Annabel Taylor Hall is quite lovely. (Photo by through-pan*flashing)

I was back in Ithaca for Yin and Lee’s awesome wedding. Being in the wedding kept me from taking too many photos on my own, but I’ll put up what I’ve got later. I had a fantastic time back in Ithaca and I wish them both the absolute best.

Movies

Too busy with weddings!

TV

The League – Always raunchy and hilarious. I really enjoyed the high school reunion episode when it aired and I liked it yet again. Excited for the return of this show.

Top Gear – I selected the ever popular carboat episode for Duffy’s enjoyment. She did, in fact, enjoy it.

Music

Google Music has (had?) a huge sale celebrating the 50th anniversary of the phonograph. Go get some cheap albums!

Books

Not really, no. I’ll sure I’ll pick something up this week to replace 1Q84.

Video Games

Persona 4 Arena – 20 minutes of text, two minutes of fighting, if that, yet I love it. Lots of fun to see where these characters are and the fighting system is actually pretty neat. So far I’ve beaten Yukiko and Charlie’s (Yu Narukami for those who didn’t watch the Endurance Run) first stories. Can’t wait to get to the rest of the characters to find out exactly what’s going on.

Spelunky – Still just trying to master the game and eventually get to hell. Always tons of fun to mess around and die a bunch.

Metal Gear Solid 4 – Konami added trophies in like years later, but it’s motivated me to go back and get my stealth action on. Lots of fun so far. I think I got like three or four trophies already.

This was a piece I wrote for Gamers With Jobs to try and score a writing gig. They ended up going with two other writers, so I figured I’d post what I wrote here. Enjoy.

It was last month when I realized that something had gone terribly wrong . There were fifteen people in my apartment, maybe a tenth of them lifelong gamers, and they were all here to play video games. Most strange of all: there I was, microphone in hand, belting out “Don’t Stop Believing” in front of my friends. As my voice cracked on the high notes I wondered how I reached this point. Wasn’t I the same guy who refused to go to karaoke bars to avoid singing in public? Weren’t these people the same ones who scoffed at Final Fantasy and Halo?

I still remember what social gaming used to be, back when I was a kid. A mere ten years ago it was some combination of me, my brothers, my cousins, and my buddies all crowded around our tiny television set playing Goldeneye. If we weren’t cackling at our proximity mine craftiness, we were smashing in dunks while setting the net on fire, boom-chaka-laka. There was one constant and it was that we were all boys of various ages playing simulations of things that boys love. Shooting spies, hitting home runs, killing monsters, hand-to-hand combat, all of the social gaming conventions out there catered explicitly to teenage males.

Those times are over. The success of the Nintendo Wii has all but erased the teenage boy stereotype from general gaming. All Nintendo had to do was keep toeing that same party line that dated all the way back the days of the Famicom: make gaming fun and uncomplicated and they will come. In droves, apparently. The Wii went and did what we all thought impossible. All of a sudden grandma was playing. Wives, girlfriends, kids, old men, they were all playing and it was more than socially acceptable, it was cool. I didn’t have to force my girlfriend to pick up a controller, she wanted to come over and play tennis. It’s still kind of crazy, when I think about it.

Ignoring the power of the Wii when considering other social gaming phenomena like Rock Band is naïve, at best, so we must consider that the Wii created the culture of social gaming that enabled the success of Harmonix’s band simulator. After Nintendo convinced everyone that swinging a remote around and pretending it was a golf club was cool, getting them to jam to music they already loved on fake, plastic instruments seemed trivial. So it came to pass that I pre-ordered a copy of Rock Band and threw the first of many Rock Band parties the day it arrived in the mailroom of my dorm.

A former electrical engineering student like myself is easily able to cultivate a large group of friends who love video gaming in general, so rounding up gamers to try out the latest video game was a trivial ordeal for me. The real trick was rounding up the non-gamers. Word of mouth spread slowly at first, but it wasn’t too long before the people who had last played a video game in 1991 started to outnumber those who could recite the Konami Code on command. The moment it should have dawned on me came that January.

