Posts tagged metal gear

The first episode of our new weekly gaming podcast! This week we discuss the weeks gaming news, game of year editions and confess our love of the metal gear franchise.

So I got the Metal Gear HD collection mainly because I wanted Metal Gear Solid 3 because it’s one of the greatest games ever. Turns out it wouldn’t be the first thing I’d play. Instead fellow member of the stars team Sam suggested we play through peace walker together. Something we had planned on doing since we had it on the psp, unfortunately my psp never liked to connect to the internet making it rather awkward to play together. Now peace walker is actually a brilliant game, when I attempted to play it on the psp I really wasn’t that into it. Maybe it was the controls, or maybe because I was now playing it on a bigger screen it was better I have no idea but either way I’m glad to have completed peace walker. The narrative throughout the game was really intriguing and well scripted. The metal gear series has always had a compelling story to it and it’s really enjoyable getting to play through this part of the metal gear narrative. You play as Big Boss in events set shortly after Metal Gear Solid 3. I’m a huge fan of Big Boss as a character and as mentioned I loved 3 so this game is well worth the play through. If your a fan of the metal gear series of any of the games, this is definitely worthwhile playing and will help enhance your knowledge of the Metal Gear series as a whole. It certainly helped clear a few things up for me. So if your not entirely familiar with the ins and outs of the metal gear story, Peace Walker will certainly keep you on the edge of your seat.

The controls of Peace Walker are so easy to get to grips with and it certainly feels very natural. It’s so easy to just pick up this game and get into, there isn’t really an adjustment period with the controls, vital if your going to drop in and out of playing this game. There are side missions with peace walker and they are well worth doing especially the fulton recovery missions which will gain you more staff members to build up your mother base. Mother Base is another important aspect to this game. Seriously don’t ignore it. The upgrades you can get from working on enhancing and improving your mother base are incredibly useful. So I would suggest if you are playing this game set aside 5 minutes after each mission or every other mission to improve your mother base it’s a great aspect to the game. I like all the side missions and all those aspects within this game. I love games that have re-playability or give you a reason to keep going back and continually playing them. Peace Walker certainly has that, including in your mother base are an army of troops which you can dispatch and send on missions. It’s a really fun aspect to this game, not necessary but it’s something cool and feels like a bonus. The soundtrack in this game is awesome, the Metal Gear series never gets it wrong and that’s what makes them such good games in there consistency. You know that whenever you pick up a game in the metal gear series it will be a brilliant and riveting game. Soundtrack is really important within a game, you may not always notice it but a good soundtrack will certainly make the gaming experience all the more better. I advise people to just listen to the soundtrack of metal gear, it’s amazing. Peace Walker is a very different style to the other Metal Gear games but don’t let that put you off. It’s a really nice change to the formula and is just as effective and compelling as the other games. Visually it’s a stunning game. Some of the cutscenes would make for brilliant artwork.

It’s a really beautiful game and I would advise anyone to play it, even if you’ve never played a game in the metal gear series I recommend you try this out. Now you could buy it for your psp, if you still have one and haven’t traded it in for a vita or you could buy the HD collection which I would recommend more because then you get a bunch of other metal gear games that are seriously worth playing. Even if you have those games already get the HD collection because it’s a worthwhile investment.  

Yesterday I went into Gamestation. I occasionally like to peruse that shop and pick out bargain games. Also, I went in to trade my games, to get new (not new new, but new to me) games. All that’s mostly irrelevant, my point is coming. Whilst I was in the shop, making idle chat with the (very pretty) girl stood behind the counter, my mind went to the Metal Gear Solid HD remake, so I asked about it. I was told it was out on Friday, but if I wanted it I would have to pre-order.

Apparently, they don’t stock HD remakes except copies for people who pre-order them. In fact, they didn’t even have any advertisements for it. They had advertisements for FF XIII-2, Mass Effect 3 and SSX, amongst others, but not for a game just about to be released. I found this very strange. Do they not make much money from these sorts of games? Is it that the only people likely to buy this sort of game are people likely to already know it’s coming out and anticipating it weeks beforehand?

I will say that I don’t know whether they meant they didn’t stock the game in all their stores, or just in that one. I will admit, it is a small shop, and the space for new games is very much limited to a few select titles, often with the words “Duty” or “Battlefield” in their title. I suppose that in a larger shop they probably will stock some copies, but I think that this shows that HD remakes maybe don’t sell as well as other games. That’s all speculation though.

I have also heard that there is the possibility that next year Game will go down, meaning there would be no games shops on the highstreet here in Britain anymore. That would be a real shame, since I need used games because I can’t afford to buy all my games new. Although I suppose by then I’d hopefully have a job.

Anyhow, Sony, a company you might have heard of, has just announced its 3^rd quarter takings. They made a loss of $2 billion. An entire $2 billion dollar loss, that’s just an insane amount of money. What makes it even more amazing is that this is on revenue of $20 billion. Over a year that makes $80 billion in turnover. That’s more money than the entire budgets of some countries. The fact that someone can make a loss of that much money just astounds me. Apart from that, I don’t have much to say on this story, because I don’t really know much about business.

My last story to comment on is the fact that Ubisoft is about to start some server maintenance on the 7^th. What with a lot of Ubi games having “always on” DRM,  that means people won’t be able to play their games. Games these people have paid hard cash for.  What I am saying is that this is bullshit. I mean seriously, this is exactly the reason why people straight away said that this system wasn’t going to work. I would suggest anyone that has any of these games cracks them so that the can continue to play.

DRM is a bad idea. All you need is a CD key for online play. DRM is going to get hacked, it’s going to be released onto the various torrent sites, and people are going to pirate it. What you have to make sure of is that you have something to offer paying customers. Multiplayer is one thing. Most games won’t work online if pirated, so you’ll need a new version to play online.  What a waste of money it is to have servers running constantly, and developing the programs and whatnot. How do company execs not realise this?

Anyway, that’s enough for this week, I’ll be back next week with a new post.