Another throwdown is happening this Saturday and Sunday! East Coast Throwdown 2018 in Fairfield, New Jersey is the final offline Ranking Event for North America in the 2018 Capcom Pro Tour season, the Last Chance Qualifier for the Injustice 2 Pro Series, and a Tournament of Legends III qualifier. Carrying a tradition for bringing the hype, this year’s line-up features current mainstream titles including the newly released SoulCalibur VI, as well as a host of arcade titles as part of 2 Old 2 Furious.
Spoiler title
BlazBlue Cross Tag Battle
Dragon Ball FighterZ
Guilty Gear Xrd REV 2
Injustice 2
Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite
SoulCalibur VI
Street Fighter V Arcade Edition
Tekken 7
2 Old 2 Furious x East Coast Throwdown
Capcom vs. SNK 2
Fighting EX Layer
Super Street Fighter II Turbo
Street Fighter III 3rd Strike
Street Fighter Alpha 2
Street Fighter EX 2 Plus
Players competing over the weekend include GamerBee, Gama, NuckleDu, Punk, Chris Tatarian, Alex Myers, Nephew, XsK_Samurai, CJ Truth, SonicFox, NYChrisG, HookGangGod, Nakkiel, Lord Knight, KnowKami and more.
Five streams will be covering the event live, with Team Spooky heading the main stream, TSB_Blaze and Kick-Punch-Block Live providing secondaries, Arturo Sanchez covering the arcade titles and NetherRealm providing dedicated coverage of Injustice 2. Check out all the streams below and follow the brackets on Smash.gg.
With the much anticipated sports-fighting hybrid Lethal League Blaze just around the corner, there hasn’t been a better time to brush up on your volleys. Team Reptile knows this, and have an exciting announcement to get you hyped up:
That’s right, the original Lethal League is free to play all weekend long on the Steam platform. You can try it right now for free, and if you happen to like it, you can get it for 50% off its original price at the Steam Store.
Lethal League Blaze launches on October 24th on Steam.
The legacy that Street Fighter X Tekken has is often divisive between people in the fighting game community. While there exists the camp of players who fell in love with the game it became, many still remember it for the game it was — and the poor marketing choices that Capcom made that resulted in its downfall.
In this video, Stumblebee takes a hard look at the game — including its initial announcement, the promotional machine before its release, and its flaws upon release. He also delves into what made the game better within its title update — which still ultimately still saw the game widely abandoned for the Ultra Street Fighter IV update.
Have you been wanting to try the new indie horror fighter Omen of Sorrow but missed its first demo? You’re in luck — you get a second chance!
AOne Games has launched a second public demo today on the PlayStation Network for American and European audiences. This demo will have dive-kicking Zafkiel and shoto-esque beast hunter Gabriel. There’s a third character for each demo version, unique to the region: American players will get the rushdown werewolf Caleb, and European players will get Frankenstein grappler Adam. The demo will allow players to play either in local multiplayer or single player modes.
Omen of Sorrow will be launched digitally on November 6th, and its physical version will arrive in America on November 20th. It has already appeared at over 100 events organized by the fighting game community around the world: Evo, First Attack, ThunderStruck, Treta Championship, SoCal Regionals, and more.
As we near the end of October, the Dragon Ball FighterZ World Tour just keeps on chugging on, with another Online Dragon Radar Event wrapping up recently for Eastern North America. Eligible States included Alabama, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, Tennessee, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and the Canadian Provinces of Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador.
With a massive 363 entrants and only two Dragon Balls left in play, it was going to be an undeniably intense battle to see which mighty warrior would get the chance to compete at one of the two remaining Saga Events in Japan and Australia, or the Last Chance Qualifier in January. Sami “Samifish” Nash and “Based” Jake Ryan were on hand to call all the top 8 action.
Results
Dragon Ball FighterZ
1. sM|SuperHotGarbage (Kid Buu/Captain Ginyu/Super Saiyan Vegeta) – Will be flown to the Saga Event of his choice
2. Crescent|Doza (SSGSS Goku/Bardock/Super Saiyan Goku, Bardock/SSGSS Goku/Super Saiyan Goku)
3. Teemo (Bardock/Fused Zamasu/Android 16)
4. Monkeymadness (Cell/Piccolo/Tien)
5. SX|EMP RougeYoshi (Nappa/Kid Buu/Gotenks)
5. Legendaryypred (Adult Gohan/Gotenks/Android 16)
7. BxA|A$AP R1CKY (Android 21/Broly/Super Saiyan Vegeta)
7. Millsaysurass (Adult Gohan/Cell/Super Saiyan Vegeta)
The next Offline Dragon Radar Events will be Canada Cup 2018 for the Americas, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and the 2018 Thailand Game Show, occurring in Bangkok, for Asia, both on the weekend of October 26th-28th, as well as The Colosseum for Europe, in Rome, Italy, November 17th and 18th. Meanwhile, the next Online Event will be for Latin America South, with fighterz from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Venezuela, Peru, and Uruguay eligible to compete. Registration is currently open on smash.gg. The tournament will begin on Sunday, November 18th, with top 8 being played on Tuesday, November 20th, streaming live at twitch.tv/dragonballfighterz.
