Xbox One is the American fantasy as only a corporation could envision it.

All in one.

Yesterday, Microsoft unveiled its newest device in its successful Xbox brand, the Xbox One. “The war for the living room” wages, and the Redmond, WA-based company has embraced an all-in-one philosophy. With its new version of the Kinect sensor, you can use your voice to command the Xbox One to change television channels, open up Internet Explorer, dial someone on Skype. Oh, and you can also play games on it.

The event itself was as Microsoft as Microsoft could get. This actually came as a slight surprise to me, which is admittedly a bit of naiveté on my part. The 2008 ushering in of the Next Xbox Experience was Microsoft slowly adopting this ‘entertainment box’ notion, and now owners can watch Netflix video, HBO Go programming, Amazon Instant Video, and more. Yesterday, it took the company nearly a half-hour before they even showed a game for the new device. Instead, they seemed to be more interested in showing the device working congruently with current cable boxes (Xbox One has two HDMI ports), showing a programming guide, and with its fast processors (“snap” multi-tasking) and a clear shout of “Xbox, CBS!” you’re instantly watching “The Big Bang Theory” or “Elementary.”

A montage of international athletes talking up the device and brand helped establish Xbox One as the go-to device for your EA Sports needs is seen. Microsoft Game Studios is working on its next Forza Motorsport game. Remedy, the studio behind Max Payne and Alan Wake, used a live-action clip with live actors to promote their next exclusive property. New information of Activision’s Call of Duty: Ghosts surfaced (and a now memetic dog), including the inevitable “exclusive content” (aren’t these executives tired of saying that already?) for Xbox One, and now this new device has the juggernaut franchise behind it first.

Another large brand behind the Xbox One is the National Football League providing, well, a slightly different way Americans will spend their Sunday afternoons and Monday evenings, with up-to-date statistics right there on your television for your fantasy league needs. No need to look down on your Windows Phone or Surface tablet, I suppose! I don’t remember hearing a mention of the DirecTV NFL “Sunday Ticket” package, which allows viewers to watch any NFL match as opposed to only local-market teams. One wonders if this is Microsoft competing with itself, since the next installment of EA’s Madden franchise offers a $100 “Sunday Ticket” voucher, and the DirecTV package is available on Sony’s PlayStation 3 console.

The question becomes whether the general public will see value in this all-in-one branding, whose applications seem mostly suited for live broadcasts in an age of DVR and Hulu+. It’s naturally hard to judge because no pricing information has been made public, yet. People can purchase an Apple TV or a Roku box for their entertainment needs at $100 or under, never mind dropping X dollars on the PlayStation 4 or $350 on the Wii U. Lately, critics have chastised the value of the Xbox Live service, since the ideal experience requires a cable-television subscription (more expensive versus services like Netflix and Hulu+), an Internet package, a paid Xbox Live Gold-level subscription, and extra fees for premium networks like HBO Go. Most of these services available can be circumvented for much cheaper (though HBO’s tether to cable providers is still a sticky situation on its own). Microsoft wants your living room to look like those you have seen in their stock, promotional images for the Kinect: the grand living room, the American family together on one couch, as writer Leigh Alexander succinctly puts it: the “entertainment altar.” Americans currently live in a United States with a not-so-great housing market, a struggling economy, a refusal of cooperation, with new college graduates facing debt problems, and the lack of governmental cooperation FOX, MSNBC, and Jon Stewart love to show you. The Xbox One presentation and its (American-centric) direction is, right now, the product of the Baby Boomer generation. Right now its perception is that it is a device designed by executives for executives. Competition is beyond just Sony and Nintendo.

Gamers on forums have lambasted the lack of any more titles in the works, with others reasoning that Microsoft is holding off on that portion of the Xbox One for E3 next month, which I imagine to be the case. The biggest issue, which Microsoft has been incredibly marble-mouthed and confusing about twenty-four hours later, is how secondhand games will operate. The past few months have been like looming clouds of an incoming thunderstorm, with rumors about the device blocking secondhand games and requiring an Internet connection to properly function and verify the authenticity of software surfacing at every corner. This seemed like all anyone ever really wanted an answer to, and Microsoft floundered on using the event and subsequent press interviews to put this issue to rest. Wired initially reported the implementation of fees for verifying secondhand software. Customer support for the Xbox 360 tweeted this was not the case. Corporate Vice President Phil Harrison implied there will be restrictions unless the original owner signed into a second Xbox One device. Xbox Live Director of Programming Larry “Major Nelson” Hryb wrote a short blog post stating nothing is finalized yet except there will be some sort of trading system. Microsoft’s silence and lack of clarity on an issue that has been on so many minds, especially after former employee Adam Orth’s less-than-subtle opinions on the subject stoking the flames, says more about how we now experience games, instead of merely playing them.

It will be a wonder of the big brands they have secured partnerships with is enough for the Xbox One target audience to “jump in” again, and if these possible restrictions are an irony and hindrance on the socialization of this hobby. E3 itself may not even provide the best measuring stick, and we’ll all have to just watch the Xbox One hit the masses.

For the glory of Arstotzka! ‘Papers, Please’ is a great concept.

Papers, Please: A Dystopian Document Thriller is a game with a relatively simple task: review an immigrant’s authorization documents, and then either allow them entry, or deny them.

It is the product of Lucas Pope, a developer at Ratloop. Ratloop’s output includes titles like Helsing’s Fire, an iOS puzzle game. There is also Mightier, a freeware action puzzle game for Windows. I haven’t played either game yet, but I invested the half-hour to hour of Papers, Please and have loved every minute of it.

