I have a couple of confessions to make. First of all, I am a JRPG fan-girl. I love my androgynous main characters, romantic plots, over-the-top badguys seeking world domination, anime art style, and Japanese voice actors. I like cat-girls, airships, giant birds used as transportation, and cute fluffy animals with pompoms on their heads in my games. I like outlandish costumes, vibrant colors, and a mix of pop, rock, and orchestral music as main fixtures in my RPGs.
 
That leads me to my second confession -- I'm not that big of a fan of western RPGs in general. I never really played either of the Baldur's Gates or Neverwinter Nights, Fable 2 was okay but super short and ugly, Oblivion was more fun to watch than play aside from the assassin and thief guild quest chains (which were fun to play), and Mass Effect wasn't fun for me at all as the combat and AI felt really sloppy. With all of that in mind, I didn't go into Dragon Age with very high hopes.
 
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Baldur's Gate, Oblivion, Mass Effect, or any of those western RPGs are bad games, they've just never really been my thing. It's like Dungeons & Dragons -- a group of friends and I would get together to play that back in our high-school and college days, and while many of my friends would get completely immersed in the world and their characters, I'd spend most of my time just drawing my character and rolling the dice when told to roll them. I enjoyed the atmosphere of being with friends more than playing D&D itself, and while I can totally appreciate the fact that many people adore the elements that make D&D or western RPGs what they are, I've just never cared much for those things myself (which is sort of weird as I loved reading the Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance books when I was younger *shrugs*).
 
It came as no surprise to me that as I started playing Dragon Age and noticing the attention to detail involving lore and backstory, that my eyes started to glaze over and my mind wandered as some elf rambled on about a sacred burial ritual or something. I dunno. He asked me to help him talk to some children about elven history, and me being the type that tries to choose the answers that make peoples happy, obliged him in his request, even though I didn't actually listen to a word of what he was saying. 
 
Matters were made worse when I was sent out to find my hunting partner who had got himself in trouble by touching a mirror and unleashing all hell. A new companion and I made our way to where the mirror was located and encountered some enemies just outside. My companion -- a mage, decided she would run up into the midst of them and start casting. Needless to say, she was slaughtered, and I was left rather dumbfounded by her successful suicide attempt. Picking my jaw up off the floor, I decided the best course of action was to flee out of the cave, as the main baddie had a nasty habit of healing itself with a drain life spell.
 
Running for my life, I made my way back to the entrance where I was greeted by our old friend, Invisible Wall. Invisible Wall decided that he wasn't going to let me out of the cave while I was in combat. Great. So I couldn't run from battle and held my last stand in front of Mr. Invisible Wall until I breathed my last fighting the monster that just kept on healing himself. Quite an annoying experience considering I was all of 15 minutes into the game.
 
But some friends gave me reassurance and recommended I set the difficulty to "easy". I'm not one who normally does that, but I wasn't invested heavily enough in Dragon Age to let my pride get the best of me and I decided to go to an easier difficulty. Ahh what a difference it made! The monsters dropped like flies and the story was able to progress.  

At this point, the lackluster engine really stood out for me, as my character looked rather awkward while running and really had no emotions as she stood there lifelessly while interacting with other characters. Characters like Duncan and Alistair showed facial expressions while talking and used gestures, but mine just stood there like a blank slate before, during, and after picking voiceless text responses to all of my companions inquiries. I find that makes it difficult to immerse myself in the story or character when she has about as much life as a mannequin. What made it stranger is she was full of emotion during combat, taunting at the enemy and calling out to party members to watch out behind them, so seeing her stand there with her arms rigidly at her sides and a blank expression on her face while someone was begging for help, expressing grief, or even insulting her for being an elven woman, was very odd.  
 
Thankfully, the story and the supporting cast make up for this with their personalities and well-written and spoken dialogue. Many of the NPCs suffer from... hmm,what do I call this... RPG NPC Syndrome? Where there's about 10 different-looking NPCs that they cycle through for all of the characters you interact with. So, for example, the priest you just talked to looks just like the mayor you're talking to now. But oddly enough, they have a plethora of voice actors, and you'd think that would be where they'd cut corners and use the same voices for multiple characters, much like in Oblivion, but it seems (so far at least) it's the opposite -- similarly looking characters voiced by different people.
 
