Author: Jeremy Voss

Musician, wanna-be writer, suburban husband and father. I'll occasionally tweet from @couchshouts. You can find me on XBL, PSN and Steam as JervoNYC.

>Impressions: Mercs 2 / Tiger 09 / Tales of Vesperia

>I’d rush-ordered Tales of Vesperia last week, figuring that with the 3-day weekend, I’d have ample time to mess about with it. As it happened, though, I barely touched it; did a lot of and Tiger 09 and Mercenaries 2 instead.

Mercs 2:
I’m a little concerned about Mercs 2. I’m only about 3 or 4 hours into it, and yet I’ve unlocked almost 300 Achievement Points and my save file indicates that I’m just over 40% complete. For an open world game, that doesn’t bode well at all.

As a huge fan of the first game I had very high hopes for the sequel, but I can’t really say that I’m all that impressed this time around. Graphically, it’s a bit spotty; textures pop in and out all the time, and even when they’re fully in they’re not necessarily all that pretty. The driving model is pretty strange and doesn’t really feel quite right, especially when it comes to braking to a full stop (for all the game’s emphasis on physics, the laws of inertia do not apply at all when jumping out of a moving vehicle). Blowing things up – the hallmark of the franchise – is still fun, but to be perfectly honest, I haven’t really had many opportunities to blow anything up just yet (however, I only unlocked the airstrike support option this very morning right before I went to work, so maybe that will change now).

And, of course, the game does suffer a bit from EA-itis – there’s lots of poorly-written and generally unnecessary emphasis on how bad-ass these characters are.

I do appreciate the game’s new economy feature – you can’t just call in supplies and air support willy-nilly now, you need to have enough fuel stockpiled to arrange for this stuff; which means that in addition to the missions, you also need to be on the lookout for fuel, cash and armaments you can arrange to steal via airlift. (There’s a logic flaw in this, though – it costs fuel to get stuff airlifted to your location, but it costs no fuel to steal stuff – and I’ve stolen far more stuff than I’ve ordered, and from farther away than any of the missions I’ve been on.)

That said, I’m a little underwhelmed, especially if the game is as short as it appears it may be.

Tiger 09
Tried to get some online golf going over the weekend, but EA’s servers were a bit wonky and we couldn’t get it to work. That said, there doesn’t appear to be an in-game option to invite anyone from your friends list; you have to create a game lobby and then back out to the 360 guide button, which is where you invite someone. This seems to be a bit too many steps than necessary, and it’s especially confusing when the server isn’t working.

As for the single player – it is definitely the best iteration in the franchise that I’ve yet played. All it really needs, in Tiger ’10, is a graphical upgrade; while the players and the courses look good, the backgrounds and the trees look PS1-ish, and there are issues with the camera during certain shots (especially with long putts where the camera doesn’t always follow the ball into the hole, which means you have no idea what you just did).

Tales of Vesperia
As noted above, I didn’t really get around to this one. I did about an hour’s worth late Friday/early Saturday, and that was about it. I’ll need to spend more time with it when I can put 100% focus into it. What I saw was interesting. Combat is a little tricky, at least in terms of the controls.

>R&C; Duke; Tiger

>1. My wife was out of town this weekend, which gave me full reign over the living room and all the creature comforts therein, and so I had my first real gaming marathon in quite some time. It was as good an opportunity as any to milk the Fable II Pub Games exploit for all it’s worth before it got fixed (and, honestly, after several hours with it, that’s pretty much all it’s good for), and I finally got to finish Braid. (I did end up using a walkthrough for 2 or 3 puzzle pieces, mostly to confirm that I was on the right track – only one puzzle really, truly stumped me.)

But the bulk of my time was actually spent reminding my PS3 that it can play games, and thus taking care of some unfinished business with respect to Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction; and by “unfinished business”, I mean I’d barely started it before I put it down in lieu of… oh, I don’t know, it was so long ago -probably MGS4.

Having never played an R&C title before (aside from a few minutes with the PSP iteration), I was pretty well satisfied with the whole experience; it’s actually genuinely amusing in places (although it does try awfully hard), and the gameplay is pretty solid. I do recall, when I’d put it down the first time, being a bit overwhelmed with all the weapons and gadgets – I think most of my initial combat time was simply spent hitting enemies with my wrench, which shows you how little I know. But soon I was getting the hang of it, and the game was easy enough that I eventually just concentrated on upgrading and levelling up 3 or 4 main weapons, and throwing out a disco ball every so often. Graphically, it’s pretty fantastic, although it’s still obviously a first-generation PS3 game; I am very curious to try out the new downloadable episode to see if there’s a discernable difference. And I may even continue through a second playthrough in the Challenge Mode, just to see if I can get to some of the places I was unable to get to earlier.

