Fallout 3

I had no intention of playing Fallout 3. Gorgeous Hair said he was going to wait till the "game of the year" edition came out, and he kept to his word. Purdy Teeth, GH and I were hanging out playing it shortly after he got it. The next day Purdy Teeth owned a copy. Two days later, I did.

That's excessive, by any measure. It's a damn old game now, but none of us was willing to wait to borrow the game. Do I regret spending that money when I could have waited a month and borrowed it from either of them? Nope.

Fallout 3 is nothing short of fantastic. It makes every RPG I've played in the past decade seem impossibly archaic. The fact that Final Fantasy 13 is going to come out next year with a "you stand there, I'll stand here, I'll hop over and hit you, now you hop over and hit me" battle system is pathetic. This game is everything a RPG should be.

A small example: Megaton is a town with an unexploded nuke in the center of it. The mayor would love it if you'd disarm it. You can either do it for free for good karma, or you can charge for the service. Mister Burke would like you to detonate it, and he will pay you much better than the mayor. You can do either of those things. You can kill Burke, and you can kill the mayor. You can get the mayor to arrest Burke, and have Burke kill the mayor for you. And everything in the game is structured like this. There's no one path. Not even close. Now that all three of us are playing it, we've been amazed at how different each of our games is. We fight with different weapons, run with different people, do different quests.

The game's huge, dense and a joy to exist in. All other RPG's have been put on notice.

4 stars

Tekken 6

Problems (Obvious): Laggy Online
Problems (Nitpicky but I care more):

- No ability to set vs mode to automatically go back to character select, and as a subset, only p1 can choose whether to rematch or reselect characters.
- Online VS, when it dumps you back to the character select screen forgets the character you were playing as and resets to hovering over Lars.
- Music is so-so
- Backgrounds are limited and lacking much of the whimsy and magic that Tekken 5 had. Some are great (Tomato Stage, Temple) but there's too few and too many duds.
- The glow is aaaawwwwful. Try playing Lili on the tree stage to see what I'm talking about. She's a white blob. I can shut off Motion Blur, why not Glow?

Things I like:

- It's Tekken
- Character models and designs are stellar. No seriously. This game does such a better job than every other fighter out there with their character design it's obscene. There's not much new on the default costume front (everyone's in their Tekken 5 gear, which is admittedly lame), but the customizations are excellent. Between making Nina a flight attendant and Bob a fat Power Ranger, there's lots of amazing looking options.
- Scenario mode may be a mediocre Final Fight clone, but it's a much nicer way to earn custom items and money than playing against the computer for days on end. It would have been even better had they done something like Virtua Fighter 4 Evo's quest mode, or Soul Calibur's for that matter; keeping the core gameplay while sending you on an interesting adventure (where you win lots of clothes).

So yeah, do I think they could have done better? Yup. Will it be my favorite fighting game for the next two or three years? Yup.

3 stars

Tekken 6 on Xbox or Playstation?

Tekken 6 is coming out multiplatform in October. They're offering what is rumored to be a wireless Hori Real Arcade Pro. Even if it's wired, that's a fantastic joystick.

I've always gotten my Tekken (and other fighters) on the Sony system of the time. This is primarily due to my love of Tekken over all other fighters and the fact that I have acquired some nice arcade sticks to play it on Playstation.

Getting Tekken 6 on PS3 seems like a no-brainer. I've got some PS3 compatable sticks, the game was built on an arcade version of PS3 hardware (I think) and Japanese games tend to be better on Japanese systems.

Except that's not exactly true anymore. Resident Evil 5 was noticeably better looking (to both me and Gorgeous Hair) on Xbox 360 and it had no mandatory install. The head-to-heads of Soul Calibur 4 say the game is nearly indistinguishable across systems but slightly better looking on Xbox.

This is compounded by the fact that Sony hasn't done one thing right since the PS3 came out. Despite having a purportedly much faster processor, there has been no indication of that from any game, cross platform or exclusive. Half the games require installs (and in the impossibly offensive example of Metal Gear 4, require one install per level.) and neither load faster or look better.

Other than the rather slim odds that the game will look better on PS3 (which I doubt based on the Soul Calibur reviews) there's no more reason to get the game on PS3.

So as of this week, I'm getting a Tekken game on a non-Sony system. It reminds me of buying a PS1 to play Final Fantasy 7.

Recession Reviews: Burnout Revenge

Burnout Revenge, the fourth in the series (i think?) is, on the Xbox 360, effectively an up-resed xbox/ps2 game. Having bought the ps2 version after having played the 360 version but prior to owning a 360, I can tell you the 360 version is way better.

