REVIEW: Xbox Live Arcade's Soul Calibur

Remember back in 1999-2000 going over to your new shiny system from Sega,the Dreamcast and firing up this fighting game called Soul Calibur?. Well do you remember how amazing of a fighting game it was? Well here we are around 8 years later and we finally have Soul Calibur available on the Xbox Live Arcade. For a great price of only 800 msp ($10.00) you can download one of the best looking XBLA games available.

Graphically Soul Calibur has pretty much survived the transition to HD without many glaring problems. One of my only gripes with the visuals in this game is that the menus and pretty much all of the text in this game is pixelated and blurry,BUT during gameplay the character models and surroundings all look great and sharp,sporting obvious improvements to the textures over the Dreamcast version. In the first options menu when you first turn the game on you can elect to either have the screen small with surrounding borders,or bigger with borders just on the sides,but unfortunately there is no setting that will allow you to go completely full screen.

Other obvious Xbox 360 improvements made to the game include 12 achievements totalling 200 gamerscore as with all XBLA games and the addition of leaderboards (60 of them to be exact). Unfortunately there is NO XBOX LIVE MULTIPLAYER,so definitely keep that in mind if you are thinking about purchasing this title.

Soul Calibur retains the quality of the Dreamcast champ and adds some online functionality with the inclusion of online leaderboards along with the achievements and visual upgrades. So you should definitely pick this one up if you are one of the following........... A fan of the original and no longer have a Dreamcast............or a fan of 3D weapons based fighting games and you don't care about no online multiplayer,if you are neither of those types however,you should avoid this game.

GRAPHICS- 8 out of 10 (improved over the DC version,but blurry/pixelated text and menus)

CONTROL-9 out of 10 (controls just as good as the DC version,it just feels better with the superior 360 controller)

SOUND- 7 out of 10 (no noticeable improvements made here,everything sounds the same as the DC version on my setup)

OVERALL- 8 out of 10 (A first of it's kind in the XBLA,hopefully we will now see more 3D fighters come to the arcade,like I said earlier,this is a must have for fans or anyone else looking for a high quality but cheap offline fighting game)