Critical Gauge

The Critical Gauge charged at a little over 100%

This is the power gauge next to either player’s health bar, previously known as the ‘Soul Gauge’. The main difference now is that you can charge the gauge fully twice (indicated by the number in the centre of the gauge). Most of the moves on this page use a percentage of your charge, and trying to trigger them with insufficient power will result in nothing happening.

• You fill the Critical Gauge by performing attacks or blocking them;
• If you’re about to lose the match, you get a free, one off 100% boost at the beginning of the last round. i.e. If your opponent is 2-0 up in a 3 round match. Note that if you already have two full charges, you will get no further advantage;
• The same will happen for your opponent if you subsequently push the game into a Final Battle situation (i.e. you turn the above battle around to 2-2).

Critical Edge

The showy, big new combo moves. These use a full charge of your critical gauge, but they can be blocked or side-stepped. Or you can be stupid enough to trigger them out of range of your opponent (doh). The following trailer shows you everything you need to know: 

Or in other words: If you’re on screen-left, press down,down right,right x2, followed by “A+B+K” (the upper three face buttons on your joypad, or the rear-right trigger). The directions are flipped if you’re on screen-right. Easy.

Brave Edge

Honestly, I cannot find any examples, though I’ve triggered this on occasion. Brave Edge is simply a supplementary, powerful end to certain combos, achieved by pressing “A+B+K” (again, the upper three face buttons on your joypad, or the rear-right trigger). You lose half a charge of your Critical Gauge for triggering one of these.

Guard Impact

Brought forward from the previous games with a little tweaking, Guard Impact is a defensive move that repels all basic attacks at the loss of 25% of a full Critical Gauge charge. It is a little easier to perform than in Soul Calibur IV, executed with left+A+B+K. If you’re being pummelled by an opponent, it can give you an opening in which you can turn the tide on them.

Just Guard

Oddly, Just Guard seems to have much the same function as Guard Impact, except the competitive community feels that it’s a lot more useful. For starters, it’s free. Secondly, it allows you to quickly get an attack in once executed, or quickly take up a guarding position. By comparison, Guard Impact leaves you a little more open for repeat hits and costs 25% of a Critical Gauge charge. This great video from Youtube user AvoidingthePuddle gives you a run-down of the move, though be prepared for a little fighting game jargon:

Just Guard is executed with a single tap of the Guard Button (the lower face button) just as your opponent’s hit connects with your character. Low attacks must be caught with down+G. The reason that Guard Impact still exists is simply that it’s a lot easier to pull off (you don’t have to be dead on with connecting to your opponent’s attack). But with Just Guard, a top player can parry a string of hits, unblockable attacks and worse.

Quick Step

Soul Calibur’s defining feature has always been its ’8-way run’ system, allowing you to side-step and circle your opponent to avoid attacks and get your own attacks in whilst they’re left flailing about. Quick Step helps streamline this, and when executed will briefly put you outside the range of any ‘vertical’ attacks (though ‘horizontal’ attacks) will still connect.

Quick step is simple to execute: you tap the direction you want to go once and quickly follow up with a longer second press in the same direction. I.e. up,UP or down,DOWN. As the video above shows, you’ll know its been successful when you see cartoonish white lines appearing.

Other Important Concepts

• The Ukemi – a move that allows you to stand up quick after having been thrown to the floor – remains in the game. Press A+G (the left and bottom face buttons) when you hit the ground;
• Fuzzy Guard is assumed to be an unintentional glitch that allows you character to guard against both high and low attacks by simply pressing Guard and tapping Up. It’s listed here so that you know not to use it (because any player who recognises what you’re doing will likely be very unhappy. And, I don’t know, perhaps their Dad could beat your Dad up in a fight?);
• When a player with a flashing life-bar unsuccessfully lands a series of strong attacks on an opponent, they enter ‘Guard Crush’ (formerly ‘Soul Crush’ in SCIV). They then become vulnerable to heavy attacks from their opponent;
• Unlike in Soul Calibur IV, customisable weapons and costumes are just there for aesthetic value – they do not have special attributes in battle;
• This also means that when equipment breaks, you won’t suffer any ill-effects (aside from standing around in your underwear).

