DoA2
I think my friend Dillan summed up this game best when he put masking title over the title of my copy of this game and wrote: \\ Kung Fu Strippers 2: Will There Ever Be A Rainbow?
Indecentally, he had many other fun labels on games. On ChargeNBlast for my old Dreamcast he put, Not For Entertainment Use
The friend who introduced me to DoA2 (long live Jan Lee! WHOOT!) now has Dead or Alive VOLLEYBALL. He swears by it. Little perv.
But hey, can you blame him? :)
Man that game had some wierd endings. But if you wanna see WEIRD, check out Guilty Gear XX. It's cool, but it's WEIRD.
~Mailanka
The best part about working at GameStop was when the X-box vendor gave us all DoA: Extreme Beach Volleyball calendars. -dissolvegirl misses getting cool free stuff
My favorite fighting game has always been Soul Calibur. My only quarrel with it is that the stages are all just irregularly-shaped platforms situated over bottomless pits/lava pools/etc., unlike DoA2's multi-leveled stages.
Now I have to admit, I've liked what DoA I've played (I don't have shame) but it's never been anything near a favorite. Too much Street Fighter and Darkstalkers really, to a lesser extent Mortal Kombat. The closest I really tipped towards 3D was on Soul Calibur when we got the arcade machine at work. But, really, I'll play any of them since I've owned most all of them in one form or another.
A classic case of too many systems and too many games. -- MidKnight
In my not-so-humble opinion, SoulCalibur is one of the best fighting games ever released. Playing it is unlike almost any other fighting game I've played (save maybe Tobal #1). You just kinda flow from move to move, and your rythm matters a lot more than your technical butting-pressing abilitiy. Moves are hard because of timing and judgement of range and collision, not because it's the ElephantPunch.
Sidenote: I'm sitting in my office, and in the cube across the way, someone has a ballon. It's a weird ballon, shaped like a spaceship with a transparent top. Inside another balloon, one of a small alien, resides. "So what?" you say? There are two things bugging me about this baloon.
- The alien baloon isn't floating at the top of the spaceship balloon, it's resting at the bottom. Now, after thinking about it, I understood why that is, but it still looks wrong.
- I keep hearing this in my head, "We've secretly replaced Mike's helium baloon with one filled with Hydrogen. Let's see if he notices." \\
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!
-- DaveFayram
I liked SouCaliber ok. Enjoyed the hell out of Mitsurugi :) But I thought Sigfried was cheezy as hell. Plink. Plink. Plink. STOP THAT! Damn bitch.
Anyway, most GOOD fighting games require good rythme. Nobody wins Streetfighter all the time JUST because they've learned Hado-ken. You have to know ALL the moves, and know when to use them, and then it becomes a contest of strategy against strategy.
It's an entire chess match in 30 seconds.
One of the reasons alot of RPGs have bugged me (especially D&D) is that you don't get that. It tends to feel more like your just hacking away at each other until someone's hitpoints had dropped to zero. Exalted, on the other hand, has a much more complex, and yet fast, system, that allows for really intense fights that are closer to the intellectual/instinctual struggles of highly cinematic combat like what you see in fighting games.
Anyway, I think that's one of Exalted's appeals, and why you see so many Forum combats appearing, because combat IS so interesting.
I really need to figure out why people think that Seigfried was such a cheezy character, because he wasn't one of the best. His range was good, and he was tricky, but he was slow and his major damage moves were predictable. Being a high-level Seigfried player is much harder than being a high level Mitsurugi, or (dear lord) Hwang. Hwang was ridiculously good, my friend used to joke in a falsetto, "My name is Hwang and I'm impervious to all forms of metal!"