Here is the premise, taken directly from Pope’s page (with links to the game downloads):

“The communist state of Arstotzka has just ended a 6-year war with neighboring Kolechia and reclaimed its rightful half of the border town, Grestin.

Your job as an immigration inspector is to control the flow of people entering the Arstotzkan side of Grestin from Kolechia. Among the throngs of immigrants and visitors looking for work are hidden smugglers, spies, and terrorists. Using only the documents provided by travelers and MoA’s primitive computer dispatch system you must decide who can enter Arstotzka and who will be turned away or arrested.”

You are the new immigration officer at the Grestin border in late November of 1982. The title screen plays an Eastern European-style ditty, and PAPERS, PLEASE scrolls slowly to the center of the screen in its big Soviet-era font and aggressive falcon/hawk icon. A brief introduction and a newspaper front page serve as the narrative backdrop. You sit behind a desk, and for a certain number of hours in the day, you meet a number of people desperate for new opportunities, a new life, in the glorious nation of Arstotzka. The game then explains the rules as an issued memorandum by the Ministry of Admission. On the first day, for example, only citizens of Arstotzka are allowed entry. People will come to your window and gripe about how long they’ve been waiting, and the pain-in-the-ass process of getting to the border, etc. Unfortunately, that doesn’t matter if they aren’t Arstotzkan. They’re not entering.

A small clock in the bottom left corner of the main window indicates that a workday ends around 6-7pm. You earn a daily salary, calculated I believe by the number of admissions in a day. The salary is used to pay rent, feed and keep your family warm. You can also choose not to pay for certain services and save money. On the first day, I decided heat wasn’t a necessity, and the end of the next workday indicated my family was cold, and so I turned heat back on but sacrificed a meal for everyone to save a buck (or whatever Arstotzkan currency is).

The challenge of the game’s mechanics is that the rules change daily based on narrative circumstances. Someone allowed entry can turn out to be a terrorist, attacking the immigration center and thus the MOA enforces stricter rules about admission. Now a certain nation’s emigrants are flat-out banned from entering, and now more authorization is needed to gain entry (e.g. an entry ticket one day, a whole entry permit the next). The player has a window to drag documents around as they need to, to consult the rulebook and see if an individual is qualified to enter.

Do you see a problem?

Click on a red button marked with an exclamation to enter the search process mode, which is essentially the core of Papers, Please. Search for things like mismatched names, expired issue dates, etc. Even the tiniest detail can land you a violation citation: in one example, everything checked out on a man except his gender was marked as “F.” Even if it’s a typographical error, it’s one error away from letting the wrong person into the country. The sound of the automatic typing, and that glaring pink sheet with the phrase “MOA VIOLATION” is never welcome, and will eventually affect earnings after two warnings. Just about every document you have access to, including newspapers, and even notes from potential immigrants, can be the difference between entry and denial and can impact daily narrative.

The balance of salary continues, and the rules continue to change. There are some fun surprises and some curveballs thrown your way. So far, I’ve only reached the eighth day of work. There seems to be speculation that the game will span thirty days. As it is right now, I think this game has a great concept. I love the drab, cold aesthetic that is commonly associated with visual representations of the old Soviet bloc. That it looks like something I’d play on an Apple IIe in 1983 just adds to the experience. It’s simple to play, but requires keen detection skills, an alert mind and can get very challenging. I look forward to more of this, perhaps even a port for smartphones. On a side note, I also believe Papers, Please to be a great complement to the FX series The Americans, about two Russian spies posing as an American married couple in 1981 Washington, DC/Northern Virginia.

Tokyo Jungle — true survival horror.

I fell in love with Sony Japan Studio’s Tokyo Jungle somewhere between breeding a pack of golden retrievers and watching a rabbit attempt to take down a Deinonychus with hilarious, disastrous, and quite frankly vicious results. The game was originally available only in Japan over the summer and recently found its way westward as a $15 downloadable game on the PlayStation Network. When I had seen images of chicks confronting dinosaurs and a Pomeranian, the game’s sort-of mascot, about to go head to head with much bigger animals, I really didn’t know what kind of game I would be in store for but I was sold. The pleasantness comes from just what a fun, simple, and yet quite challenging game it is.

The setting takes place in the near future, a post apocalyptic Tokyo where humans have vanished, with pets, strays, and zoo animals left to fend for themselves. The entire game feels like an arcade game, where the objective is to see just how many years you can last in this dangerous world before the clock runs out. There is a large number of species that can be unlocked, a mixture of carnivorous predators and herbivorous grazers. While the predators are more focused on direct attacks and kills to feed off their prey, the grazers’ moves are tuned defensively, which means avoiding the big guys in tall grass a la Metal Gear until it’s okay to proceed to any available plants for nourishment.

This will not end well.

Feeding is essential, as the game calculates the amount of calories ingested, which affects the ranking of the animals, as well as keeping the constantly diminishing Hunger meter full. Rookies are somewhat slow at first, but reaching the highest rank Boss can mean animals run away from your character, and said character has his choice of mate: “desperate,” “average,” and “prime,” which determine how many newborns are bred, and allow for pack traveling which helps keep the lineage going. Larger packs are crucial in taking down boss animals (yes, bosses!), which are then unlocked in the next game should your current one end.

Survival then becomes key as the game throws even more challenges at you: larger animals, a possible scarcity of flora and fauna, aging with abilities diminishing, and perhaps the most dangerous one being toxicity in the air. Toxicity is probably the most damning of the obstacles, as the higher toxicity levels (ranging from 0 to 100) can have an effect on your health as well as contaminate fresh kills and plants. Polluted areas can be hard to escape as it spreads from area to area, and Tokyo Jungle‘s areas are plenty large in relation to the animal’s speed and size, so escaping an area might feel like it’s taking forever. Nightfall and bad weather can hamper your senses, so you won’t know whether there are animals or not on your radar.

