The Thing That Follows The Thing.

I've done no reading on this but let's say there are two types of video games: open and closed games.

An open game, like the majority early video games, never end. They go on and on and the best you can do is, I dunno, roll the score over. Pac-Man is an open video game. Asteroids is an open video game.

Closed video games have endings. Metal Gear Solid is a closed video game; you can win. Closed video games may offer incentives so that you replay them, but it's not that awesomely sisyphean experience where the game never gives ground. You can master Pac-Man, can play for as long as you want, but you can never beat Pac-Man. Those ghosts will never turn to you and go, "Okay, okay! Jesus, enough already!"

In either closed or open video games, you spend a lot of time dealing with The Thing, and knowing that you're going to be dealing with The Thing that follows The Thing. You're gunning down a ton of guards, but on the next screen is a Boss so you better save some ammo. If you position yourself partially behind a shield, you can shoot at the invaders as they go by.

Honestly, I'm not sure how good I am at dealing with The Thing that follows The Thing. Strategy? Too much thinking! Just lemme run around and make crashing noises! (And this is why I was a little ahead of the curve with GTA III, having loved precisely the same sandbox thing with GTA Uno. GTA III was all about ignoring your immediate objectives and doing cool, immediately gratifying stuff.)

I'm balking about how this actually (and depressingly) also describes my approach to life, so maybe I'll get into that in another entry. The point of this entry was to talk about how, now that I'm wrapping up MGS:Subsistence, I have to deal with the Thing that follows The Thing: what video game do I play next? Or do I finally grow some stones and drop video games altogether?

The interior poll currently runs: 30% drop video games; 20% Guitar Hero; 15% Kingdom Hearts II; 10% Star Wars Legos; 5% Baldur's Gate II on my PC; 5% Amplitude (bought it used in Half Moon Bay, which was also supposed to be an entry all its own); 5% Shadow of the Colossus (which Joel said he'll loan to me); 5% Resident Evil 4 again; and 5% walk to Hollywood Video tomorrow and rent what's there.

(Some notes on those delicately honed statistics: Guitar Hero's rating would be higher if 6 minutes of Amplitude hadn't reminded me how retarded I am with rhythm games; Star Wars Legos would have been higher (and I would have played it much, much sooner) if they hadn't taken such a long fucking time to release it at Greatest Hits prices; Baldur's Gate II would be much, much higher if I wasn't resistant to playing video games on my PC; Amplitude would be lower if I hadn't sold off a bunch of my old favorite games; and dropping video games would be much higher if I had more backbone or I could lie to myself more easily. As it is, that option is probably even lower than the cited 30%.)

Can I Get a Fuck Yeah?

It's a shame my wife hates watching me play video games, because she's my good luck charm. Yesterday, as she sat on the couch, too ill with a stomach bug to resist, I played through the last three motorcycle frog sequences, and then the rest of the game.

And at the end of it, after waiting through the closing credit sequence (Konami, for the love of God, this is my third time seeing it, please lemme skip it) and the Ocelot blabbity-blab, my rating screen came up stamped "Kerotan" (Japanese for "frog.") I turned to Edi and yelled, "Wooo! I did it! Fuck, yeah!"

I'd gotten the Stealth Camo.

Edi looked at me hopefully. "So that means you're through, right?"

I looked at her, and tried to fake a placating smile. "Kinda?"

Ten minutes after she left the room, I fired it up.

The Stealth Camo is a funny thing since it's an item, like the thermal goggles, that you keep in your stuff inventory, as opposed to with your camo. I thought this was a little odd, but it makes some sense in terms of how the game handles it. You're invisible while you've got it equipped, but bumping into someone immediately unequips it, making you vulnerable. It also forces you to make some strategic choices--if I want to equip the thermal goggles (which allows me to pick important targets or objects out of the landscape), I have to make sure I'm in a secure position first.

