Hitman Tommy's January 2013 Recap - Fighting Game Month

After the amount of fun we had during Wii Month here at River City Retro the decision was made to dub January to be Fighting Game Month. Tyson and I both had a handful of current gen fighting games that we hadn't even tried yet so to help rectify this, making an event out of it seemed like a good idea.

In doing this it also got us to do something that we don’t typically do and that is to play online. Even though its 2013 and it seems like each game that comes out is all about the online multiplayer component, the two of us would rather sit in the same room to play a game. Besides when it comes to things like Xbox Live and Playstation Network usually the only people we would play against would be each other anyways. That being said to kick off fighting game month we donned the headsets and loaded in Soul Calibur V.

Both of us have been pretty big fans of the series and this seemed like a good way to kick things off as neither of us had played the newest installment. When going head to head things were about what you would expect in terms of game play, they weren't reinventing the formula by any means in this one but some moves did seem to be a hair off. I can't tell you how many times we'd try to pull off a move and just miss it by a millimeter. This turned out to be in my favour as historically Tyson beats my ass at pretty much any fighting game we play. At the end of the night I think the final score was 13-10 for me. I'm surprised I didn't take a picture of the tv screen for proof.

The games of Fighting Month 2013

The next day I continued on with some more Soul Calibur V playing through the story mode and trying to unlock a few other achievements. After playing it for most the afternoon I decided to try out a couple more games with Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe and Street Fighter X Tekken. I played each of those for about an hour. While they seemed like decent games I just didn't see myself sinking 9-10 hours in to either right away.

Over the course of that week I ended up settling on Rumble Roses XX. This was a game I had tried out before but that was shortly after it came out years ago. This game pretty much gives you what you’d expect. Scantily clad women, wrestling and more scantily clad women. Going into it I really wasn’t planning on playing more than an hour or two and then moving on to the next title. After an hour I realized I hadn’t got a single achievement yet so I made the decision to keep going until I got one. Winning the singles title with one of the characters seemed like it would be easy enough. Figured it would work much like an arcade mode where I would fight match after match until I got to challenge the champion. I didn’t know this until a bit later but the stipulations to get said title shot were: have 10 wins with the character, be on a 3 match win streak and have beat every default roster member in singles competition. Doesn’t sound too bad right? Well about 3 hours later after fighting the same people over and over I finally got a match against the last person I needed to fight to unlock the title bout. When the achievement blipped up for winning the title I breathed a sigh of relieve and promptly turned the Xbox off. I’m not saying it’s a bad game it’s just not something I would recommend playing for 4 hours straight and would be decent in short doses.

The following weekend I found some time get some more gaming in, went through arcade mode once in King of Fighters XII and that week I had just picked up Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3. I ended up spending an afternoon with this one trying out the different modes and playing as some of my favourite characters from the franchises. This is a game that I’ll be spending more time with going forward, I would have played more during fighting month but for the life of me I could not beat Galactus in arcade mode. Luckily Heroes and Heralds mode gave me plenty to do after getting a little frustrated with Galactus.

During my play time in January I knew exactly what game I was going to end up with and that was Tekken Tag Tournament 2. The Tekken games are probably my favourite series of fighting games and I think TTT2 helped solidify that even further. This ended up being the game I spent the most time with in January(9 hours) and unlocked 23/50 achievements. I still have some work to do in this game as I've only finished arcade mode with 41 of the 59 characters but in the upcoming months I plan to complete it with the rest.

That wraps up the individual games I spent playing and fighting month ended the same way it began with some online multiplayer action. Tyson and I hooked up on Xbox Live to play some Battle Fantasia and Street Fighter X Tekken. I won't say much about Battle Fantasia as I haven't played any of the single player mode. We had a lot of fun playing this one and Street Fighter X Tekken. However things had gone back to normal and I spent a majority of the fights getting my ass handed to me. Once or twice I did have to resort to some spam tactics just to break a couple of his winning streaks. Either way it was a very enjoyable way to end Fighting Game Month and as a whole the event was very successful in getting us to play some of the titles we've been meaning to try.

Battle Fantasia: The advantages of playing an older game that no one else is. 

February doesn't have a specific theme and we've been using this time to play whatever we want. First on the list for me:

Thanks once again for reading and hopefully you'll continue to support our blog. Until next time It's not hoarding if you alphabetize your games!