Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker

I never learned how to play Metal Gear despite finishing several titles from the series. Peace Walker teaches you how to play Metal Gear properly, and it feels good to finally be on even terms with the series.

It’s quite simple, really: all the missions are split into short segments and you can choose to replay past missions. You’re being graded for your performance, the main criteria being speed and secondary how few alarms you’ve raised, how few kills you’ve made and how few enemies you’ve left dying (as opposed to hauling them away to your base for care). Acting violently decreases your heroism score, which affects how many new recruits you get, but it’s usually the easy way out to just shoot your way out of trouble.

But the thing is, you know killing is not the right way to do it, and while you can progress in the story by clearing a path with bullets, you’ll be back to perfect your scores. In past games triggering an alarm was frustrating, because the enemies would just keep coming. This time you’ll kill a few and that’s it. It’s also usually a viable option to just leg it, hide yourself and wait for things to calm down. The enemy is quite good at flushing you out, but playing smart it’s entirely possible to evade capture.

The outcome is that you learn how to sneak aggressively, taking out enemies on your way without killing them and always remaining unseen. And it’s voluntary – the game does not force it on you, rather, it rewards it.

This structure alone would make me consider Peace Walker an important title in the series, but it’s got a lot more going for it, as well. Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops was an interesting title with lots of problems, the main ones being that the soldier collection mechanic was tedious to use – you had to physically carry every knocked out soldier to the exit – and the controls were more or less broken.

Peace Walker fixes both of these issues with instant evacuation (via a balloon) and shifting the camera controls to the face buttons, in addition to a host of usability improvements. The inventory is now large enough, for instance. It works really very well, I’ve only cursed the controls a bit in up close and personal combat – which always means you’ve messed up anyway – and during some of the boss fights.

The soldier collection is actually a key part of the game. You’re assembling an army, building a base and researching technology. Set in the 1960s in South America, you’re playing as Big Boss (as in Portable Ops) and very quickly it turns out you’ll be putting together Outer Heaven, the legendary mercenary state featured in pretty much all of the previous Metal Gear titles, being the setting of the original game (Metal Gear, 1987) which Solid Snake is infiltrating (to take out Big Boss). If you’re a Metal Gear fan at all, this is very exciting stuff! The Metal Gear universe had got so convoluted by the time of Metal Gear Solid 4 (2008) that I wasn’t really keeping up any more despite being a fan, and it’s great to reconnect with the series this way. It feels like you’re re-enacting history, if you’ve spent a lot of time with the series.

The oft-ridiculed Metal Gear gameplay to exposition ratio is better than at any time before in the series. Generally, you get a cutscene every few missions and while some of them are a bit lengthy, they don’t get tedious. Some are interactive. The comic book style used is gorgeous throughout. Missions generally are never interrupted by plot. When you’re playing, you’re playing, and for once the Konami designers have allowed the gameplay to shine on its own. There’s plenty of variety on offer. While the levels are relatively straightforward, you usually have at least two routes through them, exploration is rewarded, and you always have options on how to handle enemies on your way, depending on positions, time available and what equipment you kitted out with when embarking on the mission.

The Southern America setting and the 60s vibe with Ashley Wood’s lively, animated comic book cutscenes contribute in a major way to the strong mood.

As we’re just past the halfway mark, Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker is a strong contender for game of the year.

Soul Calibur: Broken Destiny

Fighting games on handheld consoles are something of a weird combination. Obviously the big problem is that unless there happens to be a PSP-player with the same game in the same room (and that room isn’t an airline cabin), I will be playing against the computer. Playing fighters against the computer is never ideal, and in many cases it can downright spoil the game due to cheap AI.

Yet I’ve put more hours into Tekken: Dark Resurrection (warning: clumsy and hilarious Flash site) and now Soul Calibur: Broken Destiny than their big-screen incarnations, much as I love Soul Calibur IV. Leaving out long flights, what makes me come back to these games?

