I’ve been playing SoulCalibur IV pretty frequently the last week. It is the first fighting game I’ve playing in years that I find myself enjoying both against the AI and against my friends (who are much better at fighting games than me). The controls are forgiving enough that button mashing can get you though the Story or Arcade mode on Normal. However, with a little time looking through the moves list, and a little practice, you can learn some cool combos and make it through on Hard pretty easily. In addition to the Story and Arcade modes they have a great mode called “Tower of Souls.” Each level gets progressively harder as you work your way through it. I’m really enjoying it because it has forced me to learns some combos and vary my fighting style. Plus, you get a nice amount of gold and items as you play through the Tower of Souls.

The items and gold you win in the various game modes are used in the Character Customization. In the Customization section you can either edit current characters or make your own new one. It really helps in the Tower of Souls because you can take your favorite character and then give them better weapons and armor to make the fights easier on yourself. You can also customize your specials to fit your play style, but really the shave damage and autp impact specials are really the best ones. My customized character currently has 195% attack and 155% Hp. It makes fights go really fast as long as I land some strong attacks.

The achievements have a really nice range of difficulty. Most of them can be picked up pretty easily, but some of them require a lot of time and effort. For example, you get an achievemetn for customizing a character but also for completing the entire 60 levels in the Tower of Souls. Sure, I like easy achievements but it is nice to earn some by actually working at them for a while.

For anyone who even sort of likes fighting games I’d recomeng checking out SoulCalibur IV. It is a great fighting game to play with people who don’t generally like fighting games because there are so many characters to choose from and the controls are really forgiving.

I tried playing it some more, but the crashing at the end of missions finally pissed me off to much. It takes too long to save and load to have to replay part of the level each time you complete a campaign mission. In addition to the freezing/crashing the camera issues have put me over the top. I’m sending it back to GameFly today. It is really to bad because the game was a lot of fun when it worked. If they patch it to fix these issues I’ll rent it again, but for now I’m done with it.

I don’ play a lot of fighting games because I’m not very good at them, but I did rent SoulCalibur IV. I played a lot of SoulCalibur on the Dreamcast back in the day, and I could not pass up the chance to play Yoda. I had a firend over and we played for a few hours against each other. We tried all the characters you start with, and we both agreed that all the characters we remembered play pretty much like we thought they would. Overall, we had a lot of fun playing each other. I will say it is hard to fight against Yoda because he can’t be thrown and high attacks go over his head. After we had played for a while we checked out the option to create a character. I think the create a character option is going to be what makes me love this game because I can create a player that fits my play style perfectly. I spent about 5 minutes just throwing a guy together and I was already dominating with him. With more time I cold have made him even more perfect. I’m planning on playing some more tomorrow and this weekend to see if I can get everyone unlocked and figure out some of the cooler combos/moves. Once I spend more time with it I’ll get a better review together.

I started playing Supreme Commander this weekend. It is a very traditional RTS with a lot of micro-management. I am enjoying it for the most part, but it is quirky about saving. I started playing the campaign and found that the missions are very long. Like between 1 and 2 hours per mission. I don’t mind this, but it would be cool if there was an option to speed up time when you’re waiting for things to build and then slow it back down when you are ready to attack. The controls work well for a RTS on a console. They give you access to everything without going through a lot of levels of menus.

My big complaint is that the game has a tenancy to freeze/crash when it saves at the end of a mission. It has done that to me twice. I looked around xbox forums and it seems it is pretty common occurrence with this game. I get around it by saving right before I finish a level so that if it does freeze I can just load it back up and try again. It seems to be about a 50/50 shot on if it will freeze or not. It is bordering on making me send the game back to GameFly, but I have not even tried the other races yet and I’d really like to. Additionally the camera has a tendency to stop moving for a few seconds when a lot is going on. Everything continues, but the camera will not move for you. It is like the game can’t keep up with everything in has to control so it pauses the camera while it catches up. With hundreds of units/buildings on the map I can see where that would be an issue, but I with they had worked that kind of thing out.

I’m planning to play some more and if I finish the game it will be a while until I get a full review because it is so long. However, if I get mad and send it back I’ll get a review up sooner.

I finished Guitar Hero: Aerosmith this weekend. I ended it like I started, annoyed. The game only has 42 songs on it including all the unlockable ones. Maybe it was just me but they did not seem to properly progress in difficulty. Some songs in the last couple tiers were very easy, but others were almost impossible for me. It seems like though have spent a little more time on putting the songs in a better order so they progressively getting more challenging.