But, on the other hand, having the Stealth Camo as an object means that you can use any special camos you've taken from beating the bosses in endurance mode or health mode or whatever the hell it's called (it's when you take out the boss with a non-legal weapon like the mk22). So, for example, I can use the Moss camo with the stealth camo equipped and regain my endurance as long as I'm in sunlight. Better, if I wear the spirit camo I picked up from the Sorrow, nobody can hear my footsteps and I can run around with greater impunity. Yesterday, I made it from the first screen to the boss fight with Ocelot in about twenty minutes, which is obscenely fast. If I snipe The End early on in the game, I can see myself clearing the halfway point (the boss fight with him) in, I dunno, 45 minutes?

Yes, part of me is thinking of playing it through one more time as a speed-run, to see if I can get a super high ranking. I'd say "God help me," but, really, God help Edi, in that scenario.

The Final Grind?

I've been away for the last few days, so no MGS. Tonight, though, after meeting my writing deadline, I sat down and turned on the PS2. I wasn't particularly excited about it, either, as it was time for (shudder) Motorcyle Frog Hunt. I'm very indecisive about how to approach the sequence. Before the Shagohod showdown, I decided to take a very cavalier "If I thought I hit it, I hit it" attitude to the whole thing. After all, if I don't hit them all, I'll have to (*shudder*) replay the whole thing through.

Nonetheless, the first sequence after the Shagohod, I missed the frog three times in a row--very clearly, no doubt about it. After the third time, I turned the console off in disugst and decided to do something more productive with my life, like read video game fora.

Sigh. Maybe I'll give it just *one* more try...

The Holiday After the Holiday.

I'm tearing through MGS:Subsistence, although with an absurdly high body count. At a little over seven hours of play, I'm at the motorcycle screens which are really the ultimate challenge of this playthrough--nailing the frogs on these screens is absurdly hard, and it's imperative I save at every single screen so I can replay them through if I have to. The shagohod sequence sucks up an inordinate amount of time as well. (The last time I played through the sequence where I'm on foot firing on Volgin while Eva circles around on her motorcycle and "assists," Eva kept running over me repeatedly. Stupid Eva.)

Still it's not impossible to imagine wrapping up the entire game in less than ten hours altogether. And there were a number of small triumphs (blowing up the Hind, drowning myself on the Sorrow showdown, and finally getting a stealth win on The Fury, which was absurdly easy once I gave up on the whole "ooo, I'll headshot him with the tranq sniper rifle in his big glass head" and took the far easier and effective "gut shoot him with the MK22 repeatedly" approach) along the way. Combined with the Infinite Ammo Facepaint, it's been a fun playthrough.

On the other hand, if I don't get that stealth camo? Again? I will throw my PS2 off the fucking roof.

I have to come up with something to write for the newsletter and pronto. I've been thinking about reworking this diary into something even more absurd than it already is...I'm sure I can up the absurdity with no problem, but can I make (or keep) it funny? Or would it just become too pathetic?

Bad Timing.

It's Easter Sunday, and when I sat down to write this, I thought I'd riff about the idea of easter eggs in video games. Maybe a list of my favorites in video games or (more likely) my favorite ones in the Metal Gear Solid games. Or maybe even some musings (if they could be found) about how Easter is the only holiday associated with video games because of the term easter eggs, and how there's something faintly apt about that, since one of the main additions of video games is being able to come back after you've died. (Which is also why if you asked me to pick the best video game movie ever made, I'd pick Groundhog Day.)

But instead--and this is a train of thought I'll never be able to fully reconstruct so I'll just jump in--I was thinking about Metal Gear Acid (or Metal Gear Ac!d as they would like us to call it). MGA, as you probably know, is a series of games currently only available for the PSP that are collectible card games set in the Metal Gear universe.

You know what collectible card games are, right? Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, and of course, Magic: The Gathering, the multi-million dollar card game invented by a bunch of Seattle gaming guys who realized if you took the game of hearts, combined it with marbles, and used illustrations from Frank Frazetta paperbacks, you could create a potent form of Nerd Crack.

Anyway, Hideo Kojima, who's become more aggressively exploitative of the Metal Gear brand since forming his Kojima Productions as a separate subdivision within Konami, decided he very much wanted to expand into a bunch of other potentially lucrative ventures with the brand--comics, card games--and the common theory seems to be that getting a virtual collectible card game on the PSP might be a good way to get a toehold in the actual field itself.

