A Week Without Trophies.....

My epic quest to get my write ups caught up continues! This time, I play two games with no periodic psychological validations (I also call them Trophies and Achievements) whatsoever! In fact, both of them even berated me, one with it's increasingly convoluted series canon, and the other with an actual psychiatrist! Read on!

Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker

• Platform: PSP
• Release Date: 6/8/10 (3 months behind!)
• Trophies: None!
• Playthroughs: 1@32 hours
• I compare it to: A REAL handheld Metal Gear Solid

Let me throw this out there right now: Loving a franchise doesn't necessarily mean you automatically love each entry. Portable Ops, the first Metal Gear on PSP, was a mess, story and gameplay wise. It was a pain to do just about anything, and after my one and only playthough, I pretty much regretted my 3-day valley-wide search for a used copy. I am very happy to say that its follow up, Peace Walker, is much easier to mistake for an actual Metal Gear Solid game.

Graphically, PW runs circles around it's predecessor. While PO fell far short of the high bar set by MGS2 in 2001(!), PW looks almost as good as Snake Eater and really pushes the limits of the PSP hardware. It's seriously gorgeous for a handheld game, especially the jungle environments.

As with pretty much any game with shooting on the PSP, the controls are an issue. The right-stick camera control that was used to great effect in MGS: Subsistence and MGS4 has been, like most PSP shooters, mapped to the face buttons, and I want to break the control scheme with my face every time I play one of these. However, MGS:PW does it better and less painfully than just about anything I've played. That doesn't make it right though.

One of the features in Portable Ops that I never got into was the soldier management system. Acquiring new recruits was so cumbersome that after the first three or so, I didn't even bother getting them from the field. Capturing mercs is SO much easier in this entry, thanks to the Fulton Recovery System (a balloon you attach to downed soldiers). No more dragging passed out men back to the shady truck for purposes unknown! This enables you to actually build a proper army of captured soldiers, and as a result, I got ridiculously involved in the mercenary combat mission mini-game. This, more than anything else, I what found myself addicted to during my time with Peace Walker. I caught myself saying things like “Oh, just one more sortie” and, “I really should send this back, but I don't want to just yet” that took me by surprise. The mini-game REALLY gets fun when you acquire a certain piece of hardware.

The story is told in the same animated graphic novel style cutscenes as PO, except this time, you may be surprised by the occasional integrated quick time event (usually resulting in surprise and death if you're not paying attention). This game is a far more important link in the chain, begun in Snake Eater, that sees the hero Naked Snake transform into the villain we know by the first Metal Gear as Big Boss. (In my opinion, as a character, Big Boss is arguably more dynamic and compelling than Solid Snake.) It's filled with more than its share of anime style ludicrosity (yeah, it's a word. MY word) and blatant technological anachronism, but its still a great look at the reasons why one of America's greatest Cold War heroes became a despotic warlord. And a whole bunch of other stuff that I don't even bother telling the wife about.

In short, if you're a fan of Hideo Kojima's continuing dude soap, Peace Walker is a must play. If not, go play something else. I don't have time to explain the backstory (and I can't risk Tiger Wife hearing me tell you).

What's that, Konami? You have another game from one of my legacy franchises for me to play?

 

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories

• Platform: PS2
• Release Date: 1/19/10
• Playthrough: 1@10 hours
• Trophies: None!
• I compare it to: Silent Hill: Now with Waggle! But not, since it's on PS2.

It's pretty easy to tell when a game is designed for the Wii. When the graphics are PS2 quality, when there are extraneous minigames (like opening a cabinet and removing a key) that scream “MOTION CONTROL, COOL HUH!!!!” , and when said game is ported to PS2, that pretty much seals the case. And this begs the question from me, if a motion control game is ported to a non-motion control system, was it any more fun with the motion controls? In the case of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, probably not.

