Tag Archives: Konami

Best of 2015, Games, GOTY, PC games, PlayStation, Xbox

Best of 2015 #3: Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

29/12/2015 Olly Leave a comment

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain Despite The Phantom Pain facing ardent attempts to undermine it from both Konami’s avarice and Kojima’s lack of restraint, its qualities manage to shine through. And believe me, if the game is still shining after living through this many attempts to torpedo it since release, the core game must be shining pretty damn brightly.

It would have been higher on the list this year were it not for some poor design decisions and an annoying structure. It’s a superb 15-20 hours stretched quite thinly over 50-60 hours, with the second act being mindbogglingly bad in its design. I was wishing for it to hurry up and finish by the end, which even with the best underlying gameplay in the world, is not a good sign.

But when The Phantom Pain is at its best, it’s so, so good. The open world complements an infiltration game incredibly well, dramatically increasing the strategic options in a series that has always been famous for giving you more than one way to complete an objective. Going back to classics like the first game, suddenly the option to go through the front door or the vent doesn’t seem too freeing. Do you go in from the north, south, east or west? Day or night? With a sniper or the dog? By vehicle or on foot? With explosives or silenced weapons? Non-lethal or live rounds? Extract or eliminate?

It’s just a shame when all this variety is used to infiltrate the same encampment for the 12th time. Hopefully whomever is in charge of Kojima now won’t give him such free rein.

Games, PlayStation

Retrospective: Silent Hill

04/06/2013 Olly Leave a comment

Much of my gaming time over the last couple of months has been spent compensating for this generation’s dearth of creativity by delving deep into the back catalogue, saying goodbye to hardware backwards compatibility by enjoying some of my overlooked classics on the PS1 and PS2. One of these was the original Silent Hill, perhaps not afforded the credit it deserves in the wake of its admittedly better, more widely ported sequels, and certainly in the shadows of Resident Evil in the PS1’s survival horror canon, but one worthy of revisiting.

Silent Hill

As you’ll see above, it’s also responsible for possibly my favourite screenshot ever. (Courtesy of the Silent Hill Wiki.)

Despite its formidable reputation, I didn’t find Silent Hill scary. Its reputation for creeping psychological horror seemed overstated, with nothing that had me cursing it beyond a couple of cheap jump scares – an unexplained window breaking or sound of unseen objects clattering to the floor. Perhaps it’s too difficult nowadays to look beyond the rough edges and see a vicious creature torn from a tormented psyche when they look more like melted cake ornaments. Low-poly ones at that.

Shorn of what is arguably its raison d’être, though, Silent Hill is still worthy of your time. Firstly, a well-documented bug in the PS3’s backwards compatibility and some mixing issues aside, it’s one of the earliest games to have impressed me with its sound design. Akira Yamaoka’s dissonant soundtrack complements the Lynchian weirdness wonderfully and, along with the unsettling industrial sound effects, is by far the aspect of the game that has aged best.

When Silent Hill was re-imagined as Shattered Memories, it dropped combat entirely. This led me to believe that the combat, so often the weak point in games that aspire to more than action, would be terrible, but it’s really not. Ammo is scare enough to be valuable without discouraging you from pulling the trigger when necessary, and relying on melee combat is actually a realistic proposition. Simply by not having combat be a total drag, it outdoes most survival horror games, which is intended to be higher praise than it might sound like.

Not a life-changing classic, then, but another example of a clever, original franchise that has devolved into shooting and jump scares in this generation. People banging on about the depressing frequency with which this has happened may be getting tiresome, but you know how publishers can make us desist? Stop doing it.

Best of 2010, Games, GOTY, PlayStation

Best of 2010 #4: Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker

28/12/2010 Olly Leave a comment

Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker Considering the esteem in which the franchise is held, Metal Gear has a lot of disappointing instalments. This, however, wasn’t one of them, following up the best in the series – that’s MGS3, for those who aren’t keeping count – and absolutely stomping over the letdown of Portable Ops. This was a proper Metal Gear Solid game, originally planned as MGS5, and it’s a strong contender for my favourite of the lot.

Even if the story was mostly utter rubbish, taking a huge dump on some of the best characters, if you let that affect your enjoyment of Metal Gear games they’d never get anywhere near these lists. Cramming console games designed for dual analogue sticks onto portable systems rarely works, and indeed here it takes a period of acclimatisation, but in no time at all I had my head around it and, by the end, I found myself hoping that some of this game’s advances will get ported back to any future MGS games. This is the first one in which I’ve been able to make use of the CQC system, for example, now that it’s been slimmed down and the need to regulate pressure on the buttons as well as direction on the stick has been removed.

It’s looking increasingly likely that 2010 could be the PSP’s last year as Sony’s primary handheld console, and despite some of its most impressive games coming out – Persona 3 Portable also deserves a mention – it’s been an ignominious end, with mediocre hardware sales and almost non-existent software ones. This, though, must go down as evidence that the system had more to offer. Aside from its segmented areas – methinks as much down to hardware limitations as it is portable game design – this could have quite easily been a PS2 game, and as that seems to have been the Holy Grail of PSP development since the beginning, it’s one of the biggest compliments I can pay to one of its last great games.

