Finally have my own copy of OoT. Also got Pokemon Snap. Let the nostalgia begin anew...

Shit, I've been gone for a while...what did I miss?

damn i installed wow and i'm liking it i must try not to get hooked

Aquaria.

You will gain 40 pounds and your ass will become sore.

Alternatively, you'll get to about level 20, enter the dungeon-swag game and realize how incompatable you are with being ordered about by condescending fuckheads with no life

Which, incidentally, is why you should never play TF2 with me.

Playing Ico and MGS3 side by side has made me realize why I hate the latter; since Metal Gear Solid on the Playstation (and indeed, maybe even Metal Gear, which I forgot came with the Subsistence editon of 3), MGS as a franchise has done little to no evolving, and anything resembling changes have all been in the wrong direction, see also the increased tendency towards 20 hour cutscenes and retro-camp-deprecation humor. MGS1 got away with that shit because a, it was relatively conservative about applying silliness lest it mar the super-serious-business dramatic storyline trying to occupy the same space as a sarcastically self-aware low-res stealth game, and two, shit was brand cracking new and seemed to make people collectively realize that games could be just as inclined towards storytime as any other medium.

But while other people took Metal Gear's erection for pushing games into semi-literate territory and have improved upon it - see my previous post on Ico in which I describe the emotions being portrayed by the in-game walk cycle - Metal Gear itself just made the fucking cutscenes longer, effectively doing the opposite of other guys: saying nothing with a million billion words. Per minute.

So, that's what I don't like about Metal Gear as a series: it obstinately refuses to move forward, except to increase the amount of things in it that belong in a cartoon show. Kojima knows the shit out of that, too, since he made Metal Gear Solid 2, but I guess now his mind's just snapped and he's taken to wallowing in his own spunk like Death Proof era Quentin Tarantino. I could also be talking out of my ass since I haven't gotten around to playing Guns of the Patriots yet, but I hightly doubt it!

Although, as a non-ragey aside, the soundtrack in MGS3 is all kinds of awesome. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5b3PqMezmk

They also really nailed the ambient jungle noises, I think, and even though the level design by and large was shitty as hell, I'll find enjoyment wherever there's stealthan to do. And I guess the bosses were ok. I guess. The End and The Fury are major high points, although I was stoned badly fighting Fury so he may have been marginally less terrifying than I originally thought. I also spent the entire game looking forward to fighting The Boss, only to have the camera now be fixed instead of mapped to the right thumbstick, crippling my visibility and forcing me to just put on snow camo and Geisha makeup, hide in an extreme corner and snipe her to death. It worked, but it was stupid.

I've been playing the leak of Crysis 2 and....wow....it's actually good. I hated the first Crysis with a passion because it was a boring, plodding, slog with bulletproof Koreans and a suit powered by hearing aid batteries. The sequel fixes all of the first games problems and actually delivers a convincing narrative with solid gameplay and great pacing. Color me surprised.

FotNS: Ken's Rage. This game is easily the most faithful video game adaptation of anything I've ever seen. And it's so satisfying to pull of a signature move that wipes out a huge crowd of mooks. But how the hell do you decide that the name "Thouzer" is pronounced "sow-zer"?


I want to second what GW was saying about the MGS series. The innovation in that series seems to come on the cinematics side rather than the gameplay side, and the stories in those games are not so great that attention should be drawn to them. A lot of the game series that I most enjoy are guilty of having relatively little change from one game to the next, but it seems like to really enjoy the MGS series, you need to be a fan of Kojima's particular brand of storytelling, which is crummy.

That's why I was so worried when I saw he had even a tangential link to the last Castlevania game. And as it turned out, those concerns were fully justified.

@Dr. Boogie: You weren't surprised by the whole "I'm Dracula" thing? lol, I have no idea why they did such a hamfisted job of ending the story of that game. I mean if you pay any attention throughout the game, you can make that assumption by about half-way through.

I didn't play MGS4, is that pretty much the end of the series?

Well I liked all of them, so I guess I'm stupid. I will be playing Rising when it comes out next year, as well.

I constantly hear about how the Metal Gear series is more like a dissection and parody of video games and media, but really that just makes me angry, because I just don't like it because it's too deep for you, man.
That said, I liked

The first one was good. The second one was good right up to the end where it got all Kojimafied. The third was fun for the gameplay. The fourth was down right ridicules.

I'm with Fathom Zero I love Metal Gear Solid.

I know nowadays cutscenes are considered outdated and anathema to game art but you know if what your watching is interesting then I don't see the problem and to be fair there is interactivity in MGS2 and up's cutscenes, it's not a lot but you shouldn't overestimate how much interactivity is needed to keep the player involved. And please don't tell me that Kojima should have just made a movie instead because it wouldn't be the same. Paradoxically, Kojima is probably the best in the business at using video game interactivity for dramatic and comedic effect; The sorrow boss fight, the torture scene in MGS, that scene where you get pissed on in MGS2, etc. Also, retro-camp-deprecation humor is a spot-on bit of wording but I don't see how it's a point against the series.