To give an example, my character looks much like the leader of the Elven tribe I was a part of as well as Morrigan's mother, except mine has brown hair instead of silver (same style though), doesn't have wrinkles, nor speaks in riddles. On a side-note: I'm pretty sure Kate Mulgrew (Captain Janeway from Star Trek Voyager) does the voice of Morrigan's mother (and does a great job).
 
Actually, that gets me back to the original point I was trying to make -- the dialogue and personalities of the characters are terrific, made more so by the excellent voice acting so far. I really found myself starting to get drawn into the story after Duncan took my character under his wing and I started on my journey as a Grey Warden. Shortly after, I was introduced to Alistair, who has a great sense of humor and duty to him. I found myself genuinely being interested in him as a character and some of his responses to the conversation choices made me laugh out loud as they were funny yet completely believable answers. 
 
At this point I actually found myself enjoying the game. Granted, combat as an archer has been reallllly monotonous so far (auto-attack till everything is dead, yay!) but the story started drawing me in and I soon found myself actually paying attention to the NPCs that rambled on about the history of the land and such. It's also neat that many items and places have information you can read in your codex to add a bit more flavor, though truth be told, I still tend to avoid a lot of those, as no matter how much I care for the story, I can't see myself wanting to read 5 paragraphs on the ecology of a particular herb used in potion making. But all the power to those people who are fascinated by that sort of thing.
 
So my first mission as an apprentice Grey Warden came to an end, and I had to partake in a "joining" ritual. The outcome of that was painfully obvious from the onset of the mission (SPOILERS: The spineless wimps die. Gasp!!), though the method of which one is disposed was a delicious surprise. In any case, it was an interesting plot device to explain why we're able to see the baddies on our mini-maps and get crazy fever dreams.
 
So... a war broke out, people died, and I was re-introduced to Morrigan and her mother. Both are excellent characters in their own right, but Morrigan is a girl after my own heart with her scathing sarcasm and razor-sharp wit. She also has no problem with saying "That guy's useless. Get rid of him." Unfortunately, "that guy" she tends to refer to is usually Alistair, who I also happen to like >< In any case, the banter that happens between her and Alistair is hilarious and very enjoyable to listen to. It's a shame my character never gets to interact with them, but oh well. Such is the price to pay for being able to make different types of choices during dialogue events, I guess. She also has no problem voicing her opinion when you decide to help random villagers out, getting in quips like, "Oh great, next we'll go save kittens from trees!"
 
The dog who joined my party is also an excellent character, who interacts with other party members in different ways. Some of his interactions with the characters at the camp were a riot, especially ones between him and Morrigan. It was a cute touch that you can pet him.. err well sorta. Your character just stands there as lifeless as always while he rolls over looking happy.
 
Aside from those characters, I've managed to get a man who murdered 8 people to join my party... He hasn't really said much, but his backstory was interesting. Though it suffered from an unfortunate problem of "unimmersion". That is to say, the game presents you with a moral dilemma -- "This man is bad. He's admitted to being bad. But there might be hope for him. Do you leave him to rot or do you save him, knowing that he might stab you in the back as well?" When faced with this, the first thing I did was step outside of the game and think, "The game obviously won't let me recruit him only to have him kill us all and give us a Game Over screen 5 hours down the road, so what's the worst that can happen? He runs off with the gear he's wearing and later fights us like Kain in Final Fantasy IV or Sialeeds in Suikoden V?"
 
Unfortunately, that sort of general video game continuity logic made the moral dilemma the game presents become a non-issue and it didn't have the impact it could have had. But this really isn't the fault of the game so much as the medium it is a part of, and I think I've digressed about a general issue with moral choices in games enough for now.
 
The game was a bit of a slow burn for me, but I've come to really enjoy the story and the characters. The combat isn't great as I don't like the idea of having to pause and give commands every 5 seconds, or set up automated commands -- Gambits didn't appeal to me in FFXII, they don't appeal to me in Dragon Age. I'd honestly prefer turn-based combat to a gambit/tactics system, but that's obviously not an option in a game like Dragon Age. So far the AI has done a good enough job on the easy setting that I don't have to worry about tactics which makes me happy.
 
There is also a VERY limited option of things to do in combat as a ranger -- the different types of shots I've trained so far are really slow, do the same damage as an auto-attack shot, and don't really do much to the enemy anyhow -- lower armor or movement speed, whoopie. The movement speed one might be good if it didn't take 4 seconds to use and by that time the mob is already in melee range of me. Thankfully Alistair makes a good tank and usually holds aggro on the mobs, but that just makes the movement speed shot entirely useless at that point!
 