To be fair, the Silent Hill games have never been much “fun” in the traditional sense. The first one was a new level of unrelenting nightmare for me when I first played it on the PS1 in 1999, and I was so enthralled with its new type of atmospheric horror that I didn't really notice how shitty the controls were. (That happened a lot in those days) The controls have never been fluid and easy, but they've incrementally improved over the years. The franchise's shift to motion control, and the shift back for the port only tell me that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Shattered Memories is a reimagining (reboooooooot) of the original Silent Hill and still tells the story of Harry Mason and his search for his lost daughter Cheryl in the haunted resort town, but it has changed significantly. Instead of the hellish rusty/bloody chain-link, barbed wire, tar-drenched underworld that the dark side of the town transformed into for the original, it is now an equally hellish frozen graveyard, with every tree, building, person, blade of grass covered in a shroud of ice. Exploring doesn't ever reach the heights of dread that the previous entries did, but it's still kind of creepy and fun to look at.

Combat is plagued with game-breaking flaws, the most glaring of which is the fact that YOU DON'T EVER ACTUALLY FIGHT! Enemy encounters literally consist of “Run away, run through glowing door, jump to glowing edge, OMG you're caught mash some buttons!1!!!11! Run some more, hide for a second, OMG you're caught! Rinse, repeat until by an extremely frustrating process of trial and error, you finally arrive at your destination (and in one particularly infuriating example, you have to run back out to, I kid you not, look at the colors on a toucan's nose. No shit.). I've played games where your only option was to run, such as Clock Tower, and those can be fun/scary if they're well designed, and there's an eventual way to outwit and thwart your pursuer, such as a trap to lead it into, an environmental hazard to turn to your advantage, or a finding a big ass rocket launcher. However, Shattered Memories gives you no way to fight back, and as a gamer, this adds nothing to my experience but frustration. Maybe this makes me a dumb alpha male, but I like to confront my fears head on, and I don't like to run unless I'm running to get a better weapon to kick its ass with. Analyze that.

And that brings me to what I actually really like about Shattered Memories, and that's it's storytelling style. The game begins with a home video of the Mason family, at home, at an amusement park, etc. After the video has played, your psychiatrist ejects it, talks to you a bit, then has you fill out a questionnaire. The questionnaire has several vanilla questions, then gets into what Captain Hammer would call the “weird stuff.” Questions about substance use, sexual proclivities, things I generally only talk about when I'm drunk. Your answers to these questions actually influence the game, and your further “sessions” with the psychiatrist (who really doesn't pull any punches, he's actually kind of a dick), which serve as bookends to the game's levels contribute to this along with (seemingly random) things you do during the game. In classic Silent Hill fashion, there are multiple endings, (Fun fact: I'm sure that EVERY guy that's played this has gotten the “perv” ending. Ask me why, I dare you.) and characters throughout the story adapt to your actions. I was also very happy to find that Shattered Memories has one of the best story twists since the end of Silent Hill 2.

The other thing I liked about Shattered Memories has probably been my favorite thing about every Silent Hill game, and that's the excellent soundtrack by series producer Akira Yamaoka. Ever since the first Silent Hill, the series has had some of the most distinctive tunes in the entire industry. I have most of the soundtrack albums. While he didn't compose all of the music in this entry, Yamaoka's tracks on the Shattered Memories soundtrack are just as powerful and emotive as they've always been. I'm trying to put together a two-hour “Best of Video Games” playlist right now, and what I'm stuck on is finding the “best” track to represent Silent Hill. There's too damn many.

Silent Hill is a franchise that has struggled to get it right and I'm not sure it ever will. Psychological horror is utterly defeated by the confidence of a gamer who has learned a well polished control scheme; that sense of empowerment is very difficult to shake and few games ever get there (a few newer franchises have, see Dead Space and Metro 2033). Will I keep playing Silent Hill? With Yamaoka's departure from the franchise (as well as his music), it doesn't look likely. But, who knows. Maybe a future entry will have something new to offer.

Next Time! 2 down, 16 to go!