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In every videogame, a hero is needed. It doesn’t matter whether it’s that star quarterback in Madden scoring the touchdown to carry his down-trodden team into over-time to even out the score, or the larger-than-life foundling turned demi-god matching up against the universe to save his planet - heroes are what define our projection in a videogame. They allow us to sympathise, to imagine, to put ourselves in the same situation, and add to our intelligence and morals. In a way, they help the gamer outside the fictional lingua franca to mature by way of an experience befitting any Ratchet, Link or Chief. Funny that - rather than by the scale of their deeds, including rescuing their seemingly immortal ageless princesses, it’s now how popular they should be rather than would be. In the business dominion, Mario, for instance, sells. Quality of the game, money well spent, a fun experience, an SOS from Nintendo begging for something else to work on - they can all be represented by his red-bottomed, unshaven mug. More Mario franchises would lead to more adulation from gamers (and their moolah, as a bonus) according to Corporate Santa, who then spreads his love around the world with Mario Strikers, Mario Party and Paper Mario like every freaking 24 hour-span is Jesus’s birthday. But gamers only have so much to give; some one is bound to get over-shadowed in the exchange, namely the “other” heroes and heroines. Like it or not, these underdogs, in terms of either recognition or success, have gotten much less compared to your usual magnanimous mantles.
However, enjoying their exploits for what they are isn’t difficult, since they’re part of some wickedly fun - and if you’re a collector, rare - titles.
Here A-Snake, there A-Snake. Everywhere A-Snake-Snake! In case that rock you’ve been living under got any cozier in the past 20 years, Kojima and his crew have been busy celebrating the Metal Gear franchise’s 20th Anniversary. And what better way is there for us to rejoice, especially since we weren’t invited to the party recently held in Tokyo? A roasting glut of Metal Gear news, I’ll say! After you’re down gawking at the new Guns of the Patriots gameplay trailer for the 5th time in a row, remember to hit the jump for other noteworthy items. Expansion pack for Portable Ops? New Metal Game online cell-phone game? “Snake vs. Zombie?!” It’s all there, gentlemen.
… and how to tell if you are one of them!
Here’s the simple 5 Step test.
5 – You buy Tomb Raider because you just heard that Tomb Raider Legend has a Hot Coffee mod available for download on Xbox Live!
On an added note, read this.
And get the patch from here.
4 – You think John Leguizamo makes a cool “Luigi”
3 – You heard about Metal Gear Solid and decided to invest in an Ageia PhysX board. Just to see how Solid and Liquid Snake will move.
2 – You just heard about the new Bodyguard game for the Wii. Featuring Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner, of course!
1 – Truth is stranger than fiction. You go to a gaming expo and check out fucking PINBALL on the latest Dual Cores available.
So did you pass the test?
Poor Sony! First it sells a miserable number of consoles compared to its competitors, and then it starts losing out on all third party exclusives, and then ends up losing its much beloved Ken Kutaragi, who openly apologizes on TV for all the mistakes others ended up doing.
With a lot of games like Final Fantasy, Grand Theft Auto and Devil May Cry ending up in Microsoft’s court, and once PlayStation chums Capcom sticking to their guns with not releasing Dead Rising and Lost Planet for the PS3, Sony desperately needs more third party developers to stick to them now more than ever. And just when people started speculating that Metal Gear Solid 4 was also slowly making its way to the Xbox 360, Konami’s Ryan Payton went on a Kojima Productions Report podcast to say:
I can tell you honestly at this point, we have not changed the game in any form with the idea of ‘oh, we got to do this on 360.’ Put aside whether or not we’re developing for 360 or not, the game is built on the PS3 hardware, as you guys have known for the past two years or so.
While he didn’t make it exactly clear whether Metal Gear Solid 4 would be a PS3 exclusive, he did imply that even if it did end up on the Xbox 360, it would be a port and a scaled-down version of the PS3 version, considering how creator Hideo Kojima himself had said that
MGS4 is aimed for the movie theatre, it’s aimed for the PS3, so the game’s scenario and graphics need this theatre-type hardware. It’s when a producer has a game that can work on the “DVD level” that a game can go multiplatform.
Well, that hasn’t really stopped a lot of companies from making bad port jobs anyway, right? But considering how the game is made for the PS3, the BluRay disc and how the MGS movie is being made by Sony Pictures, one wonders how far Sony will go to make sure that they don’t lose Snake to the snakes at Redmond. We’ll just have to wait this one out.
via [Kotaku]
If there’s one thing that the Metal Gear Solid games have taught me, it’s how even master spies have to debase themselves to hiding under cardboard boxes to get the job done. It might look rip-roaringly hilarious to watch Solid Snake duck under a cardboard box and move around comically, but we don’t see the dead guys laughing about it now, do we? But who cares about those jerks anyway? They got what’s coming to them.
And if you want what’s coming to you, then take a gander at this. Kotaku has picked up on one of the funniest papercrafts ever seen - you guessed it, Solid Snake sneaking under a “The Orange” cardboard box. (As if you couldn’t tell from the picture) If you’ve always wanted something cool to put on top of your PC or your favorite gaming console, then this might just be it. Extremely simple to put together, all you need to do is download and extract the files, print them out, cut them and glue them together like the instructions tell you to do and you’re all set to have Solidus Snakius take on your Wobble Bobble Hulk! Yes, they do come alive when you sleep and start fighting with each other, in case you were still wondering.