Samurai Shodown II

I have very fond memories of this game. I used to play it when I was in high school in the arcades, along with Samurai Shodown, several Street Fighter games, Dark Stalkers, X-Men: Children of the Atom, and others. What I remember most about Samurai Shodown II is that I never beat it.

I never even came close. And the same went for Samurai Shodown.

So when I bought a Wii and the Wii Shop Channel had this title, I knew I had to go for it.

I've been playing it on and off for a while and this time it was not much different. I suck.

I still enjoy this game, but it's difficult. Unlike Street Fighter and many other Capcom fighting games, Samurai Shodown is very unpredictable. Your attacks do wildly different amounts of damage from one moment to the next. Sometimes it feels like the more slow-down there is, the more damage your character inflicts. The characters behave erratically and it's seriously hard to anticipate what they're going to do. The controller inputs are not super precise.

I still love this game.

I don't know if it's merely nostalgia or what. There is so much personality in these games that I just can't help it. I haven't downloaded Samurai Shodown as of yet (let's face it, the last thing I need is MORE games), but I suspect I will. I haven't mastered all the characters. I have barely beaten it once with Haomaru, but I don't really care.

Small point of interest, at least to me, is that this game taught me my first lessons in Japanese phonetics and phonology. I'll elaborate: each of the characters' names get called out when the match begins, say "Galford versus Cham Cham" or "Charlotte versus Tam Tam." However, that first match up was called out as Garufodo and Chamu Chamu, whereas the second one sounded like Charuroto and Tamu Tamu. Japanese is a language highly controlled by its syllables and I started to notice that every syllable in Japanese must end in a vowel sound (with the exception of N). Therefore, Gal·ford has to be changed to Ga·ru·fo·do. Char·lotte becomes Cha·ru·ro·to. I also started to notice the love/hate relationship between the Japanese language and the L sound. It's not that they don't have L's or even that they switch L's for R's. It's that those two sounds are nearly indistinguishable to a Japanese person. This is problematic because the Japanese love to include foreign words in their own speech. If there is one ridiculous thing I love (ha!) it is taking English words and phrases and figuring out what they would sound like if a Japanese person said them. It's silly. It's stupid. I am both of those things so it's amusing to me.

Anyway, there it is. I have Samurai Shodown II. I beat it with one character. One day I'll go back and play it with more characters and even download the original. It takes me back to my high school days when my life was ruled by fighting games. Except Mortal Kombat. I never really did play that one a whole lot. Anyway. Moving on. Up next, Shadow of the Colossus.

Rocking Some Band

Well, I went full into Rock Band 2.

There is much to say about this game. I started a new band cause apparently my save file rom when I was first playing it disappeared. Maybe I never played Rock Band 2 as much as I did Rock Band. Regardless, I created a new band and called it The Halfshells, with front man Leo. The rest of the players will be Mike, Donnie, and Ralph as I get to them.

So far I've been playing guitar on expert pretty consistently.
The only downside to this game is how much repetition there is in songs. I've been on the local tour mode and there are a lot of long set lists where I have to play several songs in a row.

Still, this is a game I can spend months on.

The only other thing I can say about Rock Band is that Harmonix scared me half to death. Ever since I bought this game, I knew I was going to spend some money on songs and track packs, but then I went on this alphabetical order feat and Rock Band got put all the way to the end. Now, I assumed I had all the time in the world to play the game and buy my songs, but I got a bit of a rude a awakening. At some point, when I was finishing Devil May Cry 3, I got reintroduced to Manfred Mann's "Blinded by the Light." It's an amazing song and I thought I'd log on to the Rock Band store to see if I could purchase it. To my horror, I could not log on to the online store! I went on the phone to customer service with Sony and EA. Nobody had an answer for me. I kept being told that the Rock Band online store was no longer being supported. I could no longer download songs! I couldn't even pay anyone to take my money (yeah, I meant to type that.)  Finally, I contacted Harmonix by email and they came back with an answer: the week I tried to log on, they were having server stability issues, but the store was still up and running and they'd willingly take my money. I promptly got some PSN funds for my wallet and downloaded some tunes for when I got to it. For some reason, there's some songs that I can't purchase, since they only run on Rock Band 3, but I got most of what I was interested in, and I can always go back and download what's left that I'm still interested in.

Top on the list of things that I wanted to download was More Than a Feeling. This was the first song on the first Guitar Hero and it was a beautiful way to set the tone for that game. Now I have it on Rock Band.
Equally worth mentioning is Weezer. I got every song available to me. I got some Dinosaur Jr and Satriani's Surfing With The Alien (I still haven't played that on expert cause it frankly scares me. Fucking Satriani!)

I'm going to have to move on to some other game before I finish this game because, let's face it, there is no "finishing" this game. I will gladly keep playing while I start other entries on the list.

I just love Rock Band. I'd take this game to a deserted island. It is that good.
Up next, Samurai Shodown II.