Death in the game requires a restart, which any earned attributes carrying over to the newest generation of animal (think Dead Rising), as well as Survival Points that unlock clothing items and new animals. The game has been compared to the likes of ‘roguelike’ games, featuring level randomization and permanent death. I’ve seen comparisons to Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls as well although not quite there in difficulty.

Sometimes the game can feel a bit repetitive and, depending on your mood, cheap. Toxicity is both a challenge and a burden. Avoiding fights and staying full is already itself a continual task, but I can count so many times trying to find food in a toxic area as I watch the toxicity meter rise and my hunger meter fall and all I have to go on is a bottle of water (one of many consumable items that ease things just a tad). As your animal gets older in years, the game will do everything in its power to keep you from going past 100 years. Breeding is also an important process as one animal lives every 15 years.

The thing about Tokyo Jungle is that there is always an objective. It provides sets of challenges, such as consuming X amount of calories, head to this area, mate twice, etc., which earn the player attributes and new items and bonus survival points. There is never time to rest, well, unless you’ve marked territories and then find a mate. Its controls are incredibly easy to learn and respond well to input. Its “clean kill” combat system, which allows the animal a one-hit kill with a well-timed button press, is fun to watch and key to master. Its premise alone, animals running around an abandoned metropolis, has been seen as an acclamation to the kind of games Japanese studios produce, that Tokyo Jungle is not something a western studio might even attempt barring possibly independent developers. Even the Story mode, separate from the main Survival mode, reaches amusing and absurd levels. It’s refreshing, and the potential of downloadable content, new animals or even new areas, help to extend the fun. I’ve already put in countless hours, hardly ever the same experience twice. If SCE Japan took this game back to the drawing board, figure out what could be improved or expanded upon, a sequel could be incredible.

It astounds me how into this game I would be, certainly so that it has definitely made whatever top ten games of 2012 I may put together as the year closes. What I had originally assumed to be a title worth experiencing ironically is a genuinely great game.

Miscellaneous summer musings…about games

I had a plan which completely nosedived the moment Valve unleashed its Steam summer sale on me. I find when I make some sort of schedule, or plan, involving playing a single game, it just doesn’t work out as well as I would have hoped. Back in April, I had picked up the highly praised Xenoblade Chronicles for Wii. I had spent a significant amount of time with it for the better part of April, but the moment I couldn’t handle a particular enemy, I shut it off thinking I would go back to it later. I never did.

The goal to complete Xenoblade Chronicles in as few sittings as possible was not realized, and I’m not sure when I’ll pick it up again. Instead, I focused my efforts on smaller games and THQ’s Darksiders, which is faster paced than Xenoblade, although it takes the combat mechanics of the God of War games and the exploration of The Legend of Zelda and puts it in front of biblical lore, so familiarity is the appeal. I managed to see that through to the end, and ended up mostly enjoying it, but I felt as it the team behind it tried their hardest to extend the game where it didn’t need extending. It was worth the $10 I paid for it, nevertheless.

I also tried to put some time in with Final Fantasy XIII-2, which I’d been anticipating for a while despite mixed opinions from a lot of people. I’m enjoying it enough, having played for close to 20 hours. It’s fun when it’s fun. I enjoy the combat most of the time, and sometimes I think it’s too much work to find the right strategy. I don’t always feel clued in to the next objective, since the game’s plot involves a lot of time travel and allows the player to manipulate and change events already experienced earlier. I intend to see it all through to the end, but I think it’s my anticipation for The Last Story, from XSEED Games, that puts me out of focus with it.

I think the lesson I’m learning is to simply play what I feel like. It sounds ridiculously obvious. I do enjoy trying to hammer through a game as quickly as possible, but not to a point where the fun stops. It’s a twisted game in and of itself. It’s why I also went back to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, one of the best games from 2004 I’ve played through twice, and being on PC allows me to enjoy it in high resolution. I’ve also been readjusting to life in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, where my character is now the guildmaster of the Thieves’ Guild. Strangely, she still gets treated like a rookie by the others.

“Play what you feel like.” Did I mention I purchased three Shin Megami Tensei: Persona titles for PlayStation Vita? Oy vey.

Binary Domain — I, Shoot Robots

I had a lot of interest in SEGA’s action game Binary Domain, so I was glad to see that the Windows version was on sale for $10 at Amazon. Binary Domain is produced by Toshihiro Nagoshi, more known as the producer behind SEGA’s Yakuza games, a series I have grown to love over the years. After completing a run of Binary Domain, I quite enjoyed myself. The game is gloriously clichéd, but its cyberpunk inspiration, aesthetic, and Hollywood-level of silly plot kept me rather engaged, and so did the game’s shooting mechanic.

The plot centers on “Hollow Children,” robots with extreme artificial intelligence and look and act human. This is actually a violation of the New Geneva Convention, and when one is seen acting insane and attacking people in a public area, a strike force team called the “Rust Crew” is assembled to bring in its creator to answer charges. The backstory also centers on the world being destroyed by global warming, and a new world emerging from its ruins, with Japan now an isolationist state.

