Super Street Fighter IV — First Impressions

Other than the Third Strike characters slowing down a little and Ibuki losing a couple of my favorite combos—like sweep into standing roundhouse—I've got three problems with the game, not the gameplay necessarily.

1. It seems like the CPU is way more into their projectiles now. Rose and Guile did almost nothing but throw shit at me.
2. There doesn't seem to be a way to control the voice language at the character level. I had Ryu, Akuma, and Gouken in Japanese and Ken in English in SFIV. Can't do that here?
3. I like the new "colors" but was expecting a little more from previously owning SFIV. I don't really know what I expected but am still, somehow, a little disappointed.

That's all for now. Seeing Ibuki, Dudley, and Makoto in their 3D form definitely brought a smile to my face.

Update: I retract #2. You unlock it after clearing Arcade—maybe on Medium or higher.
Update 2: The Ibuki combo I mentioned is in there, it's just a target combo that requires a Fierce to lead in.

Just Cause 2

Let me begin by saying that I don't necessarily hate Just Cause 2. Most sandbox games just get categorized as "alright" in my book. Maybe it's the grappling hook. Maybe it's the parachute. Maybe it's both! Regardless of why I don't hate the game, there are several reasons to hate it.

Strike One: Resources

This is probably my biggest problem with it. The fact that I need to have monies to buy something from my "black market contact" goes against everything I think a sandbox game should be. There's basically a finite number of times I can buy the best vehicle or the strongest weapon. This becomes even more annoying when 2 SAM strikes take down the most expensive helicopter—and it's the most expensive by a wide margin—I don't really feel like I got my money's worth. This could easily be solved by a stash in any of your many faction bases. Even if it's just a slot for each type of vehicle (e.g., land, sea, air).

Strike Two: The Story and Voice Acting

Both are so awful that I don't even give a shit about them in any way, shape, or form. Which isn't terribly rare for me, but I hardly ever do it with such fervor. I literally hate the voice acting and /facepalm every time I have to hear that jackass Sheldon talk whenever I am forced to buy a weapon or vehicle from his stupid ass.

Strike Three: The Combat Just Kinda Sucks

That pretty much sums it up. It starts to just get annoying. It escalates way too quickly and just becomes a pain in the ass. It started out fun but got old real quick-like.

Redeemers

1. It looks pretty good if you don't ever look at anyone's face or the way anyone moves up close.
2. It has nice motion-blur.
3. Driving isn't unbearable. 
4. When you have the ammo, blowing up things is fun.
5. The grappling hook and parachute are probably my favorite things that have ever been in a sandbox game.
6. The missions are fairly easy and it allows for a lot of freedom between missions.
7. If you're playing it like a sandbox game, like you should be, it'll take about an hour per 1% of completion. 100 hours for a game is pretty damn good these days. Then again, after 20–30 hours, the fun and novelty start to really grind to a halt.

Conclusion

It's definitely worth playing. Like I said, I didn't hate it, but that doesn't mean that it'll ever be in the 360 again after Super Street Fighter IV launches.

Spoiler alert: It won't ever be in my 360 again after Super Street Fighter IV comes out.

Samurai Shodown: Sen

I'm a card-carrying lover of fighting games—especially 2D fighters. I love Soulcalibur as much as the next gamer, but it just never really seems like anyone can create a 3D fighter that's as smooth or responsive as the top tier 2D fighting games. Most of them suffer from over-juggling, cheap combos, unintuitive controls, and what feels like a tacked on strafing mechanic that is really the only thing that makes it 3D.

With that out of the way, let's get down to talking about Samurai Shodown: Sen specifically: it is not a good game. It's frustrating on more levels than any game should be and looks and feels like a regular Xbox game or an arcade game from 5 years ago.

Strike One: the Controls and the Third Dimension

The controls are sluggish at best. Being able to move quickly to, from, or around the opponent is a task. Characters like Draco start to make it literally impossible, but I'll get to that in a minute. I found myself ducking rapidly like an idiot when I was trying to sidestep towards the camera and doing that stupid half-jump that's been a staple of 3D games since their beginning when I try to move away from the camera.

This becomes especially frustrating when fighting characters who are good at-range or the ones with rush attacks.

Strike Two: it Doesn't Look Good (or Sound Good)

No. It really doesn't. Hair is in super-large chunks that only moves half the time. The environments in which you fight look like they're well-intentioned but are full of what looks like 32-bit sprites and a complete lack of interaction and dynamic. The only thing that redeems the way the game looks is the occasional fatality in which you slice off some part of someone. Too bad while this is going on the only sounds you hear are the thud of them hitting the ground—no screaming, no blood fountain sounds, nothing that sounds like you just sliced some dude's arm off.

Strike Three: Unbalanced Characters

Time to talk about A vs B and C vs D. Most of the main characters are balanced as well as any 3D fighter. In other words, there seems to be tiers of characters and one always has an advantage. I'm talking about characters like Cervantes. With that said, the story mode isn't terribly difficult until you get to Draco and Golba. The two bosses are so overpowered that I almost have trouble believing that someone would approve them as part of a production game. Cervantes' warping is bad enough, Draco is a completely different story. To be honest, I think that they might play on the highest difficulty regardless of your difficulty settings—which would be fine if it was an arcade game; how else would they get ma' quarters?

Sub-boss: Draco

This guy. This-fucking-guy. You could really begin and end any negative review of this character with the fact that he uses a rifle and can fire it in succession without any delay. Meaning he has no trouble pushing you to the other side of the ring with one shot and then juggling you with what seems like one million shots in-a-row. He also has a grab in which he gets in close and fires his Winchester into your face from underneath your chin. Guess what. It takes like 40% of your health. Guess what else! You can't block these gun shots.

The only strategy I found that worked was staying close and sidestepping around him (when it doesn't result in ducking like an idiot) and hoping to land blows. Even after fighting him on my 24th time through story mode (for the "beat with everyone achievement"), it took 5 or more frustrating deaths to get past him. Then, sometimes, he just lets you have your way with him—inconsistency is good in games, in my experience.

Main Boss: Golba

Nowhere near as frustrating as Draco, but still completely over-powered. Not really much to say here, he looks stupid and is annoyingly difficult. Until he, like mentioned above, bends over to take it.

Bonus Strike: Engrish

The lack of "Victoly" upset me at first. Then I saw the list of achievements and met an entirely new reason to laugh at bad Japanese ports. They're all pretty bad, but just to highlight one: "Kill thousand of men—50G—To kill thousand of men (in any mode)".The translate/port team couldn't even get title case right. The big stupid Viking guy is called "North Sea Unsinkable Ship" while the slightly more racist Native American is "Noble warrior on the earth".

Also—this isn't really a translation thing as much as it's just kind of offensive—the Viking is a big clumsy, stupid version of Asteroth and all American characters play in the same ridiculous looking theme-park wild west town with the same laughable wild west saloon song played on what sounds like the little music boxes sold in Cracker Barrels around Christmas.

Conclusion

Don't play it. I'm not as big into SNK fighters as I am Capcom, but I have played Samurai Shodown enough to have a few favorite characters and have played enough of the past games to know what I like from the series. The game frankly just doesn't work and disappointed me. Even if someone had told me that it was just a bad Soulcalibur clone, I still would've been disappointed.