Blogger, why are you so touchy today?Anyway, speaking of the GameCube, I rented SoulCalibur II last night, a highly regarded fighting game. Nothing too cerebral, good for some button mashing and the like. It’s always interesting how even single-player games in our household are communal affairs. Kristin is really really good with puzzles, and I’m…not. When she’s playing say Metroid or Paper Mario, I’d like to think that I give at times some good stategery. Either case, I easily think of it as both of us playing at the same time, no matter who has the actual controls. Anyway, that’s just backdrop. When I loaded SoulCalibur, it slowly dawned on Kristin just what type of game we were dealing with here-almost zero narrative, bad voiceovers, pure 75-combo combat baby. Like this:
Aww yeah. At any rate. “This is it?” she kept saying. “This is the game?” “Yeah, it’s a combat game.” She sighed. Still, Kristin and I started to spar in the game with a series of different characters. After a few times, when she started to get the controls down-lo and behold-she completely kicked my ass ten times in a row. I mean, she was really good. “Hey this game isn’t so bad!” she said, after the eighth or ninth time. So beware! (and those of you who have played Mafia with Kristin know this well): it’s just like that Eric Clapton song about playing pool in that movie with Paul Newman and Tom Cruise about playing pool-there’ll be time enough for countin’ when the dealin’s done.
Sterling turned me on to Virtua Fighter back in ’94, and while I was never obsessed nor particularly good at it, I did pay way too much attention. Not only in the arcade-I ended up buying a Sega Saturn after they released VF2, which (among other things) added an elderly Drunken Fist fighter. Later there was VF Kids, with superdeformed (big head anime) versions of all the fighters, and a mode especially for children, that randomly unleashed all the cool moves if you just kept stabbing the buttons frantically. Good times.