Soulcalibur – One Happy Team…

XBLA: Soulcalibur, Virtua Figher 2

I’ve been going through some games available on Xbox 360 through Xbox Live Arcade.
One interesting sample is Soulcalibur. As far as I know that’s the only version available on consoles beside the original Dreamcast one. It is decent. All characters are unlocked from the start, and it seems that the internal resolution is a bit higher. It runs in this strange letterbox, though, maybe to preserve some original aspect ratio or integer scale.

Dreamcast with RetroTink 4K:

Xbox 360:

Dreamcast:

Xbox 360:

Then there’s Virtua Figher 2. As I wrote some time ago, PS3 and Xbox 360 got the superior arcade version instead of a meager port from Saturn. And it’s so good I even spent an evening beating the entire game with Sarah. Ok, not Dural, that’s a bit too much to ask from a first playthrough.

Soulcalibur was one of the first games I managed to emulate on Demul, back in 2007, and I’ve been playing it ever since ocassionally.
But I never knew that the arcade version was actually inferior to the Dreamcast one, which almost never happens:

Also, I was under the impression that every time you completed Story mode for a character, you unlocked their “twin”. Mostly those were reskins, but some of them would grow into distinct characters later. Turns out that’s incorrect. You open charactacters based on how many times you finish the arcade with distinct characters, not with which character you finish it. Yoshimitsu always opens after 2nd completion, while Cervantes requires 10.