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Snake? Snake! SNAAAAAKE!!!

2/24/2014

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Having grown up exclusively with Nintendo consoles, and having only had minimal awareness of and interest in the first two Metal Gear games for the NES, the adventures of Solid Snake were never something I'd ever had any exposure to. Sure, I played about five minutes of Metal Gear Solid 2 at a friend's house one time, and I'd seen people cosplay as the cardboard box with a guy inside of it, but those hardly count. I understood the games to be dark and serious and realistic and all the things I don't normally go for, plus I assumed that Metal Gear Solid had to be some sort of remake or reboot of Metal Gear, because nobody jumps from the NES to the PS1 and expects to maintain any sense of continuity. In both cases, not really my style. Nonetheless, I picked up Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes for the GameCube sometime back in 200X so that I could get up to speed, if only partially, with this popular franchise.

I finally got around to trying the game a few weeks ago. I watched the well-paced, well-animated, well-orchestrated, well-acted cutscene that plays when the game first loads. I noted the pretty title screen. I went through the game customization options, bonus material I had yet to unlock, and mission briefing. I hadn't even started playing yet, and already I was impressed. I'm normally not one for long cutscenes, but I devoted the time to watch through, what, half an hour of expository "security camera footage"? I give credit to the developers for breaking the briefing into a series of shorter, individual videos that each cover a different subject, allowing the player to navigate through the videos at their own pace. I knew I was gonna watch through all of them before getting to the actual game, but that tiny offering of freedom and control meant a great deal to me. I detest cutscenes that bring any and all gameplay to a screeching halt because it's suddenly storytime, children, especially when it's just people standing around talking for far longer than necessary; MGS managed to make three people huddled around a bed for minutes on end feel legitimately interesting, and that's a feat.

Sometime later that evening, when I finally got to the gameplay, I was overcome by a sensation I haven't experienced since I was a child: the feeling of being completely and utterly useless at video games. There are entire genres of games at which I'm not very good, and there are extraordinarily difficult games with which I struggle; I was so bad at MGS that I didn't even survive long enough to struggle. Within 60 seconds of gaining control of Solid Snake, I had tripped the alarm and been gunned down by a trio of soldiers. I tried again; this time I made it into the elevator, pressed the buttons on my controller madly to try to somehow activate the elevator, determined I probably had to kill all the guards first before the elevator would let me use it, and died stupidly because hand-to-hand combat only works when one of the combatants is not standing 20 feet away with a gun in hand. I tried one more time, attempting to utilize this "stealth" thing the instruction manual kept talking about. I don't remember all the particulars, but I'm pretty sure this attempt involved taking a guard by surprise by running right past him and getting shot in the back instead.

I returned to the menu screen, swallowed my pride, and bumped the difficulty down from Normal to Easy. This time I discovered you could hide in the water. Even if I tripped the alarm again, I could retreat into the water until things calmed down. This was a great plan that would've worked remarkably had I not gotten shot to death in a crawling position I couldn't figure out how to stand up from.

This was absurd. I'd spent at least 15 minutes playing the game, and I hadn't even figured out how to get out of the first room, let alone come close to it. I rounded up the last few morsels of pride that I'd overlooked before, swallowed them, and bumped the difficulty down from Easy to...Very Easy.

And proceeded to die again.

WHAT. THE. HECK. I had read the instruction manual from cover to cover. I'd been practicing the first room for 20 minutes now. I very nearly shut the game off right there to go back to something I could play, like Level 3 of Battletoads. One last try, I told myself. This time I decided to avoid the level altogether. I just walked around in the water for a couple minutes. Maybe the guards would all go take a lunch break or something. Or maybe I'd come across a bunch of cool items that totally weren't there before. I'm not sure whether I picked it up or had it all along, but I discovered a gun in my inventory: an M-9 sleep-dart launcher, which still didn't solve all my problems, but was far better than trying to swat away bullets with my fists.

Now I had a chance. Subterfuge went out the window as I started running around corners with my weapon drawn, which is the only way I really know how to play. I'm a huge fan of No One Lives Forever, a first-person spy game that emphasizes stealth but lets you rampage through most areas like a regular FPS if the guards see you; MGS confused me, because I simply died the moment I was spotted. The third-person overhead perspective and cumbersome manner of leaning against walls to see around corners made it difficult to do anything but run blindly into guards. I'm used to sniping people at a distance or waiting and watching and moving a little bit at a time, but I could only do that by switching to first-person mode, and by the time that happened, I was already being shot at. Also, years of playing games with ample visibility and generally unhelpful radars and minimaps led me to ignore the little graphic in the corner of the screen that displayed the positions of all the enemies and their fields of view.


