61 Frames Per Second : metal gear solid

Metal Gear Solid 2: The Novel?

Bob Mackey — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 17:15:00 GMT

I have a bit of a soft spot for Metal Gear Solid 2; while it certainly has its share of embarrassing flaws, I'm probably one of a dozen people who were pleasantly surprised--instead of enraged--by the protagonist switch from Solid Snake to Raiden so early in the game. But even I have to admit that MGS2's story was mostly unintelligible by the end, though some of this may be due to the content cut from the game because of the September 11th terrorist attacks--or perhaps that mysterious shipment of mushrooms which arrived on the steps of Konami's HQ in early 2001.

Whatever the case, you have to give Kojima some credit for throwing so many baffling, off-the-wall ideas in what was intended to be the Playstation 2's first big blockbuster. And in case the director's unique storytelling style has still has you confused about what the hell happened in Metal Gear Solid 2 a whole eight years later, then you'll be happy to know that publisher Del Ray has a novelization of the game in the works, penned by Raymond Benson, who apparently wrote a novelization of the first Metal Gear Solid in 2008. Not exactly striking while the iron's hot, eh?

According to Game|Life's Earnest Cavalli, Benson is no slouch when it comes to video game novelizations--but I still have to question how this novel could be any more informative than the text dumps and game scripts for MGS2 that have been floating around on the internet for years and years. Though it's possible that Benson's novelization could be worth reading just to see how (or if) the author turns all of that batshit content into a cohesive narrative. My guess is this will be Benson's final project before the inevitable forced institutionalization.

This little bit of news has inspired me to show you a preview of my Metal Gear Solid 3 novelization, which I plan on submitting to Del Ray in 2012:

The Pain, covered in bees, shot a steady stream of bees at Snake, who was not covered in bees. The bees soon reached his bee-less body.

"Agh! Bees! Covered in bees!"

Snake dove underwater and decided to contact HQ for assistance. Perhaps a smoke grenade was in order?

If you would like Solid Snake to use a smoke grenade, turn to page 154.
If you would like to stop reading, close the book.

Related Links:

The 61FPS Review: Metal Gear Solid 4 Part 1
Metal Gear Solid: Hideo Kojima’s Inability to Show Instead of Tell
C'mon Kojima: Port Metal Gear!

10 Years Ago This Week: Silent Hill

John Constantine — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Silent Hill (released February 24th, 1999) did not mark a pivotal moment in the original Playstation’s lifecycle. Technologically speaking, Silent Hill was a solid effort, but nothing unusual for the time. Foregoing the pre-rendered backgrounds that were horror games’ stock-in-trade, Silent Hill’s full-3D environments weren’t as pristinely rendered as Konami’s own, year-old Metal Gear Solid. The CGI cutscenes, another requisite of the era, were competent but by no means up to the Squaresoft gold standard. Its control was wonky, its camera unwieldy, and the voice-acting was stiff even for a Playstation game. Of course, none of that matters. Silent Hill was a pivotal moment in game’s maturation as an affecting, expressive medium. Forget technology; its technical failings made it a stronger work. Forget genre; Silent Hill is not survival horror. It’s just horror.

The game’s premise and story are simple enough: widower Harry Mason travels to scenic Silent Hill with his adopted daughter Cheryl. On the drive there, during some of the game’s plastic-doll-CG, Harry almost hits someone standing in the road and crashes. When he comes to, he’s alone on the foggy streets of Silent Hill and the game has shifted to its playable state. Snow falls around Harry but doesn’t collect on the ground. From here, you, as Harry, follow what might be your daughter down a series of alleyways. As you go further down the alley, the camera shifts abruptly to successively stranger angles, mundane brick walls shift to rusting corrugated metal and rotting chain link fences, and silence gives way to buzzing dissonance. By the time you get to the end of the alley and find an eviscerated, inhuman body hanging from the wall, the gory imagery isn’t nearly as unsettling as the walk has been.

This opening sequence defines both Silent Hill as a series and its enduring legacy. The game that follows constantly shifts perspective in pushing you through the town’s locales, and there is no real safe haven. The game in Silent Hill is traditional exploration-puzzle-progress play made fresh by an unpredictable light-dark world dynamic. It’s not that one is good and one is bad; they’re both aggressive places. The duality is meant to unsettle and disorient both you and, in the hazy story, Harry. Every aspect of the design fuels that disorientation, too. Throughout Silent Hill, your field of vision is constantly obstructed, either by fog or darkness, a clever work around of the Playstation’s limitations, but essential to the game’s tone and goals. Akira Yamaoka’s sound design and its spectacular stereo mixing also aim to disturb. The game’s gurgling and grunting enemies are typically out of site until they’re right on top of you, and the only thing that signals their proximity is the static squall of the pocket radio you find early on. The awkwardness of the game’s acting, both the voice work, the script, and the animation of the characters, also serves the game’s atmosphere. While I’m not convinced it was intentional in the original Silent Hill, this sort of stilted drama has become a mainstay in the series, to great effect. It enhances the impressionistic tone, and lets the game’s unreality take root instead of constantly forcing linear plot on the player.

Horror games in 2009 are still made in the mold of the Playstation era: the dog-through-the-window scares of early Resident Evil, ominous-Gothic-setting of Tecmo’s Deception, and monster-escape of Sunsoft’s Clock Tower are still largely the types we see today. Sony’s Siren and Tecmo’s Fatal Frame series take atmospheric cues from Silent Hill, but are more tangible, less abrasively psychological games in subject matter. Even Team Silent took the franchise in a more digestible direction. After following up with Silent Hill 2 – a game that realizes every one of its predecessor’s ambitions – the team went on to make two more sequels that bear more tonal/structural resemblance to Resident Evil than their source material. The closest thing to a spiritual successor has been Punchline and Shuji Ishikawa’s Rule of Rose; Rule of Rose relies even more heavily on visual metaphor to convey its story than Silent Hill. (Unfortunately, it’s almost completely unplayable.)

