Much to my dismay I still do not have Xenoblade. Nintendo and UPS both claim that it will be arriving tomorrow, so I hope that's true. However, my dismay was not enough to keep me from playing a few other games.
This entry is going to be a bit short, because I ended up playing a lot of what I played last week. SSX and Kid Icarus are still at the top of my gaming list, but I also got in a whole bunch of Skullgirls.
Skullgirls
My brother loves fighting games. Prior to this week he was watching all the Skullgirls streams that he could possibly consume at once. By the time Tuesday rolled around he was basically losing his mind with excitement. Personally I was on the fence about Skullgirls, because I wasn't convinced by what they were showing.
My brother plays on 360, so he was going to have to wait until Wednesday. I decided to buy it, because indie fighting games are few and far between. We both ended up loving the game. The initial reason that I didn't want to buy Skullgirls was because of the art style. It's a combination between 1940's Disney cartoons and hyper-sexualized anime. It really weirds me out when cartoon girls have their boobs spilling out over their tops.
 |
| Valentine is exactly what I don't like about the art style, but I use her anyways. |
While I still don't like the art of Skullgirls, I like almost everything else about the game. What's cool about the game is that it was built by extreme fighting game fans for fighting game fans. Mike Z, one of the main people who worked on the game plays Blazblue at tournament level. Due to this fact the game does a lot of things that people who really like fighting game fans will go bananas over, but casual players won't care about at all.
In fighting game tournaments if the pause button is pressed the perpetrator loses. This can totally break up the match, so the penalty is completely justified. Sometimes the button can be pressed on accident and Skullgirls totally gets around that. In order to pause the game you have to hold start. To the average gamer this might be frustrating, but it;s a very cool feature. The game is chock full of little things like that to make it feel polished. You can edit the buttons from the character select screen, there's a system to protect against infinites, and a whole lot more.
 |
| There are only eight characters in Skullgirls, but they're all unique. |
I play a lot of fighting games, but I'm not super hardcore like my brother. The reason I like Skullgirls is because I really like how it plays. Games that have 1 frame links like Street Fighter IV make it hard to do combos. Skullgirls is all about pushing the buttons fast, so I can actually do fairly decent combos. It doesn't make me feel like a failure and that's cool.
On top of all that the game has a great tutorial that does a pretty good job of teaching the basics. The skills that the game teaches can be applied to all fighting games. It's really the first real tutorial seen in a fighting game and it's something that a lot of games could learn from.
SSX
It's been a week and I still think SSX is awesome. Even though I beat the campaign and reviewed the game I still had to keep playing. It definitely helped that one of my friends bought the game. SSX has a system called Rider Net, which is essentially the auto-log from Need For Speed Hot Pursuit. If your friends beat your scores in global events or explore mode drops you'll be challenged.
For some reason I had to beat every single challenge that I was given, which ended up being 50 or so. Some of them were crazy, but I still ended up beating them. The competition is prolonging the life of the game for me. Normally I would have moved on, but the challenges are keeping me coming back for more. Since I the challenges keep going back and forth I'll most likely be doing this for a long time, especially since I'm still having a boatload of fun.
Tomorrow EA is going to announce what the first SSX dlc is, so my fun might be extended. They released a promo picture that looks a whole lot like SSX Tricky. I can only hope that the SSX Tricky mountain is being added as DLC. It would be even better if they threw in some new clothes that were reminiscent of the Tricky costumes.
 |
| This looks a lot like SSX Tricky. |
Kid Icarus: Uprising
I really wanted to have a review of Kid Icarus up last week, but I didn't end up finishing it. Initially I thought it was super short, but it ended up being much longer than I expected. The first few chapters flew by and only took twenty minutes at most. Now the chapters are taking an hour or more a piece to complete and I'm not complaining. I'm just saying it's way longer than I thought.
Initially I thought the overall plot of Kid Icarus was basically non-existent. It seemed to be a bunch of referential jokes and a whole lot of witty banter. I'm nearing the end of the game and all of that is still there, but now there is an overarching plot and I'm really liking it. There were a few plot twists that I didn't see coming. While the plot may not be a masterpiece I think that it's got a lot of charm. Iwata's sense of style really shows in this game.
Last week I talked about how uncomfortable I thought the controls were and I'm going to have to take that back now. At a juncture that I can't pinpoint I felt totally fine playing the game. The controls even began to feel right. I'm no longer having trouble doing what I want and I'm dying far less often, which is weird because I'm getting farther into everything while slowly ratcheting up the difficulty.
I want my Xenoblade
I have been wanting to play a new JRPG for quite some time, so its great that Xenoblade should be coming tomorrow. If all goes as planned it will consume my gaming life for the next week. If I can tear myself away from it for long enough (If it even comes) I'll try to finish up Kid Icarus and throw up a review, but I promise nothing.
That's what I played this past week. Get ready to hear about a whole lot of Xenoblade next week. I'm starting to get pretty excited about it. What's not to get exited about? It's a recent Wii release that doesn't suck.
With that final thought I leave you to pursue another week of video gaming.
-Manny
No comments:
Post a Comment