I hate him, but I want him.
As I said before, the Star Wars bits in Soulcalibur IV are entirely non-confrontational. However, if you want to unlock the SEEEEECREEEET APPRENTIIIIIIIICCCCEEE, you have to beat Arcade Mode with Darth Vader. Which is super hard. I can beat Arcade Mode (which is 8 matches; Secret Apprentice is #7) with Talim because I fucking rock faces with Talim. But that gets me naught but another 10,000 gold to go spend on in-game panties. Darth Vader is a pile of slow-moving suck.
Although Vader in SCIV did inspire Clark to want a lightsaber. So we got him the current Clone Wars Build Your Own Lightsaber kit, which was on sale for $25 at Target. It comes with a dozen parts that you screw together to create your own lightsaber handle design. The coolest bit is that you have to insert special plastic crystals in the hilt to determine the saber's color and sound! Clark prefers a blue lightsaber.
Final Crisis totally making sense.
We've had two issues of setup, and #3 started paying off on that. It is highly obvious now that Darkseid's group is somehow switching bodies, and have infiltrated the heroes (and villains) at the highest levels. Traditionally, the Justice League et. al. is a reactive group, but this attack is so finely orchestrated that they have no idea what to react to. So they're totally at a loss, the major players have been swept off the table, and they really haven't be able to do a thing about it. Those marketing lines about "the day evil won" were not the usual advertising hype.
Siren is probably coming to US blu-ray anyway.
Forget about importing AND downloading. Siren will likely see a US blu-ray release, with extra content to make it worth the assumed $60 price tag.
So this either means that DLC Siren sold so well that Sony doesn't mind bringing this up, or that DLC Siren sold so poorly that Sony thinks they need a disk release.
Blast Works kinda sucks.
I picked up Blast Works this weekend, on the basis that it always comes up in the lists of Awesome Third Party Wii Games That No One Is Buying. It was marked down to $20 at Toys R Us.
Turns out, it's pretty lame. It's a shmup, a side-scrolling shooter with exactly one clever gimmick: killed enemies attach to your ship, creating this hilarious malformed spaceship. If you're good, you can make your ship as big as the screen. Or bigger. On one level, I actually filled the board with my gestalt ship, to the point where I was killing baddies totally offscreen.
But even with all that, it's still just an average space shooter, and I'm just not that interested. You're supposed to be able to build your own ships and levels and enemies, but the editing tools are typically cumbersome and do not seem to be worth the effort. Plus, the download station website (blastworksdepot.com) has been a total disaster for me, refusing to let me log in.
Yeah, my friend played a versus match against a CPU controlled Apprentice (which apparently is harder than the one you face during the Story mode) and found him to be potentially abusable in the right hands. Neither of us have touched him as result. Although we did have a great time a few evenings back with a Yoshimitsu versus Darth Vader match—I used Yoshimitsu since I really, really don't know how to use him and he used Darth because of his belief that you can know all of his best moves and still be taken down fairly easily. Well I'd have to say that my friend's guess was mostly right since at the end of around 20 matches we were about evenly matched despite him actually knowing far more of Darth's moves than I of Yoshimitsu's.
So yes Darth is fairly slow and would appear to have all the finesse with a lightsaber as a lumberjack trying to fight with his axe. The one bright side is that Darth does have a decent enough force move that impales the enemy upon his stationary light saber. Anyway, like everyone else I've found Darth and Yoda's presence in the game odd. Of course my rationalization about the whole matter is that it finally attempts to legitimize the presence of Darth, miscellaneous Jedi, and Storm Troopers at purely anime conventions (we're talking purely anime conventions like Anime Expo, Fanime, Otakon, etc).