One thing I can't defend about Metal Gear Solid is Kojima's method of delivering exposition by weaving factual and semi-factual and pseudo-factual information along with his own fictional scenarios. But even this I don't really hate.

I don´t hate Hideo´s modified reality-storytelling at all, that I actually like. I just think he´s really pushing it with the lenght of each and every dialogue and cutscene in Part 4.


I´m playing GTA4 at the moment cause I never finished it and after several hours I´m kinda sure this time will end the same...those fucking idiots should learn how to utilize checkpoints.

It´s NOT fun to drive to the mission three times in a row, not at all. I mean the cues for the checkpoints are there, they´re in plain sight but noooo, one chance, that´s all you get.
Got rushed by the last cop in the mission? Sorry, you´re losing 20mins of progress, nothing we can do...


One other strange thing...my girlfriend fucking LOVES Saint´s Row 2. She´s never played with a 360 before and I´m pretty sure the same is true for any console but dang, does she have a lot of fun running people over with her gangster-chick...and she can´t even control where the fuck the vehicle goes let alone the camera :lol

I never thought it could be so much fun watching someone being bad at videogames but being happy about the whole thing at the same time.
And I gotta say, that girl earns a lot of points in my book :love

They actually did include checkpoints in the middle of missions in both of GTA4's expansions, and fixed most of the other problems people were complaining about. Motorcycles no longer suck, you never get nagged about man-dates anymore, and you can totally pretend like you're playing the opening scene of Akira all the time, especially during the "bikes-plus-baseball-bats" racing minigame.

No, it definitely wouldn't be the same as if he made a movie. I think part of the point of the first game was to show that video games could do things movies couldn't, which is why I liked it. Loved it, even. I also seem to be in the minority when I claim to like MGS2, but I remain steadfastly gay for the direction it took in the second half. Meta, brilliant, probably made on drugs, and I get to be a smug prick with the air of an intellectual when I talk about how deep it is. This is something I like to do. That shit is fruitcake.

It boils down to "I just think it's too silly," pretty much. I always had the impression of Metal Gear being a mostly serious drama with a point to make, and anything that seemed too ludicrous to believe I wrote off as a bit of comic relief, or something I thought was retarded but the writers and some of the players might not have. So, watching the sequels, Snake Eater especially, be intentionally ridiculous and point to themselves going "ha ha, look at how camp I am, remember how stupid we used to look?" makes me cringe more than a little bit. The first four seasons of the Doctor Who revival had the same problem, and like with that I get more worked up about the things it's doing wrong because when it does shit right it's an absolute joy to behold.

I'd equate it to having a good friend who is gradually becoming an embarrasing prick because of his crippling cocaine habit. I mean, you love the guy, but you can hardly stand him a good half of the time and don't want to be seen together in public.

But really, maybe all Kojima ever wanted to do was make campy comedies, and he's passive-agressively getting back at us for demanding more Metal Gear and distracting him from his real passions by breaking our hearts. Or, rather, just mine, since I seem to be the only one with a problem. I wouldn't put it past him, crazy dickhead.

By the by, did anyone else play the one on the Gameboy Color? It's a crime how overlooked that game is.

Yeah, it had a little too much far-out humor than I would have liked. I got sort of tired of getting to some serious part, then the awkward "We're all kind of dysfunctional! WAR IS HELL!" jokes would start to kick in, and it just didn't do anything for me.
Also, Vamp. Why the hell he was even in the games is beyond me. Fuck that guy.

It's on my desk. Shit's great. :rock

I've playing Half Life 2: Episode 1, between study bursts. Pretty sweet so far! Also I bought Arkham Asylum today which was probably a bad choice with exams coming up.

I started on Champions Online. Anybody else play?

the best MGS3 tracks are Snake Eater (sup, ladder?) and Sea Breeze.

Also Tactics Ogre PSP is really good but hard as balls.

Snake eater was the James Bondish theme where he climbs that 8 mile ladder right?

Yup, that´s the one. I thought it was pretty funny since Snake is not exactly a Gentleman-Spy, he´s more of the Stfu-woman-Im-looking-at-my-gun-Spy.

My favorite tune is the original Theme from MGS1. That and the Codec-Beep of course, I´ve used it as my message-tone on my mobile for as long as I can remember...which is fitting I think. I never found out what kind of phone they used when they first discovered it...

That's awesome. The one thing in MGS3 that I've seen done but wasn't able to do myself was kill the bodyguard for the end pushing him in his wheelchair. I have his sniper rifle and camo from a different run but if you shoot the bodyguard the end just kind of sits there. Then you can either kill him or drug him without having to fight him later.

Been playing Condemned: Criminal Origins. I remembered it being pretty good and I was correct. Too bad the sequel never made it to PC.

Been switching around from DJ Hero, Dead Space 2, Red Alert 2, Skulltag, and Ninja Gaiden 2. My attention span is absolutely awful.