Ok, so I missed a couple of weeks....

You'll live, I'll have to make this entry extra awesome. Let's start with what I promised, a review of Song Summoner and Soul Calibur 4.

Song Summoner (for those not in the know) is a turn based strategy game that Square Enix surprise-released for the ipod about a month or so ago. It creates characters from your songs, similar to how Monster Rancher works. The plot is as hokey as you'd expect from a game that you play on a mp3 player, the combat system works well enough, and the graphics are about par for the course. The biggest downside is how battery thirsty the game is. If you don't want to sit plugged into the wall you better save pretty damn often. This is nicely balanced against how the character generation works. The biggest issue I have with the game is the difficulty in remembering which songs you've already transferred over (though there's likely some tag I've not noticed that explains this....I haven't had too many chances to play it sadly).

Next is Soul Calibur 4. The storyline is as convoluted as I've grown to expect from any fighter made by Capcom. I'm really counting on them releasing "Soul Calibur: This Is What Happened" a few years from now. It'll have a story mode with every character from the beginning of Soul Blade to the end of the series, so you can figure out just who all got to the Lost Cathedral in SC3, who beat Cervantes, and whose endings were canon. I think it'd be a big hit. Let's talk about mechanics though. They've added a new feature called "Critical Finish" that let's you end the fight with an instant win the second you perform it. This sounds pretty game breaking, but you only have the option of performing one once your opponents Soul Gauge is blinking red, which essentially means your opponent has been turtleing the whole match. What this means is that as long as you remember to use Guard Impact, you'll do just fine.

I have a problem with the story mode in SC4 though. Every character's story is a grand total of five fights long, which doesn't really give you enough time to get attached to the characters (particularly the new ones, Hilde and Algol). The Tower of Lost Souls mode is kinda fun, though for the life of me I cannot easily beat any Zasalamel bots. Lastly, the Star Wars characters (you knew about this, right?) that they added work pretty seamlessly from a gameplay perspective (though having a fight on a star destroyer is...weird). The Apprentice is particularly fun to play as.

Anyway, I'm having ADD something fierce right now. I'll try to update next week with my thoughs on Snoop Dogg's foray into country music, a local label called Sticky Green Records, and the game "The World Ends With You."

-Andy