Dan Marshall and “Big Bo” are the Rust Crew members you start with, until you meet up with a few other characters as the story progresses. The game allows the player to pick certain squadmates and give them orders (“Attack!” “Regroup!” “Hold position!”) through selected dialogue options or voice command. It was my experience that the game couldn’t really understand a few of my commands and would pick the wrong response. There are options to adjust the microphone settings nevertheless. Binary Domain also has a trust system in place, where certain responses and actions build squadmates’ confidence in Marshall, which actually influences the outcome of the final battle. Even how much you contribute in a battle will result in praise or a scolding or somewhere in between. Here is one issue with this system: friendly fire will cause a loss of trust. It is unfortunate and likely that your squadmates will run into your line of fire quite often and hurt your relationship with them.

Binary Domain features the now standard cover and blind fire mechanic seen in other third-person shooters today. You’re fighting robots the entire way, but have certain behavioral traits depending on where they are shot. Legless robots will crawl towards you like the way the T-800 crawled after Sarah Connor. If a robot loses an arm, it will look for any weapon to attack you with. Headless robots don’t know friend from foe, and is likely to attack their own allies and make battles a little easier. It makes battles pretty fun, and there are different kinds of weapons to mess with although nothing extraordinary: the typical shotgun, sniper rifle, submachine gun, the more extreme light machine gun arsenal. Marshall’s default assault rifle which can be upgraded via vending machines, comes with an energy shot that can stun enemies or, upgraded, wipe out entire groups of enemies in one shot per charge.

The thing I found interesting about the story is that a lot of its characters are actually developed as the story progresses and there are certain personal motivations behind their actions. The characters all share a strange chemistry with one another, especially since a lot of the dialogue is back to back banter and one-liners. The voice acting is well-directed and feels intentionally silly. Marshall as a character is basically another version of Sam Gideon of SEGA’s Vanquish, another sci-fi shooter from 2010, with a lot of loud and obnoxiously outspoken tendencies that the others characterize as “American.” Big Bo is basically the “Roadblock” (of G.I. Joe) of the group, the overly muscular black guy with the heavy machine gun who, like Marshall, just wants to kick ass. I’m not particularly sure how much the story changes if you really mix up your squad, as I only ever traveled with two squad members: Faye, a marksman expert from China, and Cain, a robot with a French accent who honestly became my favorite character in the game because of his friendly nature and, in a script filled with one-liners and jokes, is the game’s comic relief.

The plot has a few twists as well as a moral discussion taking place on the existence of the Hollow Children and the ethics of allowing them to exist at all. The Hollow Children not only look human, but believe to be human, and the prejudices they experience in a future shared with these machines. When they find out they are machine and not man, well, they actually go insane, which is more or less what kicks off the story. It’s the kind of discussion seen in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner or maybe I, Robot (I’ve never read the novel).

Binary Domain is perhaps the second attempt by a Japanese developer to try their hand at the third-person cover shooter that the west helped popularize since this generation of games began five years ago (unless we’re counting Resident Evil 6). Although robots are not the most unique foes you can attack, that the game has you consider your aiming is a nice sort of challenge for the player. I found myself thinking about the situation at hand during firefights. It also features an incredible boss battle against what I can only call a reject from Michael Bay’s Transformers universe. Its characters are ridiculous, but the visual design has a nice “mecha” aesthetic to it. It’s a very fun game.

E3 2012: Am I already too old for this?

Last week, the big game studios showed up for the 2012 Electronic Entertainment Expo, better simply known as E3, to give us a taste of what’s to come in the next few months to a year. I didn’t go, because I am not press or a developer. I can only write as someone whose relationship with these companies extends to me handing them money for their product. Spike TV and its associated web site Game Trailers were nice enough to broadcast all sorts of game demos as well as the major press conferences themselves.

I honestly wasn’t sure how I wanted to approach this piece. Even after the official first day of E3, I had talked about the conferences to death on Twitter and message boards. With the exception of Ubisoft, who showed some great-looking content, none of the conferences did anything that ‘surprised’ me or grabbed my attention. After Halo 4 footage that does its best Metroid: Prime impersonation, Microsoft began to sell the idea of the Xbox as an entertainment brand, beyond playing a game and paying for extra content. Watch television shows and movies on Netflix and Hulu Plus. Catch up on Game of Thrones and Veep on HBO Go (which requires paying for a cable subscription, HBO, and then an Xbox Live Gold membership). Their big moment came when they introduced Internet Explorer and their Smart Glass app, which serves as a sort of PDA for entertainment. Get cast biographies for the movie or show you’re watching. Turn your tablet (iPad) into an interactive map for an adventure game. While this may sound convenient or fun, the way it was demonstrated indicated that Smart Glass seeks to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. I’m not sure I need an interactive Westeros map while I’m already trying to remember names on Game of Thrones. I’m already using GameFAQs to get help with games, and also I’m not using my tablet with my entertainment as frequently as Microsoft wants me to.

The real stars of the show were South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone who took the stage to quickly talk about the upcoming South Park: The Stick of Truth, developed by Obsidian Entertainment, but delivered the conference’s only major highlight with this quote:

“How many times have you been watching an episode of South Park and thought, ‘I’d like to be able to watch this on my television, while hooked into my mobile device, which is controlled by my tablet device, which is hooked into my oven,’ all while sitting in the refrigerator?”

Somewhere in the conference was an Usher performance and a Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 demo where people shot things and were shot at. It was everything I was already expecting from Microsoft after their terrible conference last year and it delivered for all the wrong reasons.

Last year, Ubisoft delivered upon the world Mr. Caffeine, a manic gentleman who informed us of upcoming “Tom Ca-lancy” games and used Wayne’s World references to do it. Survivors of the conference refuse to talk about it to this day. This year, Aisha Tyler took the stage for Ubisoft, and I’m not sure if ever a huge upgrade took place than having her host, because she was great and very enthusiastic. Her only crime honestly was having to share the stage with a Tobuscus, a YouTube ‘personality’ who went by Toby where silly, scripted back and forth banter ensued, and then we saw games.