Much as Silent Hill was informed by other games and media – the horrible “other world” and enemy designs recall Adrian Lyne’s Jacob’s Ladder and the metaphor-heavy psychosexual narrative shares many of David Lynch’s more recognizable tics – it has managed to stand on its own artistic merits ten years on. Sadly, it just isn’t very easy (or fun) to play any more. Its technological failings certainly helped it to be a creative triumph. But those failings don’t do it any favors as a game today. It doesn’t help that the game has never been re-released outside of its inclusion in the Japan-only Silent Hill Ultimate Box in 2006. With the Team Silent disassembled and the series now in capable, albeit not very creative, hands, it’s unlikely that Silent Hill will ever have the same impact it did a decade ago.

Previously on Ten Years Ago This Week:

Syphon Filter
Alpha Centauri

Related links:

Silent Hill: Homecoming is, Thankfully, Both Silent and Hilly
Screen Test: Silent Hill Homecoming
OST: Rule of Rose

Mega64 Calls On the Elite Beat Agents

Nadia Oxford — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 23:46:00 GMT

The world would be a better place if the Elite Beat Agents could fly at our everyday problems singing and dancing. Flat tire? Beautiful voices can re-inflate that. Broken vase? The Elite Beat Agents can coax those pieces back into place. Failing with your girlfriend in bed? Maybe not. She might run away with Agent Spin (I know I would).

Game-related comedy troupe Mega64 has catapulted to nerd fame by videotaping themselves bouncing around in a kuribo, performing stealth operations in a grocery store as Solid Snake, and wandering around PetSmart as a lonely Tetris L-piece looking for a corner to lean on. This time, the group dressed up as the Elite Beat Agents and tried to bring joy to Californians by the ocean. Unfortunately, Californians seem immune to joy. Actually, given the demographic of San Francisco, they've probably just learn how to politely step around crazy people the same way suburban dwellers have learned to step around piles of dog poo.

Video after the jump.

Watching this makes me nostalgic for Elite Beat Agents. It was a great game with a fantastic localisation, but it wasn't the Nintendogs successor Nintendo was obviously hoping it would be. Despite careful retooling of the source title, Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan!, the sharp anime art style was still a bit intimidating for mom and dad.

Related Links:

How Chicago Inadvertently Penned an Anthem for Dead Fathers
Ready? Okay! Wii've Got Spirit, Yes Wii Do...
No Alternate Soundtrack: Chibi Robo

True Tales of Thanksgiving Gaming

Bob Mackey — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Okay, okay; I know I just wrote a 1500-word feature on this subject, but I wouldn't be an unscrupulous freelance writer if I didn't milk an idea until it was crying, chapped, and swollen. Please see my 9000 posts about Mother 3 for more on this.

So now that my credibility has safely been disposed of, it's time to move onto more important topics: namely, Thanksgiving. For nearly all of us, this holiday signifies a wanted or unwanted family reunion; and with this gathering comes sitting around for extended periods of time while stuffed full of food. Obviously, this situation is perfect for the playing of video games. We are fortunate that the industry is kind enough to schedule their most important releases of the year around this period of maximum immobility.

Since the purpose of this post is to share our Thanksgiving-related gaming memories (as if you couldn't tell), I'm going to go ahead and start with my own. Thanksgiving of 2004 marked two memorable events: the recent release of Metal Gear Solid 3, and also one of my brief flirtations with food poisoning--in this case, it was a post-Thanksgiving Taco Bell menu item. Yes, I was young and stupid.

This is one of the few instances in my life where I could have sworn I almost died--if not from the extreme dehydration, then from my nightmarishly vivid fever dreams. For about 24 hours, I lapsed between two different realities: my own, and the jungles of Groznyj Grad. Obviously, the part of my brain the likes video games decided it was time to stage a mutiny, which led to a series of very realistic hallucinations where I was hiding, murdering, and generally being scared shitless. And even though all of this happened in my mind, I still count this altered state as one of my most memorable gaming experiences.

So can any of you out there top my burrito fueled ride to Hell in the department of Thanksgiving gaming memories? I'm sure someone has an awesome story about grandma blinding the family dog with a flying Wii-mote.

Related Links:

The 61FPS Review: Metal Gear Solid 4 Part 1
The Ten Greatest Opening Levels in Gaming History, Part 2
Bringing Sexy Back: Yoji Shinkawa

A Decade of Gaming Excellence

Joe Keiser — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Just like Mackey, seeing that Half-Life is only a dollar on account of it’s ten years of being awesome brought back plenty of wonderful memories of late 90’s gaming. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that 1998 was not a great year, but the best year for the medium in its history.

I think this is easy to prove. Below I’ve listed just a handful of 1998’s most well remembered games, and many of them continue to represent the best-in-class of their respective genres. Think about all the changes that have happened in gaming since these came out: high definition came to fruition, the Wii changed the rules, all those idiots you muted on Xbox Live last night were born. And yet, these titles endure:

Thief: The Dark Project – Between this and a much more memorable game we’ll get to, stealth gaming was born this year. Thief made sneaking great fun, something most developers following it couldn’t figure out.

Descent: FreeSpace – The Great War – I don’t care what anyone says, this and its sequel are the best space simulators ever made, period, no discussion. It certainly helps that the genre died immediately after FreeSpace 2 came out, but that’s just a detail.

Grim Fandango – Ten years later, and Tim Schafer’s noir tale of murder and intrigue in the afterlife is still the high watermark of adventure gaming. At this point, there’s a good change it will stay that way forever.

