So after some procrastination and a realization that my upcoming Paralegal night school program is going to slice into my gaming time like a hot knife through Hot Pockets, I sat down and finished off Metal Gear Solid 4 late last week. Readers, please be aware the SPOILERS might lie ahead, so do not read any further unless you have completed Metal Gear Solid 4.

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Act IV: This was my favorite segment of the game. Perhaps it was the opening, which took a segment from Metal Gear Solid from the PSX to instigate nostalgia in old-school fans of the series. Maybe it was the choice of "The Best Is Yet to Come" end music from the first game once you play in the high-res remake setting of Shadow Moses. The nostalgia, perfect balance of brief cut-scenes and brief gameplay, and awesome ending fights make it the highlight of the game for me.

Act V: As the fifth act does in a stage play, the fifth act in MGS 4 manages to wrap things up with a few final boss fights and a lot more exposition. The last series of boss fights against Ocelot were nice in a retro way. I wish the game would have ended after the ending of Act V right when it goes to the brief "fake out" credits-- Snake shooting himself while the rest of the "new generation" of heroes celebrate felt so much more satisfying than the too-tidy epilogue.

Epilogue: I understand MGS series creator Hideo Kojima promised MGS 4 would tie up all the loose ends and this Epilogue resolves that, but it does so in a way that feels like a cheat. Sometimes it is better to leave things unknown than explain everything. The end of Act V just crystalized things so well for me that most of the Epilogue was kind of a let down. Perhaps if I had beaten all the previous games in the series I would have enjoyed the Epilogue more.

As a whole, I enjoyed MGS 4, but had the most problems with Act III. Was it a computer game that made me cry? No. Has a computer game made me cry...

That's a topic for another blog post...

So I've had a 80 GB MGS 4 PS3 Bundle since it was released and I still haven't quite finished the game. When it comes to beating games, I have a terrible track record. To put insult to injury, I've never beaten a Metal Gear Solid game despite owning all 4 of them.

Now that everyone has tossed their tomatoes at the screen, I am going to proceed with a brief review of the first 3 acts of the game. I realize the game has been out for a while now, but be warned there might be SPOILERS.

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Act I: Compared to other MGS games, the controls are improved but still not easy to learn and quite hard-core. After recently listening to a 1-Up Yours podcast in which one of the American producers on the game stressed on how this game was made to ease players into how to play a Metal Gear game, I think they have truly failed in this respect. The controls are still kind of confusing and while the graphic still images reminding one how to do context-sensitive actions such as hopping over ledges or dangling from ledges help, I would argue things could have started with a VR tutorial. The Middle East setting reminds me too much of Call of Duty 4, although the MGS humor and plot start to pick up a bit towards the end of the Act. The Gecko Mechs remind me a lot of ED-209 from Robocop in their stumbling movements and deep grunts.

Act 2: So far, this has been the most fun of the game for me. The initial area has a sizeable chunk of gameplay (sizeable gameplay being 30 minutes!) and the boss fight with Laughing Octopus scared the crap out of me... There was something about the synthized voice, echoing laughter, and the music that made me break out into a cold sweat. Drebin's post boss fight origin stories remind me a bit of the short text stories in Lost Odyssey, although they are not nearly as verbose. Much like the Gecko sequence in Act I, there are several parts in cut-scenes that look awesome that could have been really fun to play, but instead are non-interactive. I know this is a staple of the franchise, but given the lack of gameplay later in the game, a more balanced cut-scene to game ratio would have been preferable.

Act 3: After a brief cut-scene setting up the scenario, things get quite hard in a stealth section that has players tracking an undercover rebellion member on the run in a European city. You have to be so precise with the controls to not alert your target and knock out enemy soldiers that it gets frustrating in the same way a Splinter Cell game does. The boss sequence this time around is not as memorable, but fighting in a destructible environment is a sound concept. The cut-scene at the end is very dramatic and leaves things on a cliffhanger.

Mission Briefings: The mission briefing sequences are way too long. I understand some of them have character development between Otacon, Snake, Naomi, and whomever else they may be talking to, but Kojima uses 2000 words where 20 would do. My view on Metal Gear is similar to that of the Xenosaga franchise--all too brief moments of fun gameplay sandwiched inbetween long cut-scenes that tell a story that gets more compelling as the game goes on.

In other words? The Metal Gear Solid franchise is an interactive anime. There's nothing wrong with that, but I struggle with the concept of how enjoyable the game parts are considering their brief length. I enjoy the game and am glad to have a PS3, but it's not going to win newcomers over to the series.