The songs also feel very different from the Rock Band tracks I’m use to. In Rock Band the harder songs feel like the developers want them to be challenging, but still possible. In Guitar Hero: Aerosmith the harder songs feel like the developers made them trying to make it so you will fail. They do chord combinations that just don’t feel natural. They have HO/PO sections that are ridiculously long and hard to complete. I really think they want me smash my guitar in anger so I have to go buy a new one and they make a little more money.

The one good thing about the game is that the achievements are easy for a Guitar Hero game. In past games you had to get all songs with 5 starts on expert to get all the achievements. In Guitar Hero: Aerosmith the hardest cheevoz are for beating Expert and playing a song prefectly on at least Medium.

Unless you are a huge Aerosmith fan and have a lot of spare cash I’d not recommend this game. If you’re really wanting to play it then rent it for a weekend. You should be able to get through all the songs in a weekend if you want to. And, since all the Aerosmith songs feel the same when you play them you’ll get your fill after getting through the career mode.

and signed up for twitter today. I checked it out and I can see using it with my friends. Feel free to follow me.

http://twitter.com/jigsawhc

I decided to rent Guitar Hero: Aerosmith since I already have the guitars and I heard the achievements are stackable so I no longer have play on every difficulty setting to get all the achievements. Finally, I can play though on Hard and get the Easy and Medium achievements as well. After loading the game up the first thing I did was to try my Rock Band wired guitar which worked great. I’m really glad because I’ve seen polls showing that about half of people who tried could not get the Rock band Guitar to work in Guitar Hero: Aerosmith and the other half could. Since I like the Rock band guitar a lot better than my Guitar Hero Xplorer I was pretty excited when it worked. I’ve played about 8 or 10 songs so far and I have mixed feelings about the game. I should preface that by saying that I’m not a real big Aerosmith fan. So far, playing all their songs is getting a bit old because they all feel the same. However, the opening ats songs have been pretty fun to play. Overall though I like Rock Band better. I can’t quite put my finger on why, but the songs in Guitar Hero: Aerosmith are just not as fun to play as the ones in Rock Band. I think it is how they structure the note charts, but I’ll have to play more of each to see if I can figure it out. After I get through more of the game I’ll get a full review together, but that might take a few days since I keep going back to Rock Band.

I’m out of town currently without my Xbox 360. Wish I was at home because Supreme Commander and Guitar Hero: Aerosmith are sitting there waiting for me. It will probably be a week or two before I get a chance to play enough of them to get a review together. Until then I’ll sit here wishing I could be playing the RSV2 Fan Pack.

I’ve been playing around with the Spore Creature Creator trial. I did not think Spore was going to be the kind of game I would spend a lot of time with, but my son and I have been creating guys in the Creature Creator trial and loving it. They have the full Creature Creator available for like $10, but the trial has the full functionality but with limited options for each body part. It is really growing on me the more I play with it. It really takes some practice to get use to rotating and moving each body part, but once you get the hang of it you can make some really cool looking stuff. The system requirements are not very high so check it out when you have a couple minutes, but if you waste a few hours instead don’t say I did not warn you.

I decided to rent the Iron Man game for Xbox 360 since the movie was so good and the demo was pretty fun. If you tried the demo the game is more of the same. Lots of flying around and blowing up a large number of weapons and enemies. For the first couple levels it is pretty fun to blow stuff up and try different attacks, but after about 3 levels it gets old really fast. It is the same enemies and goals over and over again. Graphically the game looked pretty good and it controlled pretty well once I got use to switching between flying and hovering. Almost all of the achievements can be done playing on easy so I was played it on easy to just go through and try all the levels. I easily finished the whole game in a couple sittings. I really wish there was more I could say but if you play one level you’ve played them all. If you were thinking of checking out this game just play through the demo 4 or 5 times and you’ll get the same experience. Sure, there are fun moments. Tearing apart tanks and grabbing planes out of the sky are fun, but after you’ve done it 50 or 60 times it looses its appeal. The plot line follows the movie with some levels thrown in the middle to make it a bit longer. I’m really disappointed because playing as Iron Man is fun. I just wish they had more things to do than fly through very similar levels and blow everything up.