Ubisoft had probably the most solid line-up with Far Cry 3, whose demo was one of the strangest, drug-fueled demos I had ever seen. Rayman Legends, which is exclusive to Nintendo’s upcoming Wii U system, is looking like a solid follow-up to the fantastic Rayman Origins, which I talked about earlier this year. I’m hoping Rayman Legends will feature as great a soundtrack as its predecessor. Ubisoft also showed new footage of Assassin’s Creed III, which I have ordered from Amazon despite its October release date. Perhaps the biggest and most talked-about surprise is the new game coming titled Watch_Dogs. The demo showed a man walking around a huge virtual recreation of Chicago and proceeding to gather information about its residents with a device that allows hacking of mobile devices and also jamming communication signals and even manipulate traffic lights as he sees fit. The demo concluded with this man in a shoot-out with his antagonists, which honestly presents a slight concern over how much taking cover and shooting I will actually do in Watch_Dogs. Regardless of this, although I’ve never visited Chicago, the world was stunning and was also impressed by the number of NPCs walking around the town without a hint of frame rate dropping. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on it.

The evening of “Day Zero” closed out with Sony’s press conference which, aside from Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us, Quantic Dream’s Beyond: Two Souls, and footage of the Vita game Assassin’s Creed: Liberation, did very little to catch my interest. We got a demo for God of War: Ascension, the next title in the seven-year PlayStation series, where Kratos kills more things in the same way he has for the last seven years. I’m sure the fans have already eaten it up, especially when Kratos killed an elephant minotaur by cutting it in half. One thing I was looking forward to was Sony’s plans for the Vita. It’s almost common knowledge at this point that the PlayStation Vita isn’t off to a particularly strong start across the globe, with its predecessor the PlayStation Portable outselling it in Japan. I’ve seen more doom and gloom comments than positive ones despite the device being four months into its launch in the United States. Sony unveiled… a Call of Duty logo and an Assassin’s Creed spinoff game. In fairness, I do think the Assassin’s Creed title has plenty of potential to get major use of the device’s hardware, but E3 is the center stage to show people what you’re up to and what to look forward to and to get the folks excited for it (a point I will reiterate with Nintendo). Instead, we got Wonderbook. Wonderbook, from what I understand, is an augmented reality software that utilizes the PlayStation Eye Toy device where you have interactive experiences with storybooks. It might sound fun for the kids, but it didn’t look “explain this product for 15 to 20 minutes” fun. While I think SCEA President Jack Tretton did a decent job onstage and successfully got the crowd excited for God of War and The Last of Us. Quantic Dream showed footage of their newest game, Beyond: Two Souls, which stars actress Ellen Page. I’m not sure what kind of game it will be. Will it be another “interactive experience” (i.e. quick-timer event) game like 2010′s Heavy Rain?

A few nice details here and there about games, mostly lackluster, and then there’s Nintendo, which I will talk about tomorrow because there’s a lot to address.

Metal Gear Solid HD, Part 1: “And we will become the Sons of Liberty!”

One of the most popular franchises gets remastered.

Last Christmas, I was pleasantly surprised with a copy of the Metal Gear Solid HD Collection for PlayStation 3, a series I’d wanted to revisit for some time. It is both unfortunate and brilliant to not be able to play your PlayStation 2 games on the PS3, since it becomes incentive to purchase these packs and play your favorite games in high definition. Having owned Ico & Shadow of the Colossus Collection HD, I personally think these have value. Hopefully I feel the same way when I revisit two more favorite games of mine, Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill 3, in HD next month. I also just realized Sony is releasing PS2 titles on the PlayStation Store for a $10 price, although not remastered, it means you can now play the 2006 cult hit God Hand without tracking a copy down!

The Metal Gear Solid package includes two PS2 games, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, and Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, first released in 2001 and 2004 respectively, and then updated (respectively) as Substance (2003) and Subsistence (2005), which are the versions appearing in this HD set. Also included is the 2010 PlayStation Portable game Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, which continues the Snake Eater story, but I have not spent much time with it. Side note: the HD collection is also available on the Xbox 360.

Metal Gear Solid 2 HD is the first time I have completely played the game from start to finish since November 2001. As a teenager then, never had a game disappointed me more. What I wanted was the further adventures of the anti-hero Solid Snake. Snake has his ability and curse to be a soldier going for him. His military prowess, his stamina, his determination, and his cold, arguably pragmatic approach to life were noticed by players, which says a lot because the point of Metal Gear is to avoid the enemies, rather than fight them, on the screen and reach the objective. It was through creator Hideo Kojima’s not so secret love of storytelling and film did we watch the characters of Metal Gear Solid gab away about ideals and their roles on the world stage and almost start picking sides as to who might have a point and who is dreaming. The thought of experiencing this a second time, on a more powerful system no less, was too good to be true.

Instead, the sequel divided players as we excitedly snuck around in a tanker operated by the U.S. Marine Corps and then watched as Revolver Ocelot (and his grafted arm played by the deceased Liquid Snake…) destroyed it, leaving Snake as a scapegoat close to drowning in the Hudson River.

Do I shoot him in the leg? Or go for the headshot?

It was realized then that Snake aboard this tanker was the prologue. Then, we met him.

