What, I have to write more than that? Sheesh. Okay, how about this? Xianghua has the cutest butt in the history of videogames. No contest at all. What, why are you looking at me like that? It's not a joke. I'm serious. Xianghua has a downright mind-bendingly cute derriere. It occurred to me to bring the subject up because of a conversation I had on Usenet some time back, about Metal Gear Solid in general and Sniper Wolf's breasts in particular. You probably remember how weird her chest looked, being as how it was just a texture mapped onto a single flat polygon. In regards to that subject, I opined that women in videogames had ought to keep their jackets zipped up until such time as consoles were powerful enough to render aesthetically pleasing cleavage in real time. This relates to Soul Calibur because Soul Calibur proves that said time has arrived, and the Dreamcast is the first console to do it. Xianghua has her cute butt, Sophitia has great legs, and Ivy is, well...Ivy. I've gone on enough about her earlier on, I believe. I'm doing my drooling pervert impression here because it's a good (or at least amusing) way to introduce Soul Calibur's graphical quality. All the characters are so finely rendered that I'm able to say with a straight face that Xianghua has a darling posterior because it's the God's truth, and if you play the game and don't agree with me, go away, because you're obviously no fun at all. And that's only an infinitesimal fraction of the visual excellence that Namco has seen fit to bestow upon us. To coin a phrase, the godliness is in the details. Pick a character, any character. Take Astaroth. As he hefts and swings his axe before a fight, look at how it takes him just a moment to stop it, and marvel at the sensation of weight given by the animation. Take Nightmare. Look at the absolute smoothness of his right shoulder joint, as the muscles of his monstrous arm flex and stretch, and the roving gaze of Soul Edge's eye. Take Kilik. Admire the animation of his sash as he leaps and spins, and the finely textured inlays along his staff. Take Ivy. Watch her hair, epaulets, cravate, and jacket hem all blow in the wind, or wave back and forth as she runs; observe the detailed textures on her red trousers, as they wrinkle just a bit over her hips. Oh, and keep an eye out for the Bounce. Shouldn't miss that. Altogether, the characters look more or less...real. Their joints are perfectly smooth, with no polygon breakup. The textures on their skin and clothing are shaded and highlighted exactly right for particular lighting conditions. As they speak, their mouths move appropriately. It's almost eerie some of the time. Soul Calibur's stage backgrounds are equally marvelous. To begin with, each stage is a different shape. Some are relatively uniform, others are quite odd; this makes movement and edge avoidance just a little different each time. That's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the variety on display, though. Voldo, for example, still resides in the Money Pit, but now the famous vault is halfway submerged under water. A chandelier hangs from the ceiling, its candles still burning. The flames are as near to real as makes no odds, and the whole works is reflected in the water below (complete with warping effects); meanwhile, rats scurry about the floor. Taki's stage, the Hoko-Ji Temple, is occupied by a massive golden statue of a Buddhist deity; it's so large that you assume it's 2D wallpaper, until you walk past it and see the perspective change. Flanking the statue are large, complicated gates, with brightly-colored banners hanging beside them (the colors are perfectly shaded to give the impression of real cloth). These are also 3D, and rather make your eyes twist when you see them from the proper angle and make out the number of elements they're composed of. Ivy's home, the Valentine Mansion in London, has huge vaulted ceilings that stretch off into the distance, with paintings on the ceiling panels and Corinthian columns supporting balconies that are rendered in 3D like everything else; you can see behind the pillars. Soul Calibur really deserves to be seen on a monitor with the VGA box, or a very high-quality TV (it looks amazing on our Sony WEGAs). The resolution and attention to detail in texture and animation are frankly appalling. The special effects are overwhelming: explosions, light trails, and particle effects illuminate the stages with a plethora of amazing lighting effects. Everything is in high res, everything moves at 60 FPS, and everything has been created by artists who are obviously just about the best in the videogame industry today. Playing a couple of other fighting games the other day, I was struck not just by their technical inferiority, but also the weak artistry on display. Sometimes, when playing games like Soul Calibur, you're so awed by the achievement in programming that you forget someone had to conceive of these wonders before they could be executed. Even if Soul Calibur didn't play like a dream, then, it might still be worth buying. Luckily, though, it could have the tightest, deepest fighting system ever devised; Virtua Fighter 3 is the only game that might be comparable. The way the game gradually introduces you to the system is rather nice. On the default difficulty setting, in the arcade mode, it's pretty easy to get by with basic attacks, throws, simple combos, and ordinary blocking. This allows you to unlock all the hidden characters (there are nine altogether) relatively simply. Then you take on the mission mode, where things get interesting. The mission mode is like the Edge Master mode from Soul Blade, but with less plot and many, many more scenarios and secrets to unlock. It starts out with a few basic missions that introduce you to more advanced elements of the fighting system: unblockable attacks, active parrying, dodging, and the eight-way run system (by double-tapping and holding the D-pad, or just using the analog stick, you can quickly and easily run in any direction about the arena). Then many more missions open up, requiring you to take on increasingly difficult challenges. As the opposition gets stiffer, you'll probably have to spend some time in the game's excellent training mode, where you can see any of your character's moves displayed, and tutor yourself in the really tricky stuff, like juggling and attack linking. Practice will pay off, though, because as you complete missions, you earn points, which you then use to unlock hundreds of pieces of art in a series of galleries. As you unlock more pictures, you unlock new galleries, new missions, new character costumes, new versus mode stages, new play modes, hidden Web pages, a theater mode with beautifully-animated katas for each character (this really shows off the game's amazing motion capture) and a fearsome number of other options and possibilities. Add that to the potentially infinite amount of time you can spend taking on your friends in the versus mode, and the result is a game with superior replay value. Soul Calibur is basically a must-buy title for the Dreamcast. Even if you don't like 3D fighters, you should check it out to make sure, because Calibur may very well convert you. The only possible downside to the game is the lack of Namco's trademark excellent CG (the endings consist of still images and text), but that's outweighed by the museum galleries, the katas, and the amazing real-time introduction movie, which you can substantially modify once you've unlocked the appropriate option in the museum mode. The amount of respect I have for Namco on account of this title is awesome. This is a home conversion on a direct competitor's system of an arcade title that wasn't especially successful. They did not have to do such an amazing job. But they did, exceeding the already high mark set by the arcade original by leaps and bounds, and I salute them for it.

-SegaNet