A Metal Gear Solid 2 HD Wish List September 19, 2011

In December, both Metal Gear Solid games that released on the PS2 as well as Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker, which was a Playstation Portable exclusive, will be bundled together and remastered for High Definition TVs in the Metal Gear Solid HD Collection for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.

The initial previews of the game have come back from the trade shows they have been demoed at. The previews have been partially negative, because Konami did not touch any of the graphics in the games, opting instead to increase resolution and performance. I think the people who have been previewing these games are idiots. Honestly, I don’t have a problem with that at all. I’m glad that they’re keeping the game’s aesthetic completely intact, and only updating what they have to in order for it to run on modern systems (and modern HDTVs).

However, there are some problems I do have with the versions of the games that Hideo Kojima has announced they are releasing in December, and that is if they release everything as intact as they said they will. Now, I have no problem with the fact that they’re releasing the versions they are of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, which is the Subsistance Version of the game, or of Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, which should have the ability to exchange save files between the PS3 and PSP versions of the game. Those game versions are perfect, and I’m glad they’re including those versions.

No, I have a problem that they’re including the version of Metal Gear Solid 2 Substance which came to the United States, when there’s so much more they could have included with that version of the game, including things fans like me have been requesting for the past ten years.

I don’t know if a lot of people know this but Metal Gear Solid 2 released in November of 2001. That was two months after the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. As someone who’s played the end sequence in the released version of the game, you can easily tell something is missing before the final Solidus fight. In what was probably intended to be a spectacular finale sequence, all you see is Arsenal Gear go under a bridge and then all of a sudden Raiden and Solidus are knocked on top of Federal Hall with rubble all around them. The first time I saw that sequence I asked myself, “What did I miss here? Did I hit the X button and something jumped?”

Ryan Payton confirmed (while he was still working for Kojima Team) in the official Kojima podcast that there were more scenes that were supposed to be in the game which they did not have time to redo before ship, so instead they just had to chop them out of the game. GameTrailers.com, when they did their retrospective on the game, mentioned some glaring omissions that we never got to see. The first was an all out attack on New York City by Arsenal Gear just before it crashed into Manhattan! It was obvious we saw the first part of this sequence when Arsenal Gear was cruising up the Hudson something terrible was about to happen. This attack would have caused the displacement of the Statue of Liberty, which has been done already in action movies. We’ve seen things like it happen in Batman Forever or Judge Dredd, heck, even Ghostbusters II. Finally the American Flags all over Wall Street were removed. Anyone who’s ever been to Wall Street (I have) knows that there are American Flags hanging from poles every ten feet across the building entrances. You can clearly see the flagpoles in the final version of the game, but no flags on any of them, including the one that should be on the pole on top of Federal Hall. The reason why Raiden raises up his sword after defeating Solidus was because he was chopping the flag down on top of the building, and this flag would have fallen to cover Solidus’s dead body. The action wasn’t to look cool, Raiden gave a final honor for the game’s former President of the United States.

After the end credits, a news report would have revealed the Statue of Liberty had been fully restored and was given a new home, Ellis Island. I smiled when I found out they would have restored the statue, and I think the fact that they put things right at the end gives them the creative liberty to restore all this in the game without fear of any lingering repercussion.

I liked this original ending so much when I wrote the story “That Day at Federal Hall”, which told the story of two normal people caught in the middle of that event, I included that nod to the deleted scene in the story’s coda. I can moderately understand why they would feel the need to cut all this content out at the time, but that was ten years ago. When Steven Spielberg refused to cut the Twin Towers out of A.I. for its DVD release, the insanity of censoring anything happening to New York in any fictional medium started to calm down. Watchmen depicted New York City exactly as it was in the original book, with it’s unaltered 1985 skyline, with no media repercussion.

Also, Metal Gear Solid 2 Substance did not ship with two important things that other countries got. It did not have a complete demo theatre feature that is in Metal Gear Solid and Metal Gear Solid 3. Metal Gear Solid 2’s story is my favorite of the three games, and I wanted to be able to watch the cutscenes from start to finish with a tub of popcorn just like I could do with the other games (or even games like Metroid: Other M). From what I heard, the European Version and Japanese Version of the original game, since they released after the American Version, did ship with this feature, although I could have been misinformed about this. It would be nice to see it included in the American release of the HD collection, or at the very least have the demo theatre that was included with the US version of MGS2 Substance have all the game’s cutscenes included, instead of just the few that were.

