Play Soul Calibur 2 Online For Free

[Jacqualine Henington]

I fell out of love with it around the time of Soul Calibur III due to the growing trend of online play and lack of internet in my region. Now that Soul Calibur V is out and I still count myself a fan of the Soul lore, I caught up on what I missed via the wiki and dove right into the Story Mode of V.

Not only was Sophitia no longer a playable character (she died between IV and V) but I was stuck playing a whiny, arrogant, psychopathic manchild that not even the rest of the cast liked as a person. After a small sulk, I decided that instead of being annoyed, I would enjoy the narrative wreck that was presented. Fighting games aren't really known for their deep stories, so there was no point in getting upset that the plot is filled with holes, increasingly stupid actions on the part of the characters, and turns very predictable.

This thin mode plays out in a series of matches interspersed with cut-scenes that detail the plot. Some of these cut-scenes are fully rendered. Some are done in animation-free line drawings with voice-overs, as though the animators ran out of time to finish the rendering and decided to gussy up the storyboards and use those. This lack of coherency in style is best exemplified when a fight scene occurs between Patroklos and another character, and consists solely of fight sounds played over a slow pan of a static, sketched image. Every other non-interactive fight? Fully animated.

Another issue with the single-player content? It's a good thing I used Sophitia as my main character in previous games, because players are stuck using characters that fight almost exactly like her for most of its duration. In a bizarre twist, the game then forced me to fight as a new character with his own unique style against late-game cheating bastard AI. Adding salt to the wound, the match had nothing to do with the narrative as a whole, so when I finally capitulated and dropped the difficulty so I could finish before I snapped my controller, the character I was forced to use vanished without warning, leaving yet another plot hole in a series of nonsensical choices.

While I appreciate the "effort" that was put into the Story Mode to make the tale semi-coherent, I missed the individual stories and endings. Without them, I felt little draw to experiment. In other fighting games I've played, seeing the endings for each character encouraged me to try the entire roster. This translated well into multiplayer, as I had a better grasp of each opponent and what they could do. There is an Arcade Mode in V, but I don't feel any particular urge to play it. The same went for Legendary Souls, the harder version of Arcade Mode that is eventually unlocked.

Of the other modes: Training is a decent place to practice and I liked the option to simulate button lag, but I wish that the timing of the inputs was shown when having the computer demo a move. It's hard to tell on attacks with delayed frames if my own inputs are too early or too late. For a newcomer, it's more or less like having a training dummy to practice the move list on, and little else. Actually learning the mechanics of the game and how to play it will have to come from playing for a while, or from external sources.

The lack of the previous games' dedicated Challenge mode hurts, in that there's no way for a solo player to practice more advanced gameplay concepts unless they set their own self-imposed challenges which can't be reinforced by a computer setting.

As the first fighting game I've played online, I found the unranked casual lobby to be a godsend. Here, I could browse people's licenses (a breakdown of their statistics while playing Soul Calibur V), and view replays of other players' matches to see what the game looked like when the AI wasn't being a stinking hunk of cheddar.

Every so often a person would challenge me to a fight which I was free to accept or decline as I saw fit with no change to my ranking. If I really liked playing against someone, I could mark them as a rival and keep tabs on that person's rankings and skill alongside my own. It's a neat feature if I don't want to add random people to my friends list, and overall I could see myself spending quite a bit of time in multiplayer. While my own ISP issues hampered my ability to play for any significant lengths of time, the matches where my connection was stable played without any noticeable hitches or lag. In addition, all the players I encountered (barring one person who ditched the game as I was winning) were pleasant and friendly, and the text chat was filled with people congratulating each other and discussing strategies.

