"We all got holes to fill. And them holes are all that's real"

Mere minutes ago in an E-mail to Tim I described last Sunday’s Six Feet Under. The important factor being that to my knowledge Tim has never watched a single episode of the series. I was explaining to him, in the same way I explained to Will a couple days ago, that it feels good to be a fan of something. Stuff like Kissing Chaos, White Stripes cds, Six Feet Under, makes my life seem full. In return I become overly obsessed. As far as Kissing Chaos goes, I am a member of the comic’s official forum. On top of owning all five of the White Stripes cds, I also own numerous singles on vinyl. I don’t even own a record player. I even have bootleg albums, one of them being a two-disk set of their Peel sessions. And in the case of Six Feet Under, I feel compelled to send Tim an e-mail describing how awesome it was to hear the amazingly fitting Townes Van Zandt song ‘To Live is to Fly’ during a pivotal scene.

This is all leading into my review of Metal Gear Acid, but first, some back-story.

I woke up one morning about a month and a half ago with the goal in mind to really take it easy. My plan was to sit in my room all day and play Final Fantasy X and that was it. My little brother, who makes three times the money as I do, walked into my room while I was doing the most tedious level grinding known to man and asked me to give him a ride to Wal-mart. Seeing as how a trip to Wal-Mart didn’t fit into my taking it easy plan I told him to drive himself.

“I am going to buy a PSP man.”

“Yeah, let me grab my shoes.”

I knew there was no way in the world that Chad was going to buy Acid, but I figured he would at least buy a game for the console, maybe that Twisted Metal game, or even better, NBA Street Showdown. He walked out of the Wal-Mart with a PSP and three UMD movies and that was it. I asked him what exactly he wanted the PSP for and he told me movies.

Strike one against my theory of PSP users.

I just honestly figured if someone wanted something to watch movies on the go on they would just buy a portable dvd player. Or if someone wanted an mp3 player they would just buy an I-pod. Not Chad. He bought the device specifically for those purposes and nothing else.

Does mean that Sony succeeded in their marketing the PSP as a multimedia device/cultural phenomenon? Truthfully, I don’t know. I mean you can go to any website and read their E3 coverage and every single one will talk about how Sony treated the PSP as an afterthought.

If I had three-hundred dollars and my brother didn’t own a PSP I would still purchase a DS and a copy of Feel the Magic (the most important game of the past eight years) and Kirby’s Canvas Curse. Because as a gamer, the DS has more appeal. Oh yeah, and Nanostray simply because I have been playing shooters again here lately like crazy.

Except there’s one major exception. The PSP has Metal Gear. And in the same way Chad has played every Final Fantasy game known to mankind, it is my duty to not only play every single game carrying the Metal Gear moniker but to play any game that has Kojima’s name in the credits (even D2, which in the special thanks section of the credits lists Kojima, Mizuguchi and freaking Yuji Hori of Dragon Quest fame.)

Color me a Kojima fanboy. And you can bet that I am not the only one who writes here. Maybe we should turn Idle Hours into a Metal Gear fan-fiction site. I guarantee while the writing wouldn’t be top notch (especially in my case) the continuities would be correct.

The crazy thing about Chad buying a PSP and three UMD movies, after he spent the one day necessary to watch them, the PSP sat in my room untouched for nearly three weeks.

On more than one occasion I have mentioned a girl that used to work at a Game Stop that I had the hugest crush on. Not because she was a girl who worked at game store. More than once I think I grimaced when she displayed an utter lack of knowledge to customers who had questions someone who reads EGM could answer. I had a crush on this girl because she wore wire frame glasses, and loose fitting khaki pants with a men’s longsleeve button down shirt that was never tucked in. When she spoke she refused to look you in the eye. Anytime she was walking around she kept her eyes on the floor. Once she asked me if I needed help finding anything in a voice so quiet and low I said, “Excuse me?” When she reiterated herself and actually looked up I became frozen in fear for three entire seconds and then without speaking a word bolted out of the door. I had a crush on her because she had very pale skin and kept her hair very long in the front and very short in the back. I always called it a backwards mullet and I found it the utmost adorable. There was this one time when I walked in to buy the original Silent Hill and instead of her giving me the copy of the game that was in the broken case, she took the time to unlock the little window thing and get me a used copy of the game with a case that was in near mint condition. Believe me, I poured over that gesture of kindness for so many sleepless nights and that’s to say that it wasn’t a gesture of any sort at all. Maybe that broken case was merely the display case and all they had were cases in near mint condition. Eventually we got an EB and I got tired of Game Stops lies and I stopped going to there except for rare occasions when I needed to be reminded that I am nowhere near as cool or smooth as I would have believed. After the incident where I bolted out, I never saw her again, except this one time……

