Posted on , by

The greatness of Metal Gear’s Game Boy mission no comments

That Metal Gear Solid works in two dimensions shouldn’t exactly be a surprise — the series started out as Metal Gear on the 1986’s ill-fated MSX, a keyboard-shaped home computer with big ambitions and small sales.

The real surprise here, then, is that Metal Gear Solid feels Solid-like on Nintendo’s debut handheld. It’s less Metal Gear Game Boy, more Metal Gear on Game Boy. A bit crude today, but it’s easy to how novel the concept of Gear on the go would’ve been in the year 2000.

And kinda still is now.

More electric words…

Posted on , by

There are no honour points in LISA: The Painful no comments

Contrary to popular belief, gamers are an empathetic bunch. Reportedly, around 92% of Mass Effect players were ‘Paragons’, meaning they almost exclusively chose the most morally pure responses to any given player choice. They saved civilians, halted genocides, and brokered peace to garner undying adoration from NPCs and those juicy, invisible honour points.

Given how high the percentile of Paragon players is, I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I fall hard into that group and, if you’re reading this, you probably did too.

More electric words…

Posted on , by

Final Fantasy XI, and the stories we shared with strangers no comments

They were family. In that moment — mere hours among the thousands been and gone  —  that monk, that thief, and that white mage were effectively family. It was a bond of necessity, a bond driven by the brutality of a world that wanted nothing more than to see us fail.

That was the world of Final Fantasy XI twenty years ago, where convenience wasn’t a word — nothing like the online worlds of today. It was a time when we thought more real meant more good and more fun. Square’s debut MMO embraced that, and wanted — nay, needed — every second you had spare if you wanted to make your way in its web-based world.

More electric words…

Posted on , by

Free Radical’s time travelling shooter predicted the future no comments

One series remains trapped in time, a relic held in a stasis of circumstance and corporate reluctance. It seems forever stuck in the mud of its sixth-generation origins, defined as much by its inability to move than its ability to enthral. A series that turned out to be as prophetic as it was preservationist.

But the history of what got stuck where and why is only the first part of its story. That story in a sentence or two: staff from GoldenEye-developer Rare splintered into Free Radical who, after the commercial failure of PS3-exclusive Haze, was bought and turned into Crytek UK.

In doing so, Crytek obtained that time-trapped series: TimeSplitters. There it remained dormant until it was ultimately acquired by Embracer Group.

Where it still remains dormant.

More electric words…

Posted on , by

The legacy of Shinta Nojiri’s Metal Gear Acid no comments

In a 2005 interview with Eurogamer, Director Shinta Nojiri said Kojima asked his team to take a ‘different approach’ when developing a game to complement 2004’s Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. That direction led to Metal Gear Acid – a grid-based, turn-based, decking-building PSP game whose villains are a pair of sentient, people-murdering, plane-jacking puppets.

It doesn’t sound like Hideo Kojima’s sneaky, sneaky, peaky, peaky PlayStation classic – except for the convoluted description and the sentient puppets bit. Yet the two share far more DNA than you’d expect: Acid has all the beeps and the boops and the cardboard boxes and stuff and things we look for in a sneaking special from Kojima Labs Inc.

And yet it’s one of the greatest genre shifts you’ve never played — a game that sits on the periphery of our collective video game consciousness as that Metal Gear card game on Sony’s first handheld.

More electric words…

Posted on , by

Metal Gear Solid 2, the original next-generation video game no comments

So, like, in Metal Gear Solid 2, there’s this guy who attached another guy’s arm to his very much arm-free elbow. The transplant apparently included a hidden extra: the spirit of a dead terrorist who’s the genetically identical twin of this guy’s sworn enemy. Ghost terrorist – using this guy’s body – then steals a giant, sea-faring robot that makes animal noises right from under the nose of the US military.

More electric words…

Posted on , by

We’re all living in the future of Phantasy Star Online no comments

There’s no way we’re living in the future of Phantasy Star Online, you cry — there’s no talking robots with laser swords and nobody’s scrambling for floating red boxes while wearing properly silly costumes.

Perhaps we’re not actually living in the future of Phantasy Star Online, then. But we are living in the timeline where the vision of 2000-era Sonic Team became the blueprint for just about everything.

Yet ask folk about PSO and you’ll hear something about how you spelt ‘fantasy’ wrong, or how that’s ‘the one where everyone’s got spiky hair and rides big yellow birds’. Indeed, we live in a timeline where everybody’s played a spiritual successor to Phantasy Star Online ,  but few could tell you exactly what the damn thing is.

Let’s fix that by taking a look back at what PSO actually did that was so gosh-darn fantastic, and why it never quite made it into common video game parlance.

Let’s go back to the future.

More electric words…