A rather effeminate man in a tight sneaking suit with a teenager’s voice is swimming to the docking area of a facility called Big Shell. A familiar voice, belonging to Colonel Roy Campbell, the Codec handler of MGS, referred to this person as “Snake,” but no way did this “Snake” sound like voice actor David Hayter. This was apparently his first time on the field, and so his codename would have to change. We came to know him as “Raiden.” You may suspect that this is where I trash the character and argue that he is a stain to this series, yet time itself and I would tell you that this is not necessarily the case.

This will make a bit more sense later... maybe.

As I played through MGS2 in 2012, some of why I wasn’t too pleased with the game had begun to familiarize itself. It is lazy in design, for starters. The Big Shell plant does not stand out in any way and is representative of the common “corridor” complaint often seen in first-person shooters. Each Strut was a rearranged version of the last one and is not particularly interesting to explore. Despite its bland look, the areas fit the then new mechanics of Metal Gear well enough. The second is the dialogue and the cutscenes. It is rather tiring by now to make any sort of comment on the length of every scene in these games, but it isn’t how long they go on as much as how well they’re paced, which is not very well. The smallest action by the player leads to a long cutscene where nothing particularly exciting is happening and does not advance its plot while we listen to a speech about the ideals of life and death in the name of being a warrior. This leads into the biggest offender of Metal Gear Solid 2 for me: Its cast of characters aren’t at all interesting, compelling, or engaging.

Raiden works because he serves as a surrogate for the player, who is constantly fed ideals and schemes to interpret and what it means to play a role in this modern world. Its villains spew them out, each with a personal stake in the overall objective, which is then given up in the name of a shadowy organization called the Patriots. As far as I realize, the Patriots act as puppeteers for American events and history, all of which sound nutty but plays a crucial role in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. Raiden communicates with Colonel Campbell, and Raiden’s girlfriend Rosemary who pesters him about April 30th and its significance and why Raiden is the way that he is. The “Sons of Liberty” themselves provide no memorable fights at all, except perhaps for Vamp, who incorporates flamenco as part of his combat training. Fatman is a man who enjoys explosives, cocktails and roller-skates and his only interesting attribute is being named after the bomb detonated over Nagasaki. Fortune, daughter of the commander who drowned on the tanker Snake infiltrated, seeks to take revenge on Snake. She lives a life wondering why she can’t die, delivering hammed up speeches about wanting to be relieved from this world. Her voice actor’s performance is monotonous and empty, which makes it incredibly hard to feel for Fortune’s misfortune. Worse off is that you never even get to fight her, instead forced to survive her blasts from her giant energy rifle.

The most interesting plot comes from Revolver Ocelot, who is cursed with the spirit of Liquid Snake (which expands in MGS4) by living in his new arm. He serves as the wrench in the gears to this Patriots plot, turning the Sons of Liberty on its head and. Ocelot (and Liquid Snake) is the twist in this soap opera players expect in this series, successfully leaving us desiring more explanation (again, covered in MGS4). His cohort Solidus Snake is also fleshed out well as the game’s primary antagonist. He represents the series at its most political, an ex-President of the United States looking to set Manhattan free in perhaps the same way Tyler Durden intended to set people free at the end of Fight Club. The unfortunate part of this is I had to research these stories again, which is a testament to how complex these twists get for better or worse.

The third act of the game is the most memorable, above all. Campbell and Rosemary grow insane (“I need scissors! 61!”), Raiden runs around in the nude, we fight dozens of Metal Gear Ray robots, and have a one-on-one duel with the main antagonist Solidus Snake, and we learn the lesson that we must believe and think freely and combat censorship (I think). This is why the ending that did not completely work for me in 2001 worked for me in 2012 in an age of combating internet censorship and the change in societal norms with the advent of social media and linking. Raiden throwing away his dog tags communicates this well. It’s not that they all have a direct relationship with Metal Gear, it just impressively feels more relevant ten years later.

I am glad to have played Metal Gear Solid 2 this time.

It’s ‘Resident Evil’ Day! (Update: Now with trailer!)

Well, sort of.

Starting today, if you head over to the eShop on your Nintendo 3DS, you’re bound to find the demo for Capcom’s upcoming Resident Evil: Revelations, due for North American release on February 7th. Fan favorite Jill Valentine will be the main (playable) character, and it is set in 2005, taking place between Resident Evil 4 and Resident Evil 5. The game will also release bundled with the controversial Circle Pad Pro accessory, which is exclusive at GameStop. In a rather strange decision, 3DS users are limited to 30 uses of the demo. The demo itself uses 1,146 blocks of memory.

Perhaps the bigger news today is this image that sprang up like a wild Pokémon:

Resident Evil 6 will see a release date of November 20 of this year, available for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Perhaps we’ll see Resident Evil 6: Wii U Edition some time in the future. The game will feature Chris Redfield and Leon Kennedy, debuting in the first two games respectively, together for the first time in a series entry. Ada Wong supposedly plays a role also and will be a playable character.

Credit to IGN for the image. They have more details here:

Link 1
Link 2
Link 3 

Update! The first trailer for Resident Evil 6 has been released via Capcom Unity!

Nintendo 3DS ‘Ambassador’ program reminds us of primitive goodness and frustration with free NES games.

Surprisingly, Nintendo seemed to have uploaded their free Nintendo Entertainment System games for their 3DS ‘Ambassadors’ a day earlier than they had announced. Typically I’m sitting around in the afternoon to evening waiting for something new to show up on the Virtual Console. I think Nintendo is still trying to figure out this newfangled “internet” business the kids are raving about today.