I jumped on the Edge bandwagon at issue 148. That’s when I realized that the local Barnes and Noble carried the magazine at the hefty but ever so worth it price of eight bucks. Seriously, all the hyperbole you read online about Edge being something of a gospel for intelligent game writing is true, not hyperbole at all. So when issue 149, the one with all the different handhelds on the cover and an awesome write-up of the Gizmondo launch, came out I made sure to make what would become my once a month stop to pick the magazine up. Then when issue 150, the one that is titled “The Gamecube’s Awakening” on the spine, came out, I walked briskly into Barnes and Noble to make my purchase. I always want to get in and out of there quickly because pseudo intellectuals sitting around talking about politics over their soy-tea-mocha-latte-espressos intimidates me to no end. So I run to the rack, pick up Edge and walked over to the checkout line without taking my eyes off of the floor. I looked up to see, what is honestly, the most beautiful girl in my whole life staring at my chest. She had hair shoulder length all the way around this time. She seemed to have lost about fifteen pounds, which honestly means absolutely nothing because she was already the most beautiful girl in the world. I caught the brief outline of a smile on her face. I was absolutely shaking when I handed her my ten dollars and was starting to sweat and burn to the point I thought I was going to pass out. She handed me my change and I speed walked out the door.

All of that plays into how I obtained Metal Gear Acid.

Three weeks ago, on a Monday evening I had a brilliant plan. I knew the new Edge should be out. And I knew that there was a slight chance that I may have a run in with a girl that by all means could very well be the girl of my dreams. I decided to pull an all nighter, watch Fooly Cooly, get completely loaded on two two-liters of Mountain Dew, smoke two packs of cigarettes, a four pack of Red Bull and then go in walk into Barnes and Noble like I owned the place (confidence is key is what I have been told by everybody) completely out of my mind. Then maybe I can speak to this girl.

Well suffice to say, like every single plan I come up with, it failed miserably. It started before I even drove there because while I definitely was completely out of my mind, I was also sick in a way that was also insanely painful. And all of that caffeine had given me the runs. But I still continued with the plan.

The despair of Edge not being on the shelf was fitting because she was also nowhere to be found. And I wanted to cry when I sat back down in my car. But I didn’t, because that would have made me weak on top of being a loser/geek/master of coming up with the worst plans ever. But I made up my mind, in order for me to feel better about the whole situation, I needed to go buy a new game with money I didn’t have. But luckily for me, I had a savings account that I was meaning to close anyway because instead of it drawing interest and making me richer, I was being charged with some kind of service maintenance thing and was becoming poorer. So I went and got the cash I was saving for school books and bought Metal Gear Acid and the strategy guide for it which was a complete waste of fifteen dollars just like the Snake Eater guide before it.

I’m going to change gears here and go back to being a fanboy. Just a warning.

This past weekend I didn’t sleep at all and beat Snake Eater three times. The first time was my Kerotan run, in which I shot all 64 of those pricks so I could obtain the stealth camo which would be important for my 2nd play through. I decided to do a speed run on the game and completed it in just under four hours. I know I can get do it in less than three though so I gotta try it again. The last time I beat the game I played it “in spirit” which means no killing, even the bosses. I successfully did this in about thirteen hours. I then spent six more hours playing the game on hard mode, and in those six hours I got past the Ocelot fight, which in itself took me an hour and a half.

