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!