We sniff the magic grass and commune with the celestial moon wolf.

Let’s Finish is InsaneBear’s weekly video series in which I slowly whittle away at my backlog of unfinished games. Hijinks generally ensue as I pick up right in the middle of games I haven’t played in years. New Let’s Finish videos can be found here every Friday-Monday around 12:00PM EST.

Share/Save

Score: Superb
Difficulty Played On: Snake Eater: Normal, Peace Walker: No difficulty options, Sons of Liberty: Normal
Time to Beat: Snake Eater: 10 hours, Peace Walker: 18 hours for main story + a good amount of extra missions, Sons of Liberty: 8 hours
Platforms: Xbox 360, Playstation 3
Loved the Most: The incredible amount of high quality content.
Hated the Most: No MGS1; different controls for every game

Do you like Metal Gear Solid? Good, then keep reading. If you don’t enjoy yourself some convoluted storytelling, epic boss fights, and occasional Japanese quirkiness, then this review won’t change your mind about the MGS series. The Metal Gear Solid HD Collection brings together high definition remakes of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, and the previously PSP exclusive Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker. Both Snake Eater and Sons of Liberty have aged extremely well and still represent some of the best stealth gameplay you’ll find on a console. The addition of Peace Walker is nice for fans (such as myself) who were unable to experience the game when it first released on PSP, but it’s clearly not at home on the big screen. Taken as a whole though, the MGS HD Collection is one of the best values in video games since Valve’s Orange Box.

MGS HD Collection changes little about the three games contained in it. Of course, everything has that shiny high definition sheen, and all the games run at a buttery smooth 60 frames per second. Other than that (for better or worse) only very minor changes have been made to any of the games. It will please fans that their games have been preserved faithfully, but it may turn off newcomers who find some of the control elements outdated and frustrating to operate.

The Collection presents you with Snake Eater first since it’s the earliest chronological point in the story, so that’s where I’ll start. Snake Eater was a spectacular experience when it first released in 2004 and remains the fan favorite among many. Over seven years later, the game stands the test of time like few can. The fantastic art direction has made it a joy to look at in 1080p and only a few muddy textures remind you that it was released more than half a decade ago. This is the Subsistence version of Snake Eater, so it comes with the tremendously welcome addition of a full 360 degree camera. If you’re feeling nostalgic you have the option to switch back to the limited camera view that was available in the original game, but why you’d want to do that is beyond me.

What’s worth being nostalgic about are the memorable story and revolutionary boss battles. They are just as excellent as you remember as Naked Snake goes on a mission to kill his mentor and her squad of supernaturally powered lunatics. The open-ended nature of the game offers several tactical options not just for every boss fight, but for most normal stealth encounters as well.  But a few of the game’s gameplay innovations have started to feel a bit dated. The camouflage and survival elements really add depth, but have you switching back and forth between multiple menus that really take you out of the game. But that’s a small quibble given just how fantastically well done nearly every other aspect of this game is. Snake Eater is a timeless game that should be experienced by everybody.

It’s also worth noting that Snake Eater contains the original MSX versions of both Metal Gear 1 and 2. Bringing this collection to a total of five full games.

Next up in the continuing saga of Naked Snake is Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker. Now, this is a game that had little exposure given its limited release on the PSP. As such, this was my (and probably many others) first experience with the game. So I’ll be going into more depth in this portion of the review than I have/will in any of the others.

Peace Walker begins in 1974, ten years after the events of Snake Eater, and tasks Snake with stopping the newest (first?) iteration of Metal Gear. Like its fellow PSP exclusive Portable Ops (forgot  about that one, didn’t you?), Peace Walker takes place in South America as Snake begins to build his “army without a nation,” Militaires Sans Frontieres (MSF to those in the know). Snake and his mercenary compatriots, at the behest of a little girl named Paz, take on a mission to defend Costa Rica from the meddling of the CIA and KGB since the country lacks an army of its own. Several twists and turns later you find yourself at the end of a game absolutely packed with content but not lacking in its fair share of flaws.