I was spotted by the first guard, but he didn't have time to radio for help before receiving a generous serving of sleeping darts. Remembering my NOLF training and recalling something from the instruction manual about moving bodies, I stood over the zonked-out guard to drag him into a dark corner somewhere.
At the time, I didn't realize you had to had to hold the A button to drag guards; I kept lifting him and dropping him like a buttered bean bag. I soon gave up and ran across the room to find more guards to send to slumberland. I tripped the alarm, I got hit a few times, but I did at last make it into the elevator.


And I still had no idea how to make it work.

The rest of the game proceeded in this fashion, with me making an utter mess of things, failing miserably, and then suddenly discovering something I'd overlooked that made the situation winnable. I am normally very resourceful in my video games, using everything at my disposal to my advantage, but Metal Gear Solid was unlike anything I'd ever played. I was too busy getting a feel for the moves that veterans of the series take for granted to think about "tactics" and "self-preservation." We won't even go into details about the battle where I tried to take down a tank with sleeping darts.

Things did get better as I continued playing, though. By the end of the game, I was executing lunging rolls to knock over my enemies (which worked great against Liquid Snake until I threw myself off the platform repeatedly), disposing of corpses by dropping them (and occasionally myself with them) into bottomless pits, and detonating chaff grenades to temporarily disable turrets (sometimes even before getting shot to death by them!). It certainly wasn't the most elegant or skillful playthrough in history, but my confidence in my own gaming ability had been restored. Someday, perhaps if I'm feeling ambitious, I'll step up my game and challenge myself to Easy Mode.
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Living Quantum Leap

2/3/2014

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Ever watched Quantum Leap? The early '90s American TV show starring future Enterprise captain Scott Bakula as a man who travels uncontrollably through time and space, landing in the bodies of various men and women and living as them until some wrong in their life has been righted? Well, I had a Quantum Leap dream last night.

Oh boy.


I dreamed I was a twenty-something woman, a little on the counter-culture side of things from what I could gather. Dark clothes, some kind of artsy hat, and vaguely purple jaw-length hair, as I recall...but we're talking about a dream, so the details are subject to interpretation. I was getting dressed in a hotel bathroom, and though I'm well aware how to put on a pair of overalls, the body proportions and speed and muscle strength were somewhat different from my own, so I was very clumsy to do so.

Once fully dressed, I started to step out of the bathroom and into the main area of what appeared to be a suite, but was chided by...someone; I don't really recall—almost like in a video game where Navi or Alia or Cedric shows up out of nowhere to warn you about something...about having the string of tiled jewelry that was supposed to run the circumference of my hat instead tangled up in a mass on top of it. I quickly untangled the string and pulled it around the brim of the hat, not fully understanding if I was even wearing it correctly. By this point I was fully aware that I was definitely in someone else's body, and as I've learned from all my time-traveling, identity-assuming TV shows and movies, the first rule is to act like you belong there until you figure out what's going on. The easiest way, I decided, was to stand off to the side, not engage in any kind of overly expressive body language, and not speak unless asked a direct question...and even then, to keep answers brief and with the kind of tone and casual verbiage I assumed my borrowed persona might use.

I came to learn that this person into whose life I'd stumbled had an older brother and one of those typical TV crime show dads with the sizable bald spot and the beer gut and the wife-beater t-shirt (I really wish I knew some expression other than "wife-beater" to describe this article of clothing, but it would not be inappropriate for this man). They were all hanging out in the suite, along with a few other people, eyes transfixed on some television hanging from the wall. In the midst of the idle conversation that was going, the brother found an excuse to walk past me and whisper something about meeting him in the hall. I got the sense that there was some sort of tension building between him and the father. I risked a couple of words to quietly announce my temporary departure, and I stepped outside to meet him. He began to talk about some sort of concern about the father, and some sort of potentially harmful plan to...I don't know, because this is about as far as I remember, and I started to wake up around this point.

Perhaps this isn't much of a story, but the experience of simply being someone else for a few minutes was fascinating, especially with no knowledge whatsoever of this person's history and personality, and the unspoken pressure to keep up an act. People often talk about walking a mile in someone else's shoes or taking on a fake identity, but truly being someone else—physically occupying a different body, and living a life we haven't pioneered for ourselves—grants a kind of perspective that is unmatched by pure imagination...even if, in this case, it was purely imagination.
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Retrospective: January 2014

2/2/2014

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Even if it's technically just another month, January always feels like a fresh slate, particularly after storing up most of my time off from work for the end of December. Spending extra time with friends, family, my wife, and myself is the best way I know to relax and recharge. For the first time in a long time, I have no real New Year's resolutions to speak of, other than upholding the "Do Something About It" policy I instituted at the end of December. Here's what I've been working on:

This Blog:

Not much in terms of quantity, but plenty of heartfelt positivity for a change. I like this new direction, and I'm planning on sticking with it.