As SoulCalibur VI is now available, some may be wondering about input lag in the game. Any seasoned fighting game fan wants to know the precise milliseconds between the timing of their input and the resulting animation on the screen. French computer science developer WydD put Bandai Namco’s latest fighter through the wringer, and unfortunately, the results aren’t the best.
Per his testing on PlayStation 4, SCVI has approximately 5.42 frames of lag, variable by stability. This positions right around Street Fighter V‘s estimated 5.37 frames of delay, and slower than Tekken 7‘s reduced lag (4.60 frames).
The chart below displays the results:
WydD said that due to a “weird bug” the stability came out to 72%. He also cross-checked with other games to make sure the issue isn’t with his console. SoulCalibur VI has legacy controller mode, and that didn’t affect testing either.
Having played the game at various events in an offline setting, I definitely felt a fair amount of input delay. Whether Bandai Namco is going to patch the game to reduce this remains to be seen; however, before letting this deter you from purchasing, make sure to check out Shoryuken’s own review of SoulCalibur VI to help guide your decision!
We’re breaking the first and second rules of Project Fight Club right now.
With the rise of fighting games in the esports climate, we’re seeing many networks and shows come up with attempts to showcase the fighting game community in different ways. Yet another one has surfaced — with some entertaining twists.
eGG Network — an esports entertainment network based in Southeast Asia — has released a trailer for Project Fight Club, showing off Marn, Justin Wong, HumanBomb, Xian, Rose Ma, and Oil King among the participants. While focusing on Street Fighter, there also seem to be some twists — including random character battle,s and what seems to be shuffleboard matches.
No other information has surfaced on when the series will launch, at least not yet.
Despite our focus on mechanics and technique here at SRK, we can’t overlook the fact that a big part of the success of SoulCalibur is its unique world and single-player content. Given the appeal that these features have to a wide audience, it feels irresponsible to not address them in some way. Here, then, is documentation on my experience with the pre-release, PlayStation 4 version of SoulCalibur VI‘s single-player experience.
Note: All information discussed references the PlayStation 4 version of SoulCalibur VI.
Museum
Portrait mode in the Museum has several pages of info on each character.
The Museum is where you go to dive head first into SoulCalibur’s lore, art, music, and more. Probably one of its most fascinating sections is the library, which contains a massive encyclopedia of various weapons, characters, and histories of its world. It’s worth reading, despite the fact much of it must be unlocked via either playing through Libra of Souls or by unlocking with “Soul Points” earned through various game modes. (Soul Points are also used to purchase some costume items in Creation Mode, though, so you might want to use them there first.)
I want to note that while I have less kind things to say about some of the game’s story modes further down the article, the stories I sampled in the Muesem were fun to read and interesting. I also have a hunch that some of these sections — such as the music section — will be expanded on in the future.
Character Creation
You can’t put a skeleton in hot pants.
Sorry, that’s an odd sentence, isn’t it? Let’s give it some context.
SCVI’s character creator is great: it has 12 races and a huge amount of customization options thanks to stickers and accessory slots. If you are willing to take the time to play with its options, you can make some wild-looking stuff. Unfortunately, there are a few things lacking — namely, the equipment itself.
It’s impossible not to compare this to Tekken’s Customization Mode — and I think the major difference is that, while SoulCalibur undeniably lets you do more with individual pieces, Tekken simple has more pieces, and they fit better on the model. SoulCalibur’s pieces clip nearly all the time, and it gets particularly bad on some of the fantasy races –a basic shirt clips through the entirety of the front of the Fully-Transformed Malfested, for example. (Which, for some reason, are only allowed to be male.) And that’s even assuming you’re allowed to put that equipment on a particular race at all.
You can, however, put a skeleton in a French maid outfit.