The largest and most general problem with Peace Walker is that it’s a PSP game first and foremost, and it definitely shows. The game doesn’t look bad in high definition, but a lot of the textures look extremely pixelated and muddy. Plants and trees look like cardboard backdrops and the ground and wall textures look especially low-resolution. As impressive as the PSP’s graphical power can be, it’s not quite on par with the PS2, making the HD graphics for Peace Walker look worse than both Snake Eater and Sons of Liberty.

But the game doesn’t have to worry about the technical prowess of its graphics when it comes to its gorgeous, hand drawn cutscenes. Every cutscene looks like it was ripped straight from an extremely stylish graphic novel. Bright reds stand out among the mostly black and white drawings, creating a striking contrast that can’t help but catch your eye. And these aren’t just static panels either. Each cutscene is like a little motion comic, and there are various interactive moments sprinkled throughout. Some of these interactive moments add little, but others really add to the action on screen. It’s also nice to have something to do while watching a MGS cutscene. Perhaps surprisingly, the amount of time spent watching Peace Walker, as opposed to playing it, is limited compared to other MGS games. The game creates a nice balance between watching and playing.

When it is time to play the game, there are a few changes to the usual stealth action that might surprise MGS veterans. There are many elements from previous MGS games that are missing. Snake cannot move while prone or pressed against walls and cannot drag enemies’ bodies or store them in lockers. It seems as if the game has become more focused on shooting. Peace Walker uses the control scheme found in MGS4, so it feels much more like a shooter than other games in the series. One welcome change that is suited to the shooting gameplay is the addition of moving while crouching, but given that this is supposed to be a stealth game, I’d much rather be able to crawl on the ground.

Peace Walker is also structured much differently from previous MGS games. The story is broken up into short missions, none taking much more than 30 minutes (at most) to complete. This is where the spectre of PSP exclusivity haunts Peace Walker most. These bite-sized mission segments would be great for playing the game on a handheld; they allow for short bursts of gameplay while on the go. But when sitting in front of a large TV for an extended play session you wonder why you have to keep going back to the mission selection screen after every mission, and the game begins to feel fragmented.

This fragmentation is first apparent in the level design. Every area of the game feels self-contained and cut off from every other area, so the freedom and sense of tactical choice that you get in Snake Eater is non-existent. You just run from one end of an area to the next, incapacitating enemies in between. The mission structure also highlights the repetitive nature of Peace Walker, and really the entire MGS series. It essentially boils down to you sneaking through a few areas and then fighting some sort of boss/mini-boss. This is fine in other MGS games because it is a continuous and fluid experience where you are constantly advancing. But in Peace Walker you sneak through the area or kill the boss, complete the mission, and then you expect something different for the next mission, but it’s just more of the same thing.

The mission structure fragments the narrative as well. There’s nothing worse than when you’re watching a really intense cutscene after a hard fought boss battle only to see “Continued in the next mission” show up on the screen. And this happens on a regular basis, almost to the point of absurdity. It’s as if the game wants you to believe that just as Snake was facing down the barrel of a tank cannon, he said “Hold on a sec,” ran back to his base to stock up on equipment and possibly change his entire outfit, and then returned to the exact position he was in before he left. I’m all for breaking the fourth wall, but this is just unbelievable, and really breaks up the narrative in a very jarring manner. I’d have welcomed it much more if Snake actually said “Hold on,” and went about his business.

Yup, there's a Dr. Strangelove involved

When the narrative isn’t being broken up by the contrived mission structure, it’s generally what you’d expect from a Metal Gear game. There’s a new Metal Gear being developed, Snake has to stop it from destroying humanity, and lots of crazy boss battles stand between him and his goal. Stir in some heavy-handed philosophy about war, peace, and the role of machines in combat, let simmer for about 10 hours, and you’ve got yourself a heaping helping of MGS storytelling.