Crap, I was trying to bring this to a close but I ended up talking about the combat system. It seems like there are a lot more options open to melee classes or mages, so maybe the moral of the story here is don't go ranger if you want to do more than auto-attack in combat? Anyhow, the monotony of ranged combat isn't unbearable or bad, it just feels a bit shallow. Thankfully the story, characters, dialogue, and quests have been enjoyable enough to draw me in and I find myself more and more interested in the game.

Now, enough rambling about it. Time to play it some more!
 
Oh, I should also note, the PC version of the game takes screenshots for you when you get achievements or do certain story events. Certainly a nice little touch and made finding images for this post easy :D

My TV has a bit of an attitude problem. It doesn't like cooperating and has been especially finicky the last few days. I've found myself mentioning it in conversation a lot lately so I figured I'd post a lovely image of what it looks like to play when it's in a really bad mood. The image splits so that the blue is seperate from the red and green, so a double image appears on the screen and gives the whole screen a blue tint (its not that I shook the camera while taking that picture, it seriously looks that blurry.. cept for the characters, they were mid-animation so they are a bit clearer than that)
 
 
  
It can get even worse than this with all of the colors being replaced by pink and making it completely impossible to see the image. It will also stay like that for a good 15 seconds after turning the power off. Hehe always fun going halfway through a SF match just fine then suddenly it goes haywire. Very painful on the eyes as there's a perpetual double-image that makes it impossible to focus your view.
 
It's not always that bad though. There are different levels of bad.. starting with a double image that doesn't bleed blue and its still relatively easy to focus, followed by bleeding blue but still clear enough to play, followed by a light rain of pink lines, and then the full out blur + tons of pink links like in the SF, and finally the totally pink screen with lines and you can't see anything period.
 
Here's an example of "level 3" -- bleeding blue with some pink lines, but you can still read menus and text but the contrast is shot, so a snow-covered level such as this one is impossible to navigate. The camera doesn't capture the double image so well, but it's definitely noticable when playing, as if you're viewing a 3d movie without wearing 3d glasses.
 
 

Anyhow, just felt like posting about my misery! If I ever say I need to stop after a SF match to reset my TV, this is why ;P

 I've been a fan of Tekken since the first one was released back in arcades long, long ago. Virtua Fighter was the first contender in the 3d arcade fighter arena, but it didn't feel right for me. The jumping was way too floaty, the graphics were... well... they were first generation polygons, and getting my ass handed to me on the first or second stages in two hits by the computer was just not fun.

Along came Tekken with its crazy CG opening of Heihachi growling (at least, I think he's growling... or raging.. or something) and while the graphics were still pretty damn ugly, they were okay. The gameplay was much easier for me to pick up and play and I didn't find myself getting defeated in two or three hits. It was actually fun! Since then, the franchise has evolved and so has the gameplay.

Tekken's controls, massive move list and overall feel has been my favorite of any fighting franchise since Tekken 3. It's very easy to pick up and play, looks great, button-mashers can feel like they are accomplishing combos and such, but actual players can still make mincemeat out of them, and it has a robust roster of characters to choose from. Oh, and no projectile spam. Sure, Devil/Devil Jin have their laser beam, but they are stunned for a second or two after using it so it's easy to punish them.

Of course, the trade-off with projectile spam is juggling. Tekken's been well-known for its crazy juggles involving jabs that keep the opponent in the air or moves that send them 20 feet high. It looks silly, but pulling such combos off is always fun.

So how has Tekken 6 faired in comparison to the previous games in the franchise? It's... complicated.

The fighting itself is fantastic. If I had a Tekken 6 arcade machine with online connectivity, I'd be pretty happy. Alas, I'm stuck with a console port that promised lots of bells and whistles as well as online play. Bells, whistles, and online play are usually very good things, but in Tekken 6's case it's a mixed bag.
 

Customization

There's lots of character customization but it's messy. You could easily spend hours and hours in the customization menu (I certainly have) dressing up each different character but there are a lot of issues the development team seemed to have overlooked or didn't care about. Let's list some:

• Buying each individual color of a piece of clothing. It's bloated and silly. Why must I spend 800,000g just to get a different color of the same article of clothing I just bought? Oh right, because otherwise it would look like there's not really all that many items to buy for your character. It seems like they did this just to make it look like there's more gear to buy for each character than there really is. They can say "Each character has over 150 items!" when really they only have like 25.
  