2. In an earlier post, I talked a bit about the Oddworld series and how it got me back into console gaming. I would be remiss, however, if I didn’t mention my extreme love of Duke Nukem 3D, which I was obsessed with whenever I was home from college and I could get my younger brother’s computer to work. My brother had gotten the shareware version of DN3D from our brother-in-law-to-be, so I’m not even sure I’ve seen the whole single-player game, but what I have seen, I’ve seen A LOT. Anyway, it looks like it’s arriving on XBLA a lot sooner than I’d anticipated, and I’m very, very, very excited.

3. Tiger Woods 09 comes out today, and after playing the demo, I’m fully on board this time around. The franchise peaked for me with either ’03 or ’04, and every game since then has been more and more depressingly mediocre. Tiger 08 was incredibly annoying, with glitchy controls and the same goddamned courses I’ve already played a zillion times, and I swore I’d stay away from the franchise forever, but the improvements that are featured in the demo specifically address all the things that drove me crazy in the past. You no longer enhance your attributes by arbitrary clothing choices; you get better by getting better, which is an innovation that maybe should’ve been picked up on a little sooner than this. For experienced Tiger players (like me), you are only as good as you actually are, so you can start the game without having gimped stats as in years past. The challenge, then, is not to max up your stats, but to keep them maxed by playing at a consistently excellent level, which is (1) a well-intentioned shift in philosophy, and (2) a great incentive to keep playing. Even better is the club tuner feature, which (hopefully) will correct the problems in last year’s game with respect to the controls; you can auto-correct problems in your swing with reasonable trade-offs in performance (i.e., you can increase the size of the sweet spot at the expense of distance). I was waiting for reviews to come in before picking this up, but I already have over $100 in credit at Gamestop and so I might as well take the plunge.

>The Best Achievement / Release Calendar

>Up until last night, the Achievement I was most proud of was finding the last of 500 Agility Orbs in Crackdown; last night, however, I got the Wax Off Achievement in Geometry Wars 2, and even though it’s a substantially less Point increase, it was a HUGE monkey off my back. I like GeoWars2 a lot, even though I’m near the bottom of almost every leaderboard in the game, and Pacifism is my favorite of the game modes. The problem was, I was so obsessed with getting the Wax Off achievement that I wasn’t actually playing the mode – I was simply trying to get the achievement, and that led to lots and lots of frustration, and I often wondered how I would ever get back to the sheer joy of the actual mode without getting the Achievement. After another 10-15 tries, somehow everything lined up and I was able to unlock it, and now (1) I don’t have to worry about it anymore, and (2) I can go back to playing the mode the way it was meant to be played. That said, Wax Off – and a lot of the other Achievements in GeoWars2, for that matter – does a great job of teaching you how to avoid the enemies and how to strategically steer through gates.

The Olympics are killing my CivRev buzz; my wife keeps wanting to watch the Olympics on our HDTV. Good thing, then, that the upcoming release calendar is somewhat bland and uninspired; I’ll probably still have a lot of open hours with it before the Next Big Thing hits.

I was going to do a Release Calendar, but there’s really no need; there’s no week-to-week insanity like there was last year. Some big titles are coming out, to be sure, though…

MUST HAVE / ALREADY PRE-ORDERED

  • Mercenaries 2
  • Star Wars: Force Unleashed
  • Little Big Planet
  • Fable 2
  • Fallout 3
  • Saints Row 2
  • Gears of War 2
  • Resistance 2

not a lot of original IP in there.

RENTING / MILD-to-VERY CURIOUS

  • Too Human
  • Tales of Vesperia
  • Infinite Undiscovery
  • Viva Pinata
  • Harvest Moon (DS)
  • Harvest Moon (Wii)
  • Rise of the Argonauts
  • Silent Hill: Homecoming
  • Far Cry 2
  • Midnight Club: LA
  • Dead Space
  • Motorstorm: Pacific Rift
  • Mirror’s Edge
  • Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts
  • Left 4 Dead
  • Prince of Persia
  • Tomb Raider Underworld
  • Last Remnant

STILL HOPEFUL IT WILL BE RELEASED IN 2008

  • Brutal Legend

>And we’re back

>Back in a big way, actually. The summer gaming doldrums have hit us here at SFTC HQ quite hard, and not even Braid, Eden or GeoWars2 – all of which are excellent in their own unique ways – could do anything to relieve them.

But then I decided to rent Civilization Revolution for the 360, and now I’m afraid I’ve gone and unleashed some feral nightmare into my brain. After deciding to purchase my GameFly copy Friday night, I was (kinda) exiled from my living room on Saturday, so I ended up downloading Civ 4 – and its 2 expansions – over Steam; and then, to top it all off, I traded in some old 360 games on the way back from Pineapple Express (meh) on Sunday towards preorders of Fable 2 and LittleBigPlanet, and also CivRev for the DS.