Resident Evil 2 – Capcom Studios 4 eventually rewrote the genre with RE4, but for years this was survival horror’s defining title, and the best game in its franchise. It feels pretty old these days, though.

Tekken 3 – I knew two guys in college who literally played this every moment I saw them, and that was years after it came out. Look past the blocky graphics, and this one actually holds up pretty strong.

Unreal – Before this game, Cliffy B’s claim to fame was Jazz Jackrabbit. Now he makes games where men pair up to contemplate flowers through the sniper scopes of their chainsaw shotguns. Or something. In any case, Unreal was the turning point.

StarCraft – Oh, Blizzard went from normal game developers to legendary game developers in 1998 too! The world’s useful productivity has been in a downward spiral ever since.

Metal Gear Solid – Prior to this game, Hideo Kojima…was making the exact same type of inscrutable, self-referential meta-games he continues to make now. But MGS made this brand of madness a sensation.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time – TOOT turns ten tomorrow, actually. For a fun exercise, contemplate the simpler, happier time this game represents for you. Then turn on cable news.

Fallout 2, Panzer Dragoon Saga, and Gran Turismo also came out this year (though GT only kind of counts, as it just managed to eke out a Japanese release before the end of 97). Okay, enough reminiscing. Go to the Steam now.

The Ten Greatest Ice Levels in Gaming History, part 3

John Constantine — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 00:10:00 GMT

Donkey Kong Country – Snow Barrel Blast

Donkey Kong Country isn’t the most fondly remembered SNES game out there. It was marketed to hell and back in 1994, its pre-rendered characters shoved down millions of gamers’ gullets as a final grasp at technological relevance before the dawn of 3D gaming’s rule. At heart, it’s a simplistic and fun platformer whose visuals have aged poorly. But certain stages in DKC still impress fourteen years later, thanks to a combination of inspired graphical presentation and deft sound arrangement. Snow Barrel Blast is the best DKC has to offer. An ice level that seems simple enough when Donkey and Diddy Kong emerge from an igloo at the start but soars when the sky starts to darken and the level goes from sunny winter landscape to brooding driving snow storm. It’s purely aesthetic, not informing the game’s basic platforming at all. But its beauty makes it the one thing memorable about DKC besides the hype. – JC

Super Mario Bros. 2 – World 4

Traditionally speaking, ice is the bane of platforming. As soon as you see blue ground, slightly shaded to a reflective sheen, you know that the rules you’ve been operating under up to that point are going straight out the window. You will slip, you will slide, and, so, you will miss many, many jumps. World 4 in Super Mario Bros. 2 turns icy surfaces into an exercise in speed and timing, setting up a first level that’s less about jumping across tiered platforms than it is about running as fast as possible and expertly sliding beneath/over oncoming enemies. It’s the speediest stuff in any of the original Mario trilogy. World 4 gets downright weird by the second stage: yeah, those are whales in between the ice-platforms and snowy outcroppings of rock. Why are there whales? Why not! Go spit some eggs, or something. – JC

Super Ghouls ‘N Ghosts – Ice Forest

Though it came out at the same time as Actraiser, as one of the first fantasy epics for the fledging SNES, Super Ghouls 'n' Ghosts could hardly be more different in tone. Where Actraiser is an existential epic, SG'n'G is a macabre romp; it plays as if Tim Burton and Danny Elfman designed a platformer and let the Marquis de Sade balance the difficulty. Stage 5, the Ice Forest, is a glimmering nightmare full of wolves, frozen ghost knights and spore-spitting snowdrops. In its lurid way, it's awfully pretty, but if you stand around admiring the ambiance, you will soon find yourself without your pants. – PS

Metroid Prime – Phendrana Drifts

Come on, you knew it was coming. Ice in Metroid recalls Samus’ arsenal more immediately than the series’ sprawling environments, but it also defines the most evocative and beautiful space in Prime’s Tallon IV. The Phendrana Drifts has a quality rare in Miss Aran’s adventures: it’s a tranquil place, almost soothing in its stillness. As the camera pans when you first arrive, and Kenji Yamamoto’s eerie, still score begins to play, the ice flows, icicle laden cliffs, and crumbling Chozo architecture come off as a place that’s safe to explore, free of bloodthirsty space jellyfish or insectoid pirates. It isn’t until Ridley’s shadow glides over Phendrana’s surface that you feel a literal chill and remember: Tallon IV isn’t a safe place. The frozen water kills and the ice blocks your way. Best to get bounty huntin’ before your suit freezes up. – JC

Part 1
Part 2

Previous Top Tens:

Ten Reasons Why Secret of Mana Sucks
The Five Greatest Enhanced Remakes - And Five That Weren't So Great
The Ten Greatest Classic Mega Man Levels
The Ten Videogames That Should Have Been Controversial
The Ten Greatest Opening Levels in Gaming History
The Ten Most Adventurous Sequels in Gaming History
The Ten Greatest Fire Levels in Gaming History

The Ten Greatest Ice Levels in Gaming History, part 2

John Constantine — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 00:05:00 GMT

Lost Planet – The Whole Game

Lost Planet, Keiji Inafune’s attempt to make Halo for Japan, is one of this console generation’s most underappreciated games. The shooting is tight, the levels are impeccably designed, the automated-grappling-hook platforming is neat, and the Starship Troopers-bug baddies are some of the cooler looking HD threats out there. Sure, it has some clunky parts, but the good far outweighs the bad. What’s more, the entire game is all about snow and ice. The initial stages, wandering the frozen wastes of E.D.N. III, are still jaw dropping. It isn’t even the swirling snow or the ice-bound cities; it’s the sound, the crunch, of stomping through snow drifts. My teeth grit just thinking about it. The snowy setting is also behind Lost Planet’s health system. Your health is constantly draining because of the cold, so you’re forced to constantly collect the body heat of felled foes. That is cooler than crawling inside a Taun-Taun. – JC

Actraiser – Northwall

Let other developers go the way of stock level design. Quintet was always too good for that, giving their levels in Actraiser a pre-human quality that went far beyond the usual D&D boilerplate. That sense of a vast natural world haunted by gods and demons was perfectly captured in the two Acts that take place in the frozen land of Northwall. In the first, you enter a pristine wasteland to clear it for your subjects. Despite the substantial amount of combat that takes place therein, the austerity of the snowy background and the chilly beauty of Yuzo Koshiro's score gives the whole scene a sense of peace.