All the little details are better utilized and developed.

It also looks great. As good as Paradise or Gran Turismo? No way, but it looks sharp, has a smooth framerate and it's fast as hell. It's also an order of magnitude better than Burnout Paradise. As much as I respect everything they've done DLC-wise to make Paradise awesome, I still hate the open-world mechanic. I hate open worlds in general because instead of taking the fun part of a game and just giving you that, they let you do all the boring stuff too, like getting from place to place.

Revenge does everyting better than Paradise. To start with, the driving is simple. Gas, Brake and Boost. No handbrake nonsense, and no need to ever ever take your finger off the gas, for any reason. The arcadey feel for speed and control is superb.

Then there's different signature takedowns for each course, different kinds of takedowns (including my favorite: landing on top of your rival), and you can take down at least four opponents at once, which is rare, but I did it and it felt fantastic. This game is actually why I'm so hard on Paradise, which is in and of itself a fantastic racer. But Revenge is better. It's more focused, more compartmentalized and very much more menu driven, which is the only downer. Not that the menus are bad, just that after every race the "you did this good" screen isn't skippable and like most games, I just wanna get back in and play.

That is my only complaint about it though. I bought a "like-new" copy off Amazon the other day for $15 shipped cos I thought I lost my old one. It was over at Purdy Teeth's house. I wish I had known that when I was sitting around doing nothing while the wife was out of town.

4 stars.

Recession Reviews: Crackdown

Due to the utter slop that calls itself the games of 2009 so far I have bought exactly 1 game: Resident Evil 5. Having milked that one to death (1000 GP to be specific), I decided rather than go out and get Prototype or Infamous and be unhappy with how Crackdown does X or Y better I'd just fire up crackdown and achievement whore.

Turns out I made a good decision. My old old copy of crackdown is still fantastically fun, and doubly so when I got Gorgeous Hair to play online. We decided to call our session quits at 1am last night, but for the next hour neither of us signed off. We just jumped around the city and accomplished nothing, and we had a great time doing it.

My middling complaints about the game still hold up (lack of bosses, touchy controls), but it does so much right that every other game does wrong, and at least until Prototype and Infamous came out was the only sandbox game that understood a game should be a game first and a life simulator second. It's still fantastic fun to climb all the tall buildings, to launch an attack on a boss and to generally raise hell.

You can easily find it for under $20 shipped, and it's still a solid 3 star game.

Resident Evil 5

I don't feel like writing a ton on it at the moment, but it's a gorgeous game, I've played it through six or seven times and gotten okay at the minigame "mercenaries".

Gorgeous Hair and I have plans to play a bit of co-op, which I'm looking forward to.

3 stars

Street Fighter 4

I had a dream last night where I'd made an awesome new friend. He only had one problem: he constantly pooped his pants. Being in his company was being in his poopy pants' company, and it was ruining an otherwise awesome time. Eventually I had to man up in my dream and ask him about the issue.

"What, you mean Seth?" was his response.

He'd named his unfortunate affliction "Seth", and so it's fitting that Capcom decided to name their instance of pants crapping amidst otherwise good times "Seth" as well. Seth is the last boss in Street Fighter 4 and he sucks. I didn't quite believe it when everyone cried "cheap!". After spending half an hour fighting Seth with Gen on "Easiest" difficulty I fully understood.

Gorgeous Hair and I unlocked everyone. It was some of the least fun I've ever had with a video game. I have zero desire to play the game anymore.


2 stars

So I've been playing EDF again

My friend Matt got a new XBL name. The best feature of this is that you lose all your old saves. Awesome.

So he's been going through EDF again, and I've been helping him. The game is just fantastic. We've been farming for weapons on Level 52 "Inferno" on the "Inferno" difficulty. Confusing, yes. Inferno Inferno. We're barely strong enough to do it, but one out of every two or three times we succeed in beating the level. It's much more fun than hunting for the Lysander Z on level 46, which gets rather boring.

What amazes me about the game is how you can have everything under complete control, yet things can still go to hell in second if you're not constantly on top of things.

So in this one case, thank you Xbox, for deleting my friend's saves.

still, as always, 4 stars.

DLC pricing and unlockables

Street Fighter 4 is (or will be?) selling costume packs for around a buck per character. While I appreciate the option to unlock new costumes, paying for things that a game used to give out for free is utter nonsense.

