1UP editors ponder the future of Hideo Kojima’s mega-series.
By: 1UP Staff November 21, 2011
Jeremy Parish, Editor-in Chief
You know what I’d like to see for Metal Gear Solid 5? Nothing. Don’t get me wrong; I’ve been following — and a fan of — the Metal Gear games since before the original game came out for NES. I love me some Metal Gear. But at this point, and MGS4 will back me up on this, the series just has too much baggage. Why not just start over with a clean slate and a new series and let Kojima and his folks work their magic without having to worry about an insanely convoluted backstory that was never meant to be concluded? Oh, right… money.
Fine. If Kojima has to go ahead with a fifth chapter, I only see two ways for it to work. One, jump way far into the future and leave behind the legacy cast. Maybe make the game about Olga’s kid Sunny, all grown up into an idiot savant secret agent who sings about eggs while she snaps necks, but leave everyone else behind. Alternately, let’s take the series way into the past and focus on The Boss (aka The Joy) and her work with Cobra Unit in World War II. Or, hell, stop the flirting and cockteasing and just let Metal Gear make out with Assassin’s Creed already. Find some way to combine the two series’ ridiculous story lines into one. (Suggestion: The Apple is nanomachines!)
Whatever the case, Metal Gear Solid 5 shouldn’t be about the Snakes. Not Solid Snake, not Liquid Snake, not Naked Snake, and definitely not Solidus. Their story is done. The Patriots’ story is done. Here’s an idea, though: Why not get back to basics and make a Metal Gear that’s about, you know, Metal Gear? The series’ big deal used to be the mad threat represented by a compact, self-contained nuclear delivery system. Before the AIs named after dead presidents and social manipulation and impossible continuity, Metal Gear was about a simple deadly threat. I’d love to see that kind of clarity of purpose in the series again.
Bob Mackey, Features Admiral
If you’d like to see the direction the Metal Gear Solid series should go, look no further than Peace Walker; though the game’s admittedly built with on-the-go play in mind, it managed to shake off most of the baggage that clung to the series for so long. Simplified controls, a dialed-back story, a nearly bottomless toy box full of weapons and gadgets, and several multi-layered RPG systems built for endless tinkering — all of these elements brought Metal Gear far above the fan-pandering torture that nearly sunk Solid 4. Given that MGS4 tied up every loose end (and turned Solid Snake into a human Hot Pocket), the series has an unprecedented amount of breathing room; and since the Metal Gear timeline stretches across 50 years, Kojima and his team now have the ability to dip in and out of this history at their leisure. So why shouldn’t they?
So, where could Metal Gear Solid go with its fifth official installment? Honestly, it’d be fantastic to see remakes of the original two Metal Gears, even if Kojima repurposed a great deal of these games’ content for the original Solid. But instead of putting the spotlight on Snake, why can’t the Metal Gear team instead show us the story of Outer Heaven through the eyes of Big Boss himself? It’d be the perfect send-off to a character they’ve been progressively developing since Metal Gear Solid 3, not to mention a fine opportunity for Metal Gear fans to experience a plotline currently trapped behind a thick mesh of outdated mechanics and primitive storytelling.
I was pleasantly surprised when I sampled Nintendo’s upcoming Wii party game Fortune Street last month at New York Comic-Con. Despite being a multiplayer title starring Mario and other game mascots in a virtual board game setting, Fortune Street is the furthest thing from Mario Party you could imagine. The few minigames it contains are generally automated affairs that play themselves in a few short seconds: no button-mashing or stick-twirling required. Rather, Fortune Street has far more in common with Hasbro’s Monopoly than with the usual minigame collections that have shown up as multiplayer releases over the past decade.
What I didn’t realize based on my NYCC hands-on is that it’s even deeper than that. Fortune Street is playable in both standard and simplified modes, and at public events Nintendo has been demoing it in the latter mode. With the training wheels taken off, Fortune Street is kind of ridiculous. Like a real “grown-ups” board game such as Risk or Monopoly, a single match can take hours. I recently played a demo with other members of the gaming press — including IGN’s Audrey Drake — and two hours wasn’t enough for us to complete a game. And that wasn’t even on one of the more complex boards!
Minecraft, one might have noticed, is kind of a big deal. If you’re the sort of person who reads about videogames on the Internet, which seems like a safe assumption, it would have taken a directed force of will to avoid hearing about it by now. So you probably already know that it’s a sandbox style game that takes place in a procedurally generated world made up of one-meter blocks that can be mined and crafted to create everything from a simple sod house to a scale replica of the starship Enterprise. Or an automated pooping butt. Or a gigantic mechanical player piano. Or a scale recreation of most of Middle Earth. Or… yeah, the sense of awe at the outrageous feats of engineering players have cobbled together is only eclipsed by the sales of the game itself and the subculture that has sprouted up around it.
