So, the pursuit of reviewing games on the regular has proven both futile and irrelevant, but I don't really want to waste yet another blog roll with my name on it, so I'm just going to start using this to document whats going on with me gaming wise. At the very least, I'll be able to look back weeks at a glance and remember how much I hated a game without having to have the kind of experience I did this weekend with Street Fighter 4.
You see, a situation on that site I run required someone to do some SF4 research, which involved not only popping the game but actually playing enough matches to identify the absurd win quote behavioral patterns. I even took it online for a few rounds to make sure that every base was covered in my search. The good news is, I was able to get to the bottom of the mystery for FAB, the bad news is I still don't like Street Fighter 4.
You see, I was never into Street Fighter 4. Ever, not during its arcade release or for its home port. Oh yeah, I got excited about all the new characters they were adding, and the promise of a competent story and functional online play, but I was never "on board". It just looked to stupid to me. The entire unchanged cast of every game named Street Fighter and a bunch of newly designed failures wrapped in a "basic" gameplay package just different enough to stand out, but not enough to really be noteworthy. Then a bunch of my friends bought it and said it was marvelous and could not wait to put me in my place. So, I bought it, and for a time, I can honestly say I enjoyed it. Something kind of new, and also kind of familiar, some funny animations, and pretty graphics, even a few songs I didn't hate. But the more I played it, the more all those initial nags started to get to me, and when all my friends moved on to their brand new sports games, and shooters, and rpgs, SF4 just lacked the legs to hold me up.
And now that I look back on SF4 with the smug self-satisfied knowledge of being right about Capcom's compulsive need to fleece their supporters, I see that my enjoyment was never actually from SF4. It was at beating my friends face in" which, to be perfectly honest, I would rather being doing in an interesting game like Facebreaker, than Capcom's desperate attempt to dry hump a few more dollars out of the Street Fighter 2's legacy.
So, SF4 sucks and also BlazBlue has worn out its welcome. It is not so much that BlazBlue is bad. Flawed in many of the ways fighters are typically flawed, but not bad to the core. When my wife posed that question I replied simply that BlazBlue is like a roll, or biscuit if you must. Now there is nothing wrong with a good roll, or biscuit, but you can certainly do a lot better. BlazBlue has a bunch of characters that I'm sure appeal to somebody, a plot that sucks but at least is involved with the fighting, and fairly masterable gameplay that grants enough satisfaction in felling your opponents that you don't easily realize every character really only has one card to play competitively. My problem is, Guilty Gear already did all that and did it better, and then did it again and again-again each time with varying degrees of success.
If the thought of doing more of the same kind of stuff with dust loops and tech traps and roman cancels that you've already done is just so exciting you're going to die without it, then BlazBlue is probably a good idea, but that's all that's there. More of the same gatling combos to jump installs to tech trap loops to oki resets. Oh sure, this time around Jam has gigantic boobs and a stick, and Sol has vampire powers, but when the action gets going it still all blends together in a hail of glowing shields, remote projectiles, horribly unsafe supers, and gigantic full screen collision boxes. Suffice to say, as soon as I finish this particular FAB homework assignment, BlazBlue is going back to gamefly.
Other than that, there was some gears (still awesome), worms (still awesome), and even some Turok (still sucks) online play this weekend, but nothing really new to report. Turns out the Star Trek Blu Ray has an Xbox 360 demo (way to go, marketing geniuses) of the Star Trek DAC game, but that game sucks a whole lot so who cares. Finally, I brought down and bought Shadow Complex because it was on sale, but I haven't played it yet. I don't need anything else keeping me from sending BlazBlue back, so it will have to wait.
-F.