• Not being able to equip /unequip gear in the buy menu. There are certain items when you go to buy them (hair styles especially) that will tell you "you need to have this piece of gear equip to buy that" or "you can't be wearing this item if you want to buy this" and it conveniently opens up a window showing you the piece of gear that you may or may not already own. If you own it, why can't it just let you swap to that piece instead of having to go out of the purchase menu, into the equip menu, equip it, and the go back to the purchase menu?
• Prices. Items cost an INSANE amount of money. individual PARTS of hairstyles range from 100,000 to 3,000,000g, auras cost 10,000,000, and most clothing ranges between 500,000 to 1,000,000. An average scenario level will net you 500,000 to 1,000,000 (on Hard, which only unlocks after you beat normal, but more on that later) for about 15 minutes of mindless beat 'em up gameplay. I can understand this keeps a player coming back for more so they can get more loot and not have it all instantly, but the big issue here is that actually playing Tekken and not just Tekken Force barely rewards you any money.
• No custom costume slots. Each character has 2 costumes that you can change. Yes some have 3 costumes but the third only lets you change the color or aura, so I don't really count that. If you replace one costume with a custom one, there's no way to use the original in a fight. Why is this? There's plenty of buttons on a controller or joystick pad, why can't there be custom costumes bound to different keys so if you, say, press L1 when choosing a character you get Custom Costume 1 or if you press square you still get the original one? Why must the original be overwritten?
• No standard scenario mode costume. Items you find in scenario mode have stats to them you'll want to use while playing that mode. For example, more damage, more HP, higher chance of loot dropping, more gold, etc. Naturally, the best pieces will never match up and you'll end up looking like a pink-haired goth biker with angel wings and heart-shaped sunglasses with no sense of color coordination. It's not a costume you'll want to wear in actual matches (except maybe for a laugh and to get the other person to say "W...T....F...?") so why is there no option to set a costume specifically for scenario mode instead of having to either give up both original costumes -- one you want to wear in fights and one you use for scenario, or having to manually reequip each costume every time you change modes? More costume slots would solve this pretty easily...
  
• Let me use the 360 joystick in the customization menus! Augh, the d-pad is so horrible and frustrating to work with, why can't I swap the controls of the d-pad and the joystick in here? ><
• Player 2 can't use custom costumes. Err why?
• Head items don't work with custom hairstyles. Nit-picky, sure, but still kind of silly you can't wear a headband or tiara with a custom hair style when there's really no reason not to be able to. While we're on this subject, the number of hairstyle colors is really limited. Was it really too hard to just give the player a color wheel? SCIV had one and many of the hairstyles are taken right out of SCIV... so why not Tekken 6?

It's not all bad though. A lot of the gear looks great and the hairstyles in particular are more varied and better looking than even fancy-looking MMOs like Aion. Yay for a game that actually has multiple long hair styles!

I do hope they release more content for customization options as a few areas feel really empty, especially when you count different colors of the same item as one item.
 

Scenario Campaign Mode

Moving on to Scenario Campaign mode! Kind of a redundant title... they should have called it "Beat 'em Up Brawler" mode cause that's what you'll be doing a lot of. I hope you like mindless button-mashing and if you've played Tekken Force in the past you'll feel right at home (or in hell) here.

I wouldn't say it's terrible, and the reviewers who focus on how it looks are really nit-picking. Sure it can look bland and looks exactly like Tekken Force in T4 at times with generic textures and such, but seriously, who cares? That really shouldn't be an issue as there are plenty of more prominent ones to focus on. At the top of that list would be the controls.

I went through three quarters of the campaign mode not even realizing that the controls of the joystick and the D-pad were different. I was really frustrated that I wasn't able to do any moves that involved a directional input and was pretty much just spamming my 1+2 attack. Good move that deals a lot of damage, knocks them down and can hit them while they're down.

Three quarters of the way through I decided to give the godawful D-pad a try just to see if maybe, just maybe, it allowed direction input attacks. Lo and behold, it did! But very, very poorly. It doesn't help the D-pad on the 360 controller is a piece of crap and, I don't know if this is endemic to all 360 controllers or just mine, but it likes to get stuck in the down position. It also likes to register up when I am pressing left or right so I was doing lots of hop jumps when I was trying to do forward+punch or back+punch. Sooo... I went back to just spamming my 1+2 attack and doing simple 1,2,1 combos, yay.