I don’t know if the formula’s starting to wear thin, but this time around the story wasn’t nearly as captivating as past MGS games. Everything seems a bit more subdued in a way that makes it all feel much less like a MGS game. The antagonists aren’t nearly as over-the-top and crazy as they normally are, and a lot of the characters seem pretty pointless. For example, a character is introduced whose sole purpose is to tell you what a certain bird sounds like. And that’s pretty much all she contributes for the entire game.

The game does do a nice job of characterizing Big Boss even more; showing how he has dealt with the loss of his mentor and how it has affected him as a person and a soldier. Overall, the story feels much more personal than in past MGS games.

While working through his internal struggle, and just generally being a tortured soul, there are many massive unmanned robots that Snake has to destroy with large guns. These make up the majority of the boss battles in Peace Walker, and, in a series known for its excellent boss encounters, are actually probably some of the worst in the series. That’s not to say that they’re bad. In fact, they’re quite good. It’s just that none of them are as revolutionary as the boss battles in previous MGS games. Each unmanned fighting machine requires its own unique tactics to overcome, and every battle is just the right difficulty; remaining tense and challenging without ever becoming frustrating. Yet, they all essentially boil down to “shoot the giant weak spot.” Lather, rinse, repeat. It’s a bit of a letdown given this series’ pedigree with boss battles.

When you’re not guiding Snake through the main story missions, there is plenty of other content to be explored. Snake’s mercenary organization, the MSF, has a base on an old oil rig in the ocean, and Snake has a whole staff to manage. Staff can be “recruited” throughout the game by incapacitating them and sending them back to “Mother Base,” as it’s called, by way of the Fulton Recovery System. Basically, you attach a balloon to them and a helicopter snatches ‘em up and brings them back to Mother Base. There are various duties that you can assign your staff based on their skills. There’s a combat unit, research and development, mess hall, medical team, intelligence team, and brig. The unit with the most impact on your gameplay is the R&D team. The more staff you have in your R&D unit, the more weapons and items can be developed and upgraded. This gives the game a bit of a Role Playing Game feel as you’re constantly unlocking new items and upgrading existing ones.

And there is a wide variety of weapons for you to experiment with. Tranquilizer guns, to machine guns, to heat-seeking missile launchers. C4, to anti-tank mines, to chaff grenades. You’ll never be left wanting for weapons. However, the large selection of weaponry seems unnecessary for a stealth game. Given that I was playing it as such, I often found myself only using the tranquilizer and stun rod to incapacitate my enemies. Larger weapons such as RPGs were used only during boss fights.

If you get bored with the main story, there are many additional side missions for you to take on. These task you with a wide range of objectives from simple target practice to destroying an enemy helicopter to holding up every enemy in an area without being spotted. These are the areas in which you are more likely to experiment with gameplay styles and weapons, and really take advantage of all your R&D department has to offer.

Don’t feel like taking on the enemy threat yourself? There’s a section of the game called Outer Ops that allows you to choose soldiers from your combat unit to send all over the world to fight for whoever’s willing to pay. This is a neat little mini-game that has you building different combat units with your soldiers and any vehicles you may have been able to liberate from the enemy. Once you’ve built your team, you send them out on missions of varying difficulty, and depending on how well trained and armed they are, they’ll return triumphantly, or you’ll be left with a bunch of beaten and bruised (and possibly dead) soldiers. Each encounter plays out in a manner similar to the Advance Wars series on Nintendo handhelds. Each side gets its turn to strike, and depending on your units’ stats, they’ll either succeed or be destroyed. It’s a nice little mini-game that helps you gain new recruits and unlock new items for use in other missions.

