Soul Calibur 4 to undergo name change...

[jwalton]

Re: Soul Calibur 4 to undergo name change...

3 million copies sold on Xbox 360: Confirmed

(will be skipping out)

[DakAttack]

Re: Soul Calibur 4 to undergo name change...

Let's not be so dramatic about it. You wont get cooties from playing the game unless you share a controller with your sister or something.

[tdh]

Re: Soul Calibur 4 to undergo name change...

Let's not be so dramatic about it. You wont get cooties from playing the game unless you share a controller with your sister or something.

pfft! My sister has her own controller! She knows better to even come into the same room as mine! Silly siblings!

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Soul Calibur 4 to undergo name change...

Oh I'll probably play it whenever I do get around to having a PS3. In fact, I think its really lame how these games go straight to console now.

Sorry, but I'm an old gamer, I grew up with putting quarters in a machine to play and fighting games get thier best refinements by being put through the arcades first. Even if arcades dying out, that's no excuse not to put them out there in the arcades where people will play them and data can be collected. Even if its just Japan.

The console versions of SCII were the next to last version upgrades of the game, the final was Version E. Namco had data they could collect from the conquest mode and make fixes based on that mode. It let you create take an AI template of any charactrer and teach it to fight and then they could tweak the game based off the data collected from each arcade unit.

Sega took this idea a step further with VF4 and didn't just use it to tweak the game, they made player AIs part of the console game in Kumite mode. All the movesets and combos originated from actual players. SC2 had Kumite via Conquest Mode, but it never got out of the arcades and I found that diappointing.

[Raydeus]

Re: Soul Calibur 4 to undergo name change...

There's a difference between not liking the way women are dressed and being scared of the female body. And this seems to be an example of the latter.

I'd be waaaaaaaay more concerned about them not making the same mistakes (gameplay-wise) they did with SC3 than about what characters (both male and female) wear.



PS > Don't get me wrong, I understand one could feel embarrased if a naked women suddenly popped in front of you, but you'd still enjoy the view (if she had a nice body that is).

But from that to actually feel aggraviated by the sight of a female in somewhat revealing clothes feels more like a psychological issue to me.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Soul Calibur 4 to undergo name change...

I think there's just a fine line between "Sexy" and "ZOMGBEWBs"

Sexy
ZOMGBEWBS

I mean, yeah, I understand Ivy's dominatrix motif, but it was way more tasteful before than it is now. Sometimes changing the costumes just isn't a need.

We haven't even seen what they'll do to Talim and Xianghua yet.

[jwalton]

Re: Soul Calibur 4 to undergo name change...

Lawl. You seriously think we're scared of female cleavage? Ahahaha.

The Dead or Alive series blows ass because the focus is on softcore videogame porn instead of a balanced gameplay engine. Soul Calibur is walking the same road. Hell, one of the best Soul Calibur players in the world is blind.

I'll stick to Tekken, Virtua Fighter, and Street Fighter for serious gameplay.

[DakAttack]

Re: Soul Calibur 4 to undergo name change...

The Dead or Alive series blows ass because the focus is on softcore videogame porn instead of a balanced gameplay engine.

You must have done more watching than actual playing. It wouldn't matter if you played the game, though, because when it comes to fighters you always turn into a troll.

Stick to your bland fighters.

[jwalton]

Re: Soul Calibur 4 to undergo name change...

Thanks, I will.

[Icemage]

Re: Soul Calibur 4 to undergo name change...

I don't particularly care for the over-sexification (is that even a word? lol) of Soul Calibur, but unlike Pai Pai, I didn't find the problem to be game balance. It's actually a bit better than SC2 IMO (still broken, since Xianghua/Cassandra/Sophitia are all so freaking good and fast, but the number of hopeless characters is much lower in SC3 - the vast majority of characters are mid-tier).

What I hated about SC3 was the load times and the awful character designs. Cervantes looks like a rejected extra from a Chucky movie, and Asteroth looks like he stepped out of the pages of a Marvel comic book (which is REALLY a shame because he's so very much improved in SC3 play-wise).

I'm hoping SC4 improves some more on the gameplay.


Icemage

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Soul Calibur 4 to undergo name change...

DoA requires you to know how to press buttons.
Tekken wants you to study unbreakable juggle combos.
Soul Calibur favors mobility and blocking combos via Guard Impact.
Virtua Fighter wants to you study combos and mobility, but everything can be reversed or blocked.

Two are 3D, two are 2D games pretending to be 3D.
Two have ring-outs, the other two think that's unfair.

I'll gleefully kick you out of the ring, anyway

------------------------------------------------

I never really went for the fast characters in Soul Calibur and its odd because I used to favor nimble characters before. I guess it changed with age or something.

Used to be I'd go to Chun Li, Jam or Jacky.

Now its Ivy, Guile, Ken, Vanessa. GGX, its still Jam.