But... I'm a bit of a loot-whore. I love Torchlight for that reason and really, that game is just as much of a spam-fest with me hitting the right mouse button about 1000 times a minute. With that in mind, I didn't really mind spamming one move over and over, except when it came to hard mode where some of the bosses actually fight back and being able to do some juggles would have been nice, but oh well, I still managed to beat them anyways. The rate of loot dropping and things dying was good enough that I never got really tired of the monotony, and chances are if you're a D2 or Torchlight fan, you probably won't mind it that much either.

The Arena found inside scenario mode makes for a relatively easy way to get each players ending movies, as well as movies will unlock as you play the game at seemingly random intervals. I've unlocked about 8 endings of characters I've never touched just by playing the game, which is nice. However, I said "relatively easy" as the end boss, Azazel, is probably the most frustrating out of the Tekken series to date. He is definitely designed to be a quarter waster in the arcades and is not a fun fight. There is something messed up when the best way to beat such a boss is to find an exploit and use that over and over until you win (often times perfecting him, when normally you'd get your ass handed to you). With Xiao it was just spamming her quick knee attack. Azazel would get hit by it then take a back step, over and over and over. With Asuka it was her spinning elbow. Spammed that over and over and he never tried to counter attack or fight back. Trying to do actual combos and other moves just led to a quick and painful death.

The end movies are pretty disappointing and not nearly as good as ones in previous Tekkens. Most I've seen don't even have anything to do with the character's story. For example, Asuka enters to stop Jin but her ending is Lili ruining her lunch and them getting into a fight outside school, huh? Obviously a lot of the ending videos in recent Tekken games have been pretty silly and meaningless, but they just seem really half-assed this time around.

Scenario mode isn't short and when combined with the time I spent messing around customizing Xiao and Alisa, took about 15 hours to complete on normal. There's about 50 levels with each one taking 10-15 minutes and most unlocking a character when you complete it. I should clarify that. You can use any character you want from the get go in the other modes, such as online or practice, but you won't be able to play them in the Arena or use them instead of Lars in Scenario mode until you unlock them this way.

A few characters are unlockable only after completing the scenario on normal and going back to some of the levels on hard. They don't give you any clues as to how to find such characters, like Mokujin or Yoshimitsu, so you might wanna look up out a scenario mode guide online to save yourself from frustration.

So Scenario mode has issues but isn't terrible. That's not to say it's good, but it's bearable for the ability to buy new gear for your character. It's also nice you get to unlock one character at the beginning that you can use instead of Lars if you want. I picked Xiao of course and her dialogue and that of the other characters changed slightly to reflect that. Instead of Lars trying to regain his memory and stop the Mishimas, it became Xiao looking for Jin so she could save him. I found that a nice touch even if the cutscenes always went back to assuming you were playing Lars (as it IS his story, ultimately).
 

Practice Mode

Next up is practice mode! Why practice mode? Because there's a few things they overlooked that are really no-brainers....

• No record mode. If you've played SFIV, you know that practice mode lets you record what the opponent does and play it back ad nauseum. It's a handy tool for practicing and one that I'm pretty sure has been in previous Tekkens as well. In Tekken 6 they decided to change it so that you set up a list of combos the opponent can cycle through, but that really doesn't do the job as well as being able to record what you want the opponent to do and playing it back.
• Sample combos don't list the moves involved. Err... this seems like it was a simple oversight... Each character has a bunch of sample combos at the end of their move list you can watch, but it doesn't tell you what the inputs are so you're left to guess what moves it is. Very cool concept but since they forgot to include the actual buttons involved it's not all that useful for players who don't have their character's move set memorized.

I still do love the fact that Tekken lets you watch combos and moves and shows you the timing of button inputs and such. It's something they've done for a long time and something SFIV really should have included instead of putting those combos in trial mode and not telling you squat about how to execute them (or only letting you see them one at a time as you complete them in sequence).  The quick reset positions option is also really handy, unlike SFIV's that has to do the whole "Ready... Fight!" animation before letting you get back to practicing.
 

Online Mode

Alright, last but not least is the Online! Ahh yes, the online. There's been a lot of complaints and cries for patches involving this. I had initially held off from buying Tekken 6 because of this but caved in anyhow. So how is it?