I will state it as clearly as I can. Metal Gear Solid 3 is my favorite game of all time. And Sons of Liberty is a very close second. I can buy it if someone says that Sons of Liberty just flat out didn’t appeal to them, but when you get critical with it, talking about how games are meant to be played not watched etc, that’s when I start to think less of you. Because you have no yearning for games to be taken serious as a narrative device, let alone as something with artistic merit. The next paragraph contains a Snake Eater spoiler, just a warning.

After your escape through the sewers, just past the torture moment, MGS 3 demands you give it every single bit of your attention. Manhunt, a game I loathe, is violent for the sake of it. The Grand Theft Auto games are in many ways only as violent as you decide to play them. Even though they are nothing more than creatures of some form, when you button mash the X button during a Final Fantasy game and kill a million Tonberries, you are killing, and you do get rewarded for it. When I fought The Sorrow, it made me realize how many people I had killed in the game, and gave me a very real consequence for doing so. I walked up that stream for nearly an hour the first time. And I felt terrible. I kept thinking of Liquid Snake reminding me that I in fact, “enjoyed the killing.” In Snake Eater, every single person you kill up to the point when you fight The Sorrow is not out for revenge. I wanted to hug my screen. I wanted to puke. I wanted to hurry up and figure out how to kill The Sorrow because I was getting tired of slowly walking forward.

IT WAS THE MOST BRILLIANT PIECE OF INTERACTIVE GAMING I HAD EVER EXPERIENCED.

And man, that’s to say that the game ramps the intensity up after that to eleven, one more intense than ten. After this amazing reminder that I had killed these all of these soldiers, not Snake mind you, but me, the player, I get to ride in the sidecar of a motorcycle while being chased a nuclear tank trying to defend not only Snake but Eva as well from incoming enemy fire. And then the Volgin fight. And then, screw ICO, the most beautiful scene I have ever played through in the game, in a field of daffodils, I did battle with my new favorite character in a video game, The Boss. This woman who has this natural maternal instinct, but was not means to carry a child, which was taken from her out of duty. She is strong, and intelligent, passionate and very beautiful.

I shed one single tear when Kojima, ever the master of deceitfulness, made me stare at a screen with The Boss’ own Patriot in Snake’s hand, and her on her back. She had just asked Snake to, ”Kill her…..please.,” because Snake is,” is a wonderful man.” There’s no HUD. And you have no control over Snake’s movements. And I sat there for nearly five minutes staring at this screen hoping out loud that I didn’t have to press the fire button. But you do. And I did. There has not been a single day since then that I have not thought about Snake Eater.

I was able to beat Acid in fifty hours. I achieved an S-rank on about 75% of the missions and finished the game with 186 of the 204 available cards. I entertained the thought of replaying the game on the extreme difficulty if for no other reason to collect the final eighteen cards but to be quite honest, I stopped playing the game in a 100% completion manner four missions before the end because I was so sick and tired of playing.

Turn based strategy games are not my forte. I cannot beat the first mission in Advance Wars. I am that bad. And Acid is most certainly a turn based strategy game. You have to manage things like cost, equipping the right weapons, navigating the grid based levels, and making sure you don’t set yourself up for an attack when the enemy turn comes around all at the same time. But it sounds more difficult than it really is. The fact is, I beat the game, and 75% of the time achieved an S-rank at the end of a mission. The requirements or getting this elusive ranking are a) Not getting spotted or setting off any alarms b) not killing a single enemy and c) making sure you don’t consume too much cost.

The bottom line is this. It isn’t hard, just trite, cheap, and incredibly boring. Will could probably burn through the game with an S-rank on every mission in two sittings with the game. But it took fifty hours accumulated in about twenty sittings for me to finish the game and the entire time, I hated the mechanics.

But for a Metal Gear fanboy, or even better, a Kojima fanboy, this game is sheer bliss. There’s 204 cards to collect and out of those 204 cards the entire MGS series is represented along with cards depicting Jehuty, ADA, and main characters from Snatcher and Policenauts. For example, lets say that one of the game’s three boss characters are just out of range to hit with your AK-SU. Just equip a Sniper Wolf card and all of a sudden you get a plus fifty hit percentage on your shot. And after you put the Sniper Wolf card in play you get a short cut scene of her taken directly from Metal Gear Solid. And if you have already seen that cut scene for the millionth time you can simply press X and skip it.