And here’s the funny part – I suck at Civ. I suck at strategy games in general, and I normally don’t even bother, but I was playing Pirates! the other day and I realized how much I’d missed it, and being that Sid Meier has such an impressive pedigree I figured it couldn’t hurt to give CivRev a shot, especially considering how little else there is to do these days. And the truth is, it really is fun. As with Pirates, SM has a great interface and the gameplay is simplified enough for the console so that everything makes sense, once you understand how the concepts work. I can’t say the concepts have fully taken hold for me just yet – it took about 4 hours on the PC, 2 hours on the 360 and a multiplayer session with a friend and about 15 minutes on the DS for me to figure out that I’ve been playing Civ as if it were SimCity, which it most definitely is NOT.

I wonder if this is going to get me into strategy games; I suspect that it will not, if only because I tooled around with C&C and the LOTR strategy games on the 360 and couldn’t make heads or tails of them at all, and gave up after about 30 minutes or so. But then, those games kinda missed the point a little bit – so much fuss was made about how those games were dramatically retooled in order to be workable on a controller, when instead the retooling should have been about how to make those games approachable to a strategy neophyte; after all is said and done, they’re still hard-core strategy games and having a simplified control scheme didn’t change the fact that I had no fucking idea what I was doing or why. CivRev on the 360, on the other hand, is incredibly simple to control – it’s as intuitive as it can be – and so instead the focus is very much about showing you what you’re supposed to do, and why you’re supposed to do it. (Granted, a lot of it is still lost on me, but that’s only because I haven’t had enough time to even finish 1 game on the 360.)

The PC version, on the other hand, is vastly more complex, but it’s still very approachable, and you can automate a lot of menial tasks so that you can better concentrate on the bigger picture. It’s a little surprising to me that of all 3 versions I now own, I’ve only finished a game on the PC.

I wonder if I should start getting excited for Starcraft 2.

>E308 presser gut reactions

>All I’ve seen of E3 are Kotaku’s liveblogs of Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony’s press conferences; there’s been little time to actually see any video. That said, here’s my ranking:

1. Sony
2. Microsoft
3. Nintendo

I could have gone either way between 1 and 2, but it was a new and exciting feeling to have a rooting interest in Sony for once, and even in spite of losing FFXIII exclusivity to Microsoft they still had a solid showing, and – most importantly – they clearly get it now, they were aggressive and focused on the most important stuff – the software. Until I see the footage myself I can’t really comment on quality. I think Microsoft gets the edge in software to come out in 2008, but Sony’s future looks very, very bright.

That said, it’s not even close, as far as 3rd place is concerned – Nintendo’s presser today was depressing, almost completely devoid of exciting news ( GTA:DS notwithstanding) and, ultimately, it made me wonder why I tried so hard to acquire a Wii in the first place. It’s as if they’re not even trying anymore. They’re selling millions of consoles to people who don’t necessarily need a big new title every week – and that’s great, for those people – but I’m a hard core gamer, and they’ve done pretty much everything they can to alienate me and my demographic.

Now that the press conferences are done, we can get on to the real meat of the show. Here’s hoping I have enough time this week to pay attention.

>E308 speculation

>In years past, it was pretty easy for me to get excited about an upcoming E3. Being a one-console owner, my focus could be honed to a razor-sharp edge, and my primary source of information at the time had the best E3 coverage in the business.

Ah, how times have changed. In the past 6 months, I’ve acquired a PS3, a Wii and a PSP, so my focus now has to encompass a lot more information; and at the same time, the Gamespot controversy got me off my ass and got me motivated to switch to an RSS-feed state of constant information from multiple sources. Which is to say, I have too much info coming in and I have no idea what is going on.

That said, this year’s E3 looks to be a little more subdued than, for example, last year. 2007 was one of the best years in terms of quality software ever, and it’s practically impossible to expect that 2008 could compare. Not to mention the fact that a number of companies aren’t even attending E3 this year, but instead are staging their own events nearby.

Anyway, this is a long way of saying that I’m not really sure what to expect next week, either in terms of what will be announced or what information I’ll be able to retain. But here’s a short list of titles I hope to see, and news I hope to be announced.

Multi-Platform Releases

  • Fallout 3
  • Mercenaries 2
  • Tomb Raider: Underworld
  • Saints Row 2
  • Force Unleashed
  • Resident Evil 5
  • Mirror’s Edge

Xbox360

  • Fable 2
  • Gears of War 2
  • Viva Pinata 2
  • Banjo-Kazooie
  • Fez (XBLA title that was at the Indie Developers Conference last summer)

PS3

  • LittleBigPlanet
  • Resistance 2
  • Killzone 2
  • God of War 3
  • Home

Wii

  • Animal Crossing
  • whatever the StrongBad game is called

Handheld / Other

  • Chrono Trigger (DS)

So, OK. Certainly not the killer lineup of 2007, but not too shabby either. At this point, the biggest disappointment is easily Nintendo, who is taking the hardcore demographic completely for granted. If a Wii version of Animal Crossing is seriously the best they have to offer in terms of hot announcements, I’m going to be pretty pissed off. And no, Super Mario Sluggers isn’t going to cut it.