So I haven't played either of the MGA games (getting a PSP would render me incapable of getting any reading done on my commute or at my lunch hour, which are more or less my last areas of leisure reading altogether) but I've read reviews, overviews, interviews, and I realize the big flaw with the games is that they mimic the form of a Metal Gear game--you're Snake, and the computer is your opponent, and you use cards that represent skills or tools Snake would have as well as cards you've captured from previous enemies against the skills and tools of your opponent--rather than mimicking the form of playing a Metal Gear game.

In my version of Metal Gear Acid, you and your opponent would each be trying to construct the most efficient game of Metal Gear Solid, and you would play cards that would disable your opponent's game, and vice-versa. So, for example, you would play the Cool Boss card, which is when you come up against a boss in a Metal Gear Solid game and they've got some great visual hook, and then play that with a Cool Fight Card, which is when the action is really fun and enjoyable. This would give you the very hard-to-beat Cool Boss Fight combination, like in MGS:3 when you fight The End, or the fight in the hydro chamber against Vamp in MGS:2.

But wait! Your opponent lays down the Interminable Cut Scene card and the Endless Back Story card, and suddenly it's like, I dunno, that whole lead-in to the Fatman fight scene, where King Whiny has to tell you that he actually does have two working legs, and he faked his injury so people would feel sorry for him and dismantling the last bomb will be his chance to, blah-blah-blah-blah, please just die already.

See? Just like playing a Metal Gear Solid game. You'd have little cards like Cool Techno-Babble that could be thwarted by cards like Overabundance of Techno-babble, or cards which have weaknesses only to other cards (nothing kills that Romantic Flirting card like the Endless Back Story card).

Anyway, that's my Easter gift to you, Kojima-san: a collectible card game that could really recreate the experience of playing Metal Gear! May you use it to make millions!

Howzabout that?

This morning, I had about thirty-five minutes before I left for work and I looked over at the PS2, and thought, "Nahhhhhh, better not." Then I did a few other chores for a while and when they were through, I had about fifteen minutes before I had to leave and I thought, "Okay, what the hell..."

And this weird thing happened, which I will now, God help you, relate.

There's a sequence in MGS:Subsistence where you climb this ladder in a silo, emerge in some mountain peaks and make your way through a few screens of patrolling guards while trying to avoid being spotted by the patrolling Hind helicopter. (Considering this is the early '60s, it's probably not a Hind but that's what it looks like to me.) It's kind of a pain-in-the-ass set of screens, to be honest, because it's always hard for me to get by without being spotted. If I try to sneak through, I always get caught by the helicopter as I grapple with some guard. If I try to snipe my way through, somebody always ends up behind me unloading their clip into me, even though they're coming from a direction where I killed everybody off. And then I get caught by the helicopter.

It kinda sucks.

Anyway, on this brief little fifteen minute sequence before work, I end up on the screen where the helicopter first does its fly-by and it's not there. Instead, there's a lone guy in a flying crane bucket which is really, really weird. Not that there's a guy in a flying crane bucket--those guys pop up earlier in the game--but that there's one guy floating there when there's supposed to be a helicopter circling overhead.

Really, really weird.

Anyway, I snipe this guy which sets off the alert and soon the hills are crawling with guards and I snipe them, too, and it's pretty much Jeff's version of Metal Gear Solid which always tries to be sneaky, and always ends up with my guy standing on the bodies of dozens of slaughtered guards. I fight my way through the screen, get to the next screen, check the clock, save the game, leave for work. And in the car, I realize why I got the guy in the flying crane bucket and not the helicopter.