Things are different in Act 2, which finds you scaling a collosal frozen tree to rid your now-colonized land of monsters. This climactic moment finds all the forces of the arctic landscape rallied against you, with Koshiro's appropriately frantic music spurring you ever upward to destiny. – Peter Smith

Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow – The Lost Village

Castlevania is a series about place, but its range is often limited by the requirements of its title. Each game has its unique spaces, but they’re inevitably tied to Dracula’s castle and the Transylvanian countryside surrounding it, which is why franchise entries that mix things up are the most memorable. Of all the ‘Vanias to release after Symphony of the Night’s complete genre realignment, the Soma Cruz adventures are the most distinct, their near-future setting lending much needed modernity to the usual gothic ramparts and libraries. And given Soma’s snowy appearance, it’s not surprising that his second outing, Dawn of Sorrow, is home to one of gaming’s best ice levels. The first screen of The Lost Village plain makes you want to put on a coat. Snow falls lazily on a rickety wooden fence, dense forest obscures an enormous moon, and the only sound is wind. The real star is the central room, a multi-screen series of German-styled village buildings stacked on one another, frozen and abandoned. Unforgettable moment: landing a jump on a broken-down VW bus and seeing the snow slump off onto the ground. – JC

Part 1
Part 3

Previous Top Tens:

Ten Reasons Why Secret of Mana Sucks
The Five Greatest Enhanced Remakes - And Five That Weren't So Great
The Ten Greatest Classic Mega Man Levels
The Ten Videogames That Should Have Been Controversial
The Ten Greatest Opening Levels in Gaming History
The Ten Most Adventurous Sequels in Gaming History
The Ten Greatest Fire Levels in Gaming History

The Ten Greatest Ice Levels in Gaming History, part 1

John Constantine — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Autumn may only be a few weeks old, but, as it is with all seasons, you can feel its successor growing during the increasingly long nights. It’s getting cold and the chill has got us thinking about cool things, here at 61 Frames Per Second. As a result, we’re doing two things. One, we’re quoting Batman and Robin far more than we should. Two, we’re thinking about ice levels. Ice levels, like fire levels, refers to a theme more than a specific element. An ice level is more than ice. It’s freezing water, driving snow, strong wind, and grey skies. It’s gaming that makes you want to wrap up in a giant bearskin rug. Naked. Or not, to each their own. Here, we present to you, the top ten greatest ice levels in gaming history. – John Constantine

Chrono Trigger – Death Peak

*Spoilers. Big Ones.*

The snow-capped peak is not an uncommon locale in role-playing games. You’ve been there before: there’s a giant monster, typically abominable, waiting for you at the summit, and the journey to him is guaranteed to entail solving an ice block puzzle or three. You are also guaranteed to find some convenient Ice Armor or even, if you’re lucky, a Fire Sword. Chrono Trigger’s Death Peak, the lone natural environment in the Lavos-ruined 2300 AD, is different. It is, ostensibly, optional. Like everything else in Trigger’s end game following the silent hero’s death, you can skip the mountain entirely, though ascending it is fundamental in reaching the plot’s true conclusion. Death Peak is the physical embodiment of everything at stake in Trigger’s conflict, a frozen place inhabited by stray creatures, cold, and Lavos’ offspring, growing fat on decay, waiting to leave the dead planet to claim others as their own. Its challenge is both environmental and emblematic: your surviving heroes must push against snow and wind, against nature, to both save the world and also their fallen friend. No boss waits at the pinnacle, just a dreary sky and a chance to use the Chrono Trigger itself. When Crono is resurrected, the wind and snow cease, the sun emerges from the clouds and is eclipsed. If you choose to see it, it is the turning point in the game, the moment hope overcomes despair. – JC

Metal Gear Solid (1 and 4) – Shadow Moses

Most of the levels here made the list because they do two things: they are artful and the ice defines how you play through them. Shadow Moses, that forlorn little island north of Alaska where so many bad, Metal Gear-y things happened, fulfills both those criteria and then goes a step farther. Shadow Moses, and the very first post-opening-credits play sequence in MGS, defines the entire series. It sets the overdramatic tone, it bookends the franchise narrative, and it quickly establishes the stealth gameplay. It isn’t a real stunner now, but finding out that enemies would notice footprints left in the snow was exciting stuff in 1998. The return trip to Shadow Moses in Metal Gear Solid 4 is less exciting for its gameplay – it comes in MGS4’s limited-play back half – and more just artful. Approaching the base from outside, literally navigating through a white-out blizzard, provides a visually stunning moment in a game full of them. When I saw that giant bi-pedal robot lumbering through the snow, only barely visible through the torrent, I damn near threw my controller at the screen. – JC

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 – Ice Cap Zone

Okay, okay. I've never much cared for Sonic, but I will admit that its cartoony, distinctly '90s environment design is distinctive, and Ice Cap Zone probably deserves a place on this list. It's cool how you snowboard in, and it's cool how half the level breaks around you in big chaotic shards of crystal, even if the gameplay remains duller than toast. And the much-beloved music is pretty catchy, although it evokes a night of strip-mall dance clubbing more than an arctic wonderland... Okay, Sonic fans? Okay? You win this round, you hear? Now stop sending me those horrible pictures! – PS