In Dead or Alive 1 through 3 you have to play through the game again and again on higher and higher difficulties to unlock different costumes for characters. In Tekken 5 you play through the game to earn game-money which you can use to spend on unlockable costumes. In Virtua Fighter items are unlocked in a somewhat similar manner, with some being paid for and others being won via matches.

I like the old system. I don't want to be forced to pay for new content. This is especially true for fighting games where the gameplay is rather thin outside of having friends over. Sure there's online play, but I've never found it terribly satisfying. Unlocking goofy hats is pretty much my only reason to play 1p fighters. I'm good enough at the ones I feel like getting good at, and playing the computer's never been very much help in that regard anyway.

My only problem with this old system is that it gets to be a huge pain. Beating DOA 3 on some super high difficulty is next to impossible for me, and while I can fight all day in Tekken 5, the money you earn is middling at best. I get bored of unlocking stuff. At that point, I become completely okay with paying real, actual cash to have all the costumes and customizations unlocked in my game. My time becomes worth more than my money.

What I'd like to see is a hybrid of the two systems. Allow me, should I so choose, to unlock everything without paying money. Let me slog through as much of the game as I want. When I get bored of that however, let me pay to unlock everything.

This would be a great system for every game. I don't have the patience anymore to unlock everything in most games anymore, but I would like to feel like I'm purchasing a whole game. Adding $5 downloads onto a game shortly after it comes out only serves to give the impression of nickel-and-diming the consumer.

"Here's your 'Street Fighter 4 Basic' game, please pay another Twenty Bucks to get 'Street Fighter 4 Complete'."

I think most people will still end up paying for DLC, but no one would feel taken advantage of. I know if I could pay another $5 or $10 to unlock all the things I haven't in my copy of Tekken 5:DR, I would do that. I wouldn't have done that the day I bought the game, but now I've had it long enough that spending more money on it isn't offensive to me, and I just don't have the desire to fight enough matches to unlock all the hairstyles for the characters I don't play.

Earth Defense Force 2017 is still the best game on the market

seriously.

find a copy. You should probably find a friend too, cos like Contra, it's playable as a 1p game, but it's magical as a 2p game.

PS3 Home

A few years back I was at a shooting range. My friend asked if they had the Smith and Wesson .50 caliber.

"That gun's the answer to a question nobody asked." came the reply.

To this day, I love that phrase.

And so we have Playstation's Home.

I didn't get much past creating my "avatar". I tried to create my wife but it became apparent that creating attractive women wasn't in the cards and semi-attractive zombie women's not really my thing, so I switched gears to make myself. I have enough skill and confidence to make good caricatures of myself: harsh but amusing. Nonetheless, I could only manage the bluntest caveman version of myself.

Mostly, Home's character creator is lacking foreheads, or tops of heads specifically. Every hairstyle I tried on both virtual me and virtual wife failed moreso because of the decidedly cro-magnon lack of upper head than because of the wrinkles, dead eyes or awful style choices. We looked too cavman, and this coming from a man who thinks he looks more caveman than the average person.

I effectively gave up on creating me, and went out to explore this amazing new world. I appeared in a highrise apartment on the coast of a digital Saint Tropez. Running out to my porch, excited to jump off the edge and explore I found there was no jump button. My next observation was that my male avatar runs like a beaten child--very compactly.

Run animations are a big thing for me, and I won't get too into it here, but when a person is running they should look two things in videogame land:
1. Healthy
2. Their sex

Women and men run differently and it would behoove many a game maker to notice and master the differences. But anyway, I take my weak running man who can't jump the railing to the front door.

I get a message that to walk out of my apartment I'll have to download an additional 22 megs of whatever.

No thanks.

That's the end of my Home experience.

It's not a game, so doesn't technically merit a rating, but it's terrible enough that I'll give it one.

1 star


edit: I just re-read Gorgeous Hair's review. Haha.

Gorgeous Hair's review of Playstation's HOME



im in this room
and i have some couches
and there's nothing else in it
so i throw my couches around
but it's not fun
so i go out on my balcony
and i can't jump off it
so i go out the room, and it says loading lobby
so i quit
and will never go back in a gain
i want to say "dear playstation home, do you realize you made crap ?"

Good at Games

Does it matter, getting good at games?

You can argue that J0h@n@+han "Fatal1ty" W3nd311 profits from being good at games. He makes a decent salary. That makes game playing his job, however. I know a lot of people with better jobs because they decided to get good at things other than video games, so the argument is somewhat moot.

