I spent some time looking for a nice fighting game which I can play on my netbook when I'm not at home and had very little success. There are very few fighting games for PC and the only ones running smoothly on my netbook (I dont wanna play fighting games with 10FPS) were very, very old emulated games, which are nice for nostalgia, but I was bored very quickly. Since I never played the Guilty Gear series in its prime, I only recently found this game at GOG and thought I could give it a try. I already own the successor games of the BlazBlue series (which I like, but the PC port of Calamity Trigger isn't playable on my netbook), so I had high hopes for this game. And I wasn't dissapointed. It really has everything a great fighting game needs: A big cast of playable characters, lots of special moves with very different effects for different characters, quite a few single player modes for lonely afternoons (Arcade, Medal of Millionaire,VS CPU, Survival,Mission, Story, and, of course, training) and seemingly quite complex and balanced fight mechanics and combo system (but I really need more time with the game to judge this fairly). The only thing missing is online multiplayer fighting :-). And, the best of it: It runs flawlessly on my netbook (an old Asus 1000H, 1.6ghz single core Atom with Intel 945 graphics chip) right out of the box. I have constant 60FPS (Vsynced; without vsync it's probably more, in case you like benchmarks) and CPU load doesn't even reach 50%. I was also very pleased to see, that the graphics of the game aged very well. The sprites, animations and especially the backgrounds are still quite beautiful, even when compared to the recent BlazBlue games. Sure, when playing on a bigger monitor, you'll notice the game's low resolution and the graphics become quite pixelated (still enjoyable, though), but for a 10 inch netbook display it is absolutely sufficent. I also really enjoyed the soundtrack, the glamorous rock and metal music fit the game (and its weird humor) very well IMO. There was a review complaining about the (in-)compatibility of XBox360 controllers with this game. Since I ran into the same issues (I use a MadCatz FightPad for Xbox for this game) I wanted to write a few words about it, maybe it helps someone: The initial setup of the XBox controller is indeed a little messy, but it is easily fixed. The first thing you want to do is to go into the folder you installed the game in and open the application Config.exe. In the third tab you can assign all the buttons to your liking (or just copy the official layout from the Xbox1 version of the game (google "video game buttons guilty gear x2"). Make sure to check the checkbox named "ZAxis" in the advanced settings on the top right; the left and right trigger buttons of your XBox controller won't work unless you do. After that you can assign all buttons in the in-game control options. All in all: A great and, despite its age, beautiful 2d-fighter for a great price. If you like me are looking for a modern(ish) fighting game you can play on a netbook, don't look any further; I am quite sure this is as good as it gets. Thanks GOG!