It was the middle of the summer of 1991 in Centreville, Virginia. I would often wait around the house for a friend to show up so we could play Nintendo in the basement. Despite having a lack of two player games, we had fun with taking turns playing a variety of titles, but these sessions were cut short by my Dad forcing us to play outside.

Running around the dog-shit ridden forest trails, my friend and I would run around, pretending we were video game characters fighting each other. I would always pretend to be the hero of my favorite game, Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse: Trevor Belmont. Ironically, my friend's name also happened to be Trevor.

Other than an opening text scrawl with the trademark chiptune gothic musical bloops escaping from the TV speakers, Castlevania III had little story. Trevor Belmont was just an ancestor of famed vampire slayer, Simon Belmont, hero of the prior two games in the series. His appearance was just like Simon Belmont--lots of tans and browns, with a hint of yellow.

Despite the fact that nothing about the appearance or the functionality was original, the secret that endeared the character to me was the game itself. Castlevania III was a hard side-scroller with branching paths, intricate music, and a convoluted password system. It was a game that did away with the poor translation and loose RPG conventions of Castlevania II and returned to its roots, screaming, "See this? This is a real Castlevania game!"

I've enjoyed Castlevania games since, but Castlevania III holds a special place in my heart with Trevor Belmont warming my ice-cold cockles. Perhaps Trevor will appear in Castlevania Judgement, the upcoming Castlevania fighting game for the Wii... Or perhaps he will say fangs for the memories!

I was just messing around with the free demo of the Spore Creature Creator and came up with this little creature: Quandorium. The Creature Creator is a lot of fun, but I have no idea how the full game of Spore will be.

Regardless, it is nuts to see that around 1 million Spore Creatures have been created. The free trial is limited with what options you have to create the creature, but still has enough to get you a feel for how the program works. I am not going to spring $10 for the full Creature Creator--instead, I'll wait for reviews for the final product, but am keeping my fingers crossed.

Quandorium

There had been others before--the wakka-wakka sounds from Ms. Pac-Man, the stunning drama of pixelated manga cut-scenes from Ninja Gaiden, and the futile attemps of having Mario survive a dip in the ocean with some Cheep-Cheeps from Super Mario Bros. These were trumped by the strains of an 8-bit orchestral overture, a sparkling title screen, and a cute blue slime: Dragon Warrior.

I remember watching a friend playing the game when I was just in the first grade; he was just starting middle school. The gameplay was totally alien to anything I'd seen before--instead of running around killing things, you searched a town for clues to a poorly translated puzzle, open locked doors to uncover hidden treasure chests, and braved a fearsome battle with an army of slimes so cute you almost didn't want to slice them to gelatinous bits.

Part of what made this game appealing was how your character grew stronger as you won more fights against deadlier monsters. Being a pasty, short white kid, the idea of controlling an armored knight who grows stronger with time and gets to rescue a princess from a dragon was appealing in a certain way Mario wasn't. I didn't have to worry about poor reflexes and the act of grinding a character up a few experience levels helped me reach a nice Zen moment of slime slaying and weapon purchasing.

Although I still appreciate the RPG genre, I don't play as many games due to the time it takes to complete them. Still, a recent game that made me fall in love with it the way Dragon Warrior did was Blue Dragon for the 360: it might have been the familiar Akira Toriyama designs, the green and blue color pallet, or the high encounter rate, but it was love again at first byte.

With my recent PlayStation 3 purchase, I decided to venture into the limited pool of demos for the system and decided to give the demo of the much-hyped Pixel Junk Monsters a whirl. While it has a few neat spins on the web-based classic, it suffers from the same problem as Patapon for the PSP: there just isn't much gameplay there.

In the game you control a creature that resembles a turtle with an African mask that has to defend his village from waves of monsters. You can convert trees in the forest to various guns and are faced with a bit of a problem--do you build a lot of different towers that are weak or a few that are strong? Different enemies are weak against ground or air attacks and move through an obvious path towards your village. The game spikes in difficulty after the tutorial level, but my main issue with it is that enemies move at a pokey pace--maybe there is a "speed up" button I am missing.

A Mario-inspired twist to the formula is that your creature can walk up and collect coins and eggs enemies leave behind to upgrade or build additional towers. Graphics are nice and cute in a Miyamoto fashion and the music adds a laid-back pace to the proceedings, but the game seems a bit simple in the demo--I realize there are more towers available in the full game. It's a fun demo, but there's not enough there to make me spring for the full title.

The demo for Pixel Junk Monsters is worth downloading, but it's definitely a love it or hate it title--I just wished I loved it enough to try the full version out.