9/9/99: I remember it like it was yesterday. Yep, 1999 was full of boy bands, Limp Bizkit, and of course, the Dreamcast. For my 18th birthday, I preordered a Sega Dreamcast as a way to gift myself into adulthood, while still hanging on to the last vestiges of youth and irresponsibility. So, on 9/9/99, I jumped into my 1993 light blue Pontiac Bonneville, picked up the Dreamcast, and played it for 12 hours straight. It was a great day indeed.

The Dreamcast, coming in at $199, immediately was not destined to be the next generation of home entertainment. While it came packaged with a futuristic serviceable 56k modem and four controller ports (take that, PlayStation), noticeably absent was the ability to play DVD movies. DVDs did exist in the 90s, and I have a 10 lb. RCA DVD player to prove it, by the way.

Also, the controllers? Ugly.

Really, really ugly. I will never understand the reasoning for attaching the cord to the bottom of the controller, thus obstructing the controller’s movement a little bit when angled (pretty sure no other controller designers in history made this gaffe).

However, the Dreamcast’s launch day lineup was quite impressive, even by today’s standards. There was a time when launch day games were used for shock and awe — and not as time wasters until the second round of games hit the stands a year later (are you listening, Microsoft and Sony?). From NFL 2K to PowerStone to Monaco Grand Prix 2, there were many great games for everyone to pick up on launch day, no matter their interests.

Of all 18 launch day games, by far the best was SoulCalibur. Like Michael over at Kotaku, I genuinely thought that SoulCalibur was as good as fighting games would ever be (ok, full disclosure here: I still think that, mostly because I never bought another fighting game afterwards). Along with DOOM, Half-Life 2, Unreal, and Mario 64, SoulCalibur is a game that absolutely blew me away from the beginning. It was so fast, fresh, and fun (alliteration aside), accessible for people who didn’t really play fighting games, and deep enough for people to work for all of the unlockable secrets. It ended up being the only game I played on the console for the first, oh, two years I owned it. Everything about it seemed perfect.

So, I think I can speak for at least the tens of you who will ever read this post that SoulCalibur’s addition to the XBox Live Arcade (XBLA) roster was phenomenal news. While it was probably too much pressure for the game to deliver the goods like it did in 1999, I figured it would still be a blast to play.

And, for a while, it was. If you didn’t know the game were a compressed version of its former self, you wouldn’t probably notice anything, at least in terms of graphics. The polygon counts still appears to be the same at least by the naked eye, and the game’s awful writing still overflows with nostalgia (“You’ll be in hell…before me!” You don’t say!). The minor issue I have with Namco’s advertised “HD” claim is that, you guessed it, the game is still bound to 4:3 and features an ugly border for 16:9 TVs (I run my XBOX in 720p). Not a huge deal, since other “reinvigorated” games for the XBLA have maintained the original 4:3 aspect ratio, but it still appears to be a missed opportunity to really bring a “WOW” element to this version.

The first red flag for me, though, was the compressed audio. The speech cracks and hisses and is really, really muddled. It’s like listening to my tape of Sixteen Stone through blown-out speakers all over again. It’s embarrassing, frankly (which part, you may ask–the game’s audio or my admission to owning Sixteen Stone? Both.).

Similarly, while I can see Namco Bandai’s choice to keep this version as close to the arcade version as possible (by including things like the “Insert Coin” reminder at the top of the screen), I think it was a poor choice. Perhaps it fit 9 years ago, but if you’re going through all the trouble to update the game for the XBLA, get with the program and cut out all the superfluous arcade stuff. I mean, come on, it is glaringly out of place. I don’t see any coin slots on my XBOX, Namco.

Speaking of things I don’t see anymore…where’s the Mission Mode? Yep, that’s gone, which is too bad, because it probably was my favorite part of the DC version. All of the unlockable characters from the Mission Mode are now available right off the bat, which wouldn’t be a big deal if users could spend their time playing Soul Calibur on XBOX Live instead…but they can’t. So, no real single player content anymore and no online play either (seriously, if DOOM can do it, so can every other game). What’s the point, right?

Good thing there are leader boards to make up for all the other shortcomings. Ugh.

Look, if you liked the game on the Dreamcast, my guess is that you’ll put up with it on XBox Live. Just don’t expect to spend the same amount of time on this one, since it is obviously a shell of its former self. I am surprised that, even after so much press about the game (especially for one on the XBLA), it fell so short of what it could have been. The reality is that, today, SoulCalibur is merely a publicity stunt for Soul Calibur IV, and the decision to bring it to the XBLA was not for the game’s own merits, but to remind gamers of the new sequel. The shortcuts taken on the XBLA version make me hesitant to recommend it to anyone, frankly, and with a vibrant Dreamcast community still around, I think it would be more fun to grab a Dreamcast on eBay instead.

Is it the worst game on XBLA? Clearly not. But, the drop from where it started on the Dreamcast to where this version is now is both sad and infuriating.

So, what did you think of it? How does it compare to other XBLA games? Am I way off the mark?