I had returned for my final semester, classes had yet to start, and I had rounded up two of my buddies who were similarly in town early to play some of the DLC that had come out over the long winter break. As the three of us rocked out, a very confused face peeked into the open doorway, clearly wondering what all the commotion was all about. Her name was Allison, she was a transfer that semester, and she was super cute.

“You wanna play?” I asked

“I don’t really know how to play…” she protested, clearly not wanting to embarrass herself.

“It’s easy, all you have to do is sing the words.” I was doing my best, but I was losing her. Singing in front of people she hardly knew was not on the agenda for the day.

“Come on, it’s house rules, everyone has to sing. We’ll all go too,” my friend Lee chimed in. We had no house rules, but he was a genius because she picked up the microphone and a friendship was struck up with a pretty girl. It later turned out that Allison had transferred to Cornell to be closer to her boyfriend, but the point was that my gaming that day was social.

I think it’s perfectly fair to say that Rock Band is responsible for me growing out of my shell that last semester at school. My guitar skills developed to an expert level and I soon stopped worrying about failing in front of the weekly attendees of Rock Band night. When I picked up the guitar I started thinking of myself as a performer and I began singing and dancing. Whenever I picked up the microphone and embarrassed myself, I laughed it off and developed confidence in front of my friends. The only thing I feared more than singing in front of people was dancing, but thanks to those parties, I found myself cutting loose on the dance floor more and more, even sans alcohol. Still, the revelation had yet to sink in.

We’re back to last month and I’m belting out “Don’t Stop Believing” on expert, my voice cracking on the high notes. I can’t believe that I’m singing in front of a girl I’m actually trying to impress, that it’s not even crossing my mind to be embarrassed, and that I’m actually passing the song.

A lot of criticism is levied against Nintendo for diluting the player base and creating the hard/softcore schism. After E3, the Wii Vitality Sensor was trumpeted as proof that Nintendo had lost sight of the goal, but, as someone who has grown as a person due to social gaming, I can’t stress enough that they’re among the few who have got it right. Gaming should be allowed to be social too. Who knows, you might end up someone.

-Dan Mesa is just a city boy, born and raised nowhere near south Detroit.

Hey loyal readers,

I need your help in deciding what game to play next. I haven’t quite gotten my polling software down, so here’s a nifty embedded poll instead.

Basically, I want to continue to write impressions about games that I’m playing, but I don’t know which one to move on to next. A little about each of the choices:

Earthbound (Mother 2)

A fantastic, Dragon Quest-inspired RPG series by Shigesato Itoi, Earthbound is fantastic, quirky, and interesting. I played this back when I was in middle school, but I think it deserves reexamining. Ideally I would be hooking up my SNES, which I still have, to get this to work, so that would be an adventure in and of itself.

Suikoden Tierkreis

I’ve never played any of Konami’s Suikoden RPG series, but this DS gaiden-type story is said to have a pretty neat narrative.

Shadow of the Colossus

Universally hailed by nearly every human being who has played it, this game is held in such high regard that it was featured in Reign Over Me because its themes of loss and regret actually coincided with those of the movie. I can only go on without playing a game by Ueda for so much longer.

Mother 3

Held in super-high regard by the likes of Tim Rogers, among many others, the third of the Mother series is chock full of the same light irreverence of Mother 2, but coupled with a somber, deep, dark, heavy story that is sure to tug at the heartstrings.

Chrono Trigger DS

The DS remake of my favorite 16-bit game, you can’t really go wrong with CT. Developed by a dream team collaboration between Square and Enix before they were Square Enix (Squeenix!), Chrono Trigger was the swan song of the 16-bit JRPG.

Final Fantasy IV DS

The Final Fantasy whose release immediately preceded (in the US) my favorite in the series, FFIV has eluded completion from me on multiple rentals. A fine game that I just haven’t had the time to ever finish.

There’s also the obvious choice that you don’t like this feature, which I won’t take personally. If no one likes it, why do it, right?

This poll will remain open until 0000 14 July whereupon I will either narrow it down further or, if one wins outright, simply play that game next.