Part 2
Part 3

Previous Top Tens:

Ten Reasons Why Secret of Mana Sucks
The Five Greatest Enhanced Remakes - And Five That Weren't So Great
The Ten Greatest Classic Mega Man Levels
The Ten Videogames That Should Have Been Controversial
The Ten Greatest Opening Levels in Gaming History
The Ten Most Adventurous Sequels in Gaming History
The Ten Greatest Fire Levels in Gaming History

Whatcha Playing: Weight of the Stone

John Constantine — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Videogames are rich with memorable moments. Born of both play and story, there are those images, those brief passages of achievement, that are emblazoned in your memory: the first time you clear 100,000 points in Tetris, the dogs bursting through the window in Resident Evil, the booming march that begins to play after the baby metroid’s sacrifice during Super Metroid’s climactic battle with Mother Brain. We are tied to these events thanks not only to those games’ mechanical and artistic design but because of our agency in them. We facilitate these conclusions and, since the game is well-made, we feel them. Another classic: Solid Snake’s first fight with the cyborg ninja, Grey Fox. Like so much of the Metal Gear Solid series, this sequence is ludicrous: simplistic to play, overdramatic, over-everything. But when Grey Fox begins screaming, “Make me feel!” and your controller begins to shake in time with his uncontrollable gesticulations, the scene becomes something else. In 1998, rumble technology was still relatively new in home gaming, so having this drama reflected in the physical world made that much more of an impression. Every time Snake was kicked in the gut or when you landed a hit amidst this half-man’s yowling was tangible.

I feel a lot like Grey Fox when I play videogames these days, particularly action fare. I want an action game to make me feel. Not necessarily a profound emotional reaction – though that’s always a plus – so much as a physical one. When I’m playing an action or sport game, it’s essential that the game translates the physicality and impact of my actions well lest the aesthetic façade covering the game’s rules be ruined. It’s no easy thing to affect either. This past week, I finished playing through what may well be Lucasarts’ final in-house game, the damn-near-ubiquitous Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. TFU is a good game, not a great one; its big-scale Jedi power fantasy is marred by some serious glitches and questionable design choices, like its over-reliance on quick time events. Even though I had a good time playing through it, I was perturbed by how weightless much of the action felt. It’s incredible that TFU’s three physics engines allow me to pick up almost every part of a game’s environment and toss it about willie-nillie, but a mammoth, building crushing boulder shouldn’t feel like it has the same mass as shoe-sized robot. (Before any of you Star Wars nerds pipe-up about size mattering not, shut up. Idiots.)

Alternatively, Sega’s Yakuza 2, a nearly three year-old game running on hardware that couldn’t hope to run the engine beneath TFU’s hood, has been an eye-opening physical experience. Yakuza 2 is, at heart, a modern Japanese role-playing game that trades ponderous turn-based fighting for beat’em-up combat that recalls Die Hard Arcade. Yakuza 2’s combat is deliciously precise and, more importantly, visceral. Every impact of the fist is felt in Yakuza 2, and it keeps what would otherwise be a very repetitive game constantly rewarding, but it takes every facet of the game working in concert for this to work. The fights are fast, never lasting more than ninety seconds, and there’s no discernible delay between your button inputs and your character’s moves outside of what seems natural (throwing a fat guy over your shoulder or landing a jump kick should, after all, take a few more seconds than a jab.) This is on top of impact sound effects (grunts, the exaggerated thump-pop of a blow landing). What puts it over the top is the game’s “Heat” moves, a one-button super move that activates a contextual one-hit kill provided you’ve filled a meter. “Heat” moves are brutal enough to make Tony Soprano blush, but their presentation is remarkable. The screen becomes slightly washed out, the camera provides a shifting, dramatic perspective, the controller shudders, and the onscreen characters enact serious violence like, say, ramming a thug’s head through a car windshield. But it all takes little more than five seconds. Every single aspect has weight and every aspect of the game is built to translate that weight to the player.

This marks the difference between a good game and a great game. Not every game needs to translate literal physicality, but every game should leave you feeling like you’ve transcended the many, many barriers between you and the actual game. When the controller, the television screen, and the cognitive dissonance between your brain and making something happen on screen disappear, that’s when the game becomes something more. It becomes unforgettable.

This is What We’re Playing. Here’s What We Played.

Whatcha Playing: Bubbles, Bubbles, Bubbles!!!
Whatcha Playing?: Final Ninja
Whatcha Playing: Cleaning House, Finding Roots
Whatcha Playing: The Thirst For Adventure, Pointing At Things, and Not Knowing What to Say
Whatcha Playing: The New Adventures of the Nintendo DS

Where Are All Of Videoland's Nice Jewish Boys?

Nadia Oxford — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 19:08:00 GMT

Sundown tonight marks the start of 5769 according to the Jewish lunar calender (endorsed by werewolves everywhere). Become an honourary Jew and take the day off work to eat apples and honey. Everyone around me is doing it. Hell, any day is a good day to eff off and eat apples and honey. And by "apples and honey" I mean "wine" and by "eat" I mean "drink."

In August 2005, I got to attend Otakon in Baltimore and schmoose with Rabbi Wolfwood. Rabbi Wolfwood is a widely popular cosplayer who dresses as Wolfwood, the travelling priest from the Trigun anime--but he makes a few necessary alterations to his costume, of course. Good Jewish boys don't carry Cross Punishers; they carry Star Of David...Punishers.

