 simply made it better (if it didn’t then that would be unacceptable).
As a side note, the stages you do battle in are very well textured and lit as well. They easily look twice as good as the old Soul Calibur 4 stages. The textures on the stages are much more detailed in Soul Calibur 5 and the use of lighting makes them all look quite vibrant and nice. Not only that but most of them are even more interactive, with many things happening in the background that only adds more to the immersion of being in a real environment (or even battle).
One of the stages in Soul Calibur 5
The last thing to talk about is the particle effects. Every character’s weapon leaves a trail of a specific color. You can even define what color that trail is, but it helps to see the motion of the weapons in battle. Whenever you hit an opponent, you also leave a small particle effect that acts a light source. When a character is hit, sometimes it might make an orange like spark appear in the air. This spark is clearly seen as a light source as the character is also lit up with orange as well. This makes the game look more dynamic and makes it easy to see when you’ve hit an opponent.
Besides these aesthetic sparks, the game has many other particle effects, most of them acting as light sources. A lot of them are vibrant looking energies emanating from players weapons during their “Ultimate attacks”. Others include flames that signify an unblockable attack (these attacks also cut fade out a significant portion of all other ambient light sources. This makes the scene very dark and the flame mostly lights the scene). Others include electrical particle effects, which again, light up the scene. It’s hard to imagine what the game would look like without these particle effects not acting as light sources. The game wouldn’t look quite as vibrant as it would normally look.
The "Unblockable" attack effect
You can see the background light sources are all muted
We only have the flames coming from the attack as the main light source
And you can see the particle effects from the attack
Conclusion
Ezio Auditore from Assasin's Creed II, making a guest appearance
So, with great use of bump mapping and lighting to make those textures really pop and show, Soul Calibur 5 has made itself into a brilliant looking game while still running at 60 frames per second. I know that we were told that 30 frames per second is the target most games can go for, but if you can achieve 60 frames per second, it not only looks much more fluid, it also provides tighter control for in game actions. Some people might not notice it, but I know there are a lot of people that really care about 60 frames per second and that feeling of control.
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.