As for the PS3, I’m mostly curious about Home. My understanding is that the upcoming release is essentially still only a beta, but on a larger scale. There are basically 2 ways that Home can go, from what I gather:

  1. A Second Life type of world, where you’re inundated with marketing as you roam around virtual neighborhoods. As unappealing as that is, it still could be kinda cool, if they do interesting things with Trophies and in-game stats and leaderboards. It could also serve as a general lobby for online play, although the logistics of that are probably impossible. I was going to suggest that Sony could also do some interesting things in Home in terms of digital distribution of movies, similar to what Microsoft does with XBL Marketplace, but then it occurred to me that a push towards digital distribution is a pull against Blu-Ray sales, which would be bad.
  2. A buggy, visually uninteresting series of marketing displays, draped over an unpopulated virtual town, that serves no purpose whatsoever. This is, sadly, a pretty close description of what I’ve seen of Home thus far.

The biggest thing about Home, the way I see it, is how it’s incorporated into the PS3 experience. If it’s there when you turn on your PS3 – if it basically serves as your XMB – then that’s one thing – a little cumbersome, perhaps, and more than likely a resource hog, but it would at least give the PS3 some identity. But if it’s something you have to turn on from the launch screen, then one has to wonder what purpose it serves. Let’s also keep in mind that Home will probably be a large download, and not everyone will have the hard drive space to use it. Let’s also consider that Home will be free of charge, which means that Sony will be pulling revenue from other sources in order to maintain it. Microsoft has been the leader in online console technology for quite some time now, and XBL is a paid service, and even THEY get fucked up sometimes; one has to wonder how Home can sustain itself – if, indeed, it’s something worth sustaining.

Microsoft’s list of exclusives is pretty good – Gears and Fable are obviously going to be huge, and there are also rumors of some Halo-related announcements. That said, Microsoft is in somewhat of a strange position this year. Nintendo is selling Wiis and DSs faster than they can make them, and nobody seems to care that there aren’t any games to go along with them. Sony has won the format war, so more and more people are going to be buying PS3s if only for the BluRay availability. The 360 needs killer apps in order to stay relevant, and while Gears and a Halo title are sure bets, Rare remains an unknown quantity. They need a really big show this year, and right now I’m not quite sure I see it.

I’m holding off on news predictions; other sites are doing much better jobs of that, and in any event I’m not really sure I’d know what to hope for. (Besides LucasArts releasing their classic adventure games as a downloadable package for the Wii, which, in light of recent LucasArts news, seems less and less likely with every passing day, even if it’s a stupidly obvious thing to do.)

————————————————————–

In totally unrelated news, I announced the other day that a podcast was going to be coming shortly. Unfortunately, the technical troubles continue. I’m having a really tough time getting Skype calls to record properly (or at all) on my PC, which means that I’m basically shit out of luck. If anybody has any suggestions, I’d love to hear ’em.

>33333

>Someone pointed out to me that my current Gamerscore is a pretty nifty 33333. Hadn’t even noticed, to be honest – I’ve not really turned on my 360 recently.

Finished Uncharted – I liked it and look forward to a sequel where the enemies aren’t so (a) bulletproof and (b) plentiful.

Traded in GRiD – it just wasn’t doing anything for me, the way DiRT did. DiRT sucked me in from the moment I got started, whereas GRiD remained inaccessible and a little too unfocused. Also, the driving just wasn’t as much fun – it’s as if the game couldn’t tell whether it wanted to be Burnout, PGR or DiRT on asphalt. DiRT, on the other hand, had an incredibly clear focus and you immediately knew what you wanted to do. Also also – and this is inexplicable – the instant replays, which were arguably the best feature in DiRT, had no option for slo-mo!

Also traded in MLB08, but not because it’s a bad game – indeed, it’s probably the best baseball game I’ve ever seen. It’s just that, well, I totally suck at it. Even on the lowest difficulty, and with the pitch speed set to the minimum, I almost never made contact with the ball, and I never scored a single run.

Finally: some big news. There is supposedly a podcast in the works – I don’t know if it’ll be here, or somewhere else, but we’re trying to get our shit together and as soon as we get our technology in place we’re going to start pumping out a weekly show. If you have Skype, you are more than welcome to be a guest (once we figure out how to get you recorded).

MGS4: conclusion

***MINOR MGS4 SPOILERS BELOW***

It’s funny. I spent most of last week getting all bent out of shape about MGS4, mostly because Act III was so ridiculous; but then I plowed through the rest of the game on Saturday, and now I find I don’t really have anything to say about it. Or, at least, there’s nothing for me to rant about.