Street Fighter Vs X-Men, I used to go with Chun-Li + Gambit all the time. it was a sick team-up, but when MVC2 came out, It was always Guile, Charlie and Wolverine.

I think in both cases, it was just because one character had a draw-in super that would let the others beat the crap out of the opponent.

MVC spoiled me for powerful characters, so that's probably why i went from Xianghua to Ivy.

Ivy's slow, but there are so many head games you can play with her against other people, especially with the stances they added in SC2, you could launch so many different moves from the stances she had. She had an ungodly reach too.

[DieselBoy09]

Re: Soul Calibur 4 to undergo name change...

In all honesty, I think its still not that bad. I have yet to see a front view of this new Ivy, let alone a really detailed up close image of the female characters though. So until I get either of those, I don't think it has crossed the line yet. (If you want to be really realistic, all the women would be about as flat as a fort. Boobs hinder a fighter)

[Grizzlebeard]

Re: Soul Calibur 4 to undergo name change...

Why make a beautiful game with ugly women? What's the point of a revealing dress if there's nothing to reveal?
Don't be so afraid of them, they're just boobs.

Fortunately I'm old enough to have overcome any fear of the human body, equally I've matured enough not to need to see a pair of over-inflated breasts at every turn in my games. As I implied, these games are targetted to a certain mentality. Not denying breasts are great and all but the majority of these games portray women as a pair of tits on legs who either fall under the category of a princess needing to be saved by the powerful male hero or some asskicking dominatrix type. Still, trying to make this point on a FFXI board where 99% of the people playing female characters are male tit-obsessed teens is no doubt going to fall on deaf ears.

[Icemage]

Re: Soul Calibur 4 to undergo name change...

I never really went for the fast characters in Soul Calibur and its odd because I used to favor nimble characters before. I guess it changed with age or something.
Used to be I'd go to Chun Li, Jam or Jacky.

Now its Ivy, Guile, Ken, Vanessa. GGX, its still Jam.

Street Fighter Vs X-Men, I used to go with Chun-Li + Gambit all the time. it was a sick team-up, but when MVC2 came out, It was always Guile, Charlie and Wolverine.

I think in both cases, it was just because one character had a draw-in super that would let the others beat the crap out of the opponent.
MVC spoiled me for powerful characters, so that's probably why i went from Xianghua to Ivy.

Ivy's slow, but there are so many head games you can play with her against other people, especially with the stances they added in SC2, you could launch so many different moves from the stances she had. She had an ungodly reach too.

You haven't played Ivy in SC3, have you? The Ivy you're describing is indeed that way in SC2, but her move list is night and day different in SC3. She went from being at the top of tier 1 to being a mid-tier character. Still not bad, but not ridiculously dominant like before. She didn't get nerfed nearly as badly as Talim, however... boy does Talim ever suck in SC3. :/


Icemage

[Pai Pai Master]

Re: Soul Calibur 4 to undergo name change...

I agree completely with tdh and jwalton, although I think many games have recently gone overboard with the quasi-pornographic treatment of women in games, Soul Calibur being one of them. I mean, Soul Calibur III had butt-jiggle physics. Is that really necessary?

I'm all for the design of beautiful, sexually attractive videogame females. However, when non-pornographic games go so far as to leave very, very little to the imagination in favour of spending more time developing the actual gameplay, it becomes a bit of a problem.


EXHIBIT A: Heavenly Sword's Nariko



I've said it again and again: Nariko is hot. Taking the features of the classic, scantily clad videogame sex icon Lara Croft while ditching the overexaggerated anatomy (aside from the hair, obviously), I think she's one of the best female character designs to come out of a game studio in recent years. While some people may still disagree about the lack of clothing, I think she creates that perfect blend of sexy and powerful that so many game developers have strived for in a female character.

EXHIBIT B: SOUL CALIBUR III's Tira



Personally, I don't even consider this design the least bit attractive. Where Nariko's designers gave her an outfit designed to show some skin, it was still a well-designed outfit. This looks like the designer simply put her in regular clothes and wanted to rip the middle half off to expose as much boob as possible. You can tell that not much thought went into such an impractical design, other than the need to expose as much of the naughty bits without going overboard. In my opinion, it's not sexy, certainly not feminate, and basically a rather horrid character design.

There are far more examples, good and bad, than what I just gave, but the two represent some of the best and worst female designs I've seen in recent years...and one represents a game with strengths other than the boob-count while the other, arguably, does not.

I'm a guy. I'm all for games full of scantily-clad, attractive women. Look at the largest demographic for videogames. Who there would seriously want to play a game full of ugly women? Oblivion is the only one of that kind I can think of in recent years that's still been successful. However, there's one way of doing it, the DOA/Soul Calibur way of tossing artistic value out the window for the sake of increasing the nipplage, or there's the much more impressive way of doing it, where a designer can create a very sexy, very beautiful female character without going completely overboard, and where the developer can create a balance between sex appeal and the importance of gameplay over breasts, something many developers seem to have forgotten over time.