Unlockables

First thing that anyone wants to do with a new fighting game is to mine out all those optional hidden extras, but I’ve stuck this at the end because you may want to stop reading if you’d rather not be spoiled! Anyway, unlocks are pretty straightforward in Soul Calibur V (there are multiple methods for some unlocks, but the easiest is listed here):

• The characters Elysium, Edge Master, Alpha Patroklos and Pyrrah Omega are obtained at various points in the Story -1607 A.D. mode;
• The ‘Soul of Devil Jin’ character creation fighting style is given to you for getting to character level 5 (this takes very little time at all);
• Kilik is unlocked at Character level 11. Alternatively, defeat him in Arcade mode (encountered by Maxi in the ‘Asia’ route);
• The easiest way to unlock Algol is to fight and defeat a character using his style in the ‘Quick Battle’ mode. Alternatively, get to Player Level 31;
• Dampierre is either pre-order or Collector’s Edition DLC, but you can bet he’ll turn up on PSN and Xbox Live sooner rather than later (The character actually turns up as an opponent in ‘Quick Match’ mode whether you own him or not. Defeating him doesn’t earn you use of the character).

Also, the arenas:

• The ‘Denever Castle’ and ‘Utopia of the Blessed’ arenas are unlocked via the Story -1607 A.D. mode.
• Defeat Kilik in Legendary Souls or Arcade mode to earn ‘The Penitentiary of Destiny’;
• Defeating Edge Master in the same modes unlocks ‘Tower of Glory: Spiral of Good & Evil’;
• ‘Tower of Glory: Most Holy Dichotomy’ is the reward for doing the same with Algol;
• ‘Astral Chaos: Pathway’ becomes available at Player Level 25.

Oh, and as you climb the Player rankings, you pick up titles for your profile, as well as a huge array of clothing and weapons for use in the Character Creation mode!

Soul Calibur V is out now on PS3 and Xbox 360.

Mighty impressive figures I must say, further bolstered by Origin generating over $100 million in revenue since the service went live in June 2011. Eurogamer also report that there are over 9.3 million users on the service, but as some accounts were transferred over from the old EA Downloader service, it shouldn’t be taken that all those users have signed up since Origin went live.

It might not match the figures we are seeing from Steam right now, but with 21 publishers now on the service, ranging from Warner Bros to Capcom and Alan Wake coming on Origin too, Valve might have to start looking over their shoulder at what EA are doing with Origin.

Anyone out there using Origin, thoughts on it compared to Steam?

“Starting February 7, Ubisoft will be transitioning the hosting of many of its online services from a third-party data center to a new facility. During the transition, some Ubisoft services and online games will not be available. We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience.”

Ubisoft have been quick to point out that their newer and popular titles, Assassin’s Creed: Revelations and Driver: San Francisco will be unaffected by the movement. Casualties of the move however include Tom Clancy’s HAWX 2, Might & Magic: Heroes 6 and The Settlers 7, which will become completely unplayable for all legitimate Ubisoft customers throughout the duration of the server transition. What separates the former category from the latter, aside from their overwhelming popularity, remains unclear.

Games which require only a one-time activation will remain available, as long as you’ve already activated them. If you haven’t got around to that yet, you’ll just have to hang on until Ubisoft decide it’s time to let you play the games you’ve paid for.

But don’t worry, as Ubisoft points out, “this move ultimately will help us improve the maintenance of our infrastructure and deliver better uptime and greatly improved services for our customers.” So that’s alright then, isn’t it?

The server move is set to begin on February 7th. Ubisoft have however given absolutely no indication when their unplayable titles will be back up again.

A list of affected titles and services is currently available here.

The change coincides with the launch of the massive 1.7 update dubbed Carnival of the Ascended. This brings significant PvP developments, a new Master Mode dungeon (affectionately dubbed ‘Caduceus Rise’), Ascended weddings and a veritable banquet of other improvements.

Rift Lite is available to anyone with a Trion Worlds account, and is accessible across all servers. The first twenty levels can be enjoyed, without spending a penny, entirely void of any restrictions.

“We think a Lite edition with no time limit is the best way for players to see what an amazing experience Rift continues to be,” said Scott Hartsman, Rift’s executive producer. He also commented on the success of the MMO since launch; “In the past ten months, Rift has evolved at a breakneck pace, through seven massive updates that set new expectations for live MMOs, in features, in content, and in service.”

There’s been much speculation online that Rift Lite is merely an intermediary stage before the MMO finally goes fully free-to-play. Hartsman, however, stated last November that Trion has “absolutely no plans whatsoever” to introduce such a radical change.

After all, offering up the first twenty levels, absolutely free, worked wonders for World of Warcraft, when the MMO giant employed the same tactic last year – as such, there’s nothing to say that Rift won’t enjoy the same success, albeit on a smaller scale.

Head over to the official website to sign-up and start playing.