- Retrospective: December 2013
- Anywhere but the volcano!
- There's Always More to See

GameCola:

I think I more than made up for my anemic offerings in the previous month—and these are just the writeups about what I did! Taking into account all the planning and playing of the RPGcast, plus the splash of behind-the-scenes article editing I did on the side, this constitutes the most time I've devoted to GameCola in months, if not a year or two. I'm very happy with how everything turned out, and if the last few days are any indication, that momentum should carry me well into February. I was even voted as 2013 Staff Member of the Year! What a great month.

Columns:

- The 2013 GameCola Videogame Awards (Part 1)

Podcasts:

- [NSFW] Final Fantasy RPGcast – Part 1: The Best Heroes Breakfast Can Buy
-
[NSFW] Final Fantasy RPGcast – Part 2: Monster Mash

Videos:
- Let's Play Mega Pony BLIND

YouTube:

The Final Fantasy RPGcast took up generous chunks of my recording time, so I didn't end up releasing the next installment of Mega Man 7 as planned (though I did manage to generate commentary for the first half of the video, which, for me, is a major accomplishment). With the Megathon posted and no plans for further GameCola videos in the near future (save for whatever separately recorded podcasts and RPGcasts make their way to YouTube), I wasn't expecting to have anything to share...but sometimes you get a surprise message in your inbox asking you for an interview! Technically, this is my second interview for YouTube, but the first one happened well over a year ago and still hasn't been posted, so...enjoy a 1:1 chat between yours truly and Patricia Miranda of Old School Lane.

PBM717:
-
Old School Lane Casual Chats Episode 26: Interview with Nathaniel "Gemini Laser" Hoover

The Backloggery:

A very productive month indeed for my backlog of video games, despite the purchase of a compilation pack once again inflating the list. I took a closer look at my unfinished and unplayed games to weed out anything that (a) technically doesn't have an ending, and I really didn't care that much for to begin with, and (b) I don't even have. I used to, I thought... Anyhousekeeping, I kicked off the year with a slew of new games (well, new for me) and the long-delayed completion of one of the first ones I ever owned. I was also relieved to finally take Secret of Mana off my Now Playing list, having started it with my wife sometime last year and taken sole responsibility for finishing it after she lost interest. (Frankly, I lost interest, too, but that's a discussion you'll hear in GC Podcast #70).

New:
- King's Quest: Mask of Eternity  (PC)
- Kirby’s Dream Collection: Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards  (Wii)
- Kirby’s Dream Collection: Kirby Super Star  (Wii)
- Kirby’s Dream Collection: Kirby's Adventure  (Wii)
- Kirby’s Dream Collection: Kirby's Dream Land  (Wii)
- Kirby’s Dream Collection: Kirby's Dream Land 2  (Wii)
- Kirby’s Dream Collection: Kirby's Dream Land 3  (Wii)
- Kirby’s Dream Collection: New Challenge Stages  (Wii)
- LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-4  (Wii)

Started:
- Lego Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues  (Wii)
- Lure of the Temptress  (PC)
- Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes  (GCN)
- Quest for Glory I: So You Want to Be a Hero (VGA)  (PC)
- Sam & Max: Season 2: Beyond Time and Space: Episode 1: Ice Station Santa  (PC)
- Sam & Max: Season 2: Beyond Time and Space: Episode 2: Moai Better Blues  (PC)

Beat:
- Kirby’s Dream Collection: Kirby's Dream Land  (Wii)
- Quest for Glory I: So You Want to Be a Hero (VGA)  (PC)
- Sam & Max: Season 2: Beyond Time and Space: Episode 1: Ice Station Santa  (PC)
- Secret of Mana  (SNES)

Completed:
- Final Fantasy  (NES)
- Kirby’s Dream Collection: Kirby's Dream Land  (Wii)
- Sam & Max: Season 2: Beyond Time and Space: Episode 1: Ice Station Santa  (PC)

Removed:
- Marshie's Malloween Mix-Up  (Brwsr)
- Master of Orion  (PC)

All in all, a spectacular start to a new year.
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