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...