boring video game crap that i'll try to punch up for the yuks anyway

[prog]

Maybe that's what I'll call my new game zine, eh? Anyway: was mailed a Japanese-language demo of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater today. It's interesting. It's a sure thing I'll get the U.S. release when it's available, because this looks like another serving of everything I liked about the first two MGS games, and despite its apparently containing everything I didn't like about them.

The game uses the same controls and on-screen UI as the previous two MGS games, and features the same array of weapons and gadgetry, with one important distinction: this being 1964, Snake no longer has access (or rather, doesn't yet have access) to his magical automap and enemy-tracking device, which mumbled something about nanotech and gene therapy to explain its existence in the first games. Now you get some magical radar thingies that don't work nearly as well (quite on purpose), and no map at all. This leads to just enough of a major gameplay difference to make me feel pleasantly off-balance, even though I'm a veteran with the series. This is a good thing. Maybe.

The game's unusual subtitle is actually a surprisingly literal pointer to the other, um, innovation here. While the bad guys' territory has the usual supply of ammo cases helpfully lying all over place, there are none of the ration boxes that served as the first two games' healing potions. Instead, there are animals slithering, hopping, and flying all over the place, and you can kill them all for their delicious meat. I admit to having an unfortunate amount of fun machine-gunning crocodiles and lobbing grenades into birds' nests. Every time you bechunkulate a critter in this fashion, you hear a happy noise, and food boxes appear where it fell. Yum yum. Then you can go into your inventory screen to chow down, and listen to Snake remark with delight at the succulent flavor of each different species. (I assume. It's Japanese, but it sounds happy.)

It's a... unique twist, in a Beyond Good & Evil-meets-Nethack sort of way.

When snake dies (which you bet I had happen ASAP just to make sure they kept in the series' trademark wails of "Snaaaaaaaake!"; and lo, they did) you see the message "TIME PARADOX", which is interesting. On the surface, it means that you have fatfingered your way into preventing the whole Metal Gear game series from launching on the NES in 1987 since you just offed its main character in 1964 (or maybe his dad, or his clone progenitor, or whatever he's revealed to be in a series of heterocentric Shocking Twists later in the game). But I also kind of hope it means that there's time-play afoot, because I always like that stuff when it's done well, and I'd love to see Kojima's take on it.

Unfortunate things: The long and somewhat absurdly melodramatic radio conversations with your support team have returned from MGS2. I didn't like these much last time, because even while they revealed this intriguingly strange backstory, I never felt like I was very involved with it; when the conversation was done, it was back to more sneaking around and dropping baddies to get to the next stage. From my American viewpoint, it seemed strange, like splicing an action movie like Rambo with a surreal radio play like The Fourth Tower of Inverness. From a Japanese viewpoint, though, it may more resemble an anime such as Ghost in the Shell. But I can't easily dismiss my failure to enjoy it as a cultural difference, because at least in anime the characters tend to be doing stuff to make the deedle-doodle visually interesting, at least. In this game you just get a mostly-still image of Snake kneeling with his finger in his ear for the entire conversation. Zzzzz

Also, the game clearly depicted Soviet soldiers standing on Russian soil and yet still speaking Japanese to each other. This suggests that they'll be speaking English in the English release, and it's probably too much to hope that they'll speak subtitled Russian, and escape getting a vaguely annoyed reaction out of me. Oh well. (Why wasn't I upset that Snake & co., who are explicity American operatives in this story, were also speaking Japanese? Um, uh, hey, look over there.)

And that's about all I got to see from the demo.

Comments

[popecrunch.livejournal.com]

lobbing grenades into birds' nests

I know it's just a game, and therefore a certain amount of suspension of disbelief is required, but I'm pretty sure that after using a hand grenade on a bird, the result would not so much be -food- as possibly a beverage - but only if you were handy with a squeegee.

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DRACULA'S BIRD JUICE BOX