I, in my avaricious pursuit of the stealth camo the previous time through, really couldn't have cared less about the Infinite Ammo Facepaint ("IAF"). It was just something I got because I wanted to do the trick that got you the IAF--this whole complicated hoobity-doo about finding and trapping a secret animal in the game and keeping it in your inventory all the way to the end. But as it turns out, the IAF is pretty fun because nearly anything listed in your weapons inventory you have infinite amounts of as long as you have the facepaint on. So you've got infinite mousetraps, for example, which I spent five minutes spreading all over this one screen to catch an absurd number of birds, rats and snakes. You've got infinite girlie mags, which I spent ten minutes dropping all over this one weapons lab so I could see soldiers and weapon scientists crouch over with anticipation and exclaim "Wow! This is my lucky day!" And you've got infinite TNT, which I've spent well over thirty minutes spreading across various screens and then detonating. You can plant forty packages of TNT through a screen and then set each charge off one after the other, launching a dead body through a complete obstacle course if you're clever enough. (I'm not, but I did get one body to bounce three times, which is my personal best.)

So on this one earlier base screen, after I'd bumped off all the guards, I blew up all the warehouses, all the oil drums, and, just to see if it would blow up, the helicopter on the landing pad in the corner. I am happy to report it did indeed blow up which I enjoyed and then forgot completely about.

Four boss fights and approximately twenty screens later, I got a lone guy in a flying crane bucket instead of a really annoying helicopter, all because of some goofing around I did I couldn't even remember. How cool is that? Little touches like that are what keep me the video game equivalent of a black lotus eater...

Please, Sir, May I Have Another?

So, yes, like a dumbass, I'm playing through Snake Eater/Subsistence again. I'm really booking through it, though. I just finished fighting The End and have put in, by this point, I dunno, four hours maybe? The frogs are the goal, of course, so everything else is really secondary. I'm not worrying about accumulating any stealth kills either, so I'm just plowing through the boss fights as much as possible (unless like, in the case of the End, they're just pure chewing satisfaction.)

So, halfway through the game in about four hours. There is maybe, a super-slight chance that there was one frog I missed the first time around, as the location didn't seem familiar to me. But either way, I'm going to get through this game and get the stealth armor if it kills me. I've got a green felt-tip pen and a printed list of the frogs and I'm checking 'em off one by one.

Ironically, when I bought Subsistence, I thought I'd be spending all my time playing the Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2 games, but the emulation on the first game is driving me crazy--I would think that it'd be a "save anywhere" game but I've only had one successful save point in the game and no matter how far I get past it, i can't save again. Really god-awful annoying, and since everyone on Gamefaqs is too busy playing the online component, there are no FAQs about it.

In one of my posts, I alluded to the fact i've played MGS:Subsistence and Resident Evil 4 through multiple times each, and that there was a reason for that. One reason, of course, is that they're really enjoyable games that add little rrwards at the end that add value to another playthrogh. But the real reason is I'm deeply ambivalent about video games.

I've received advice from two professional writers in the past to get rid of the video games. "They're time wasters," they each said to me, in one way or another. And I'm not disinclined, of course, to disagree. I have creative endeavors of my own that I'd like to pursue and yet, when it comes down to it, unless I'm staring a hard deadline in the face, I'll boot up the video game and spend a few hours of my week chipping away at it.

If there is anything insidious about video games, it's not that they make kids violent, or promote tolerant attitudes toward drugs and alcohol (or whatever conclusion is being reached by a conservative study this week). It's that video games allow you a degree of creative interaction with a piece of art that can supplant the feeling of creative work. I mean, it's far from a perfect replacement--it might be more like methadone to the heroin of creative work--but it's a lot easier. Video games require participation at a level far less than that of creative work, and while it provides far less reward, if you're a lazy type of person that doesn't really believe in end-rewards, video games can really do the trick.

So part of the reason I keep replaying those games is out of some weird loophole I've created for myself, that these games are going to be the last games I buy or play this year. They're really good games, but even if they weren't would I still be playing them over and over, continuing to cheat myself?

I really don't like to think what the answer to that would be.

Fuck!!

I didn't get it. Again.

Like A Liveblog But Not....

I'm fond of the end credit song of MGS: Subsistence, actually. But you can't skip past the fuckin' thing and all I want to know is whether or not I got the fuckin' stealth camo or not....

And then there's that post-edit credit sequence, where the voice actor playing Ocelot tries his damnedest to come up with new inflections for the word "yes," which is the beginning of 90% of of each of his sentences....