Bionic Commando: Rearmed is the last game I had to make an effort at. It wasn't a significant effort. I spent an extra day scrounging up every last free man and patiently beat the last level. I'm pretty good at BC:R now but I have no interest in playing it on hard mode or anything else at this point. I have no idea what was the last game I worked hard to master. Even with Tekken I get by more on my accrued skill over the six games than any concerted effort to master my wall game or something.

And what's the point really? Most games out there currently require zero skill. This is every RPG, MMORPG and everything else. Sure Omega Weapon was hard, but it's a numbers game, not a skill game.

Ninja Gaiden for the Xbox was the last game I had to get good at, from scratch and properly. I even got most of the way through the Hurricane Pack, but then too, at a certain point I asked myself, what is the point?

An Aside About Post-Campaign Replay

My decision to stop playing both Disgaea and The World Ends With You came for a similar reason. In both cases there's plenty of game after you've beaten the "final" boss. What killed TWE for me was the "black planet" pins, which are the best weapons/items in the game. The problem is that to get one of them, you have to fight the hardest enemy in the entire game, making the use for them rather moot.

So what do you do with them? Re fight that boss only it's easier now?

The longer you play something post-game, the more you ask yourself "what is the point?"

With Eindhander, my quest to get the Selene led to me getting much better at the game, but in RPG's you the game player never get better; your characters in the game get better at playing it. That's a weird meta-situation right there if you stop and think about it: You're watching people play a game. Your involvement is only to be there to tell the characters to get back to work. It's as though there was some sort of God telling me to keep playing Einhander till I was leveled up enough to beat the game on Hard without continuing.

That's some weird business right there, now that I think about it.

Dead Space

I haven't played it, but I just talked to Gorgeous Hair on the phone about it. He's been playing it and called it a solid 3 star game but was waiting till it was over to see if it held up. Hopefully he'll get around to writing about it himself, but for now, i'll paraphrase:

Last level sucks, Last boss is cool, ending is a slap in the face

2 stars

Einhander

Since I mentioned it down below, I might as well cover it.

You're a space ship, you fly to the right and shoot things.

Squaresoft was magical back in these days. They were good at everything they tried to be good at. Who can say why someone there decided to make a shooter, and lord knows why it got greenlit in the Lucasarts of the East, but it did, and it's amazing.

Einhander takes everything that was previously right about shooters (dying a lot, memorization of enemy patterns, insanity) and does it even better. Bosses, mini bosses, it's all so good. While some will say some other horizontal shooter's better, I will say they are wrong. While i love Gradius 5, it's not nearly as epic or as brilliantly laid out as this.

4 stars, and in the "Desert Island" competition

Disgaea 2

First off, Disgaea 1: 3 stars. Not for everybody, but a great story and a just stupid amount of post-story gameplay.

Disgaea 2's story's not as good, or at least not as whimsical which is really the charm of Disgaea games, outside of the mathgasm anyway.

But about that mathgasm, some things about the Disgaea series:

- Max character level: 9999
- number of 'stored levels' you can accrue (this involves reincarnating back to level 1 but with more powerful base stats based on the number of levels you have 'stored') 19,998. (what this basically means is that to make your character as powerful as possible, you will have to level it to 9,999 three times)
- Every item, from a lowly piece of candy (for healing) to the great sword Yoshitsuna has levels inside of it. You can go inside the item, beat randomly generated maps populated by random enemies and level up the item. Every item. Items have between 30 and 100 levels (Per Item!) depending on rarity.
- To get the best weapons and armor (class 40) you have to:

- Buy or find a class 38 weapon or item and go into it. In this "Item World" you'll need to find steal a very rare version of a class 39 weapon, which may or may not show up randomly, pretty much anyhere if the enemy level is high enough in whatever item you are inside.
- Go into said class 39 weapon and level it all the way down to level 99 of 100.
- Collect the 16 pieces of treasure map from the 16 types of pirate that randomly show up after a few turns on any given level in the item world.
- Go to the new "Land of Chaos" opened up by finding all the map parts, going back into your class 39 weapon on it's 99th level, going to level 100 and stealing the class 40 weapon from the "Item God" that resides on the 100th level.

I currently have 15 of the 16 map pieces.

I understand the formation of religions a little better. Everyone says it's random, but there has to be something. Maybe it looks on the clock? Maybe the Jolly Pirates are much more likely to show up on Thursdays? Maybe only when the sun's up? There has to be something to give me an edge other than trying to roll a seven over and over and over again.

2 stars, at least until I get that last map piece.