I think it’s a combination of very quick, very short games which keeps me distracted when I’m not up for a more involved game and the character creation mode, shared by both of these PSP fighters. I spend probably more time in character creation than actually fighting. It’s a creative challenge, really – can I make this character look better just by changing the colors of his equipment? Can I make this hair work? I realize it’s dress-up, playing with dolls, really. In this PSP version, the character creation does not affect the way the character plays, so you can try out different looks without crippling your game, which was a problem in Soul Calibur IV.

It helps that Soul Calibur is really an excellent game. I’ve found several favorite characters in each instalment of the series, and the way how differently the characters play really keeps it fresh. The PSP version works just as well as the big-screen versions and I actually find the mechanics somewhat improved from Soul Calibur IV (I couldn’t tell how, exactly, they just feel better). Also, no ridiculous Star Wars characters this time around. Kratos from God Of War series is a very good fit in the character roster, even if he feels a bit cheap.

Rock Band Unplugged

I got the PSP incarnation of my favorite franchise on a trip to Guildford, UK. It continues to baffle me why I need to pay so much more for the games over here in Finland. I would certainly buy a lot more new games if they weren’t quite so expensive.

You’d think that it’s all about the peripherals (I have four plastic guitars, a drum kit and five mics at home) or all about playing with friends (I have some), neither of which comes with this portable Rock Band experience. But it turns out that no, it’s all about the music, and aside from some classic and progressive rock pieces, Harmonix is very good to my ears.

You can see the track listing on the official Rock Band Unplugged page. There are only nine out forty songs that are new to this game, which is a little disappointing, but overall the setlist is very strong. Freezepop’s Less Talk More Rokk is my favorite song thus far and indeed, I got their latest album based on how much I like them in the game.

You play the game by hitting a phrase 100% correct, which then triggers the instrument to play on its own for a while. You then switch to the next instrument. When you struggle to get a phrase correct, all the instruments start to fail and before you know it, the song is over. You only use four buttons (left, up, triangle, circle) to play, the shoulders to switch between instruments and X to engage star power. It sounds very simple, but the difficulty level is spot on. Moving up to hard difficulty, I have struggled to comprehend how my fingers could move that fast or my brain process the very complex patterns flying at me at warp speed and yet I usually somehow manage. Of course, it’s no different from doing the same on the faux guitars or drums, and playing at a sufficiently challenging level, you get the same kind of satisfaction from doing well.

I do miss friends and especially singing, but the gameplay is really very good.

You can even buy new songs for the game, in the first in-game store for the PSP. The price point should be lower, though, and I can’t really see myself picking up any of them unless there’s a more sensibly priced collection available at some point.

God Of War’s testosterone-dripping protagonist Kratos slices and smashes his way to the PSP, in a rather charming manner. A straightforward action title, Chains Of Olympus is essentially big-box entertainment in pocket size, just the way the PSP always promised yet has so often failed to deliver on. (Notable exceptions including Tekken and Killzone, at least.)

Visually, it’s up there with the best the PS2 could put up. Beautiful models, lighting, animation and textures, all without slowdown and with the sense of scale entirely intact. It’s impressive stuff, especially considering that the game never stops to load.

They have tackled the controls in a natural manner. When I stopped to consider them, there’s just nothing wrong. You’re never out of buttons and a second stick to control the camera is not longed for. Fighting is fast and fluid. The evade move (LB + RB + stick) is a touch cumbersome, but I don’t much use it save for boss battles.

While the action is good, I would like some more of it. As it stands, sometimes the levels feel too sparsely populated. There are good, memorable fights, but I would prefer more of them. Puzzles are very simple and clearly meant to pace the action, not stop the player for a brain-tease.

For adults only, the game features over the top fantasy violence, breasts (in a historic fashion, mind) and a weird sex scene in the guise of a minigame. They don’t show anything, but your ears might blush. I can’t figure out why it is there, right in the beginning, not really fitting with anything else. I understand it’s a series staple, but to me it’s so disconnected, it feels like the developers are saying “because we can”.