You can get some of these games at my Amazon aStore!

Insert another credit, because it’s time for your weekly video game news and you’ve just hit the Game Overview screen.

Let’s start with a little NSFW. Remember that game Left 4 Dead? Remember how Zoey was a great example of a non-sexualized hero, something Valve specializes? Remember no more, because diligent modders have released the Nude Zoey mod (Kotaku story mildly NSFW, but no actual nudity in it).

The designer of the mod wasn’t happy with just slapping on a nude skin, nope, apparently it wasn’t complete until Zoey featured realistic boob jiggle. Modders have too much time on their hands, perhaps?

Three Part Harmonix

Want to learn some interesting tidbits about The Beatles: Rock Band? Check out this interview, courtesy Gamasutra, with Harmonix’s Josh Randall for more.

!

Konami, developer of hits like Metal Gear and Castlevania, have come under fire for being giant jerks. Yoko Sekiguchi is suing the company because she took maternity leave and, upon return, found that she had been demoted and docked ~$2000 for her time off. She rightfully believes that this is discrimination and is now suing Konami for $344,000. Yep, that was brilliant Konami, you were assholes and saved $2000 only to have to pay legal fees and potentially $344,000.

Voice Talent

Interested in learning a bit about the two female leads in Uncharted 2? Here’s a longish interview by Sony with Emily Rose and Claudia Black:

No Mai?

Kotaku is reporting that Mai will officially not be in King of Fighters XII. I am announcing that I will not be buying KOF XII until/unless Mai Shiranui is added via DLC. So much for that…

Says Ignition Entertainment’s Shane Bettenhausen:

I think the thinking is that they are making you wait because you want her.

Looks like I’ll be making them wait because they want my money.

I’m not a fan of the horror genre. Not even a little bit. The only “survival horror” game I’ve ever played was Eternal Darkness and, despite how awesome that game is, it scared the bejesus out of me in some places. Yet here we are again with another horror game tempting me with it’s interesting aesthetic.

The Silent Hill series has always been the more “intellectual” survival horror game compared to Resident Evil, in that it relied more on psychological scares in places and was designed to reflect that. The enemies and locations were generated from repressed psychological instincts rather than just using standard horror tropes. Combat was never any good because the point of the game was that the protagonist was a regular Joe, not someone accustomed to fighting freakish monsters.

Unfortunately, the series was handed to less capable hands a few too many times, resulting in diluted rehashes that lacked the poignancy of the earlier Silent Hill games, or so I’m told, resulting in more and more generic survival horror. It seems that Konami’s at least reoriented themselves properly with the latest iteration, a reboot of the first Silent Hill game known as Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. This is a game I’m actually tempted to try. Here’s why, from Brad Shoemaker at the Giant Bomb:

These scenes were shown at the Konami event a few weeks ago, so I’m merely verifying for you that they play as well as I hoped they would then. But here’s your brand new information about Shattered Memories, a truly unique and sort of creepy technique for personalizing your experience that I didn’t expect. Essentially, the game has its eyes on you at all times, watching what you’re doing and recording what sounds like an enormous array of minutiae about how you’re playing. The game starts with a psych exam, which you can see a bit of in the trailer below, where the doctor asks you increasingly personal questions about your likes, dislikes, bedroom behavior, and other strange topics.

That exam is explicit, but later in the game, according to a company rep, the game will more invisibly track your every move. The sole example involved that first deserted building I was exploring. When I came to a hallway junction with a sign indicating the exits were to the left and the bathrooms to the right, the rep pointed out that the game would remember whether I went right to investigate the bathrooms or went straight to the exit. And if I did hit up the facilities, it would further remember whether I went in the men’s or ladies’ room first. How all this data will manifest later on the rep mostly wouldn’t say, though he did let slip that your cumulative choices will determine what the monsters will look like. Presumably, the game will attempt to get inside your head, figure out what scares you the most, and then do precisely that.