Which is not a bad thing; I mean, I didn’t spend $60 so that I could actively hate something. And the more I think about it, the thing that would get me angry isn’t even the game’s fault – it’s the gaming press at large for not having the balls to call it out on certain glaringly obvious problems. I listened to Joystiq’s MGS4 podcast, and there was one dude in particular who did not have anything negative to say about the game at all. Now, I’m not saying that you have to say something negative about MGS4 in order to be validated in my book – I’m saying this dude played the game, and found everything about it to be perfect. This means he found nothing wrong with Act III, whose problems I covered in detail below. This even means he found nothing at all wrong with Meryl and Akiba/Johnny’s scene in Act V, which may very well be the most ridiculous thing I have ever seen, in any medium, ever. It was so ridiculous, in fact, that my wife – who was in the other room – would periodically walk in and yell, “Jesus Christ, will you two shut the fuck up? Why have you not died?” This means he had no problems with Otacon’s voice acting – and, lemme tell you, that guy should win the “Worst. Crier. Ever.” award. Nor did he have any problem with the fact that at least 5 or 6 characters in this game ought to be dead, considering how much damage they take, and none of them do. Hell, Raiden himself should have died 2 or 3 times in this game alone; I consider this a bit of a cop-out on Kojima’s part, but what do I know. I’m saying that if you are in any way a decent and honest journalist – not a fanboy, but a journalist whose primary responsibility should be the ability to remain objective – you can’t ignore this shit and pretend it’s not there. It may not have any impact on your enjoyment of the game, but considering how much of it there is here, it is a gross error in judgment to be willfully immune to it.

Anyway. I did eventually remember that the press wasn’t the one playing the game this weekend – it was me. And, ultimately, here’s what I can say about MGS4, and I think this could be said for both fans and haters: I’ve never had an experience like that before.

From a gameplay perspective, MGS4 is one of the best games I’ve ever played, and the more I think about it, the more I want to go back and try to play it better than I did before. I unlocked 3 trophies when I finished my first playthrough, and they all seemed to reflect that I killed everybody and stole all their weapons; I’d love to try it playing the way it’s supposed to be played – silent and stealthily. The fact that the game is fun either way is absolutely a testament to its rock-solid design and mechanics. The game rewards exploration – I loved that there were so many nooks and crannies to check out, especially since so many of them yielded loot. The game can be difficult but it’s almost never frustrating; any time I ran into trouble, I knew it was my fault – and in any event, I was able to play my way out of the problem most of the time. I maintain that the octocamo system is one of the coolest gameplay mechanics I’ve ever seen, just in terms of how it works in and of itself; the fact that it’s actually effective is even cooler.

From a story perspective… well, I don’t know how much more I can say about it without repeating myself. The truth of the matter is, it’s a sci-fi soap opera, and even if the storytelling is absurdly over-the-top and self-indulgent and just flat-out poor, there’s something strangely compelling about it – even if it frequently warrants mocking, which it most assuredly does. I think this game – hell, the whole franchise – could have been 100 times better if a real scriptwriter had been brought on board; at the very least, the game needs an editor who has the balls to tell Kojima enough is enough. The story is convoluted enough as it is – it would have been appreciated if coherence and clarity were considered as well.

Now, the big question is – what do I play next?

A discussion of MGS4, Act 3

I am ready to write about MGS4 today, being that I finished Act III last night, but first I want to quote something I just read.

This comes from PS3Fanboy, which links to Zero Punctuation’s pretty good MGS4 video:

Sometimes you have to wonder whether Yahtzee enjoys playing any games. This week he predictably lays into Metal Gear Solid 4 for exactly the reasons we expected. He dislikes the amount and length of the cutscenes , which are fair points. We know a lot of people can’t get passed (sic) the heavy story. He goes on to label the gameplay cluttered and says that the entire series is badly written. Strong words.

Obviously we don’t agree with what Yahtzee says, but the video is still hilarious — and in the end, that’s what Zero Punctuation is all about. Ignore the complaints for what they are, vehicles for his unique brand of humor. Our favorite part of this week’s episode has to be the insinuation that Snake and Otacon are more than just good friends. We must say, it crossed our mind at times while we were playing through the game, too.

What I love about this quote are the qualifiers. “Obviously we don’t agree… Ignore the complaints for what they are.” As if they have to quell the fanboy rage before it starts, as if by linking to anything somewhat derogatory about the sacred franchise, they themselves are now implicated and responsible. The “Obviously” part is the thing that kills me the most. Why is it obvious? Is it obvious because the site is called “PS3Fanboy”? Does that mean that anybody who says that MGS4 is nothing less than a gift from the heavens is somehow blaspheming? More to the point, is there any middle ground that MGS4 can fall into? Or can it only be a “love it / hate it unconditionally” sort of discussion?

I digress. (How apropos!) I’m not here to talk about the press; I’m here to talk about MGS4. Specifically, Act III.*

[Here there be spoilers, insofar as I mention a key character who first appears at this point in the game. I couldn’t possibly spoil the story, because that would imply that I know what the fuck is going on with any degree of specificity.]

As I said before, Act III is, so far, the perfect example of all there is to love and hate about the franchise. The actual gameplay in Act III is pretty exciting stuff – for starters, you’re no longer on a battlefield but rather in a very noir-ish urban environment, with lush sepia tones, and you’re tailing a member of a resistance organization to his hideout. Then, later, you’re on the back of a motorcycle, speeding through rain-slicked streets, shooting out soldiers and flying monster-things, and I should come right out and say that this was one of the coolest sections of any game I’ve ever played. And then, finally, you’re engaged in a pretty satisfying boss fight, who gradually destroys the building you’re using for cover.