The Rebbe and I talked briefly about a missing presence in games: Jewish characters. Though they tend to appear in big-name games developed in the West (Bioshock had its delightfully batshit Sander Cohen), Japan's roster of Jewish characters hovers somewhere around -0.1%.

Of course, we're talking about Japan, a country not traditionally known for its diversity. That, however, is changing with these thrilling times of globalisation. Besides which, Japan has put together a couple of excellent animated adapations of The Diary of Anne Frank, as well as (get ready) this adorable adaptation of Fiddler on the Roof.

(When am I going to see a Fidder on the Roof anime?)

I can think of one possible instance of a Jewish family making itself known in a videogame, and that would be the Silverburgs from Suikoden I and II. There's also Metal Gear Solid and Meryl...Silverberg.

Good job on the Silverbergs, Japan. Try a few Goldbergs, now! A nice Wolfe, maybe?

I feel obligated to bring up the Kabbalah here, since Japanese game developers/manga-ka are completely insane for the myths and magic associated with that particular bit of Judaism. It's something else to see these spikey-haired teenagers throw around fire spells that have been penned in perfect Hebrew calligraphy. I wasn't in Hebrew school for long, but my penmanship had this curious habit of falling on a gentle incline. It drove my elders out of their minds.

Have you seen some religious diversity in games that I've missed? I think we can at least all agree that Link, regardless of his religion, is a mensch.

Related Links:

Atheists Riled Up Over Spore
Christian Games Need Not Sucketh

The End Has No End

Derrick Sanskrit — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 17:30:00 GMT

I recently played through Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction and, while I had a long list of problems with the game, the conclusion cinema was certainly a troublesome concern. More than anything else, the massively disappointing finale made me realize how intensely narrative-driven the game was, even more than the New York Times' claim that the game was an interactive Pixar movie (which, for the record, it totally is not). Ever since games first became produced on discs rather than cartridges the focus on cinema-centric storytelling has been undeniable, most notably with early Playstation games like Final Fantasy VII and Metal Gear Solid.

The resolution (or lack thereof) of R&C:ToD did, however, bring me back to a simpler time – a time when games just sort of... ended. You beat the game, congratulations, now try it again. Here now, a sample of some of the worst endings in the history of the NES:

Related articles:
Would You Play A Final Fantasy VII Remake? Hmm?
Metal Gear Solid: Hideo Kojima's Inability to Show Instead of Tell
Up All Night: Bad Dudes

A Letter to the Industry: How to Destroy the Female Gender Barricade

Amber Ahlborn — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Girl gamers, how to attract more women to games, making games for girls, various takes on these topics have been popping up a lot lately. This is a subject quite close to my own heart and I have compiled a few suggestions for game developers to consider when making their next title (assuming said game is aimed at an audience broader than “randy male youth”). These are not suggestions for how to make a game just for girls but rather, how not to drive us away...

Suggestion 1: Do not insult 50% of your potential audience.

In games where characters have any developed personality at all, male characters run the full gambit of possibilities while females typically fall into just four categories.

The Twit – Cute, clueless, possibly a Cloudcuckoolander. Is often your prize at the end of a rescue mission.

The Tomboy – Can handle herself in a fight and has the personality of a brick. That's okay though because she has the biggest bust size and probably wears leather.

The Innocent – Sweet and modest. She's typically unsure of herself until she gets a pep talk. Will do anything for her man even if it's impossibly stupid and/or suicidal. Usually the hero's love interest.

The Feisty One – Cute and spunky. Often a child. If she's at least within a five year range of the age of consent will probably be wearing some variation of Daisy Dukes.

This is not to say you can't find strong, self assured women who need absolutely no help kicking ass. After all, there's uuuhhh... Ultimecia, The Boss, Leorina, wait those are all villains/adversaries. Nice, strong woman = Bad! Kill it! Well, as awful as the personality limits tend to be, the body type category is even worse.

Unless you are making a game for the Playboy crowd, do not put a T&A girl in your game if you do not also have a Chippendales guy. Now, of course we like our game characters to be good looking. It's like the movies and Hollywood Homely; important characters never look ugly unless they look hideous. However, there is a difference between sexy and hypersexualized. If your female characters have gelatin filled watermelons strapped to their chests, watermelons that follow their own personal laws of physics, you have a problem. If your female character's skin tight outfit is so skin tight it looks painted on, you have a problem. Again, we do have positive role models. There's the lovely Jade and the mostly unseen Samus Aran. Alas, Nintendo does earn my Golden Kick-in-the-Groin Award for making the end game cheesecake shot a series tradition. I must ask the guys, would the complete absence of Samus smut turn you off the series? Is Metroid Prime the worst game in the series because Samus failed to *show skin?

Suggestion 2 – Do not assume male as the default.

The sex of most game characters is completely irrelevant. It has no bearing on the game what so ever. Did that hedgehog/purple dragon/space marine/ninja have to be a guy? Studies have shown that while guys have no avatar preference, women prefer to play as female characters. Next time you design a badass Longcoat, make it a girl. That grizzled old mentor with the BFS in your RPG? Why not a woman? The bald space marine? Hey, Ripley made the look work for her.

Suggestion 3 – Sure, sex sells, but why are you only selling to half your potential customers?

Story time. While I was perusing the shelves of a game store, I saw a box for an RC car racing game. I pulled it out and looked at the back of the box. You raced remote controlled monster trucks around tracks in toy rooms, parks, and other such locales. I flipped the box to its front and what do I see? There is an RC monster truck jumping over the ample chest of a bikini clad woman with a lip puckered “Oh My!” expression on her face. Really? It did not convince me to buy it.