You see, there’s Lizardmen and Skeletons in the game, and I hope you didn’t actually want to get creative with either of them, because you can’t put them in most of the pieces in the game. A skeleton can wear pants, but not hot pants. Lizardmen exist, but they apparently don’t know how to wear most clothes, either. Maybe Lizardmen clothes are going to be DLC along with Aeon. Grumble grumble.
These are extreme, silly examples meant to underline a more general point — there’s arbitrary things you just can’t do in this engine, and it all just smacks of a lack of imagination on the developers part. Or time. Maybe they just ran out of time. Honestly, given some of the cool stuff you can do, I think I am more willing to believe that.
So yeah, long story short: I got to write the sentence “You can’t put a skeleton in hot pants.” That’s on my resume now.
Story Mode
There are spoilers below for events very early into the game, so if you want to play this spoiler-free, I’d just skip this section all together.
There are two story modes in SoulCalibur VI: “Libra of Souls” and “Soul Chronicle”. The bigger draw from a promotional standpoint was Libra of Souls, as it called back to SoulCalibur III’s wildly popular “Chronicles of the Sword” mode.
For whatever failings SCIII had as a game — and it had a lot of them — it made money for Namco because of this RPG/Fighter hybrid. Both SCVI’s LoS and SCIII’s CotS are basically RPGs where you create a character that participates in part of the SoulCalibur plot-line. Substituting your typical RPG random encounters are AI Battles within SCVI’s versus engine, and you can manipulate your damage output and health with food and weapons as you journey along.
Libra of Snores
As far as Libra’s plot is concerned, the basic gist is this: Zasalamel finds your character floating in a strange, energy-filled tear in time and space called (unfortunately) an “Astral Fissure”. He tells you that you almost fully turned into a Malfested — a being inflicted by a curse that turns its victim to a cancerous, enraged Body Horror — but that you’re lucky he got there in time to save you. He also tells you this exact same dialogue if you pick the Fully-Transformed Malfested race as your character. You don’t have to lie to me, Zas. I know my character’s face looks like melted nightmare candle. That’s why I picked him. It’s October.
Where’s the “ask about his eyesight” option?
From there, your quest leads you to running around and thrusting your hands into Astral Fissures — the game’s choice of wording, not mine — in order to stay alive. There’s not much to really develop your character’s personality outside of a small alignment system. The way it works is: you’re presented with tough moral questions like “Do you want the GOLDEN SWORD OF FREEDOM or the BLUE SWORD OF ORDER.” I picked the golden sword because I think free people are typically happier people. The game informed me that I became more evil because of this decision. Cool, thanks.
I don’t know if it’s just a problem with some poor translation choices, or if the original writing is really that bad. But between the bland presentation, dry prose, and bizarre motives of every character (every party member that I can recall, I stabbed with a spear in order to make them my friend. The 16th century was wild, ya’ll.) have made Libra of Souls an experience I have trouble picturing anyone enjoying. Having dumb-as-rocks AIs as your antagonists doesn’t really help the excitement levels in anyway. The only difficulty in Libra of Souls is that, eventually, your health will start carrying over between battles through the form of an expedition. With that in mind, item management becomes important so that you don’t die while traveling — this might be the only “fun” I can really picture from LoS, overall.
So, this is it. This is Libra of Souls. Just imagine the experience of looking at this picture for 13 hours.
Minor aside: There’s also a strange quirk with the camera in this mode — it’s off-center, tilting towards your character’s perspective. It doesn’t make things “more difficult to play” so much as “more difficult to look at.” Luckily, I found out, this can be disabled in the options. It might be cool and cinematic for other people, but I had the vague feeling of motion sickness when I looked at it.
If all you need is an RPG UI to be happy and nothing I’ve said above sounds like a negative to you, let me drop one more thing here: Lizardman is in the game. He’s a finished NPC you run into with some regularity, he has his own unique style with his classic moves from earlier games, he has some new moves, and you’ll never know how good they are because you can’t play as him. He’ll almost certainly be in the Season pass later down the line, and much like Tira, it’s a shameless nickle-and-diming of the audience that has, unfortunately, become commonplace in our genre. I don’t mind that he’s there, I mind that he’s there and not playable.
But there is good news that even I can’t deny: there’s a lot of content this mode. My 2 hours is nowhere near the full amount of this story, and this mode is good for grinding in-game gold to unlock CaS equipment. I think if you enjoyed Chronicles of the Soul in SCIII you’ll probably dig this if just for sheer amount of stuff to do. It’s just a shame that all that stuff feels completely bland and inconsequential at best.