Beyond that, there are Peace Walker‘s two multiplayer modes. There’s your run-of-the-mill competitive mode that contains the standard objective, deathmatch, and team deathmatch gameplay modes. And while it’s not implemented terribly, I’ve never been a fan of the competitive multiplayer offered in other MGS games, and Peace Walker is no exception. It’s the control scheme that’s the biggest cause of my distaste of MGS multiplayer. It’s just not made for the fast-paced environment of competitive games. You must cycle through your weapons using the shoulder buttons like in all MGS games, and it’s incredibly inefficient when quickly trying to switch out weapons in the middle of combat. There’s also no shooting from the hip, you must always aim down your sights, which makes it difficult to take out enemies who spawn right next to you. And that happens way more often than it should. I found myself spawning right in front of enemies multiple times in every game I played. There’s not much that’s more frustrating than spawning and immediately dying because your enemy was standing right behind you. So while the competitive multiplayer is a nice option to have, it’s not done well enough to justify returning to like you would a Gears of War or Call of Duty.

But the content train doesn’t stop at competitive multiplayer. In a first for the Metal Gear Solid series, Peace Walker contains cooperative multiplayer. Cooperative Operations (CO-OPS for short), let’s you run through almost any of the single player missions with a buddy or three, as long as those buddies are connected to the Playstation Network/Xbox Live. No local co-op here, folks. All of the boss fights can be played cooperatively, but CO-OPS is put to better use with sneaking missions. Sneaking your way through enemy territory and incapacitating enemies with another human being really gives you a great feeling of teamwork. There are also several gameplay features that can only be experienced in CO-OPS. You can go “co-op in” by standing next to your partner. When in this close proximity you are able to trade items and your health/stamina are combined into one large bar. You can also opt to go “Snake in” which has the entire team form up in a line behind a leader who controls movement while everybody else looks out for trouble. Great for sneaking around in a relatively large group. CO-OPS are a nice addition to the traditional MGS formula, but they still feel a bit out of place in a game that’s always been about solo missions. I had fun while I played them, but the whole thing felt a little extraneous, as if it was there just to add even more content to a game already packed with it.

Peace Walker is a game that was meant for the PSP. When played on a TV for extended periods of time, the fragmented missions and narrative really mess up the pacing of what is otherwise a decent MGS game. That said, Peace Walker is just packed with so much content (even if some of it is a little half-baked) that it’s a great deal for any MGS fan.

Last up in the MGS HD Collection is Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. When released in 2001, this was a divisive game. Many hated it for abandoning Snake as the protagonist for most of the game and replacing him with pretty boy Raiden. Hopefully we’ve all had enough time to get over that and realize that MGS 2 is still a great game. And it’s essentially unchanged in its HD incarnation, crazy plot and all. What you remember from 2001 is all still here, plus all of the bonus content from the Substance version of the game. That means you can play through all of the “Snake Tales” missions if you’re feeling down on our boy Raiden (just remember, he’s now an awesome cyborg ninja who stabs a sword through his own chest). There’s also an absurd amount of VR and alternative missions that have you playing as both Raiden and Snake in a variety of challenges that test your stealth and combat skills. The only criticism I have of this version of MGS 2 is the lack of a control scheme update. Going from Snake Eater and Peace Walker with their full 360 degree camera control to MGS 2‘s limited camera control is jarring to say the least. It feels backward and convoluted and makes the game a frustrating lesson in trial and error at times.

There are only two pieces of criticism that I have for the entirety of the MGS HD Collection. 1) The original MGS isn’t included. Including an HD update to the Twin Snakes version released on the Gamecube would have made this the ultimate MGS collection. 2) The control scheme changes for each game, and moving between them is much more difficult than it should be. One should not have to relearn a new set of controls for every game in a collection such as this.

Taken as a whole, the MGS HD Collection is a ludicrously good deal. There are essentially five games in here (if you count Metal Gear 1 and 2). Peace Walker has enough content to keep you busy for dozens of hours, and the quality of Snake Eater is worth the asking price alone. Throw in MGS 2 for good measure, and you have a collection that I can confidently say is one of the best deals in gaming. If you’re a Metal Gear Solid fan or just a little MGS-curious, you shouldn’t hesitate to pick up this HD collection.