What a finale, though, both to the Metal Gear Solid series and the PSP’s viability. I’ve had rocky relationships with both, but they’ll still be missed.

Best of 2010, Games, GOTY, PlayStation, Xbox

Best of 2010 #10: Castlevania: Lords of Shadow

22/12/2010 Olly Leave a comment

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow Many talk about how unexpected this was, given the series’, shall we say, inconsistent relationship with the third dimension, but in reality there was no time like the present. The ongoing commercial success of the God of War series and a spate of critically acclaimed games in the genre showed that there was a viable blueprint to follow, and with that, all it needed was some talent.

That’s Hideo Kojima explained, so perhaps the choice of MercurySteam as developer was the big surprise. Regardless, the Spanish dev did what Rocksteady Studios did with Batman: Arkham Asylum last year by unleashing a game on the world that exceeded all expectations, both in its own right and as a reflection of the developer’s pedigree.

Lords of Shadow isn’t particularly original, liberally borrowing from myriad similar games and also anything else that took the designers’ fancy: Pan straight out of Pan’s Labyrinth, an extremely familiar battle against an Ice Colossus Titan that immediately follows, and nods like a trip inside the Great Dekuh Tree – and those are all within the first couple of hours. Regardless, it’s a highly competent game, dripping with atmosphere and putting those high production values that are the mark of Kojima’s involvement to good use for some stunning environments and quality storytelling.

Word on the grapevine is that a sequel will be announced in 2011. With the hard reboot stuff out of the way, give me this with an appearance by a certain dark lord and I’ll be queuing up to indulge.

Games, Impressions, PlayStation

Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker

30/07/2010 Olly Leave a comment

The Metal Gear series gets a lot of criticism for its labyrinthine story and ridiculous plot twists – AIs controlling the world by filtering the Internet, anyone? – and I’m no huge fan of it either, but my time with Peace Walker has convinced me of something.

Like how Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader is the real main character in Star Wars, the key player in Metal Gear is not Solid Snake but his ‘father’ and frequent antagonist Big Boss. Considering Kojima’s love of pop culture the similarities in structure can’t be a coincidence – great warrior with good intentions is manipulated into evil, while his son defeats the super weapons of the true villain’s powerful organisation before reconciling with the father shortly before the father’s death – but unlike Star Wars, I actually far prefer the prequels in the Metal Gear Solid series.

Snake Eater is the first stop, which is by far my favourite game of the lot. In its Subsistence form with a competent camera, at least – it’s not a coincidence that every MGS game since then has used it – it offers some restraint in its story, a Cold War setting where the series’ brand of nuclear paranoia makes sense, features some of the best boss battles in the series, infinitely more interesting environments than the generic warehouses of Solid Snake’s adventures, and, in Naked Snake and The Boss, has the series’ two best characters. Not to mention my favourite ending in any game ever.

The previous PSP game, Portable Ops, didn’t really do it for me, but Peace Walker is built as a full-on entry in the series that would be as at home on a home console as it is on the PSP. It was originally going to be Metal Gear Solid 5, in fact, but don’t let its demotion from the main series line-up make you believe that it’s any less than those entries. It’s up there with MGS3 in my opinion, and everyone should play it. Continue reading Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker →

Best of 2008, Games, GOTY, PlayStation

Best of 2008 #3: Metal Gear Solid 4

08/01/2009 Olly Leave a comment

Metal Gear Solid 4

It’s hard to believe that after so much hype, so many trailers, so many years in development, Metal Gear Solid 4 actually came out last summer. It always seemed destined to be one of those epochal games, assuming it could live up to that astronomical hype, and it really did.

I had my doubts that it could come anywhere close to tying up all those loose ends that the last two games in particular had left, and while it had to utilise some insanely long cut-scenes to do it, I put it back on the shelf at the end more satisfied than I had any right to be after finishing a game with such a labyrinthine story. Some didn’t like playing a game that you could spend up to an hour not actually playing, but if you came away from the game with that as a complaint you apparently hadn’t played a Metal Gear game before.

That’s not to say that MGS4 was more of the same, because it deserves credit for being a game that wasn’t afraid to change what had always been a highly successful formula. While so many Japanese developers are struggling to make the jump to the current generation – can we stop calling it ‘next-gen’ yet? – Kojima and his team modernised what had been a bit of a dinosaur in terms of controls and movement in 3D space. Where MGS3 required three hands to perform some of the more complex techniques, this one actually felt like a proper, modern game, able to work just as well as an action game as it was the standard stealth fare.

I did have issues with it, the main one being that aside from the endgame, it peaked with the phenomenal first two acts, but overall the fact that this game even met my expectations was an achievement. That it exceeded them is testament to how big an achievement that was.