My other desire is for a re-release of the Document of Metal Gear Solid 2 disc. This was a budget title released for the PS2 shortly before the Substance re-release of Metal Gear Solid 2, and included a very in depth DVD-style documentary about the making of the game and included a playable preview of the VR missions that shipped with Metal Gear Solid 2 Substance. This is a heavily sought after collector’s item I am not fortunate enough to own, as it shipped at an awkward time before I owned a PS2 and did not have the ability to get one. When Metal Gear Solid 2 Substance was released in Japan, the Document was included as a bonus disc, but the US never got a re-release of it. For a game that was $20US at launch new, prices on Ebay for it go for over $30, even for one that’s been badly scratched. This has been considered one of the best game documentary discs of all time. It would be nice to see this re-released, even if it’s the original PS2 version of the disc, I would leap at the chance to buy it if they released it again.

With the release of the HD Collection in November, Konami has the chance to bring back everything they were not politically allowed to do, and provide much requested fanservice to those who have wanted them to rectify these decisions for the past ten years. No mention has been made specifically about any of these features of the game, but they are three months from releasing it. If you’re going to do it, Konami, do it right, and give us a great reason to rebuy it.

Ed- Thank you to the Unknown Cameraperson for the correct nautical term for describing what a boat does on water.

What Happened to Bawls? September 16, 2011

Since shortly after its release, Bawls has been known as a soda exclusively drank by gamers, BMX riders and paintballers.  It was designed to be a high-caffeinated soda in a world where high caffeinated beverages like Red Bull are extremely popular, but they all reportedly taste like crap.  Bawls was different.  It is a high caffinated soda that tasted great.  A great tasting high caffinated product didn’t take long for this product to find itself a market, and it did, with the gamers.

How much of a gamer’s drink was it?  I first became aware of the product because it was being sold by the case in computer stores like CompUSA.  That just shows you how hardcore it was. To advertise their product, Bawls would sponsor LAN parties, where gamers would get their computers together in a common venue and challenge each other at the latest games. They even sponsored LAN parties as big as Quakecon or as small as the local ones here that took place in a converted bar.

You’ve seen me drink it with friends in some of the past videos I’ve done.  The reason why I did it was because recently it is popular to shoot a video of yourself trying some weird or obscure food or beverage online and post it up for people to see.  While the practice of trying new food and beverages on camera and posting it online has been popular for quite a while, I have not seen a single internet personality try Bawls, so I took it upon myself to do it.

But why did Bawls become so obscure and get so hard to find?

In 2007 I started to notice it was getting easier to find Bawls in stores. While CompUSA, originally the only store I could buy the soda, was shutting down for good, 7-11s and various gas stations in my area started to sell the stuff by the bottle.  Trust me, I would buy out their stock as much as I could!  Then I started to see it was being sold in four-packs of cans by Target.  The packaging style was just like Red Bull was being sold. With Target selling it across the country I was elated I could get Bawls so easily, but I preferred the taste of the soda in the glass bottles opposed to how it tasted in aluminum cans.

Then around 2009 something awful happened. For some reason Target stopped selling the four packs of the can version in their stores. I no longer could find bottles or cans of the soda in 7-11s or smaller grocery stores.  I couldn’t even find Bawls in Publix, and they were one of the very few major grocery stores that sold Bawls early on.  The official Bawls webpage stopped being updated with content.  The company stopped sponsoring major events like Quakecon.

Heck, even some LAN centers were having trouble stocking the stuff.  What was going on?

For over a year, the only place I could find the stuff would be online through sites like Thinkgeek or Amazon, and you’d be paying upwards of fifty dollars a case for it!  It was a very dark, expensive time, but you could tell that the demand was still there.  Thinkgeek said on numerous occasions it was one of their biggest selling products, and it would have to be restocked constantly.

So what happened?  I did some research and it turns out that the company nearly went bankrupt around 2009. The owners of the company were forced to step down and were replaced by the current owners of the product, BAWLS Acquisition (yes that same organization I listed as the owners in my videos).

According to the research I did, it turns out the product had extended itself tremendously to tons of different retail channels in 2008, and by 2009 it couldn’t be sustained. In my opinion, this happened because you had a niche product being sold to a mass market.  This is not a major problem for most similar products.  Red Bull and Monster have thrived in the past few years as a mass market product and they supposedly taste awful, but Red Bull and Monster had massive marketing campaigns on TV and in print to get awareness of the product out, and what their gimmick was. Aside from appearing as background in The Hangover, Bawls did not step up its marketing campaign to match their product expansion.  It was still a product only known by its base but it was being widely distributed through more channels than could be sustained by the company.  The distribution network for the product crashed, which is why the only place we could get it was online for a year.