Got the map piece. Now I have two "Yoshitsuna" swords. The thing I'm finding now is that while Disgaea has always been far less about "strategy" than say, Fire Emblem, it's also becoming embarassingly apparent how rote everything about the game is.

You could not convince a man from twenty years ago that anyone would have fun doing this, and while I do and may even take all 10-plus hours it takes to "perfect" a Yoshitsuna, it's still a horrid waste of time.

I used to be mad that in Einhander (4 stars if I haven't covered it yet) to get the ultimate ship, the Selene (9999 of any given ammo, dual gunpods) you had to beat the game, on hard, without continuing (which I never did). Now I don't know. Disgaea is the opposite. The game keeps going and while there are super hard enemies to fight, there's basically no reward (other than possibly bragging to the one other dude who's even heard of the game that you know, and truth be told he's not impressed, he's freaked out). The Selene may have been nigh-impossible to get, but I did get super good at Hard Mode because of it.

2 stars. 3 if you're into strat rpg-esque games.

Linger in the Shadows

They say up front it's not a game but rather an interactive art piece. I don't entirely buy that. It's a very slow and even more poorly explained "Dragon's Lair".

I like the idea of people doing things like this, but I have no love for this specifically. Being able to spin the sprite particles does not interactive art make. If it did more stuff I'd be more onboard, but the game seems to be hit all the buttons, which all do nothing until the right moment when one will do something.

This gets into an idea of technology art. A game, by its very nature, should feel like you are in control of it. Art gets to pick and choose, but because this art is on my PS3 I want to feel like I have more input than I do so I'm upset about it.

Who knows.

Bionic Commando Rearmed

I wasn't even considering buying the Swedish developed Bionic Commando sequel, what with it's anti hero and his dreadlocks landing square in the middle of every comic book character from 1995.

They tricked me however. For $10, I got to download a revamped version of the original. Stage layout essentially the same, music remixed. Now with actual bosses and a much harder last level. I'm loving playing it. The new definition of how a remake should be done.

But they did something tricky: they got me to realize that these Swedes at Grin have the right idea. They get it. They certainly understand the original game. Then they went in and snuck in a few plot points and pickups for the 3d version coming out.

Now I really want to play it, this new Bionic Commando. Especially since by buying Rearmed, I get Rad Spencers original outfit to wear.

Interest piqued, dreadlock issue resolved, I'm now buying the new game unless consensus is it's horrible.

Also worth noting is the new writing in the game is awesome.

EDIT:
yesterday the game glitched out and I lost my save. Upon playing it through again, i'm promoting it. This game is all i've been playing for weeks now, and I can see firing it up from time to time to play again.

4 stars.

Metal Gear Solid 4: Demotion

So I played through the game again (on easy) doing a no alert, no kill run to get the always fun infinite headband and stealth camo, two staples of MGS replay value.

I skipped all the cutscenes and it underscored one thing: There's not much gameplay in Metal Gear 4.

One of the most interesting aspects in the promises of MGS 4 was being able to pick sides in a conflict. Snake would be able to ally with one side or the other, or go neutral and sneak on by. Skirmishes between factions only happen in the first two stages in the game, and you are never able to choose a side. You can try and sneak by, or you can make friends with the rebels. That's it. Helping the rebels means they won't flip out when they see you, but there's not a major change to the gameplay.

Skirmishes are boring, shooting the enemies is boring and the game is completely uneventful until level 3 when it merits more criticism.

The failure oflevel 3 is that the only people on the town streets are you, your target and soldiers. You are given a civilian disguise at the start of the level, but there's no need to ever use it. The PMC's already know exactly who you are, even with a mask on (go figure) and there's no one else on the streets. You don't need to even try to blend in: you're better off using your camo and hiding in the shadows, or, do as Gorgeous Hair did and stay in the cardboard box the whole time.

Waste of half a level. But hey, at least it was 'different'.

Level 4 takes us to Shadow Moses island, which can be summed up thusly:

"I didn't realize Metal Gear 1 was so ...small"

It's a short level, full of instances of infinite enemies, except where there aren't. Game balance: how it's done.

The Sniper Wolf battle's pretty cool. Apparently she wasn't initially hard enough, so they added those "frog" ladies to come look for you, which is a bit annoying, but whatever. I liked this battle the most.

The battle I liked next to most was the Metal Gear vs Metal Gear battle. The problem I have with it is it's like GTA. Grand Theft Auto does nothing well. It's a game of other games, all done better in their other games. People love it cos it has all kinds of different games. Metal Gear doesn't do robot on robot battles as well as other games. Still, it's the second best battle in the game, for what it's worth.