That all sounds great, right? Except here’s the thing – those gameplay moments maybe add up to about 30 minutes, tops. The entire whole of Act III – not including the mission briefing – took up almost 2 and a half hours. Before you even start playing, there’s a cutscene which is (stop me if you’ve heard this one before) at least twice as long as it needs to be, especially considering that the information it’s imparting isn’t necessarily all that complicated. And then, sandwiched between the tailing section and the motorcycle section is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever seen in my entire life. The person you’re trying to meet is a 50-60ish Caucasian woman who goes by the name “Big Mama.” The only things big about her are her breasts, which I suppose is apt because she, as with every other female in this game, doesn’t believe in buttoning up the front of her shirt, so her boobs are just hanging out.

I’m surprised there hasn’t been more said about just how ridiculous and gratuitous the boobs are in this game. It’s been remarked upon in lots of other games – the Prince of Persia sequels come to mind, and the Ninja Gaiden and DOA games are known for their physically impossible boob physics – but as far as I know, nobody’s made any mention of the non-stop cleavage that abounds in MGS4.

Anyway. Big Mama shows up and suddenly the game just grinds to a halt as she spends at least 30 minutes droning about the backstory, speaking in an unending monotone – as if the voice actress simply gave up trying to figure out how to put any emotional weight behind what she was saying, partly because her dialog is so stilted and forced and no human being would ever talk like that, especially when Big Mama is revealing herself as Solid Snake’s mother. IIRC, there’s almost no physical interaction between the two of them in this scene – she simply walks through this church, zombie-like, intoning about Zero and Big Boss and The Boss (two different people?) and cloning and AI and the nature of warfare and the tragedy of what they’ve been through. I seem to recall one particular sequence where she explains how she came to be Snake’s mother, and Snake says something like “So you were a surrogate,” and she says “That’s an awfully cold way to put it”, and then 10 minutes later she says “I asked to serve as a surrogate”, as if the previous conversation specifically referencing that exact word hadn’t even happened.

I would go on, but that would imply that I could retain any of it. Luckily, we have the internet, so let’s just cut and paste some dialog from the script. But before I do, let me be clear: I don’t necessarily have a problem with the story, and I don’t have a problem with long cut scenes. My problem is that the story is told so poorly. Snake in particular seems to suffer from a particularly bad case of what my wife and I call “Legolas-itis”, except it’s somehow worse; Legolas (in the LOTR films, in case you weren’t following) often simply blurts out the obvious, with such pithy observations as “The horses are getting restless.” Snake can’t even blurt out the obvious – he is mostly reduced to repeating nouns of sentences he’s just heard.

I digress. Again. (How apropos!) Here’s some snippets from Act III.

Snake : I need to talk to you. Raiden sent me.

Big Mama : My, how you’ve grown… David. It was you, not I, who was
created from the rib of man.

[Big Mama places her hand on her stomach.]

Big Mama : But I gave you life. I am your mother.

[Snake stares at Big Mama in utter shocked.] (sic)

Snake : What?

Big Mama : Les Enfants Terribles. You can’t grow a human being in a
test tube… Not even a clone. You need a woman’s body to
give it life.

Snake : You mean… A surrogate mother?

Big Mama : That’s an awfully cold way to put it. I am your mother. I
gave birth… For the Patriots.

Snake : Gave… Birth?

…………………………………………………………..

Big Mama : The man who wants me dead… Is Liquid. Your twin. You think you know him, but I know him better. He was once Ocelot… But Liquid has taken control of his soul. And now he’s locked in a bitter struggle with Zero.

[Snake walks over to the front of Big Mama.]

Snake : “Zero?”

Big Mama : The founder of the Patriots.

Snake : Founder? When did this happen?

………………………………………………..

Big Mama : They’ve found us. We’re moving out.

[As Big Mama and the resistance members begin heading out the door, Snake receives another Codec transmission from Otacon.]

Otacon : Snake, the PMCs are converging on your location. Damn it! They’re sending in Gekko! They’ll be on you in less than five minutes!

[Snake hurries out the door after Big Mama.]

Big Mama : Are they ready?

Resistance : Yes, ma’am.

Big Mama : We’ll escape through the canal route using the real van. Get it ready. Hurry!

Resistance : Yes, ma’am.

Big Mama : Snake, over here. We’ve got decoy vans set to draw some of our pursuers away.

[Big Mama walks over to a sheet-covered object near the side of the church. She removes the sheet to reveal a Triumph motorcycle. Snake and Big Mama look on in the courtyard, watching the resistance members preparing for their escape.]