But there is a silver lining to all this.  Bawls is coming back.  Under this new management, Bawls has started getting back the distribution network it had before it imploded. According to a press release I read from earlier in the year, Bawls has regained about 65% of the distribution network they previously had before their near bankruptcy.  They even were a part of this year’s Quakecon.

If you’re a gamer or not, Bawls needed to realize that they had a really good product that could have mass appeal if marketed correctly. Forget about being a drink exclusive to gamers! The cool looking blue bottles alone are a very good sell when put next to other products in a refrigerator case. It’s very distinctive if properly put in an advertising campaign. It’s also one of the few high caffeinated beverages that tastes good! With some people forced to drink in excess of five of these a day just to stay alert while working, this is an extremely important selling point.

A store down the street from my house has started selling it again, and I’ve been told other people across my state have noticed it in various stores as well. Heck, I’ve talked to some other gas stations in my area that didn’t stock it and they seemed interested in stocking it based on my recommendation. If you like it, spread the word. You just might see it in a store near you.

My Educational Resistance September 13, 2011

With the release of Resistance 3 for the Playstation 3, I decided to reflect on my best memory that the series provided me over the years.  A little background on me, I have a BA in English and a few years ago after I got out of college my parents were on a power trip which insisted I set my life goals to do everything but what I was good at.  They wanted me wasting my time applying to graduate schools even though I had spent my entire life in school by that point and was completely sick of it.  After twenty-five years of schooling all I wanted to do was to work and earn money.  I didn’t need to have a good paying job, I just wanted something that I could do and would enjoy doing it.

Two years ago I was working as a permanent substitute teacher for a high school English class.  The class’s permanent teacher had quit after just a month working there.  When something like that happened I would get a call to fill the teacher spot until an accredited teacher could be hired.  I would be allowed to create an acceptable lesson plan and give it to the students so they’d have something that could be graded while a teacher was being hired.  One fond memory I have of the experience around the time I was working there was the day Resistance 2 was released.  In my educational experiences I knew I had very little room to do things that excited me so any chance I got I would usually submit a college paper about video games or talk about them in a class discussion if they were on topic with what we were going over.  I really enjoyed the Resistance series and that day I decided to mess with my students a little bit.

That day on the blackboard I wrote this.  I took a picture of it before class started with the intention to post it up on Insomniac’s official message boards, so here it is so you can have a chance to look at it for yourselves.

This quote was taken from the opening cinematic for Resistance: Fall of Man, a launch title for the PS3 and a killer app for the system. I am a huge fan of documentaries on the History Channel and Discovery Channel I thought the writing in the first game matched that style very well, which is exactly what they were going for.  I asked the students if they knew where the quote could have come from.

I was pretty certain the students would not be able to identify where the quote came from, but I wasn’t expecting them to. The method behind my madness was I wanted the students to tell me the quote was a fake, and could not possibly have happened. Instead for the whole day the students were telling me that the quote had to come from a historical documentary. They recognized the name Nathan Hale as the namesake of another high school in the district, but they had no idea that the Nathan Hale the school was named after has been dead for about two-hundred years.

I was disappointed to see these students couldn’t tell the quote was a fake. The Americans had never launched an assault on England. The dates were all wrong for any kind of war they could have confused the battle with.  They really had no idea who the real Nathan Hale was or what he had done for the United States of America.

Nowadays I like to tell people I probably learned more from watching the History and Discovery Channels and playing video games than I ever learned in my schooling, but where does that leave the people in the school systems not fortunate enough to have a person who knows what they’re doing as a teacher when they aren’t privy to further educational outlets like that?  There are still some students who probably don’t even have general access to a computer, to say nothing of having Internet access, which is considered by the UN a basic human right nowadays.

These students would eventually get a full-time teacher and I was reassigned.  I got out of substituting around a year ago when I discovered I could make a lot of money fixing computers after years of my parents doing their best to prevent me from learning that.  Every once in a while I have a positive memory of my experiences like this one, but I don’t think I’ll be going back to it.  it just wasn’t right for me.

LA Noire, the Game That Could’ve Benefitted from Remedy’s Decisions September 2, 2011

I played through LA Noire last month on the Playstation 3 and am pretty close to 100% completion. What have I done in the game? I five stared all the case files in the game, completed all the side missions, solved all the cases (sans the majority of the DLC missions), rode in every car, found every landmark, and got every trophy (except for the $40,000+ damage case). I enjoyed the game, and did not feel bad about shelling out $40 for it at Best Buy, but I can’t help but feel that some of the problems that me and other critics had with the game could have spared Team Bondi for just what would befall them after its release.

