The Soul Still Burns

Although I cannot give hard figures, I am fairly certain that I have spent more hours of my life playing the fighting game Soul Calibur than any other video game.  And that doesn't even include the sequels.  My friends and I would play for multi-hour stretches several days a week for almost all four years of college.  It is very clearly on my short list of all-time favorite games.

So I was thrilled that they released the game to X-Box Live.  What follows are my quick hit thoughts after playing the game for a couple of hours last night after downloading it.

• The "HD" refresh of the game is pretty un-noticeable.  They did not change the aspect ratio, so it has black bars on the sides.  And it was already a pretty gorgeous game on the Dreamcast, so I don't think it looks that much better on the 360.
• Online play would have been killer, but it's still damn fun to play against the computer.
• The game comes out of the box with all of the extras unlocked.  I have mixed feelings about this.  On the one hand, I remember how annoying it was to have to re-unlock everything after a VMU (Dreamcast memory stick) got corrupted (which happened often).  But, it does take a lot of incentive out of exploring the whole game.
• I love achievements!  Now everyone will know that I actually can do Ivy's "Summon Suffering" throw.
• The X-Box d-pad sucks.  It's nearly impossible to do double-tap moves without accidentally pressing a diagonal on the second tap.
• I still love this game.  And I can't wait until Soul Calibur 4 comes out.