Big Mama : All of these children were orphans. They work in arms factories, and when they grow up, they want to join a PMC. They seek revenge on other companies… PMCs that killed their parents and use their earnings to support their younger siblings. There are countless child soldiers like these in the PMCs. Nowadays, anyone with a computer can get combat training. The FPS games these children love are distributed for free by these companies. Of course, it’s all just virtual training. It’s so easy for them to get absorbed by these war games. And before they know it, they’re in the PMCs holding real guns. These kids end up fighting in proxy wars that have nothing to do with their own lives. They think it’s cool to fight like this. They think that combat is life. They don’t need a reason to fight. After all, for them it’s only a game.

[Big Mama hands Snake a Vz. 83 submachine gun.]

Big Mama : Zero is the cause of all this. Defeating Liquid won’t change things. Unless we stop the Patriots’ System, the cycle will go unbroken.

[Big Mama gets on her motorcycle and starts the engine.]

Big Mama : Hop on. Hold on to me.

[Snake gets on the back of the motorcycle and hangs on to Big Mama’s waist. Allowing the engine to run for a few seconds, Big Mama calmly enhales the air around her.]

Big Mama : With so many wars being waged, oil and biofuel have become as precious as diamonds. It’s been a while since I went out for a ride.

Snake : You sure about this?

Big Mama : I only get off my bike when I fall in love… Or fall dead.

Snake : Big Mama….

Big Mama : Call me EVA.

I don’t get it. I don’t know how to get that. Again – I don’t care that Kojima has such lofty cinematic ambitions, but bad dialog is bad dialog and this, my friends, is among the worst. It lacks any semblance of humanity – it utterly lacks the rhythm of natural speech. I’m not saying that this game needs to be like a Mamet script, with people stepping all over each other – I’m just saying that people don’t talk like this, ever, not even when they’re high. People only talk like this in shitty sci-fi stories written by hyperactive 12-year-0lds, and I haven’t even talked about the character’s names. And when the gaming press refuses to acknowledge shit like this, it becomes very easy to understand why gaming still has a hard time getting taken seriously. If there was ANY indication from Kojima that this game’s story was meant to be looked at with an eye towards camp, then that would at least be something, but even then the scene could be twice as short and still be effective.

I’ve got 2 acts to ago, and it’s only because the gameplay itself is so refined that I’m staying with it until the end. But my bullshit quota is pretty much full up at this point.

* It should be noted right up front that I’m playing MGS4 on the “Naked Normal” difficulty, which is one step up from Super Easy. This is because I am trying to not hate the game, and so I’d rather be able to see everything there is to see first. I’m not sure if higher difficulties make the enemy AI smarter, or simply less easy to take down with a headshot; in any event, the enemy AI is pretty fucking stupid. At one point in Act III, there’s a helicopter hovering over a city square, with a search light that points all over the ground. I had inadvertently set off an alarm (I’m still not sure how), and ended up taking out the helicopter with an RPG. Literally within 20 seconds of the helicopter exploding, I intercepted a message from an enemy patrolman saying that the sector was now “all clear.” This is preposterous.

MGS4; second impressions

I didn’t get a chance to play MGS4 until this past Sunday, and only for 20-30 minutes at most. That was enough time, however, for me to get pretty bent out of shape about it.

I wrote this at the time, in a forum thread that somehow is still alive and kicking 3 days later:

I’ve only played about 20 minutes of MGS4, but I defy anybody to explain to me how a game franchise that is so deliberately obtuse, pretentious and self-indulgent can get such consistently high scores – especially when the actual game part of the game isn’t necessarily that ground-breaking. It’s true that the game is a bit easier to get into – the controls are still somewhat non-intuitive (especially compared to every other 3rd person action game) but at least they do all the things you need to do… But it’s also true that after 8 minutes of installation, and then another 5 minutes of completely bizarre and unexplained television footage, and then another 5 minutes of in-engine cutscenes that explain what you’re doing (as much as such a thing is possible), you spend exactly 20 seconds moving Snake around before you figure out you need to crawl under a truck and then there’s another 3 minutes of cutscene.

…So, then. Why am I still playing it? This game has its head shoved so far up its own ass that it’s almost painful to watch, and yet there’s something oddly compelling about it. I don’t get it. How does a game that’s so incredibly divisive get such good scores? Every positive review out there – and there are tons – all make some sort of mention about how if you don’t like the MGS series, you won’t like MGS4, and that there are perfectly valid reasons for people to NOT like these games (the incredibly convoluted story, the uneven pacing between gameplay and cutscenes, the unintuitive controls, the just-plain-WEIRDNESS), and then they give out a 10 in spite of all of it.
…

I’ve got nothing wrong with cutscenes. If that’s how your story has to be told, then I hope you make good use of it. My problem with the MGS4 cutscenes is that they’re used self-indulgently and without any thought given to pacing or rhythm. The beginning of MGS4 – there’s no reason to have that many breaks in the action, especially when you’re still trying to get used to the controls, and ESPECIALLY when most of the stuff that Snake is doing in those first few cutscenes are things that you could very easily be doing yourself.

