Wow! It’s been awhile since I’ve been here. I plan on doing one of these every Monday, Wednesday and Friday/Saturday (depends on how busy on those two days I am).
I read about EA that they passed on a Dark Knight (the new Batman movie) license. Allegedly, the game was already in development. There’s a good reason for it that no one realises- EA knew the game would suck.
When a movie licensed game is released, developers are given a very tight deadline. In a world where games take a couple of years to make, movie games are given a matter of months. My guess is that EA was told to have the game finished by Christmas to have it ready somewhere around the movie subsequentially saying “No thanks.” It’s a good move, because we’ve seen what happens with most licensed games (Enter the Matrix comes to mind here). I say let EA make a decent Batman game, but let them go the Goldeneye route and let them have the time they need to make a quality title. We know they can do this, we’ve seen the other licensed games they could produce if given adequate time and resources. I guarantee some developer will destroy the license now. They will have a 3 month deadline to make a functional piece of crap.
I picked up Soul Calibur IV last week and honestly, I think I am in the minority to say I am a bit disappointed. Characters move sluggishly, and the same cheap moves from the previous ‘Caliburs are still here. Is it a good game? Yes, it’s a awesome game. Do I think it’s the be-all end-all fighting game that they label every SC to be? Absolutely not. Oh and Yoda is cheap, even if it takes a god-awful amount of time to learn him, he’s cheap, plain and simple. The Apprentice is a bad-ass though. Come find me on SCIV, my gamertag is Elpato54, I am not near as good at this game as I am at Virtua Fighter, or Tekken for that matter, so if you kick my ass, it’s probably not anything to brag about.
I also picked up Final Fantasy IV. *Sigh* ok, if Square/Enix is going to give us remakes and sequels, well make them more like this. Don’t misunderstand, FFIV reeks of bad beta testing, but it’s a good game overall. Readers of the Wrath from VGM will remember me saying that FFIV was the first RPG I ever played (back when it was FFII). It took me years to finish it, because I didn’t know that running away from every…single…battle was bad. When I was in the giant I think I was at like, level 25 (you better hope to be level 40 at least to have a chance). I also remember FFIV being difficult, even the easy-type version, but not near as difficult as this. Jesus! They made the easiest bosses of the game, turn around by the power of computer science to become the hardest. I don’t mind surprises here and there, but it seems like some battles were made difficult just for the hell of it, with little thought involved on what they were putting us through. This game on some levels can be harder than the original Final Fantasy, but on most levels, Final Fantasy I’s annoying difficulty can’t be matched. Don’t misunderstand, it’s worth every penny, if you’ve ever played an RPG, you owe yourself a favor to get through this. Even if I may bitch about the difficulty, this game at least makes you think and improvise in battle, unlike Lost Odyssey’s clunky disaster of a battle system. In this game you have some battles where you will sit and go “OH THAT’S IT!” Lost Odyssey doesn’t do that, LO just throws you into a battle and you hope to get lucky that an enemy doesn’t cast a particular spell so you survive. In any case, great remake, and I can’t wait to see what they do with FFVI, if they do anything with it. Since SE can’t do anything original, I bet FFVI is next on the remake list.
