Soul Calibur IV, from a guy who doesn’t play fighting games 3 comments

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Get it. Then add me to your MSN: psychogears at hotmail dot com.

Seriously, I picked this title up when I woke up on Tuesday morning thinking it would be a fun little addition to my small X360 library (I am mostly a WoW or otherwise MMORPG player of late). Imagine my surprise when I looked at the clock as I took my first stretch break… 7 hours of playing. Didn’t even realize it.

Soul Calibur IV lets you customize your characters or create new ones… maybe you know this, maybe you don’t, but this is what was keeping me up. There’s a Story mode in the single player game, a short but sweet session of 5 matches where you go head to head against anywhere from one to four other characters, one at a time, and at least on the normal difficulty “easyness” balanced depending on how many fighers you square off against. Well I’m a sucker for any character creation process, so imagine my delight when I realized I could unlock 2 new weapons for each character after running them through a session of story mode… one seemingly a soul calibur or soul edge version of their weapon, and another weapon that I can only describe as a “fun weapon”. For example, Hilde wields a pike and a short sword… the fun weapon replaces the pike with one of those golf hole flags from the 18th hole, and the sword with a sheathed golf club. Epic. Other characters can be found weilding all sorts of weird items, from a basket and one of those dough roller things (Cassandra) to a giant squid (Nightmare) or a giant ear of corn (Yun-Seong). I want to take my modified Mitsurugi online… I gave him an afro and a practice kendo stick, and colored his vestments brown… he wouldn’t look too out of place as an extra on Saturday Night Fever.

Anyway, get it, and let me know your XBL handle so we can play. Laters.