I was putting cards into my deck simply to see their corresponding cut scenes.

If I wrote about the story here the same way I wrote about Snake Eater’s story above Will and Tim would perform a Mechwarrior style Death From Above move on me.

But the story is really good. Great compared to your typical game story, but small problems still exist that I at first thought were unforgivable. Firstly it reminds me a whole lot of Sons of Liberty’s insane story line. Lots of strange revelations and about three different “endings” each saying everything you learned from the previous cut scene isn’t true at all. But, out of the three or four major revelations, I already had two nailed because while the story is insane and good, it just isn’t told properly. If you are like me, and pour over every bit of information as it is presented you can put it together rather quickly. But that is not to say you will see the major revelation coming.

Kojima has said that MGS doesn’t stand for Metal Gear Solid. It stands for MEME, GENE, and SHEME. By that he means that in Metal Gear Solid the game is about how you can pass on certain parts of yourself genetically. In Sons of Liberty, you pass on certain parts of yourself through memories. With Snake Eater it is the scenario, or SHEME, that dictates the context of those memories and genetics. Without giving too much away I would say that with Acid, the emphasis is on whether there is any truth to the MEMES (Sons of Liberty) you’ll pass on. But ultimately this doesn’t matter.

Acid takes place nine years after the events in Sons of Liberty therefore the game can sort of write its own continuity. This makes the game a whole lot like Ghost Babel though. Ghost Babel can’t be part of the official Metal Gear storyline because Snake meets Mei Ling for the first time. He also meets her for the first time in the original Solid. But more importantly, Kojima’s name isn’t on the box of Ghost Babel. The box for Acid has no Kojima moniker as well but states clearly on the back, “Directed by Shinta Nojiri.” Mr. Nojiri served as a scenario writer on Both Sons of Liberty and Snake Eater and that is the only time in the credits his name is printed. Likewise on Acid, during the final credits Hideo Kojima is only displayed as a producer. What this means though is that Kojima only acted as a producer on the Zone of the Enders games but in both cases his name is clearly printed right on the front cover, “Produced by Hideo Kojima.”

Those small problems that were at first deemed unforgivable lie solely in the game’s translation. There is a whole lot of Engrish in the game, which saddens me because of the usual top notch translations Metal Gear games receive. To me the story of Acid is the best part, but I kept getting pulled out of it due to grammatical errors a 1st grader could point out.

But in the end I do forgive Acid for this problem. I would bet money, which is hard for me to come by these days, that if Mr. Kojima’s name would have been on the front of the box the translation would have been top notch. But I really get the feeling that the Nojiri-Kojima relationship mirrors that of Aonuma-Miyamoto. Kojima has long since said he wants to pass on Metal Gear as a franchise to the younger members of his team so they can infuse new blood into the games and keep them fresh. And Acid is fresh.

So to finish this beast up:

Do you like turn-based strategy games? Then Acid may prove to be too easy to warrant even playing. You’re probably still leveling up rocks in Phantom Brave anyways.

Do you like strange, post-modern story-driven games with a somewhat shady translation ala Final Fantasy 7? Then buy the game used or less than twenty bucks when you get the chance.

Are you a Metal Gear fanboy with a genuine interest in seeing what could be a taste of things to come for the franchise? Buy the game and play it. But don’t waste fifteen dollars on the worthless strategy guide even if you aren’t that good at strategy games.

(One more thing on a personal note that has nothing to do with games or girls. I am officially a college student now. On August 29th I will be sitting in a college classroom which feels so good to say, you have no idea.)

wes


Edit: How funny and ironic is it that I mention how much the grammatical errors in Acid pull me out of the game yet at the same time make as many grammatical errors in the text above. I haven't slept in over 29 hours. I am tired. I finally wrote this review which I have previously written five times and deleted because all five sucked. It's unproffesional, and I do realize I made alot of errors, but I am not getting money for this and quite frankly I don't care. I am going to bed.