Superficially, the biggest change in Soul Calibur V is in the character roster. After years of advancing carefully a few months and years at a time, the series has leapt forward a full 17 years to allow for a new generation of characters. Sons, daughters, apprentices, disciples, successors: most of your favourite characters have spawned a fresh-faced, younger version of themselves. In practice, they play like slightly tweaked versions of their predecessors, changes that are no more radical than you might expect between any other numbered game in the franchise.

This is no bad thing: seasoned Soul Calibur players will likely find themselves right at home. Newcomers meanwhile, feel that little less disadvantaged in those crucial first minutes of contact. Not that the backstory gets in the way of the action. The basics of the game and the universe are explained through the game’s main story mode, wherein the player controls Patroklos Alexander (and guests) in his search for sister Pyrrha, eventually becoming embroiled in a battle between the two swords, Soul Edge and Soul Calibur.

There's nothing to say that fighting game stories can't be good, or at least intelligible, but Soul Calibur V isn't ready to buck any trends just yet.

Thankfully, these solid but derivative characters aren’t all that is on offer, as there are several new styles to get to grips with. Z.W.E.I. is a bare-chested swordsman who calls upon a wolf-spirit for supplementary pummelling. Viola is the token Gothic Lolita, commanding a floating orb for spectacular ranged effects. Assassin’s Creed’s Ezio is also playable, offering a fusion of high powered close-range and weak, disruptive long range moves. The rest of the roster is filled up with series regulars, mysteriously saved from the ravages of age: controversial pin-up dominatrix Ivy remains, alongside crab-like bondage gimp Voldo, Toshiro Mifune tribute act Mitsurugi, and other familiars including Siegfried, Nightmare, Raphael, Cervantes and so on.

Some characters inevitably didn’t make the cut, and the availability of three unlockable characters that do essentially the same thing (round by round randomisation of styles) is disappointing. But there’s more than enough fighting hours to be had out of this roster. The fundamentals are all down pat: the controls are beautifully responsive, the loading times are unobtrusive and even the series’ trademark interstitials are that little less hammy. Visually, the arenas and the characters are highly detailed and very well animated, a clear step above the content of their predecessor.

Of course, if we’re talking visually, it would be remiss of me not to at least mention that the game features ridiculous amounts of exposed flesh, and boob physics that would make Einstein go back to the drawing board. T+A = Sex Sells, I guess, and of all the innovations Soul Calibur V could have brought, the removal of the genre’s perpetual male gaze was always the most unlikely. Soul Calibur V, consider yourself scolded. Also, even if your spiffy character creation mode has hours of dress-up, colour miscoordination fun, labeling a body type as ‘normal’ is probably a no-no.

Arenas could stand to be a little more dynamic, beyond the occasional broken wall or leap down to a secondary tier between rounds. But overall, there's a great variety of layouts.

Soul Calibur is usually counted among the more accessible fighting series out there, and whilst I’d argue this remains true, the genre is perhaps fundamentally hostile to new blood. The truth ought to come out this point: I’m not terrible at fighting games, but there are certainly times when ‘mediocre’ would be a generous description of my skills. But will Soul Calibur V be the game to make me more of a contender? I’m open to the idea, but not really convinced.

Why? Because SCV‘s training mode is simultaneously incredibly robust and utterly impenetrable. You can set up the state of the battle in any way you want, flick through pages of movement instructions and grind away to your heart’s content. It can genuinely make you a better player. And yet, the game never gives you something so simple as an acknowledgement that you’ve achieved the combo it’s telling you to perform. By comparison, Street Fighter IV‘s challenge mode – which feeds you moves to attempt and won’t let you progress until you get them right – is an obvious yet elegant solution. True, it’s probably also a lot more work. But so long as you’re in the business of creating games that players need to learn, you really should invest in the tools to make that possible.

SCV even puts some of its most essential information into a one-time pop up accessed in the story mode (i.e. the single place where it’s most likely to be encountered by a fresh player and thus be skipped or improperly understood). Among this information are the most essential core mechanics that Soul Calibur V introduces, including the Critical Edge attack, a simple showy high impact combo move that drains 100% of your critical gauge and is basically Namco’s response to SFIV‘s Ultra combos. Considering that even a single run-through of the game’s single player modes will involve facing AI opponents who use (and abuse) these moves, missing how to execute them is a severe handicap, and potentially disastrous for future play. At the very least, you’d expect a tutorial covering these new additions.

A 49 Year-Old Woman, Yesterday.

