But the soul still burns: Soul Calibur 1 XBLA

(tags game, Xbox 360, fighting, Soul Calibur)

Okay, I succumbed. I purchased Soul Calibur 1 for the Xbox 360 Live Arcade for 800 cred. I just wanna post this picture:

It just too much fun to play this game. 60 FPS, sparkly crisp graphics and movement, and now no loading times. Aya Hisakawa voice for "Xianghua" is still the greatest. 「正義は勝つ！なっんちゃって」 "Justice will prevail! Just kidding!" Perhaps the state of the art has improved but this still looks and feels good to me. Still there's that uncanny green glow to the polygons.

I checked my past blog posts on the Soul Calibur series. Oh my. "Jigoku e iku no wa, omae ga saki da!!" (2003-03-30) 5 years ago (!) I was play SC2 with a joystick on the GameCube. I don't even remember when I played SC1, though. I know I have a guide book on SC1 for the Dreamcast somewhere around here, where is it.

I've only seriously played with Xianghua on this port. I surprised myself by getting 37 wins in Survival mode, not that that's all great but still that gets me ranked on the global leaderboard (which is Xianghua only Survival which no one will look at). And I got 50 Break for doing Guard Repel/Parry practice (when you only need 15 for an Achievement), but I only only lucked out because Sophitia is totally predictable.

I guess I'm going to spend some time on this one because some of the Achievements are doable.

This makes me seriously consider Soul Calibur IV coming out this month. Moves that knock off clothes?!? Yeehaw! But seriously, the demo movies show the in-game play at what feels like 30 fps. Ugh?! I'm going wait for an interactive demo.

Update: (09:32AM) I played until 3 in the morning. Xiangha vs Sophitia, Practice mode with Freestyle "Vs CPU @ Medium stage 6 difficulty". Tricky but fun.