I'll let you know what happens in about two minutes....

Fingernails; Meet Pliers

Remember how just yesterday I was talking about hunting frogs in MGS: Subsistence and referring to it as "fun?" I rescind my adjective.

I've spent the last sixty to ninety minutes trying to re-hit those last few frogs--to positively confirm that I nailed each of them in the motorcycle sequence and get myself that stealth armor and of course I'm arguably even worse at it on my first playthrough.

All the pre-Shagohod chase sequences were pretty easy. It's the post-Shagohod stuff that's killing me, to the point where I'm almost positive I was high when I convinced myself I hit it the first time around. I've spent the last twenty minutes trying to hit this one frog on a rock while flying over a hill and being shot at--it's absurdly Sisyphean, and it's kind of driving me insane. Part of the annoyance is that if I miss the frog, I have to reboot the system and reload from the opening screen.

So, yeah, fun? I think maybe there's another f-word I should have used instead.

So Close and Yet...

I just finished a nearly perfect run through Metal Gear Solid: Subsistence the other day. For ultra-competitive overachieving gamer geeks, that has a very different meaning than the way I'm using it. For them, it means finishing in the fastest time with the highest ranking without setting off an alarms. For me, it means doing and getting the coolest stuff with a minimal amount of hassle and a maximum amount of fun.

The Metal Gear series, despite having at least one or two sections in every game guaranteed to drive you apeshit, are actually very pro-fun. So for those of us who want to earn bonus goodies like the Infinite Face Paint and the Stealth Camo, we don't have to finish in a certain number of hours with a limited number of saves and no alarms--we can just try to hunt down secret animals and find and shoot frog coin banks. Yes, in the middle of all the cold war rhetoric, epic monologues about death and battle, and boss fights, you can play mini-Pokemon.

Unfortunately, I did not, somehow, catch them all--there are 64 frogs spread throughout the game and you don't know until you finish if you missed once. And, apparently, I did. Chances are good that I missed one of the frogs during the high-speed motorcycle chase sequences, where you have shoot frogs jammed into corners and stuck on top of stop signs while being ridden around all over the place and shot at.

Do I:

(a) reload those sequences? (I saved all of them separately)
(b) replay the whole game all over, making careful note to hit every, single fucking frog?
or
(c) give up and move on?

I'm inclined to say (a) since if I choose (b), I'll be burnt out on the game and less likely to play again with the stealth camo. There's no point in winning the stealth camo if you're not going to use it, after all.

As for why I don't choose (c) (but probably should), well, that's a story for another post. But I do think it does have something to do with why I've played MGS: Snake Eater and Subsistence (Subsistence is essentially the director's cut of Snake Eater) through at least four times, and Resident Evil 4 no less than three times. Considering I'd be hard-pressed to think of a game I finished more than once in my entire life (I think I finished both the Japanese and American versions of Tenchu, but I'm not sure that counts), and those two have happened in the last year, I think there's more to it than coincidence.

Welcome.

This Crappy Controller is a spin-off from my regular blog. Because even when I'm not playing them, I'm thinking about video games--and more than willing to write about them--a lot. My hope is that if I have a place where I can write about them at length, I'll feel compelled to keep a healthier balance of material on the other blog.

But this is blogging at its most onanistic--and I think there are some interesting reasons for that, which I hope to get into as the blog goes on--and I'm trying to honestly write it as if I was sending an email to a friend who shared absolutely 100% of my exact tastes and absolutely wants to hear my thoughts about Metal Gear Solid: Subsistence in excruciating detail. And not just "MGS: Subsistence fails in its attempts to recreate the atmosphere of the Cold War precisely because the single-player console video game is the ultimate refuge of the apolitical" type stuff. But also "I sniped The End in MGS: Subsistence before the boss fight with him, and it was fucking cool!" type stuff.

If this was a D&D blog, in other words, a lot of the entries would be about what my fourth-level thief did. For better or worse, it's what I most want to write about. Maybe if we're lucky, I'll be able to figure out why as time goes on.