Almost two years ago Minecraft went from a weird indie project with a cult following to a million-seller that’s still earning nearly $200,000 a day in sales, and that was before the game was officially released. This game that one guy slapped together has now become the nucleus of a massive fandom — one that just enjoyed its first major convention in Vegas over this past weekend. Hell, some guy made an entire concept album about the game’s iconic suicide-bombing creepers. This last Halloween you may have even encountered your first Minecraft costumes in the wild, and when you open your door to see a kid wearing a hand-painted cardboard box creeper mask making that blood curdling “SSSSSsss” sound, there’s really nothing to do other than dump the entire candy bowl into their bag while kicking yourself for not being Notch — who is one can only assume is spending his days swimming like a tophat-wearing duck in an Olympic sized swimming pool filled with Euros.
Max Payne 3 will at long last be out next year, and coming with it is a Special Edition that devoted fans of the series can drop some extra cash on.
The biggest component of it is a TriForce-created, 10-inch statue of Max Payne with his pistols drawn. Joining that are a pair of art prints showing Max’s vices — pills and bullets, namely. You also get a bullet keychain, the soundtrack for the game, and some in-game content in the form of two DLC packs.
It is a difficult thing to distance yourself from something you’ve had a hand in creating when trying to be critical. That is especially true when you’re talking about a game you’ve spent months or even years of your life working on day after day. Knowing this, it would be hard to take a review of a game seriously that’s been written by someone who developed it. But what if you read a game review from one of that game’s developers and didn’t even know it?
That’s a situation Telltale Games is now dealing with after a pair of its staffers wrote user reviews for Jurassic Park: The Game on Metacritic where they heaped praise upon the game without noting who they were.
If you like classic NFL Blitz it’s going to take you awhile to get used to EA’s new downloadable PSN/XBLA reboot of the series — it’s not the game you remember. I recently played a few rounds of the new Blitz at an EA Sports event. At first glance it looks like faithful recreation of the arcade original: The plays are exactly the same. Thirty yards are required for a first down. There are seven people to a team. Madden-style button passing is noticeably absent — though I did see a tool-tip on a loading screen suggesting that it would be available in the final version — instead, you’ll select a receiver by pushing the left stick (which also controls QB movement) in your target’s direction.
However, the second I got my hands on the controller, I realized that this isn’t Blitz as I remembered. I was hoping for a faithful recreation à la EA’s own NBA Jam. Instead, what I played was a game that seemed, well, inhibited. It’s as if its creators had wanted a faithful remake, but were stymied by forces outside of their control. Take the classic Blitz feature of tackling an opposing player between plays. It’s absent from this new version, but there’s still a strange pause in the game after a down, but before play selection. The players even pop up from a tackle and look around as if they’re waiting to be hit — just like the original game. It’s as if the feature was implemented at one point, but then later taken out — perhaps at the request of the NFL?
Runic Games had been hoping to get Torchlight II out by the end of the year. President Travis Baldree now says the company “made a good run at that” at that goal, but it simply isn’t realistic. Rather than release an inferior product, it will instead take the extra time to ensure the game is as good as it can be.
“We’ve come to the realization, however, that getting a game of this scope up to the quality and polish level we want to achieve is going to take a little longer,” he wrote on the game’s official website today, “especially since we want to run a small beta before release to ensure that our launch is smooth.”
Among the exclusives announced during Sony’s E3 press conference this year were bonuses for a handful of EA games and THQ’s Saints Row: The Third. Now that The Third is here, it seems as if that particular E3 reveal didn’t pan out.
The nature of the bonus wasn’t specified at the time; we simply knew it would include a mode centered around the game’s signature weapon. Joystiq reports there doesn’t appear to be anything exclusive to the PlayStation 3 version of the game and that THQ isn’t commenting on the situation. It’s speculated that Whored Mode could have once been the bonus, only that ended up in 360 and PC versions of the game in addition to the PS3 one. THQ wouldn’t say if that was the case one way or the other.
In this new age of fighting games, Marvel vs. Capcom 3 was easily the most anticipated fighter to be released next to Street Fighter 4 — though most will agree that it felt like an unfinished product. For everything that it did right — silky smooth gameplay, amazing graphics, and endless team combinations — over the course of a few months it became quickly apparent that there was much that needed to be fixed and adjusted.
Plagued with sub-par online modes and netcode; extremely overpowered characters such as Phoenix, Wolverine, and Akuma ; and not to mention glitches that allowed players to kill their opponent’s character in a single combo — most couldn’t help but feel a bit cheated when they learned an Ultimate version of the game was right around the corner. I think I’m not alone in saying that after 10 years of waiting for a new entry into the series after Marvel vs. Capcom 2, having to wait an extra six to nine months for a “complete” version of the game would be totally bearable for most.