With Team Bondi closing permanently today, not because they failed to make a well received, decent selling game, but because no publisher wanted to work with them on any other project, I wanted to talk about something I’ve noticed in every review I’ve read or watched of the game. In short, Team Bondi and through that, LA Noire, would have benefitted greatly from making the same decisions Remedy Entertainment made during the development of Alan Wake.

The first problem I have with the game is that the open world environment, while enormous, does not provide anything fun to do in it. The enormous environment only serves as a facade for every single case. Driving around in it only provides an opportunity to cause accidents, which will negatively impact your final case ranking. If you want the best possible rank in each case, you’re best off having your partner drive you automatically to each destination, cutting you out of the chance to explore this ENORMOUS wasted enviroment.

There is just nothing to do in downtown LA. This is unlike games like Grand Theft Auto, where you can easily pick up things to do in the world. You can be a taxi driver and take fares, catch theatre or entertainment, you can collect side bounties, watch TV or listen to the fully scripted radio stations.

The only thing you can do are side missions, but they’re dependant on getting the call for one while driving. If your partner drives you won’t be able to do them unless you free roam after completing the case desk. Side missions themselves are short and can be easier completed during these open world driving aspects once all cases are complete. There is an incetive to find and drive every car in the game since these count towards your game completion percentage and unlock you the cars in the vehicle showroom. The problem is only police cars are equipped with radios and sirens, which are essential to getting a perfect rank in some cases. Finally, in LA Noire there’s only one radio channel, and you have no control over what’s on it or what you’re listening to, and there’s nothing really that good on it on the level of Lazlo’s Chatterbox, Pat Maine, or the Deb of Night.

My other complaint is that a good amount of the cases in the game (especially the vice cases) are downloadable content, and not included on the disc. The game also shipped on the PS3 with an exclusive case (the Consul’s Car), but one you still had to download (with a free code). If you wanted the whole story you would have to spend an extra eleven or so dollars for a Rockstar Pass, which would enable you to download all the DLC for the game (including some you may have already gotten free with the disc). Easily there were three or four extra cases that could only be investigated by purchasing them online. Instead of making them feel like an extra benefit that expanded the story after its conclusion, it felt like there were large chunks of the game missing from the retail release. This was glaringly clear when there were only three vice cases in the retail game, whereas other desks had many more!

There was another company and another game that faced these similar problems, and they made the hard decision to cut these features from the game during development. It cost them wasted development time, but in the end they released a tighter product which didn’t suffer from these problems. Remedy Entertainment had originally designed 2010’s Alan Wake as an open world environment. It was also planned to be followed up with multiple downloadable episodes to continue the story of the game. But when they started to realize that having an open world environment in the story that they were telling just wasn’t working out for them, they cut the game’s open world ability and locked levels to a single path with enviroment bridged between cutscenes.

Some people were upset about this, but a lot of what was cut was featured in the Alan Wake: Illuminated book, and I don’t think anyone thinks the lack of an abandoned dirt track for time trials or an interactive ball puzzle in a museum is that sad a loss or further enhanced the game’s story.

Their intentions with DLC was also rightfully scaled back. They intended the first Alan Wake game to be analogous to a season for a television show, and further DLC would be considered special side stories, or as they put it, “interludes.” If they planned anything further, such as a new major storyline that would seem more fitting of a second season of a show, they said they would just make Alan Wake 2 instead. This scaled back what could have been a long DLC series to just a two episode epilogue. They even gave out codes for the first DLC for free with purchase of a new copy of the game. By ending it after just two downloadable episodes, Remedy could now (in theory) focus Alan Wake efforts on a whole new game. And since these downloadable levels took place after the main game and were just a side story, anyone who didn’t play them weren’t missing out on large chunks of the story in the middle of the game.

With just one product release, I am sad to announce that as of today, Team Bondi is no more. LA Noire received high reviews from critics and fans alike, but to me, my feelings about the game were far more complex than loved it or hated it. If they had made the tough decisions early on during development that they needed to (after the game’s release stories leaked to the press on a daily basis on just how bad the game’s management was) they could have had a shot at releasing a tighter game on a shorter development timetable, and that could have looked better to publishers who they needed for their next project.

Still, their efforts were commendable, and they do have a good product to show for all their hard work. I wish we could have parted on better terms.