The Soul series has always been my favorite (apart from my love of Sophitia) because I don't need to memorize long combos and can do reasonably well without having to know every single frame of animation. Unfortunately for those returning after an absence (like me) or who are brand new to the series, Soul Calibur V does little to bring a player up to speed with the new characters and mechanics beyond throwing them into the fight and letting them wade through as best they can. Factor in the scarcity of offline single-player content, and this means that multiplayer is the only thing granting Soul Calibur V any longevity; players looking for long-term offline play will be better served with Soul Calibur IV. Rating: 6.0 out of 10.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game contains mild language, suggestive themes and violence. This is a fighting game where people beat the crap out of each other with weapons, and on-screen deaths occur frequently. The darker tone of the story mode is enough to keep the younger kids away. The teens should be alright.

Fighting games have come a long way since Karate Champ set the trend for side-view martial arts action. The mechanics, however, really haven't changed. And why should they? In essence, a fighting game is an elaborate bout of rock-paper-scissors with a reflex test worked in to weed out the lazy.

The question is how do you accurately judge a game like that, and can a newbie enjoy the Soul Calibur experience without having any idea what's going on? My experience with the Soul Calibur series consists of about two hours of 'Soul Calibur II.' My memory's a bit hazy on it, so I was basically a clean slate for 'Soul Calibur IV.'

As with every fighting game I've ever played, I began by selecting the most awesome-ified looking character from the group of strangers in the character select screen. That was, of course, Yoda. I've lived and breathed Star Wars for 30 years, so obviously I didn't have a choice.

Sure, I rolled my eyes when I heard Yoda was in the 360 version. I mumbled something sarcastic about how the Cantina theme must be just around the corner for Guitar Hero and dismissed it. Yet, God help me, I couldn't resist him. He retained a lot of the fast and furious action from the movies, but I was surprised that his lightsaber did very little damage.

The brevity of story mode was quite surprising. Not only that, but despite having only about two hours of fighting game experience in more than a decade, I had no trouble beating it. Arcade mode was slightly more challenging; not enough to discourage a newbie, but just enough to make me begin to hate those smug, heartless bastard characters that beat me.

After all, beating an opponent isn't as important as crushing an opponent. And crushing an opponent isn't as important as drowning them in their own ineptitude, humiliating them to such a degree that Anderson Cooper flies a Red Cross helicopter onto their yard and cries with the president, via satellite, for a good half hour.

The strength of a fighting game depends on its characters and settings, and these look great on the 360. I wasn't a big fan of some of the characters. I found some to be a little bland and forgettable, but there were enough high-quality ones to keep me going.

Of course, characters are only bland until you lose to them enough. Then that deep hatred begins to grow, and you can think of nothing else but destroying them and every person who dares use them online.

'Soul Calibur IV' has enough to keep fans of the series happy. The online play, along with the Star Wars characters and Ivy's giant, rhythmically undulating breasts, should keep it popular for quite a while.

The original release on Soul Calibur II is one of my most played games of all time. When I had a Gamecube, I rented the game multiple times and eventually made the smart investment of saving up my allowances so I could own a copy for myself. The novelty of playing Link in a fighting game drew me in, but there was something else about the game that kept me coming back to it.

I was excited about a high definition re-release of one of my favorite fighting games from my youth. Parts of the game are just as cool as they were back then, but this port is not as good as it should be.

Each square on this map leads you to a screen that contains a handful of unique battles. There's a fair amount of story here (a few pages at the beginning of each chapter and a lengthy text scroll for each battle) that is mostly skippable. Nice to have it, but after a certain point I just started skipping through it because it's plain, unvoiced text.

The cool thing about Weapon Master is that every match has some kind of unique stipulation. Some matches disable blocking for both characters, so you have to rely on jumping and sidestepping to avoid damage. Some matches poison you, so you have to defeat your enemies before the poison kills you. Some matches give your enemy regenerating health and turns the edges of the stage into a hazard that harms anyone who stands on it.

In the end, I found the Weapon Master stipulations to be about 70 percent cool and 30 percent unfair. Around Chapter 6 I began running into challenges that were just not fun. There is a challenge where you have to fight five enemies in a row on a limited timer. If you beat one enemy the timer refills, but it's very possible to make it unwinnable if you don't beat the enemies quickly enough.

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