SF2, Tekken, and many others focus more on the technical execution of the move being difficult, but the move being better. In SoulCalibr, the moves were seldom difficult to execute technically, it was all about rhythm. I liked it a lot more than the SF2 (smoke em if ya got meter) approach that began to develop. I'm no novice to either of these games either, as a child I placed 6th in a state SF2 championship for Street Fighter 2: CE. As foe SoulCalubr, I wore out a dreamcast, and I've yet to find people who after 5 games I'm not beating, and I've looked at places renowned for their good SoulCalibur players :)
SoulCalibur was a work of art. the game dynamic made you look move after move into the future, made you care about ring size without getting in the way of the plain fighting, and made each character so fundamentally different (except for the clone-chars, like Rock & Asteroth, which were just slightly less different). Maxi was a great example of the genius of the designers of SoulCal, "Keep in constant motion. WHEN you attack matters more than HOW. HOW you attack now determines the next moves, so make the right choices!"
- sigh* I miss my dreamcast.
Oh, my friend updated ElephantPunch. Very funny. Check it out.
-- DaveFayram
It may be that you have a vastly superior knowledge to these games than I do (I'm not being sarcastic, maybe you do, unless I played you, I wouldn't know. I've certainly SEEN ungodly players). However, back in mah home town, there was quite a culture of fighting games. We used to keep arcades in business through their fighting games alone, and people would do NOTHING all day except play those damn things (they were, of course, freaks without a life, but that's beside the point) and I could hold my own against them. Against more plebian folks, I tended to dominate, though only with games I knew (of course)
Siegfried's cheese comes from a very simple move. Duck, and press an attack (I forget which) and he'll just lean up and poke you. It doesn't do much damage, but it's a very quick motion, and it's got alot of range, and you simply can't get past it. I've tried running around it, I've tried jumping, I've tried EVERYTHING. Damn bitch. But then again, I KNOW I'm not as good as you at soulcaliber because the game didn't do that much for me.
Note from DaveFayram: The trick to that was sidestep and dash in to punish him. Or a low-guard impact. That move was very guard-impactable... That move made Siggy go "Hyut!" right before he did it, so it was easy to read. IIRC, it also caused one of his legs to move funny, another trick. A far more obnoxious form of cheese was the "crotchcrusher". Either from moves or from stance commands, having Sig go to low stance (sword on the ground) as the enemy ended a move. In that position, Siggy can do several things and there aren't many ways to see what's coming. You could poke, sweep up, sweep up to high stance, sideslash, cancel to a crouch and crouchthrow, (that move was one of the reasons many of us played Siggy, it was a very good move), cancel to a crouch and do his spinning slashes (many variants on the spinning slash made this attractive), or cancel to a crouch and do a rising kick. VERY nasty place to be.
I know what you mean by "uber moves" but I remain unconvinced. Marvel vs Capcom, for example, is LOADED with massive uber-attacks that let you whipe the floor with your opponent if you pull it off right... but you have to pull it off right. If Ryu pulls off his Mega-Hadoken... and you jump, or block, or whatever, he just wasted ALL that energy, and is quite vulnerable. You have to pull it off at a moment he's vulnerable, and in my experience, these moves are so powerful that everyone learns very quickly how to defend against them (and they're very easy to defend against), and thus they seldom are the game winner.
DoA2 (and what Tekken I played) struck me as FAR more based on basic moves than major moves. Jann Lee (my BABY) had a flying jump kick. It was great! You couldn't block it, and it did LOTS of damage. It was also real easy to see coming (most of the time) and you could easily beat it just by ducking. After initially tearing people up with its shock value, it quickly got relegated to a minor, flashy move. My mainstay was always his primary combo. Punch punch and... well, that was the beauty of it.
It had three finishes (though I often tacked a fourth on). P P P K gave me the most powerful attack, launching my opponent away from me and douing the most damage. It was also the most predictable, and most easily countered, thus the most dangerous for me to pull off.
PP -> P gave me a nice middle hit that also sent my opponent flying (Janny boy was real good at sending people flying), but a middle strike is by far the most easily countered, so I had to be careful with that as well.
PP (down) K gave me a finish with a sweep. This was nice as most people can't block both high and low, so this USUALLY worked, but if you just ducked, my first two attacks would miss, and you could counter the third. Bad for me.