I have no doubt that the advertising department has the hardest job in trying to sell games to women. The reason is as simple as it is depressing. Growing up, girls aren't taught that women pioneered the field of computer programming, we're discouraged to try hard in math class because “girls aren't good at math”. We aren't encouraged to like electronics, because “computers are boy toys”. We aren't encouraged to get into the game industry, because “it's a masculine job”. What the advertising department is really up against is generation upon generation of mental conditioning of women to not like or even look at your products. We have been lied to and asking somebody to make an ad that undoes that damage is one hell of a tall order. It is getting better though, more women are gaming and the more visible they are, the more the effect will snowball. Just make sure your poster girls aren't air brushed super models.

Final Word – No pink necessary or desired. Besides, it's a *boy color.

If you make a game for a guy, it's probably just as fun for a gal. Also, elements like more interesting stories and deeper characters seen as being attractive to women are also appreciated by men. So where is the dividing line between a girl game and a guy game? There simply isn't one. Sex specific appeal exists at the opposite poles, but there is no dividing line in the vast middle, where most games fall. All you, the game developer, need to avoid is building a gender barricade in the first place.

* aside from her head

* actually it's gender arbitrary, pick whatever you like

The 61FPS Review: Metal Gear Solid 4 Part 2

John Constantine — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:00:00 GMT

As I mentioned in the first part of this review, Guns of the Patriots is the Metal Gear that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that, for the series and game type, passive viewing is every bit as much a part of the play experience as actual player control. It’s misleading, though, to think that Metal Gear Solid 4’s greatest achievement is its presentation. Since its debut on the MSX in 1986, the actual game under Metal Gear’s graphics and story has been about using a limited, often suffocating interface to explore multiple solutions to a problem. A classic scenario: Solid Snake enters a room filled with obstacles (packing crates, trees, stationary vehicles) and a handful of hostile artificial intelligences (soldiers, security cameras, dogs) moving along set paths.

Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake and Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater

The goal is to guide Snake past hostile elements without alerting them to his presence. The environment and tools acquired in its boundaries (anything from firearms to camouflage) create options; you could crawl under cars to avoid detection or tranquilize a soldier to distract the others as you move on. Snake is difficult to manage though; move too fast and you risk accidentally walking into an enemy’s line of sight, fire a gun and you risk being heard. You could argue that the finicky and imprecise control of Snake is immersive, simulating the stress and precision of actual stealth, but the truth is that it superficially increases difficulty, masking the rudimentary artificial intelligence’s faults. In Guns of the Patriots, not only is the environment and multiple-solution approach expanded upon in both scope and realism, but control is streamlined to a point where agency is truly in the player’s hands, no longer at the mercy of a stilted interface.

MGS4’s opening chapter sets the play standard for the game with aplomb. Snake is placed in a city under siege, a local militia in constant combat with a genetically enhanced mercenary group with towering, bi-pedal war machines at their disposal. Both forces are a concern in navigating the terrain, as getting caught in crossfire can lead to death. Access to offensive actions (shooting, and more importantly, the ability to shoot while still moving) is streamlined here, allowing direct confrontation to become a more viable solution. Hostile AIs are as predictable as ever, but there is a far greater number of threats performing disparate actions on the play field. These are Guns of the Patriots greatest play enhancements; with control no longer a hindrance and the addition of conflicting AIs on the field, the game’s old faults have been integrated into play. It’s an effective and smart answer to the series’ oldest problems. The arenas for action are not so different from previous installments, each one contained and transitioning into another, but their density and flexibility have been enhanced to the point that the feel less like obstacle courses and more like actual places. In many ways, Guns of the Patriots is Metal Gear’s first successful foray into true three-dimensional design, the dynamics of its larger environments accounting for a world that isn’t only seen from a bird’s-eye-view.

Come back next week for Part 3 of this review for a dissection of presentation and final thoughts on MGS4.

Click here for more 61 Frames Per Second Review.

Related Links:

Metal Gear Solid 4 Review Part 1
The Ten Greatest Opening Levels in Gaming History
Metal Gear Solid: Hideo Kojima's Inability to Show Instead of Tell
Bringing Sexy Back: Yoji Shinkawa

The 61FPS Review: Metal Gear Solid 4 Part 1

John Constantine — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 17:00:00 GMT

I’ve spent the last ten years of my life resisting Metal Gear Solid. I didn’t play the series’ opening chapter until April of 1999 and, even then, I only played because it was gifted to me by an exceptionally generous friend. At sixteen, I considered myself a staunch traditionalist. I wanted my games two-dimensional and my gameplay familiar so Metal Gear Solid didn’t appeal to me (I'd be lying, though, if I said its monumental popularity wasn't at the heart of my dismissing it.) It took playing MGS to realize Hideo Kojima, more an eccentric than a trendsetter at that point, had captured the gaming zeitgeist in two discs of content. Basic play in MGS was little more than a polished version of the original Metal Gear’s, but its presentation and narrative ambitions were a new face for gaming, every bit as redefining as Mario’s first hop-around Princess Toadstool’s 3D castle. MGS’ in-engine acted-cutscene, dramatic-instance formula remains the template for storytelling in videogames to this day. I loved MGS but I didn’t fully take to the play; the control was too imprecise, its stealth too punishing. So, in 2001, I was curious about its sequel, Sons of Liberty, but not itching to actually play it. Convenient for me, considering how MGS2 turned out to not be about playing at all. I watched it played through, start to finish, on the day it came out and was aghast at the breadth of its expository passages (often little more than monochromatic talking-heads) and its author’s incompetence. It was the worst sort of sequel, a bloated mirror-image of its predecessor. Most insulting, however, was Kojima’s winking acknowledgement that this was what it was. The fun, inclusive meta-textual elements of MGS became mean-spirited barriers between player and game in Sons of Liberty. Its story wasn’t complicated, just horribly told, and it turned me off the series for years. MGS became a go-to gag amongst my friends (“Want to play some Metal Gear?” “Sure, I love shitty movies.”) I only played Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater for the first time this past March, largely in anticipation of Metal Gear Solid 4’s release, and was surprised to find it such an enjoyable experience. MGS3 is considered by some to be an apology for Sons of Liberty’s pretensions and verbosity, its prequel narrative a retreat on Kojima’s part. But that point of view ignores how different Snake Eater is as a game and, particularly in its revision Subsistence, how much more successful it is in enacting story through play. Opening up the game’s environments as well as making protagonist Snake’s health a core mechanic made for a better game and, subsequently, a better story.

