Happy Tree Friends the web cartoon is an incredibly violent, cringe-inducing spectacle that I am embarrassed to watch and occasionally nauseated by. It takes cute characters and puts them through sadistic torture, including but not limited to scalping, being crushed by vending machines, skinning, immolation, loss of limbs, decapitation, evisceration, defenestration and any other –tion you can think if. I love it. It should make a decent transition to a game, right? How to do you screw up ultra violence? Leaving it out would be one way. Happy Tree Friends the game is a puzzle / platformer very similar to Exit, but missing any of the style and quality that made Exit fun. Objectives are unclear, interaction with the characters is very limited, and death is not nearly as frequent or as messy as it should be. I played the demo for a solid ten minutes and not one animal had an eye gouged out with a dirty spork. This game is such a miss that the demo isn’t worth the time it would take to download it. Happy Tree Friends is neither gory nor fun, so skip it.

Ticket to Ride, on the other hand, is much more loyal to its source material. I have always thought that board games on XBLA is a brilliant idea: almost all the fun and none of the clean up. The previous two entries, Carcassone and Catan, had limitless appeal if you took the time to sit down and learn how to play them. Catan, for example, was a complete mystery to me for the first couple of games. If one more person yelled “I have wood for sheep,” I was going to kill them. It took a while to click, but when it did and I realized the state was not an overture to bestiality, I played it nonstop. Ticket to Ride is much less complicated than Catan, but that doesn’t make it any less fun. The game is comprised entirely of linking cities together on a map using drawn cards as railroads. It sounds simple, and it is, but everyone else is trying to do this as the same time. Blocking others by taking railroads that you don’t really need is great fun, and a very valid strategy. Playing a game with a full five players can result in just as much deal making and back stabbing as you would hope, though a one on one match usually boils down to the luck of the draw getting the cards you need. Still, this is a definite buy if you liked the other XBLA board games and have the patience to try another.

There have been very, very few perfect games in my mind, and they seem to be coming around less and less often as gaming continues to ‘mature.’ One of these was Soul Calibur on the Dreamcast. At its time, there wasn’t a prettier, better playing, deeper game around in the fighting genre, or any other genre for that matter. It was the best there was on the DC for a long time, and it held up against PS2 fighters very well, being beaten in the end by Tekken 5, and then only just barely. On the cusp of Soul Calibur 4: George Lucas Get His Hands in Everything These Days, Namco has re-released the original on XBLA. The core game has held up surprisingly well, but it is missing a few of the extras we have come to expect in modern fighters.

For the most part, Soul Calibur still looks great. It has been up-scaled to high definition, though adding widescreen support would have been even better. The levels feel empty and small compared to modern fighting games, but the characters are large, detailed and are animated well to make up for it. It even plays well on the standard 360 controller. At first I was surprised, then I remembered that as bad as the 360 d-pad is, the DC d-pad was many times worse. The game felt like I remembered it; I jumped back into Mitsurugi’s sandals and was juggling fools for ring-outs it no time. It has been almost nine years and two sequels and I still remember how to play. I remember all the parries and blocks, and I still can’t do Ivy’s Summon Suffering throw. Some things never change.

The port is not perfect, however, most notably in the sound department: the music and announcer sound tinny and grating. Perhaps they were down-sampled in quality to get below the download size limit, which would also explain the missing opening cinematic. Both of these could have easily been forgiven if the game had received one modern addition: online play. I don’t understand why this was not added. Both Virtua Fighter 5 and the Street Fighter HD beta have proven that online play can work very well for a fighting game. Without this, Soul Calibur is just a port that may still be worth the $10 for nostalgia alone, but that’s about all. It its time, Soul Calibur was indeed perfect, but without modern additions, the game ends up feeling hollow; its time has passed.

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