The NES games are Nintendo’s thanks to folks who purchased their Nintendo 3DS device at the original $249 price tag before it was officially lowered to $169 last month due more than likely to unmet sales expectations. 10 Game Boy Advance games were also included in this reward package. Five have been confirmed.

The following GBA games have been confirmed as of this entry:

• Mario Kart: Super Circuit (2001)
• Metroid: Fusion (2002)
• Super Mario Advance 3: Yoshi’s Island (1995, 2002)*
• Wario Ware, Inc.: Mega Microgame$ (2003)
• Mario vs. Donkey Kong (2004)

*Super Mario Advance 3: Yoshi’s Island is a Game Boy Advance port of the 1995 Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island originally on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3 (1990, 2003) has been rumored to be part of the package.

Leave it to Nintendo to refrain from keeping it simple, however. Their interface for browsing has typically been notoriously convoluted. Unless there was another way some of us completely missed, this is how you access your free NES games:

1. Access the Nintendo eShop from the 3DS menu.
2. Tap ‘Menu’
3. Find and tap ‘Settings / Other’
4. Find and tap ‘Your Downloads’
5. Find one of the NES games such as Super Mario Bros. and tap ‘Redownload’
6. Once the download finishes, repeat Step 2…

I’m not even kidding. When it asks if you’d like to continue, you are taken back to the first eShop menu, and it becomes a lather and repeat process for all six steps. I use a very good internet connection at home, but folks who aren’t so lucky may be sitting tight for a bit.

Nintendo released the following games, and I will be talking about some of them today:

• Donkey Kong, Jr. (1982)
• Balloon Fight (1984)
• Ice Climbers (1985)
• Wrecking Crew (1985)
• Super Mario Bros. (1985)
• Metroid (1986)
• The Legend of Zelda (1986)
• Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (1987)
• NES Open Tournament Golf (1991)
• Yoshi (1992)

Possibly the most successful spin-off of all time. /kanyewest

Super Mario Bros.

A long lost gem by Nintendo, never to be ever revisited–who am I kidding? You know what this is. Your grandmother knows who he is. Moses knew what Super Mario Bros. was and he split the Red Sea in two to find a copy. This was just the beginning of an empire, domination of a world whose subjects would lovingly get down on their knees and bow to a little man in red overalls. To be honest, I’m not one hundred percent on whether Super Mario Bros. was actually a launch game for the NES. Eventually Nintendo sold NES consoles that included the more common Super Mario Bros. / Duck Hunt two-in-one cartridge in addition to the gray Zapper gun accessory (I think). It is famously Mario’s first real grand adventure having legally changed his name from “Jumpman” and moving to bigger and better things from climbing ladders and avoiding barrels in Donkey Kong (1981). Super Mario Bros. is just about my age, and it’s still one of the most accessible games ever developed. The challenge is perfect. It’s still a fun way to kill a little time if you decide not to use any warp zone pipes. The concept and world design was crazy enough to keep running with it for decades. Its retro graphics have not aged well, but arguably everything else has. In a time now where people are playing quick games on their mobile phones and people embracing indie-developed homages like Super Meat Boy, the old has inverted into new. Playing this straight (that is to say, without any warping), I was able to get to 7-3 before I finally saw a Game Over screen. Remind me to try that Koopa turtle 1-Up trick next time.

Joust, Nintendo style.

Balloon Fight

Balloon Fight is the surprise hit of this collection for me and possibly my favorite in this collection. This is most likely because of my strange obsession with the 1982 Williams Electronics arcade game Joust. In Joust, you repeatedly tap a button to make your character’s giant ostrich fly around while trying to take out enemy characters on their ostriches before they have a chance to do the same to you. You are, well, jousting. I am not a great Joust player, but I love the idea and the design and the execution. Balloon Fight takes this idea and spins it into a friendlier “I’m a guy floating on a balloon and I need to take these birds out before they take me out over water instead of lava.” I think it’s even better embracing the game as an adult because of the hilarious concept and the hilarious idea of birds needing to float on balloons rather than just flying around. The fact that a man is taking birds out of the sky when they may have more of a right to be there than he does is something to ponder. Maybe they believe in fair competition, which explains why it’s one man versus about five or six birds per stage. Not to recycle the point, but much like Super Mario Bros. I found it to be a very fun pick-up-and-play kind of game and it’s the kind of thing you will find today in some mobile app stores. There is a two-player mode, but I’m not actually sure that’s supported on the 3DS. The third mode is “Balloon Trip,” which has the player trying to keep the balloon guy afloat dodging lightning bolts and popping other balloons. Thumbs up, I say.

The world's hungriest dragon.

Yoshi

To be perfectly honest, there isn’t much I feel I can say on Yoshi. It seemed like Nintendo wanted to get its fill of puzzle games in like Dr. Mario and Yoshi’s Cookie after the success of Tetris on Game Boy. In this game, you mix and match Mario’s recognizable rogue’s gallery and essentially score points connecting the same enemies together. Score good combos and keep the queues from spilling over and resulting in a Game Over. Occasionally, top and bottom halves of Yoshi’s eggs will drop, and if you manage to sandwich in many enemies in between the halves, you can score a lot of bonus points and hatch a Yoshi. This is an okay little time-waster, but there is something more appealing about Dr. Mario and Tetris. Yoshi feels rather limited.

Cruelty in a box.

Zelda II: The Adventure of Link

I should probably alert you to the fact that I didn’t exactly play this on the 3DS, but I recently did play it on the Wii Virtual Console from beginning to end. Zelda II has a bit of gained infamy over the years because it’s a bit of a departure from the design of The Legend of Zelda, which preceded it. The side-scrolling combat of Zelda II would never really see its way into any future two-dimensional entry of the series, nor would the idea of gaining experience points to strengthen health or magic or attacks. We would see the idea of visiting towns and talking to non-player characters who dispense more useless advice than useful in future games. Zelda II might be remembered for two things, if anything: “I am Error,” and its difficulty.