This is truly the future of horror. A movie can only do so much to personalize its scares. It’s intended to air to millions and has no real interaction with an individual. The video game, on the other hand, is blessed with the ability to monitor player actions and try to cater its content to the person playing. I’m sure we’re at baby steps right now, but this could lead to some seriously freaky horror games in the future. Sure, the scares will be limited to what the designers can think up, but what about if they started bringing in psychologists as consultants. They could unearth some seriously primal scares. This idea definitely has promise and I hope Konami pulls it off well.

Insert another credit, because it’s time for your weekly video game news and you’ve just hit the Game Overview screen.

E3 is a magical time for video games. So much news happened in this past week that this is gonna be an epic post filled with tons of trailers and news. In no particular order, here it goes:

Look! A three-headed monkey!

First off we have the Monkey Island news again. Tales of Monkey Island will be debuting next month (!) on 7 July from Telltale Games. Yes, it’s super exciting…yes, Telltale has proven that they can have moderate success and timely release with episodic adventure games…but I don’t feel the humor of Ron Gilbert in the trailer.

I just hope the game is quality and we get to see a lot more MI.

Legendary

Speaking of former Lucasarts comedic geniuses, Tim Schafer’s Brütal Legend (mind the umlaut) has had production suspended in what can only be known as a dick move by Activision. The litigious Activision dropped Brütal Legend not long ago when they merged with Vivendi and they claim it was because they never met milestones. Supposeedly they still retain the rights to release the game and will suffer “irreparable damages” for this.

My favorite part of the story, Tim Schafer’s response:

“Hey, if Activision liked it, then they should have put a ring on it,” Schafer said. “Oh great, now Beyoncé is going to sue me too.”

Seriously Activision? You guys look like major tools. I already don’t play much anything by Activision and I just might consider this a permanent decision. It’s unbelievable.

Back in Black (and Red)

Nintendo will be selling the Wii in black starting this summer in Japan and the DSi in red at the same time. Not a bad idea, considering that sales of Nintendo systems have started to lag behind some of the Sony stuff. It’s just the kind of Nintendo thing to do in this situation.

NEW SMB

New Super Mario Bros. Wii is on the way! It will not feature online play =[

Deep from the trenches, it’s time for your Monday video feature: Embedded Reporter.

2K has been silent as to whether or not this will be localized, but here’s the latest trailer on my favorite baseball series: MLB Power Pros!

Bring this stateside 2K. There’s a dedicated fanbase that will buy it.

The Dark Knight

I saw The Dark Knight twice on Blu-Ray this week and after three viewings, this movies still undoubtably holds its own as the best movie in the summer and even fits into my top five of all time.

What Christopher Nolan did with this movie was incredible, creating a superhero movie that feels decidedly not like a superhero movie (in that nothing that happens in it is that far beyond what you’d see in any action movie), and still retains a sense of cinematic integrity and depth beyond any Batman movie before it (save, perhaps Batman Begins).

A superb piece of cinema. I cannot wait for the sequel, especially if Nolan directs again.

MGS5?

It really is a surprise, considering how much of the early life of this blog was devoted to Metal Gear Solid 4, that I haven’t mentioned this yet at all. There’s a teaser site out there about about Metal Gear hinting at some sort of new product. I would get the link for you now, but I don’t have access now, so I’ll do it later on, perhaps tomorrow. The general crux of the teaser is that it’s an all black site with an upside down exclamation point (or an ‘i’) plus an exclamation point is equal to a power sign, with the power sign part being an exclamation point. It looks something like this:

i + ! = power sign with exclamation point instead of a vertical dash

Underneath it says “A NEXT METAL GEAR IS” or some other Engrish-y sounding phrase. Speculation is rampant as to what this might be. The fact that the writing is all in green makes it look like it could be MGS4 on the Xbox 360. The ‘i’ and ‘!’ makes it look like it might be a sequel to Metal Gear Ac!d. No one knows yet and we’re all anxiously awaiting (unless the news has spread by now and I’ve missed it since I’m behind on gaming news).

A 360 announcement would be devastating to PS3 loyalists, but untimately intelligent for Konami, a company that probably loves to make money.

I’m hoping it’s for a new Metal Gear game, although I do hope that there’s no Solid Snake in it, his story is over.