I really did go into this trying to see from the eyes of players that love this sort of thing — and I know I am woefully outnumbered on this take. But I don’t get it, and that’s fine — because there’s another story mode I can play instead, and it tells the story of the same events in a way I actually enjoyed.
Soul Chronicle
“Soul Chronicle” divides several episodic stories along a timeline of events, with chapters centered around a single character’s journey and how they tangle into SoulCalibur VI‘s overall narrative. Its individual “episodes” are told through beautifully-rendered character portraits and voice-acted dialogue. The game-play is about the same as Libra of Souls: you vs. some dolls from the character creator, or maybe the occasional main character– but something about piecing the story together into singular, contained chunks made it a lot easier for me to digest. Neither story mode’s plot is particularly deep or inventive, but at least “Soul Chronicle” respects your time and has fun while doing so. The AI battles are still dumb, but they feel a lot more tolerable only because you’re actually in the middle of a narrative whose end you can see in sight.
There are levels of madness that even Astaroth cannot process.
Every now and then, I was genuinely impressed by some of the depth woven into these stories. Slight spoiler in this paragraph: Astaroth’s section is an example of what the best storytelling in Calibur looks like. They took what seems like a flat, irredeemably evil character and wove in a gripping arc amid his divine bloodbath. The bar for fighting game plots is low and fighting game character development even lower — When Astaroth’s inevitable crisis of purpose finally occurs and his genuine confusion colored his dialogue, I wasn’t thinking about genre or combos or training mode. I was just wanting to see more of his story. That immersion is far beyond anything else this genre has ever done for me.
Not everything in Soul Chronicle hits, but when it does, it’s worth it. There’s truly not much else to say than this. It’s amazing how much difference presentation and pacing can make.
There’s something here for you.
So it’s probably clear that I leaned heavily in favor of some modes over the others. Ultimately, I think this is a strong point in favor of SCVI — that there is something here for everyone. I just wanted SCVI so that I can go back to tournaments for my favorite series of all time — and if I, as rigidly uninterested in single-player content as I am, can find some genuine entertainment outside of versus mode, I am confident you can too. SoulCalibur VI delivers, it just doesn’t deliver consistently. Given some of the sins of its past, that’s totally fine.
Bandai Namco provided SRK with a copy of SoulCalibur VI for the purpose of this review.
The latest DLC character for Square-Enix’s Dissidia Final Fantasy NT is now available for purchase. Kam’lanaut, the archduke of Jeuno, has been released for PlayStation 4.
Originally a non-playable boss character from the MMORPG Final Fantasy XI, Kam’lanaut became playable in arcades in Dissidia Final Fantasy as part of its September update. Now, players on PlayStation 4 can purchase him for $5.99, or as part of the $29.99 Season Pass.
To celebrate his arrival, Square Enix has released a new trailer for him that pays homage to his MMO roots.
With the arrival of Kam’Lanaut, only two more DLC characters remain in the game’s Season Pass. These are a female from the newer half of the Final Fantasy series who’s a veteran of the previous Dissidia games, and a male character from the same half of the series, who is making their Dissidia debut in this game.
The definitive way to play SoulCalibur VI is here with the HORI Real Arcade Pro. SOULCALIBUR VI Edition for PlayStation 4/3/PC and Xbox One/360/PC. The two fightsticks are gorgeously designed with semi-translucent cases and well-made with Hayabusa parts. There’s a lot to love about this pair of fightsticks but it’s worth mentioning there were certainly some questionable decisions made when developing this momentous fightstick duo.
The bold color choices will immediately set these fightsticks apart. The deep red and blue cases are partially see-through and are sure to stand out in a sea of silver and black fight sticks. There’s no doubt that this pair of sticks are visually stunning, and they are a must-have collector’s item for that reason alone. It is interesting to note, however, that if the two sticks are meant to symbolize the SoulCalibur and the Soul Edge the shades are a little bit off, but it’s not too huge an issue since the sticks look so good in their own right. That being said, the PlayStation 4 stick is a little darker, and you miss out on some of the translucent effect.
The stick art that was chosen for the two controllers is phenomenal. The PlayStation 4 stick makes sense thematically with Siegfried fighting his past self and eternal foe, Nightmare. The Xbox One stick is designed more with fan service in mind, with the entire female cast (minus Seong Mi-Na) front and center. It’s an odd decision to include Tira, a character who is a bonus for the Season Pass and not found in the base roster, instead of Seong Mi-Na, and this is coming from someone who has been a fan of Tira since SCIII. It appears there is room for the additional fighter on the side of the stick, but alas, she will have to be remembered another way. Maybe with a sticker.