Share/Save

Ah, yes, of course! The giant volcanic rock all the way on the other side of the continent!

Let’s Finish is InsaneBear’s weekly video series in which I slowly whittle away at my backlog of unfinished games. Hijinks generally ensue as I pick up right in the middle of games I haven’t played in years. New Let’s Finish videos can be found here every Friday-Monday around 12:00PM EST.

Share/Save

In which Jackie Estacado becomes lord of the gremlins. That’s some dark doo-doo, my brothers in light. And yeah, those last 30 seconds have nothing to do with the game, but I found them far more entertaining than any 15 second ad.

The Darkness II releases February 7th. If the “executions” trailer below doesn’t convince you to buy it, then you’re probably a morally upstanding person that scorns gratuitous violence and works toward “enlightening” our backwards civilization.

Share/Save

The returning veterans sound better than ever and the new additions seem to be quite excited to be a part of the game. I have confidence that the voice acting will–wait, the eye candy’s not Miranda? One Miranda wasn’t enough? How will we ever differentiate between Ashley (young and busty white brunette 1), Miranda (young and busty white brunette 2), and “Diana Allers” (young and busty white brunette 3)?

If the Illusive Man is cloning these broads and giving them different hairstyles to trick us, then he’s got another thing coming! Homosexual Shepard FTW!

Share/Save

And no, unfortunately this is not a real playable game…bitch.

Share/Save

So apparently Soul Calibur V is out as of today. With a marketing campaign consisting solely of Japanese language trailers up until this point (give or take a couple), this information might seem a bit sudden to some of us (me). But it’s here, and it’s got a nonsensical English language trailer to prove it. Let the battles begin?*

*By battles, I most certainly do not mean Soul Calibur fanboys taking revenge upon my virtual body for my ignorance.

Share/Save

Capcom’s Action-RPG seems to be going a bit under the radar–so much so that the publisher feels like this demo tie-in to a much bigger game is necessary–but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be paying attention to it.

As the trailer above communicates, the game’s terribly Japanese narrative sensibilities might not be its strong suit, but previous trailers have shown fluid, visceral combat unparalleled by the genre heavyweights. Dragon’s Dogma is also doing some pretty interesting stuff with NPC companions. This is a game that any RPG fan should be looking into.

Obviously, Capcom feels the same way. That’s why they’re packing in a Resident Evil 6 demo for those who purchase this lesser known, original IP. Xbox users will receive access to the demo starting July 3rd, while PlayStation owners will have to hold out a full two months until September 5th. There are no details yet on what exactly the demo will include or if it will eventually become available to the general, non-dragon-slaying public. What we do know is that Dragon’s Dogma owners will be able to download a zombie-dragon mount for use in RE6. Okay, so maybe that’s not true, but it sure sounds like a more effective marketing tool than plain old demos, no?

Dragon’s Dogma out in May, includes access to Resident Evil 6 demo

Share/Save

Man, the year 1271 was so great. Remember that awesome party the king threw on his boat in the Pontar River? There were astounding feats of archery,  jesters kickin’ each other in the butt, and two dudes just wailing on each other. Oh, and then there was that whole freezing the entire boat and brutally murdering everybody aboard thing… That guy was such a buzz-kill.

As awesome as this trailer looks, I’m disappointed that there’s no actual gameplay. Hopefully we’ll see more as the marketing ramps up in the coming months. The Witcher 2 brutally stabs your Xbox 360 in the chest on April 17th.

Share/Save

Time for some ghoul hunting!

Let’s Finish is InsaneBear’s weekly video series in which I slowly whittle away at my backlog of unfinished games. Hijinks generally ensue as I pick up right in the middle of games I haven’t played in years. New Let’s Finish videos can be found here every Friday-Monday around 12:00PM EST.

Share/Save