There’s also the matter of multiplayer, and how that’s changing the way that offline fighters are structured. The network element of Soul Calibur V seems to have received due attention: play is smooth even when the reported signal strength is low and the Global Colloseo’s system of regional lobbies containing tournament sign-ups, random match-ups and chat / personal lobby space has great potential. Then, ranked matches, a more traditional winner-stays on lobby system, replays and a ‘rival’ system that integrates with stats on- and offline give you pretty much everything you could ask for. Whilst the stress-test of thousands of simultaneous players has yet to prove the system, this could be a watershed moment for the online competitive scene.

These modes are good enough that they remind you how the offline game actually looks a little thin. Featuring just 20 fights, the story mode compares poorly to modes in preceding games, and they were far from perfect to begin with (but at least they featured objectives and branching paths). The substance is instead in the Quick Match mode, which is ultimately a place to grind titles for your online profile. Otherwise you’re left with the Arcade mode (and its different difficulty settings and opponent ‘routes’) and the tough as nails ‘Legendary Souls’ boss-rush mode.

Whilst undoubtedly an accomplished game, time will tell whether Soul Calibur V is actually for anyone but the fighting game aficionado and the controller-passing group of friends. The casual dabbler going solo will have to go online to get their money’s worth, and the experience will depend entirely on whether there’s anyone of comparable skill to challenge them. But at least this is an experience that deserves that much.

Verdict – Head Shot

Platforms Available – PS3, Xbox 360

Platform Reviewed – PS3

For more information on our scoring system, please read this post.

The demo is fairly minimal with single round bouts available in either UFC mode, or the all new PRIDE mode which provides a representation of the now defunct Japanese MMA group. There are two fighters available in each mode, which all in all makes for a fairly limited demo which is a shame considering the full game will have over 150 fighters along with the inclusion of the featherweight and bantamweight divisions.

It is also a bummer not being able to check out any of the career mode which will see you fight in PRIDE, the WFA and train for UFC before being called up to the main roster. Everything surrounding the game sounds great fun, and a little taste of some of the depth in this demo would have been nice.

At the end of the day though, Undisputed 3 will live and die by how it comes across in the Octagon, or in the ring for PRIDE fights. The action in the demo is a promising sign of things to come, I took to using the beginner control scheme which provides a simplified method of performing transitions. A quick flick up or down on the right analogue stick on the PS3 control puts you into a major or minor transition. The advanced method requires more stylistic moves on the stick to perform the transition you require.

Even at 720p the in-ring action looks brutal and fierce, I was pleasantly surprised with how good the game looked when throwing different kicks and punches. You also realise that this is a more mature game than THQ stablemate WWE 12 when you see the blood start to fly, and some of the ground and pound moves look deadly.

The demo is definitely short and sweet, but it provides a welcome glimpse of the game with release just a few weeks away. If you want real fighting action, it looks like Undisputed 3 may give you what you want.

UFC Undisputed 3 is released on the 17/02/12 on 360 and PS3.

Curt Schiling, head of 38 Studios has commented on the official forums in a bid to beat down the flames of anger. He reveals that the code that will come with all new copies of the game is in fact for Day 1 DLC, which in turn is free for those who purchase the game new thanks to that nifty little code.

There is of course the small issue of the second hand games market, a great source of revenue for high-street shops like GAME, but something which developers and publishers are less keen on. Curt explains his issue with second hand sales like so: “Every single person on the planet could wait and not buy Reckoning, the game would hit the bargain bin at some point and you could get it cheaper. 38 Studios would likely go away.” As such, he explains that the Day 1 DLC, free to those who buy the game new is a “REWARD [to] fans and gamers who commit to us with their time and money when it benefits the company.”

I for one have no issue with this approach, initial reports of there being an online pass have seem to be a bit wide of the mark as shown by Curt’s comments. In the current climate investing in new IP is seen as a risky proposition, as such developers and publishers are right to do whatever they can to ensure that they are able to maximise revenue from channels they are normally cut out of. In Curt’s post he goes on to say this:

“The industry is in a very odd place. The data coming in on used game sales is not saying the things many thought it should, or would. But companies are still trying to figure out how to receive dollars spent on games they make, when they are bought. Is that wrong? if so please tell me how.

Again, you can argue with methods, or process, and you absolutely can bitch and gripe about ANY DAY 1 DLC you are charged for, because I think I agree with many on that, but we are trying to create something here, product and company wise, and it takes dollars to do that”

I applaud Curt for his honesty, and I hope that this issue does not drastically impact on first time sales of the game which is looking quite nice. As we are talking about Kingdoms of Amalur, you may as well check out this new video showing off some of the possibilities you will find in the game.