And finally: PP (minor pause) grapple. This was fun. I often said "Stupid!" right after, since generally, my opponent was turtling down for my nasty combos, and so a grapple got right in, but it didn't always work.
This flexibility and knowledge of game mechanics, as well as a quick mind, is what gave me the vast majority of my wins, as I could vary my attacks to the situation (this, of course, wasn't my only strategy. I was very good at breaking down my opponents strategies as well, and Jann Lee's flexibility gave me an advantage in exploiting those weaknesses). Not knowing the big Uber-moves. Big Uber-moves (in most games. Not all games are that well designed, let's face it) are what snotty nosed brats who've actually read the book pull out thinking it'll win. It seldom does. Good old positioning and strategy generally wins the day.
Or at least, that's my experience. It could very well be that at EXTREMELY high level game play, stuff starts to break down. I tend to find that in alot of games (especiall StarCraft, where once you REALLY get good, you realize there's a reason Zerg never win the championships: they are actually the SLOWEST producers), so I do know I could be wrong.
---
Final side note with me and fighting games. I LOVED Killer Instict (I know, I'm old) when I played it in the arcade. I eventually bought it for my Super Nintendo, and got VERY good at it. I'll never forget the day I was in the Arcade, and the owner, someone who counted himself VERY good at KI came running up to my game to verify what he had just heard, jaw dropping in disbelief.
He'd seen "29 hit ULTRA"
He thought that was impossible. Most people did. It was well known that Saberwulf's best Ultra was twenty-EIGHT hits. He asked me how I did it. I said I did the combo backwards. See, I don't remember the exact specifics, but the human hand/mind can only be expected to do so much in the few seconds required to whip out a combo. While in theory Saberwulf could pull off higher level Ultras, practically it was impossible. But Saber could pull off the same move by pressing forward for two seconds and then back as backward for two seconds and forward. The latter is what most people did (pressing back was blocking, so it kept you safe as you powered up your attack) but I did the first. I don't remember exactly what that changed (I know it had something to do with how I linked the combo), but it allowed me to pick up that extra hit. I had my name on the tops of ALL the KI arcades in Newton.
DaveFayram: I thought that combo breakers made such long combos a request for punishment in KI to experienced players, since they'd begin to drill you right back after they threw you off?
Mailanka: True that, and I used to startle people who were GETTING good by busting their combo. However, the computer didn't combo break that often, and most inexperienced players were too busy panicing as you nail them for 12 hit combo after 12 hit combo to realize they can break out of it. But you're quite right. Between two EXPERIENCED KI players, combos seldom got past four hits. More than that was inviting serious punishment: yet another example of strategy beating uber-moves :)
^_^
Ahhh, long faded glory.
People stopped playing KI with me shortly after that. Had something to do with never getting a hit in edgewise. Sigh :( ~Mailanka
And I have nothing to add really, I do the Versus games a lot so that kinda cuts down on knowing moves and having 'skillz' and those few others I play that aren't vs. or SoulCalibur (when I catch a game when I'm outta town) end up being unheard of (few seem to have Last Blade 2 for the DC) or just there with Mortal Kombat Annihilation. I've had my fun with them, but in the end all I really can do is this.
-pets the Dreamcast- It's my precioussss...
And you're not that old, Mailanka, I traded away a TLC cd for a copy of Killer Instict and still think I got the better deal. Though Fulgore was the one for me.
-MidKnight
I liked Fulgore as well in KI. KI 2 wasn't nearly as good as KI 1, but I played Jago alot in that version. Saber just sucked too much in that version.
Sighs... I miss the old fighting game spirit (You guys should try Brawl some time: A real time card game. It's such a trip. GO BENNET!</b>). When my buddy comes down this wednesday, I'll have to talk him into letting me play Guilty Gear XX again. ~Mailanka
I only played KI 2 in small doses, normally when I was at someone else's house rather than my own I liked what I played, but often times while I was playing it just felt... off. Not wrong or bad, but just not how the first did, like the dynamic had changed just enough to throw me.