…

I wouldn’t have bought the game in the first place if I was determined to hate it. What I was hoping for was someone to tell me why MGS4 is so awesome, and to explain what it is that I’m not getting, instead of someone telling me my opinion is for shit. It’s true that I think that the MGS franchise is the most overrated franchise in the entire history of gaming, and that could maybe even extend to cover movies, art, books, and any other works of art with multiple sequels out there. But I was still ready to give MGS4 a chance – hell, I still am. I own a PS3, this is arguably the biggest exclusive title the PS3 is going to get this year, I want to enjoy it. I’m not giving up on it. I just want to know what it is that I’m not getting. I consider myself a reasonably intelligent and informed person, and yet I remain totally in the dark as to why people love this series so much, especially since the first 20 minutes of the game do as much to alienate a newcomer to the series as they do to give fanboys multiple orgasms.

I think that’s my biggest question. I understand why GTA4 got 10s. I can respect why a great RTS game will get great reviews, even if I don’t know how to play RTSs and haven’t ever really cared about them. What I don’t understand is that pretty much every review that’s come out for MGS4 has had at least one clause where they say that if you hate the series already, you’ll continue to hate MGS4. Shouldn’t a great work of art be something that doesn’t alienate a large percentage of the people who experience it? How does something so divisive get such universal praise? I know I’m stepping into dangerous waters here, which is why I specifically used the word “alienate”. Lots of great works of art have been controversial; lots of great works of art have been hated. MGS4, on the other hand… is it really something that is only accessible to fans of the franchise? And if so, how does that make it great?

…

The fact that this game has very clearly defined areas where one could find fault (and [Caro‘s term] “Kojima–ness” is as close as any other term there is to describe what I’m referring to) is something that raises a red flag, as far as I’m concerned, in terms of any sort of discussion about how awesome this game is. If any other game, made by any other developer, had this much Kojima–ness, I’m not sure it would get the same sort of fawning treatment in the gaming press. The fact that this game has SO MUCH Kojima–ness is being labeled a benefit. This is also what I mean when I said earlier that this franchise has its head stuck as far up its own ass as it possibly can go.

If people like it, that’s awesome, and good for them. I remain not only unconvinced, but dumbfounded.

Again, this was written on Monday, when I was still a neophyte, when I had barely dipped my toes in the vast pool of insanity that is MGS4.

I put in about 90 minutes tonight. Well, it’s hard to say for sure – my PS3 was on for 90 minutes or so, and MGS4 was spinning in the drive, but I was really only in control of Snake for about half of that. But I think I’m starting to get it.

I won’t be spoiling anything by revealing where I am – I’m barely in Act 1. I just got to the first new area after you get the barrel, which occurs right after you meet the soda-swilling arms dealer and his soda-swilling monkey, who happen to be in a room directly next to a room that, moments before, had been swarming with bad guys, who I happened to kill.

The cutscene with the arms dealer very much epitomizes this “Kojima–ness” that is so problematic. The scene itself serves several specific and necessary functions:

  • it occurs right after a somewhat lengthy sequence where you are sneaking around in some underground bunkers, and so it offers the player a break and a reward;
  • it introduces you to a key character (the unfortunately named “Drebin“, because every time I hear that name I can only think of Leslie Nielsen in The Naked Gun movies, but every time I actually see him I can’t help but think of Zach, the flamboyant black man from the Dead or Alive games);
  • it introduces a crucial gameplay mechanic (i.e., how you acquire new guns and modifications); and
  • it fleshes out some of the backstory (something about the “war economy”, nanotechnology and the arms trade).

Relatively straightforward, right? Except this scene is at least twice as long as it needs to be, with a script so hokey it would make a 10th grade English teacher blush, and, as said above, it prominently features a monkey who drinks soda. This is also leaving aside the quality of the voice-acting, which is obviously a subjective point of discussion but I have to say that for the most part, the voice-acting in this game is beyond stupid. The guy doing Snake is trying so hard to be an old, grizzled badass but instead he sounds like a very constipated man who is constantly being annoyed. The entire scene is a series of non-sequiturs. The scene is so ridiculous in its conception that it ends up distracting the player from what its actual purpose is.

Any other game would have gotten killed for this kind of storytelling, but somehow this game gets away with it. And the truth of it is, once I stopped being a critical observer and instead let the silliness wash over me like a wave, I kinda got sucked into it. I don’t quite understand how that happened. It’s like Kojima is a goddamned magician.

I was trying to explain this “Kojima-ness” to my wife, who didn’t quite understand. But then I asked her to imagine if Star Wars: A New Hope was released for the very first time right now, in its exact same form, with the same silly dialog and hammy acting and melodramatic story, and how stupid it would seem. She said, “But hold on, Star Wars is a great movie.” And I said, “Now you understand what I’ve been going through, explaining why I think the Metal Gear series is so overrated to a bunch of Metal Gear fans.”

I have to admit – I’m ready to keep playing. I still don’t understand how I got sucked in, but it’s starting to happen, and it’s weird.