H Jungle

No disrespect taken, though I never claimed the brainstorming session lead to the arenas. Insinuated, maybe, but never claimed. :) Still, I'd love to find that post (which apparently I even brought up here in August 2006; link to the post on the official forum now long dead)--if for nothing else than simple nostalgia.

I'm not sure if this is related, but at one point, I think around Spring 2005, I started a brainstorming session on the general forums for a PvE/PvP arena--specifically doing something with Gubarashi and the Thunderdome at Gadgetzan. We got a lot of good ideas, such as dynamic quests/challenges based on entering races/classes, mixed Horde and Alliance teams (this was before the Horde had paladins and the Alliance had shaman), scaling creatures, environmental traps, etc. There must have been 13 pages of great ideas (Spectators! That was another one).

A lot of this came about because there just wasn't much to do at 60, especially for the players who weren't raiding (I don't even think Naxx was available yet). And who knew when the expansion would hit?

When the expansion did come out there were, of course, plenty of things to do. PvP arenas, too, if I'm not mistaken. ;) Still, PvE arenas would have been fun.

I wish I could find that old post. I'd love to read some of the ideas and see if anything similar ever made it into the game (at the time I remember thinking that some of the requests would be just too difficult to pull off). Does anyone know of a way to search for old official forum posts? Google and the Wayback machine don't seem to be helping.

I'm sure someone's already mentioned it, but at one point (see: beta) the characters in WoW actually did move their heads to look at their targets. This even included looking up at larger creatures instead of focusing directly on the belly of an ogre (or...elsewhere...if you're a gnome).

I'd love to see this option come back, but I believe the official response of why it was removed had something to do with latency at the time.

Simply for argument's sake, the armor and the humanoid shape are both illusions. It's doubtful the chilly Northerend air bothers the aspects much.

And while I agree that the design probably had more to do with fan boys than character, it still makes sense to me that the aspect of life would not be ashamed of her own sexuality (which is rather important to life, after all).

Krasus, on the other hand, is a bit beefier than I remember his descriptions indicating. Maybe he got tired of his haggard old mage look?

Alexstrasza is, in essence, an aspect of life. There's nothing wrong or dirty about incorporating sexuality into her human form. Mind you, I doubt this was taken into consideration when designing her but the cries of "put on some clothes" seem to come from some other line of reasoning.

It's certainly not a beefed up port of the arcade version. The arcade version ran off of the same board as Tekken 3, if I'm not mistaken, and looked really, really awful. Raising the resolution on the arcade version would do very little to improve the look of the game.

Plus Lizardman doesn't look like Sophitia with a giant lizard mask on top of her head.

To sum up, it's a high-res port of the Japanese Dreamcast game (no censoring, no english voices). Online play would have been awesome, mission mission mode is missing, music starts over every round (just kind of odd), and the game loads faster (not saying the DC loading was slow, but there is a difference).

Ah, no one noticed Voldo's bull head cod piece has returned. That more than makes up for not having a mission mode (not really, but still, yay for avoiding senseless edits).

It should also be stated that all of the voices are in Japanese with no English option aside from subtitles. Personally, I'm grateful.

It's a fine versus title for local matches, what with the faster load times and convenience of being able to play wireless. Online would have been incredible, but I suppose we'll have to settle for really freakin' great.

As for Ivy's suffering, I once read that it's easiest to think of it as rolling two fireball motions after the initial down-forward, up-back movement. Worked for me, and though I can't pull it off for the life of me during a versus match, the CPU is polite enough to stand there without attacking long enough for it to connect.

Still Soul Calibur. Must. Have. Soul Calibur.

I would still buy everything Soul Calibur related, and I'm still quite ashamed of that.

Soul Calibur Live and pretty much everything Soul Calibur related. I'm not proud of it, but I'll be able to live with it.