Overall the button placement does not get in the way of the stick art, but the start button, which is covered by a latch, is a bit of an eyesore for two fightsticks whose main focus comes from their art. It is nice the button is recessed a little and that the latch is there to avoid accidental button presses, but it would be much preferred on the top, around where the touchpad is on the PS4 stick. The function buttons on the top are well aligned on the Xbox One stick but the PlayStation stick cuts a lot out of the image, while the pieces cut out aren’t detrimental to the entire aesthetic and there isn’t anywhere else Nightmare could have been placed without losing more of his focus points, it does show that perhaps the buttons could have been placed on the side to alleviate some of the image cutting. Bear in mind, this is all coming from someone without any icons on his desktop, so this is really just personal preference, for functionality’s sake, the buttons are great where they are.
The fightsticks are a good weight with rubber stops on the bottom so they don’t slide and they fit comfortably on your lap. The sticks do not open without being unscrewed, so easy modding is not a focus for this special edition offering. The attached USB cables are a good standard length, running at three meters, this length does get shortened a bit when using the cable cover since the cutout for the cable is on the far end. You only lose a few inches, so in the end, it won’t matter much, its just an interesting design choice. The cable compartment is nice and roomy so you won’t have to worry about crunching up your non-replaceable USB cable.
One final note on the design is how bland the PlayStation stick’s packaging is in comparison to its Xbox counterpart. It must be due to certain licensing requirements from Sony because its hard to believe the decision was intentional. And while a difficult business decision to make in regards to supply and demand, I am sure there are players on both consoles who would have preferred the opposite stick design. Unfortunately, there is no DLC to have both Yoda and Darth Vader with this fightstick offering. (Bad SoulCalibur IV joke.)
Function:
The fightsticks feel great to use and are made of standard HORI Hayabusa parts. The main buttons are all matte so your fingers will be less likely to slip off when changing inputs. Some may prefer the glossy feel when sliding to input combos, but with SoulCalibur VI only running five buttons, that becomes less necessary. HORI was even nice enough to include a recommended button layout for the stick printed on the back of the box. The joystick is very responsive and I have found myself more successful with inputs than my previous bouts with my Madcatz TE+ stick, which uses Sanwa parts. The stick and the buttons also create a lot of audible feedback, which is something I prefer when it comes to controllers, it helps me know for a fact that an input was made.
It is pretty standard fare though, so if you have used a Real Arcade Pro stick before, this is bound to feel familiar, just in an utterly stylish package. That being said, the components included within the RAP controllers are tried and true and have continued to impress. So whether or not this is your first RAP or another for your collection, it’s definitely worth checking out for its core components.
Oddly enough, both sticks do not retain the same features. The PlayStation model has additional functions like the ability to utilize the joystick as either the directional pad, or the left/right analog sticks, and a turbo mode. The Xbox version of the stick (which didn’t actually come with an instruction manual but a QR code leading to one and once you get there its just one page of information printed in multiple languages which could have easily been printed on the same piece of paper with the QR code) cannot be used as a right stick, has no Turbo function, but does have the ability to adjust game and chat audio by holding down the Right Stick Button or the Left Stick Button and a desired direction of the joystick. You can even mute your microphone by hitting the three main function keys at the same time.
It gets even stranger when you read further into the Xbox instruction manual and find that when connected to an Xbox, even if you switch the function to the left stick, it will always be read as the D-Pad and that when it is connected to PC the same problem will occur if the Xbox One drivers are chosen. Utilizing the Xbox 360 function, however, allows complete control between D-Pad and left stick on PC.
All of the strange design decisions aside, the two sticks are great to use while implementing their main function: playing fighting games. The pair of fightsticks are now my favorite weapons of choice to enter the FGC battlefield — primarily due to their impressive looks — but also because of how good they feel to use. The two controllers will be a great addition to any SoulCalibur fan’s arsenal especially when celebrating the release of SoulCalibur VI.
Pros:
Eye-popping casing with beautiful stick art.
Matte-surfaced Hayabusa buttons keep your grip without slipping.
Stands up on its own for display.
Cons:
The start button is in the top panel, cutting off portions of the art.
Both sticks do not have the same functions.
Requires tools to open and mod/repair.
Both sticks are launching alongside SoulCalibur VI today at GameStop and Amazon, so be sure to pick up your stick soon to play the next title in style. Links for purchase can be found below.