It’s time for the moment many of you have been waiting for: my review of Hideo Kojima’s epic masterpiece: Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots.

SPOILER ALERT: This review may contain story spoilers. Read at your own risk!

Operating mostly on the basis of a promised beautiful, cinematic, amazing future of games, the PS3 launched back in November of 2006 with many of its purchasers anxiously awaiting the arrival of one specific game: Metal Gear Solid 4. Arriving quite some time later, is this the game to finally make the PS3 a worthwhile purchase? Let’s have a look.

The Story

One of the main questions on everyone’s mind when MGS4’s launch neared was whether or not the game would be able to wrap up the multitude of sometimes downright ridiculous plot points laid out by the six or so canonical games that have come out over the last twenty years. I’ll tell you outright that they definitely did manage to get it all figured out in a mostly satisfying way and with a pretty great premise that relates rather well to the previous games in the series. Unfortunately we lack some of the major themes of the typical MGS game, which is quite unfortunate, since the game is now more about Snake getting revenge and, to borrow a marketing blurb from Halo, finishing the fight.

The premise behind this new game is as complex as any other Metal Gear game. “War has changed,” as Snake tells us right from the get-go. The world economy revolves around war instead of oil with major private military corporations handling military operations in lieu of the more typical government-handled warfare of the 20th and 21st centuries. Snake’s major antagonist, Liquid Ocelot, happens to control the five major PMCs and is about to stage a revolt. Colonel Campbell will have none of that, so he’s sending in Snake to put an end to Liquid once and for all.

If you’ve ever seen a clip or footage of old Metal Gear Solid games, you’re no doubt wondering why Snake looks so old in this game. Simple answer, Snake, being a clone of the great Big Boss, is actually suffering from rapid cellular degeneration as a direct result of his cloned nature. So begins the tale of the living legend as he pursues Liquid across the globe. I’ll leave the synopsis at that, since the rest is best experienced in person.

Gameplay

The Metal Gear Solid series has always suffered from rather obscure control decisions, resulting in a finger-twisting control scheme that was definitely frustrating. For the last game of Snake’s career, Kojima teamed up with Ryan Payton to try and “Westernize” the controls of MGS to streamline the obscure decisions that have been a hallmark of the past ten years of Metal Gear. By making these controls work better in the post-discovery, action-oriented parts of MGS4, Kojima also inadvertently made it much easier to NOT play MGS as “Tactical Stealth Espionage” game. Really, what is Metal Gear without the stealth? The game was punishing when you messed up because you weren’t supposed to get caught. Your gameplay should be much more deliberate, slow and controlled than a straight-up action game because this is NOT an action game. That disappointment aside, the reworked controls do make the experience that much smoother and help to bring modern game design to the classic series.

Extra Spoiler Alert

Also new to the mix is the way that the levels are laid out. The first zone, the Middle East, has you more or less in the middle of a battle between the PMCs and militia insurgents. While these two factions are battling it out, you can choose to sneak, stealthily, around the fighting, help the militia take out the PMCs, gaining their trust and making them allies on the battlefield, or kill/stun both PMC and militia alike, making enemies of both. This first section on the game also hapens to be one of the best done sections, with the interesting dynamic of warring factions, tension resulting from battlefield sneaking, and a overall cool locale.

Act two takes place in South America, in a throwback type situation to MGS3. It doesn’t quite take place in the jungle, but its got a similar aesthetic to it and is the second most fun zone in the game. There is one area of complaint, the part where you have to “track” Naomi’s footprints to get to where she’s being kept in S. America. it’s just not as fun as the game thinks it is to look for footprints. This section also features some of the militia/PMC fighting of the desert.

The third act is the weakest of the bunch, taking place in Europe, you mainly follow a member of the resistance in an attempt to locate the headquarters of said resistance and “Big Mama.” It’s just plain not as fn as other parts of the game, even if it forces a bit more the stealth aspect of MGS that I love so much.