Like the first game, the player travels to several palaces to defeat the boss and find an important item for later use. Honestly, it feels like you as the player don’t have much to go on when not only unlocking new spells, but discovering locations and especially the locations of the palaces of Hyrule. In 2011, this would be a complaint, but I remember that in the ancient calendar year of 1988, a lot of secrets that weren’t hinted at were most likely only available through an issue of Nintendo Power. It’s probably how Nintendo got you to get a subscription! A lot of the game’s difficulty comes in the palaces, where you meet an entirely different set of enemies compared to the ones you run into in the game’s overworld map. In addition, many enemies are just as skilled with a blade as Link is, and you have to maneuver and time your hits to even get a hit in of maybe five just to get to a new area. The palaces become mazes and some areas are accessed in ways that are so not made clear. Unfortunately, if you lose all of your lives (yet another feature that would never be revisited in this series), you start all over from Zelda’s palace where she rests (until you wake her by acquiring the Triforce of Courage) and you have to make your way all the way back. This got especially infuriating at Death Mountain on your way to the final palace. Death Mountain is the stuff of nightmares, with its cruel enemies and their cruel patterns. It is also the game’s real test of courage not only for Link, but for us, who were willing to toil away all those hours gaining strength, to summon the courage needed to face that final palace, where heroes are forged. *ahem* Sorry, got carried away there. The point is, that place is a bitch!

Haunting your childhood dreams.

Zelda II is arguably the least appreciated game in the Legend of Zelda series, but it does have its charm and its difficulty is the stuff of legends. I always applauded Nintendo’s efforts to experiment with different ideas (and that does not include slapping Mario sprites on Doki Doki Panic! and calling it Super Mario Bros. 2) when they did. I was personally relieved when I finished the game finally, compared to my sadness when I finished Ocarina of Time 3D.

It may be a little off for me to jump right into talking about Zelda II without even discussing The Legend of Zelda, but I intend to get to it soon now that I have access to it again. I used to have the Gamecube Collector’s Disc edition from 2003, which had the NES games, Ocarina of Time, and Majora’s Mask but I sold it off.

The next entry will, of course, cover more NES games in this package as I get to them.

E3 2011: 3DS update, Super Mario, Luigi’s Mansion 2!

Let’s get this out of the way.

OH MY GOD THERE WILL BE A SEQUEL TO LUIGI’S MANSION FOR THE NINTENDO 3DS AND I WILL TOTALLY BE THERE DAY ONE!

Sorry about that. It was amazing how divided the original Luigi’s Mansion, launched with the Nintendo Gamecube in 2001, is among people. I didn’t even play it until well into a year of the Gamecube’s US launch. It was a fun concept, if a little restrictive, but I’d have to dig out my copy.

I didn’t download it until yesterday morning, but on Monday evening, June 6, Nintendo released their 2.0.0 system update for their 3DS handheld, which now makes your 3DS a little more useful. It features the long-awaited Nintendo eShop, featuring the Virtual Console and a section called DSi Ware Favorites, featuring presumably some of the games originally on sale for the DSi, like Cave Story and Plants vs. Zombies, now available for the 3DS. In fact, DSi owners can now transfer most their purchases over to the 3DS. In the Virtual Console shop, Super Mario Land, Radar Mission, and Alleyway are available for purchase. As of yesterday evening, The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening DX, the Game Boy Color update of the original Game Boy title, is also available for download. I’m excited to play that since I have actually never gotten to play it. Strangely but not surprisingly, Nintendo has decided to sell separate 3DS cash cards to redeem, which is a separate currency from the Wii/DSi Points system, parallel to the Microsoft Points vs. PlayStation Network Wallet Funds.

Nintendo has offered a free bonus in its first of what I can assume a number of games in their “3D Classics” brand: Excitebike. The 1984 NES game is retouched to utilize the 3D screen, although with the adjustable slider it can still be played in 2D. There is not much to be said about the 3D in the game. It’s the same Excitebike I remember, and I’m still terrible at it. The highlight remains the ability to design courses and that catchy 8-bit theme. Downloading popular NES games to my 3DS is already a convenient notion, hopefully Nintendo puts the 3D to good use.

The system update adds a web browser to the 3DS Home screen, which works about as well as you would expect any mobile browser to. I believe entering URLs, along with the typical history saving and bookmarking, will save certain phrases to the 3DS’s dictionary to suppress the need to type out the same words every single time. One tap of the stylus, and it’s there.

At their E3 presentation, Nintendo informed the press they did not forget about the 3DS. The launch of the device has been less than stellar. It featured no true breakout titles (although the acclaimed port of Super Street Fighter IV and Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars are apparent exceptions) and this system update is available nearly three months after its launch in the United States. The more anticipated titles, such as The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D, aren’t due until later in the year. Ocarina of Time is seeing a release next week. Even I had considered giving up my 3DS until seeing the trailers for Super Mario and Luigi’s Mansion 2. Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater 3D is due towards the end of year, but is now rather overshadowed by its high-definition update for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, which will utilize the PSP and possibly PS Vita hardware with Konami’s own “transfarring” (that, I assure you, is no typo) system.

As others have argued, the Nintendo DS had a slow start. The games were eventually there, and the handheld crushed the competition. The competition is more fierce now, in the wake of mobile markets, smartphones, and the evolution of smartphone games.