All this makes me wanna bust out the old games, go hook up a system at my job and run a tournament for me and my friends.
Alas, currently I'm doing FFXIβ and KOTOR so my time is split. Well.. when you factor in online time, too. --MidKnight
On a related note, have anyone played SoulCalibur II? do they like it? is it as good/cool as the first one? ~Sabis
I'll more than likely have it tomorrow so I'll speak up then. Either way, I can't imagine why I won't buy it, y'know? But I won't say for sure, just incase. -MidKnight
How??? It's not out 'till the 25th, I thought. If you know a place where I can get a copy of the gamecube version early, let me know. I want it!! -- DaveFayram
Ish. Sorry, I was going off of bad info (though my coworker is going to be pissed). Sorry about that, Dave, signals got crossed somewhere and I was going off of the wrong date (even missed it in the Sunday ads where it said the date). Uh.. Import? Okay, maybe not. I feel stupid now. -MidKnight
It's not out 'till the 25th in the States! Nooo, my friend is coming over before that. Why do cheap importing schemes never work out? And Dave, I doubt there will be anyother version of the game(other than GC) since it has Link on it. OT:(But that's the whole point of this thread isn't it) Wind Waker is really good, but sadly it feels to much like it belongs on the N64. -Improphane
My sources tell me that Soul Calibur 2 is coming out for each of the major consoles. The GC version does indeed feature Link; the others will have other secret characters (apparently the Xbox version will feature Spawn).\\ _Ikselam
- Yeah. Spawn. Whee. :P And the PS2 version has... <b>Heihachi???</b> The real bummer is how good the Xbox version looks. Significantly better than all the other versions. I guess that's to be expected since it's such a powerful box. With the Spawn thing, they made him an Axe character. That seems to be a mistake as far as I am concerned. Doesn't really reflect how spawn fights in the stories and books. Oh well.\\
For those who care, the major changes to SoulCalibur2 are numerous. The biggest change (in my book) is the addition of counter-impacts. Some moves work like old-guard impacts, but can be followed up by VERY powerful special moves, like DoA2 counters. Should be excting.\\ -- DaveFayram
- I think the axe Spawn has (from what I've seen in the demos for it) is more of a short-range affair rather than Astoroth/Rock huge axe/long range. You're right though, Dave, it doesn't really 'feel' Spawn to me, but what can you do? Having him fight with chains or his cape would've rocked, but been hard and a sword... I guess I would've had to play him with it first, but I don't know if I'd want another sword user. Oh well, here's for WeaponsMaster mode! -tip 'o the cup-\\
And my take on the Heihachi thing is they did it just to see how he'd fare. If the fan response/game feel stays pretty consistant I wanna say they could do a Versus type game in the future. Not like Marvel vs. Capcom but whole groups against one another Soul Calibur vs. Tekken perhaps..? Tekken vs. Virtua Fighter? Ooohyeah.. -MidKnight
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All this focus spent on Soul Caliber. Honestly, haven't any of ya'll played Bushido Blade? Far and away, best fighter ever. :) DS
AAAARGH! I can't believe you all talked about fighting games for this long without once mentioning Virtua Fighter 4! It's beautiful, a work of art. Fast and brutal, with all of the enjoyable timing-based skill of a Soul Calibur, but with techniques in the upper echelons of skill that make other games look like child's play. And virtually no ElephantPunch stuff, either; only three buttons, Punch, Kick, and Guard, and virtually all the moves are just chains or combinations thereof with a direction or two thrown in. Even the old staples, "quarter-circle front" or "half circle back" are rare, but you'll see masters of Aikido square off against Drunken-style badasses, and brutal street-fighting / Muay Thai against Shaolin-style kung fu. Not unreasonable described as a "martial arts sim." -- DigitalSentience
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