Act IV has the third best section of the game, as you return to Shadow Moses Island hunting Liquid Ocelot. The act starts with a dream sequence that pops you back to the PSX Metal Gear Solid making you play the approach into the Shadow Moses Island base. after that bit of nostalgia, you bust into the base itself, hearing bits of nostalgic moments that took place int he island as you pass through familiar locations. The enemies in this section are far less interesting, as they are mostly robotic. and not as fun to sneak by. This act does also contain a very sweet section where you pilot the Metal Gear REX, the model you fought in Metal Gear Solid and a Metal Gear on Metal Gear battle as you spar with the Metal Gear RAY model from Metal Gear Solid 2.

The final act brings you face to face with the Outer Heaven, Liquid’s main battleship and the location he intends to launch his revolution from. The shortest section in the game, it does feature a great boss battle against a foe similar to Psycho Mantis as well as one of the best cinematic and nostalgic gameplay sections as the final boss battle.

No real review can get away without mentioning Metal Gear Solid Online. This game, I feel, suffers from the fact that stealth is not rewarded as it is in the main game. Why would you want to play MGO like any other third-person shooter? I mainly have my fun by refusing to kill any other players, but when I do manage to stun another player, one of my teammates inevitably comes around and shoots him in the head on the floor. Can’t win ’em all, I guess.

Graphics

Meet the best looking PS3 game currently on the market. Every ounce of processing power available to Konami and Kojima Productions was expertly utilized to create a beautiful experience that will wow most any naysayer of the PS3’s graphical capabilities. The desert makes you thirsty, jungle makes you sweaty from humidity, Europe feels cool, Shadow Moses Island is appropriately haunted-seeming, and Outer Heaven’s cinematic beauty makes for a great end to a fine game.

Sound

What can I say? The guns sound good, voice acting is as superb as ever (boo to losing the British and Chinese accents of Naomni and Mei Ling, respectively), and the score by Harry Gregson-Williams and company evokes the properly patriotic and legendary aesthetic of Metal Gear.

Final Verdict

Metal Gear Solid 4 is an amazing game, but I found myself just a wee bit disappointed with the epic. While the game does everything really well, I just found the story and, specifically, the acting of some of the characters (Naomi and Sunny) to be rather irritating. Compared to the sublime perfection of Metal Gear Solid 3, this game just needed a little more editing and a little less of the Japanese overacted melodrama. That being said, MGS4 is still one of the best PS3 games out there, gameplay-wise and should not be missed. A definite must-play.

Insert another credit, because it’s time for your weekly video game news and you’ve just hit the Game Overview screen.

Metal Gear Solid 4 comes out in a few short weeks and it will be the end of an era. Twenty years of Metal Gear and we’ve finally hit the end of the series. :sigh: What a great time…wait, what?

Video game news has been abuzz since about last week when Konami made it clear that there will, in fact, be a Metal Gear Solid 5, despite Kojima’s statements in the past that MGS4 would be the last MGS game ever. While gamers are used to having Kojima claim to be done with the series permanently, they certainly didn’t expect to see another announcement so soon.

The basic gist is that while it may not be a “Solid” game (as in involving Solid Snake), there will be more Metal Gear games, even if the numeral isn’t exactly 5. Kojima wants his production company, the aptly named Kojima Productions, to be involved with the game, but he would be willing to put someone else in the actual role of producer.

My reaction is, predictably, bittersweet. I mean, who wouldn’t want to see more Metal Gear games, right? Then again, how would the series proceed without Solid Snake and with his entire story told? I can say from the get-go that I wouldn’t want to see the series keep on extending the story of Snake with Snake retired and whatnot, but then again, would another game that had nothing to do with Snake even really be a Metal Gear game? I suppose if I stopped to think about it, we did have that in Metal Gear Solid 2. Sure, we played as Snake for a while, but the story had just about nothing to do with Solid Snake, aside from him actually appearing in the game. In the end, it was still a good game without Snake being the player character, so I suppose it could work.

I think the main concern that I would have with a new Metal Gear game is that I would want Hideo Kojima involved. Anything made without his strong input in some way would be objectionable to me. We’ll see what happens.