So on friday i rejoiced as i finally got my hands on Soul Calibur IV (cos namco bandai love europe). As an avid beat em up fan i have been waiting so long for a next gen fighter on the consoles and im happy to say that for the most part SCIV delivers it very well. I believe with a fighting game its appeal only lasts as long as you have someone to play against and so online is for me the main selling point of this game. After spending a good 4 hours playing in offline modes, i felt i was ready to try out online. I decided that i would jump in to some unranked lobbys to just get a feel for the game with lag, but to my surprise it was totally lag free the whole time. Me and the other 2 guys in the lobby were chatting away, trying different characters on each other which resulted in some epic fights. I got my ass kicked in some matches but i dished it out equally as much (hilde ftw), and in the end 3 hours went by just like that.

Now feeling comfortable with everything i decided to play ranked....and then he appeared....






So my first ever ranked match was to be against kilik and in my past experience with SC2 i knew perfectly well that he along with maxi was the eddy gordo, the vegeta, the sagat of the soul calibur series, but i decided to give the player the benefit of the doubt as he was level 30 compared to my level 1. In the end i wondered why i even bothered, as the kilik fag spammed the same 3 moves over and over and over and over again. I was pissed but moved on to the next match... kilik level 22, next match kilik level 28. Once i got on to my 4th kilik in a row i was ready to just play pixeljunk eden and never come back, but this kilik was at level 5 (nub in training) and with my last 3 matches experience of kilik rape i actually beat this bitch 3-0 but only because i played cheap tactics also. After this match i exited ranked and went right back in to unranked and to be honest i dont think i will play ranked for a while.


Personally i think leaderboards and rankings are truly hurting the online experience in most games. It seems people are more concerned with numbers than actually having fun or for the love of the game resulting in this new generation of cheap bastards with no sense of sportmanship. Another fighter i play is Tekken 6 at the arcade, all the players there are skilled and appreciate the game on a technical level. On the rare occasion a person plays cheap tactics, everyone watching lets them know and even sometimes yanks their ass out of the seat. However i know that once Tekken 6 comes out on console it will be the same situation as SCIV. This kind of makes the elitist in me wish that some games never reach mainstream audiences as it tarnshes it and makes me resent the game itself for even having online.



Waaahmbulance Moment incoming....

Now i know i sound like a moaning bitch but seriously, the amount of people who complain about kilik players is proof enough that the character is just pure shenannigans. Hes designed to have easy to execute moves with stopping power and range both vertically and horizontally which can flow seamlessly on and on. I hate how developers feel they need to include characters for noobs in order to be classed as accessible, what ever happened to ya know... learning to play. Dont get me wrong, im really not having a go at newcomers who button mash (if you wanna pay £40/$60 to mash buttons like a retard then by all means..), but rather people who knowingly exploit cheap moves with characters designed for newcomers just for the sake of getting their stats up, which by the way is futile in the end as you really need to have no life to be anywhere near the top of the leaderboards.

If you actually ever want to have fun online in SCIV just play unranked and let the kiliks kill themselves off until their all extinct.