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots is the game Hideo Kojima has been trying to make his whole career. It took me seventeen hours to finish the game and only seven of those were spent in complete control of what was happening on screen but, as opposed to Sons of Liberty’s repulsive disconnect between player and game, I never felt detached. Its lack of restraint is shocking; story sequences go on for well over an hour, leaving literally no facet, however incidental, of the series’ over-arching narrative unexplained. But play and story have finally been fused, every sequence of direct control inseparably integrated into the narrative and what would have previously been passive portions of the game even allow limited control. The story is the game in Guns of the Patriots which, I’m realizing, has been the point all along. Metal Gear Solid has transformed into its own genre, a blending of visual novel and action, movie and hide-and-seek. After a decade, I now find Metal Gear irresistible because it’s finally the game it was supposed to be.

There’s a lot more to be said about the game. In part 2, I’ll discuss Guns of the Patriots's play and control, and in part 3, I’ll take a look at its audio and visual presentation.

Related Links:

The Ten Greatest Opening Levels in Gaming History
Metal Gear Solid: Hideo Kojima's Inability to Show Instead of Tell
Bringing Sexy Back: Yoji Shinkawa

Games Cost Money: Sony Cans The Getaway and Eight Days

John Constantine — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 15:00:00 GMT

While the salad days of the Playstation 2 are at an end for Sony, things have been looking up for the entrenched corporate monster in 2008. Little Big Planet continues to wow, Gran Turismo 5: Prologue had a healthy release in April for a game that’s little more than a demo, and the buzz surrounding Metal Gear Solid 4’s impending release is loud enough to even drown out some of that Grand Theft Auto fervor that’s been going on. The stigma surrounding the Playstation 3 – that it’s an expensive, ugly machine without many games to play on it – is slowly starting to fade, and it has everything to do with some truly exciting exclusive software. So it’s disheartening to hear that two games being developed by Sony’s own London Studio have been cancelled. Eight Days, a Michael Bay-tinged action game that fused car chases with shootouts in the American southwest, and The Getaway, a sequel to London Studio’s successful PS2 Brit-crime drama series, have both been given the axe “due to the redistribution of resources and budget.”

While I’m the first to exclaim my love for the big-budget blockbuster games coming out on the 360, PS3, and PC these days, the truth is that, for at least the short-term future, they may not be an economically feasible pursuit for most developers. Games –graphically intensive, high definition games – cost money to make. While the Halo’s of the world sell enough to validate that sort of investment, most just don’t. It’s worrying that Sony found it necessary to kill two projects, games that were shown to the public over two years ago, because of budgetary demands. But for blockbuster gaming, it seems like them’s the breaks.

Thanks to Next-Gen for the spot.

Metal Gear Solid: Hideo Kojima’s Inability to Show Instead of Tell

John Constantine — Tue, 27 May 2008 15:00:00 GMT

As Metal Gear Sold 4’s June 12th release date looms, more and more information about Solid Snake’s purported final adventure has begun to leak into the press. British gaming mag CVG reported late last week that MGS4 features a cutscene that lasts a full ninety-minutes. While the article doesn’t mention where said cutscene appears in the game – it may be smack in the middle or after the conclusion of play for all we know - it still means that a player will watch MGS4 for an hour and a half instead of playing it.

Director and designer Hideo Kojima, in his Metal Gear Solid series especially, is notorious for using long non-interactive cutscenes and filling them with verbose, convoluted narrative. This over-reliance on the narrative language of film turns a number of players away from the games completely. Just two months ago, I replayed through MGS1 through 3 and both of my roommates could barely stand to be in the room while I played because, more often than not, the screen was filled with stiff talking heads. Games are meant to be played, not viewed, and that maxim makes Kojima a difficult creator to engage. His games are often brilliant in their ability to create drama directly through play; just look at the dramatic motorcycle chase near the close of Metal Gear Solid 3. And the continuing story in MGS, overwrought as it can be, is also remarkable as a post-modern text, repeatedly breaking the fourth wall to further engage the player in its cultural commentary. But Kojima has failed to evolve as a storyteller as the series has grown over the past decade, adding new mechanics to the play but relying on archaic methods to tell his story. It’s the oldest rule in the fiction book: show, don’t tell. I was hoping Metal Gear Solid 4 would change things up. Guess I better just sit down with popcorn each time I fire it up.

Thanks to Joystiq for the spot.

Bringing Sexy Back: Yoji Shinkawa

John Constantine — Wed, 14 May 2008 16:00:00 GMT

When it comes to Metal Gear Solid, Hideo Kojima’s always the first name that springs to mind. Yeah he’s the creator, the designer, the director, the writer of all that dialogue, not to mention that the entire team behind the games is named after the man. But another name springs to my mind as I quiver with anticipation of Metal Gear Solid 4’s release: Yoji Shinkawa. Shinkawa’s expressive illustrations have been the face of the MGS series from the beginning and are, if I do say so, sexy as hell. The vaguely defined faces of his figures, the broad-stroke heavy lines of his characters, the almost melancholic tone of his largely monochromatic illustrations. Shinkawa gets us hot and no mistake.

What do you say, FPSers?