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• The Soul Still Burns

  Come next week, I’ll be celebrating my five-year anniversary of moving to New York. I came here not thirty-six hours after graduating college, jobless, twenty-one years old, and only knowing one person in the entire urban sprawl, my roommate Dan. We were both poor as hell and were, quite frankly, terrified of everything. However, come August 27th of 2003, we had one thing to provide refuge from the crushing existential monolith of a new urban life: Soulcalibur II. Armed with two Gamecube controllers, a bottle of vodka gifted to the apartment by my father, and an atrophied familiarity with the original Soulcalibur’s move list, we poured close to twenty-four straight hours into the game, and Namco’s fighter rewarded our efforts with some of the best gameplay the system or genre had ever seen. I was a Soulcalibur fan before the end of that summer, but my time with Soulcalibur II made the series an indelible part of my life, a game that I associate with growing up as much as I do good design. Needless to say, I’ve been playing a lot of Soulcalibur IV lately. Read More... Posted Aug 06 2008, 05:30 PM by John Constantine with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, soulcalibur

• Screen Test: Dissidia – Final Fantasy

  Soulcalibur IV is hilarious. It isn’t just the character-creation tool's astounding capacity for spreading mirth or the fact that you can watch a bi-pedal lizard beat a gimp unconscious with an enormous leg of lam. It’s the detailed story behind every character in the game that’s so funny. Darth Vader, in a feat of fan-fictioneering to make even the most base deviantART dweller blush, has a discernable reason for lightsabering folks in the 16th century. You can’t help but laugh. This is why the existence of Dissidia: Final Fantasy concerns me. We have, given recent events, been discussing how Final Fantasy affects gamers’ minds at length here at 61FPS. If the discussion has proven anything, it’s that folks take their Final Fantasy very, very seriously. Since Dissidia’s narrative leaps of logic have the potential to be even more comical than Soulcalibur’s, what is going to happen in the aftermath of its release? The answer is internet riots. Trashcans will be thrown through digital windows. Funny pictures of cars will be turned over in the streets. Forum moderators will distribute ban-beatings across the land. Now that DKS3713 has come and gone, people have finally gotten to play Dissidia and it sounds, well, strange. An odd mix of Power Stone and Star Ocean in play, wanton Nomura-fetishism in presentation. These fresh screens, from Gamespot Japan, show that, yes, Dissidia is a good looking PSP title but, at the same time, Square-Enix has managed to make its characters look even more ridiculous. Read More... Posted Aug 06 2008, 01:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, final fantasy, screen test, square-enix, star ocean, soulcalibur, power stone

• New Gamer Adventures: Soulcalibur IV

  I’m a reclusive cat by nature, which can be problematic, especially when it comes to experiencing some of gaming’s more joyous social experiences. I’m lucky enough to have roommates who also enjoy the interactive media, but, as a result, I know them too well as gamers. I know what I’m in for when I sit down with them for a Rock Band session, Street Fighter match, or shoot-out in Halo. No alarms and no surprises, as I’m wont to say. But a man can’t survive in solitude for long without going bonkers so I’ve been making moves to spend more time with other folk. Just this past night, one of my roommates invited a few people over for some good company, cold beverages, and Soulcalibur. Two of our illustrious guests, a young woman we’ll call Anna and a fella we’ll call Brian, were complete non-gamers. Not even “casual” gamers if you will; Brian’s never owned a console and barely touched a game in his twenty-six years, and the same was true of Anna. They were mystified by the rest of the group’s fascination with Soulcalibur IV, put-off by the apparent competitive streak the game brought out in us and the game’s improbable take on anatomy. But, with a little help from Messrs. Killian I. Red and Miller G. Draft, we eventually convinced Anna and Brian to take up the controllers for a round. They didn’t stop playing for an hour. Read More... Posted Aug 04 2008, 02:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 6 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, nintendo, new gamer adventures, soulcalibur