After that Liquid controls Snakes nanomachines, hops into a gigantic submarine and (almost) kills Raiden. Mei Ling shows up on the only working battleship in the US Navy.

BREAK.

Here is my biggest problem with the game outside of it's 3 hours of actual gameplay time: The story is stupid. Balistically stupid. Stand in front of this story and it will kill you with it's ineptness. The US has installed nanomachines into all their soldiers and vehicles, as has every other military in the world, all apparently using the same single AI system.

Yeah.

Liquid hacks into it and has complete control over everything that can cause violence. The game says there's no fighting in the world at this point. The only working warship (in the world) is Mei Ling's. Why the un-nanoed rebels from levels 1 and 2 aren't using this time to take over their respective countries I'm not quite sure. All millitaries of the world are broken and you're honestly going to tell me that instead of revolutions happening in half the countries of the world, everyone's having a fucking sunday?

So yeah.

With that kind of lazy writing, you can guess how satisfying the rest of the story will be.


Level 5 is so insultingly short it shouldn't even be called a level except for it's at least 2 hours of cutscenes.

Level 5 is exactly one board. get past some soldiers, shoot a few robots (nobody ever goes "Holyshit, our giant robots got shot!" in Metal Gear) and open a door by hitting the triangle button really fast. That's it. Boss Fight, level over.

The plot at this point centers around a supercomputer at the end of a deadly microwave corridor. No human can get in cos they'll get cooked. Snake says he'll go cos he's dying anyway. One last act of heroism. It's awesome. I'm serious. It's an amazing moment in an otherwise mediocre game. You, playing Snake, get to sacrifice your life for the goal of the game. I wish other games could nail this level of self-sacrifice in their characters.

The great moment is promptly ruined when you get to the supercomputer and Ottacon's little robot comes out and does all the work. ALL the work. You sit there, likely thinking, "sure I was gonna die, but was my final act to escort this stupid plot device?" I don't care if they gave Snake a floppy disk to upload or had him put some plastic explosive on the machine (which would have been both sweet and a nice homage to the old NES game) but to hand off the climax of the game to an RC car is crap.

Snake sits there and watches the little robot break everything. He watches as you the player are watching while the game plays yet another cutscene, all control of the situation taken away from you and Snake at the same time. Part of me wishes this was deliberate; You the player are watching the game hero watch a robot do the job at hand. A robot which is being controlled by someone remotely, as though they were playing a video game. Maybe Kojima knows his game is hardly a game; this scene being his analogy for the whole MGS 4 experience: sit there and watch.

It climaxes with a very pretty and somewhat poignant if completely implausible (they're gonna heal each other up and keep fighting? come on!) fight between Snake and Liquid that plays nothing like the rest of the game and are then insulted for an hour and a half with the resolution of the game in which everyone is still happy and no one dies. When Yang and Cid weren't dead in Final Fantasy, that was kinda weak, but okay, cos Tellah really did die and also it was not a gritty war tale.

BUT

BUT

BUT!~!!!

now I have the Stealth Camo, the Tanegashima (gun that has a 33% chance of making a tornado) and the infinite headband. Time for some fuggin REPLAY VALUE!

Headband is instantly obsolete: you have been able to buy as much ammo as you'd ever need from the menu screen since the first level.

The Tanegashima's tornado is cool, but neither fun nor useful. The reload and randomness of the tornado make it only a novelty. It also manages to work almost nowhere. A weapon to load up and show your friends once and that's it.

The Stealth is crap too: it doesn't' work against machines, which is dumb cos it's a magical cheat device so it might as well. Once enemies are alerted to your presence, they can see you even when the stealth is on. Why? Again, it's a magical chead device, given to you after you have completed the game to add an interesting replay value. The whole fun of getting it is that you can do funny things like appear in front of a guy, have him flip out, then disappear and watch him get confused as hell. Now it's broken and all of the fun I had with it in previous games is no longer have-able.


and my last complaint:

In MGS2 you could collect dog tags from every soldier. in MGS3 you could find and shoot frogs on every map.

There's nothing like that in MGS 4. You can get medals for doing various things, but there's no sub-game that runs through everything. There's nothing that will show you the nuance of the game the way having to stick up every soldier in MGS2 did. There's nothing to force you to explore the areas like the MGS3 frogs did. My cynical side thinks this is deliberate, because frankly, there's way less depth to the game this time around.


2 stars.