Not good.

Before we even get into the issue of lag it's got other problems. If you join a quick match, you are immediately thrown into a fight without a lobby, so there's no way of telling how the latency will be until you throw your first punch. It's ridiculous. Why should I be forced to play someone with bad latency? Why not give me the option to back out, thus saving us both a poor experience? This is one of those things I thought would be a no-brainer, really.

But then there's Custom matches which will show you a list of lobbies and latency, so I guess "Quick Match" is going for the most literal sense of the term, opting to throw you into a match asap. Custom matches allow for lobbies of up to 4 people, but with the latency it is right now between even two players, four is really pushing it. That said, it is a nice set up, reminiscent of BlazBlue and I hope they can fix their netcode so that these matches work well with spectators.

So yes, lag. There's a lot of it, but not in the same sort of way a really laggy SFIV match felt. In SFIV a really laggy match often became a slideshow, while Tekken 6 has looked fine most of the time but inputs are really delayed. I've come across one match that did feel slideshow'ish, but mostly the lag has consisted of pressing a button and waiting half a second for it to actually register.

I have had a few matches where it was tolerable and I managed to pull off a few 5-6 hit combos, but more often than not even simple "send them in the air and hit them on their way down" type attacks failed to work. I really, really do hope they can fix the lag issues and it's good to hear a patch is on the way *fingers crossed that it works*.

Okay so this has turned into a novel and it's time to wrap things up. A few things that didn't fall into any categories:

• On the most recent Bombcast, Jared made a mention of the graphics looking like crap unless you turn the motion blur off. He's right. Turn it off and you'll immediately see anti-aliasing kick in on both your character and the background.
• The music is good and ranges through a broad variety of genres. Loving the fountain levels trance track and have it set as my default level :D
• Why the hell are Raven and Eddy voiced by white guys? Their voices don't match at all. I do like that they have the whole "some characters speak English, some speak Japanese, some even speak Chinese" (even if it's funny/weird to see Nina talking to Jin in Engish and him responding in Japanese) but the voice casting could have been better.

 
So is Tekken 6 worth buying? Yes and no. If you're only looking for online play, hold off until they (hopefully) fix it. If you have local friends who enjoy it or like playing the computer, it's still Tekken at its core and the fighting itself is enjoyable. The beat em up isn't very good but tolerable if you like character customization (or just like bad beat em ups). I don't regret buying it but I still feel SFIV is the best current gen console fighter out there, overall.

I'm not one to normally link music videos and such, but damn if this one isn't incredibly awesome and worth sharing. It features characters from the Touhou Project franchise. I've tried a few of the games but the art style and repetitive game play just never did it for me. The fan-base they've nurtured over the year has done some amazing things though. From crazy fan-made fighting games to amazing artwork, the Touhou characters are certainly some of the most popular out there.
 
As I really only have surface knowledge of the franchise I couldn't tell you which characters show up in the video, but even though I'm not a big fan, I really enjoyed watching this.
 
  

(I searched to see if Bad Apple had popped up in the forums and came up with no results, so hopefully this hasn't been posted before)

Rawr!
 
I made a video for JL as he was wondering about some tips for fighting against Balrog. I don't claim to be an expert by any stretch of the imagination, but there are quite a few things I've learned to expect when playing against the typical Balrog.
 
Hehe, I mess up a bunch in this but at least I did a few things right and hopefully the tips might come in handy. I still have a major problem with not low blocking after getting knocked down and then I get combo'd. One day I'll break that bad habbit!
 
I figured I'd post it on here in case anyone else is curious or has additional tips to add.
 
My video editing skills are still severely lacking, but at least I got to play around with text boxes and effects a bit. It seems really versatile so I'll have to experiment with it more and possibly look for some tutorials.
 
  
The program crashed when I tried to convert it to wmv and corrupted my project file. I'm lucky I exported it as an mpeg beforehand, but the file was too large so I ended up converting that to a wmv. I wasn't able to edit it though, so I didn't get to make few changes I would have liked to make (such as keeping some of the text on screen longer and I spelled Yuki Kaijura's name wrong. Whoops ><). Oh well.
 
In other news, I'm torn between switching to Tekken 6 when I get my 360 back or just sticking with SFIV.... I've heard a lot of bad things about the online for Tekken, so I think I'll at least hold off for a week or two to see if things get better....