...thanks to Brady Games, things have gotten a tad bit easier. If you're a n00b who bought the game a couple days ago for $30 (like yours truly), you can skip to the head of the class by checking out this video tutorial BG produced for new pilots. What I can say is that flying is a bit of an art when you're facing what seems to be a swarm of Mavericks and Icemen who coldly prevent you from really doing anything in the game because you're horrible at it and they're so not.
Where SC4 really shines, however, is in its character-creation mode. The more you use your custom characters, the more options you unlock -- with a wealth of weapons and armor pieces offering boosts to strength, impact, speed, and more, while certain stat modifiers improve your chances to escape throws or reverse counters. By selecting attributes designed to compensate for your weaknesses or enhance your play tendencies (or both), you can craft the fighting-game character of your dreams, to a degree that games like Fighter Maker don't begin to approach. That you can use these characters in any mode --- and have their appearance reflected in things like cutscenes -- is just an extra layer of detail that you must see to appreciate.
Giant Bomb is akin to an explosion in that it's created a vacuum that has been filled with the enthusiasm of thousands of gamers. While the interface is a little loosey goosey at first, and by loosey goosey, I mean almost completely unintuitive to what I'm used to when it comes to common website navigation, once you understand that the entire site is a flippin' wiki, it begins to make sense. I like the forums now that I understand they're not a centralized subsection of the site as a whole, but each forum being a part of each game section. Or something. Being a part of helping make Giant Bomb take off is just brilliant, though. Thanks former Gamespot guys, getting fired/quitting was the best thing that ever happened.
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