Ten years of PlayStation 2

Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love came out for the Playstation 2 on the US on March 30th.That's not a big deal in itself (unless you're a die-hard fan of the strategy/RPG/dating sim/mecha genre), but last month marked the ten-year anniversary of the Japanese release of the PlayStation 2. The American anniversary will be this fall. A decade after its birth and three years after the release of PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2 just keeps lumbering along.

It's been quite a 10 years, too. So many memories: The first PS2 game I ever played, Summoner. Still an underrated game, in my opinion.

The time a friend and I played through Metal Gear Solid 2 in a single marathon session, lasting late into the night. If you're familiar with both the late-game events of MGS2 and the psychological effects of sleep deprivation, you know that's not a good idea. Never before or since has a game caused me to repeatedly ask my friend “OK, have I fallen asleep in my chair and started dreaming, or did he actually just say that?”

Spending more time on the Disgaea games than I have ever spent on any other life activity, including (but not limited to) family gatherings, personal hygiene, schoolwork, and social engagements, EVER.

Becoming violently ill when I failed to anticipate the results of combining a rental copy of the PS2 port of Half-Life, my life-long vulnerability to motion sickness, the lingering effects of an indeterminate quantity of Guinness consumed earlier in the evening, and what later turned out to be the early symptoms of a strain of flu that was going around.

Loving Xenosaga. Then grudgingly tolerating Xenosaga II. Then loving Xenosaga III which, aside from its inexcusable failure to bring back Shion's glasses, was a fantastic comeback for the series.

Seizing control of the train in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and accelerating to such high speeds that it derailed as I approached a bridge, went flying over the side of the chasm the bridge spanned... and just started floating in mid-air, presumably because the programmers at Rockstar didn't anticipate my train fetish.

Being the only adult male in the Western hemisphere who actually liked Tidus in Final Fantasy X.

Joining every other adult male in the Western hemisphere in wondering why the hell Vaan was even in Final Fantasy XII.

Ace Combat 4, Ace Combat 5, and Ace Combat Zero. I let out an anguished Revenge of the Sith-style “NNNNOOOOO” when I found out that Ace Combat 6 was an Xbox 360 exclusive.

The RPG/horror series Shadow Hearts, or at any rate the first two. (The third one was just sort of meh.) Aside from the great gameplay, it broke the usual JRPG mold in all sorts of ways: Instead of the usual fantasy settings, it was set in the early 20th century in our own world. (Aside from some minor liberties taken with history. For instance, the real Grigori Rasputin died after being beaten, shot, and thrown into a river by a cabal of noblemen and reactionary politicians, rather then when his aerial fortress was destroyed by a Russo-Japanese shapeshifter in the sky over Petrograd.) The battles were turn-based but relied heavily on reflexes as well as strategy. Protagonist Yuri Hyuga was actually old enough to buy tickets to an R-rated movie without being accompanied by a parent or guardian.

Plus, it had what is probably the filthiest joke ever to appear in an American localization of a Japanese RPG. (Early on, the heroine is being held prisoner in a village where the people have turned to cannibalism. Yuri is having none of that, so he breaks in to demand her release and... well, from there it practically writes itself.)

Persona 3 unexpectedly becoming one of my favorite games of all time. Which I then sold online in mint condition for over $100 when its unexpected success caused a crippling shortage. Then finding a complete used copy in very good condition at my local Game Crazy for $40, buying it, and then selling that for over $100 as well. (Hey, arbitrage is an essential part of any market economy.) Then, shortly afterwords, cackling like some evil top-hatted Gilded Age plutocrat when Atlus announced that they were localizing Persona 3: FES and the once-lucrative Persona 3 used copy market collapsed. Then getting Persona 4, which managed to be even better.

Yes, it's been ten truly magical years of action, adventure, drama, obsessive behavior, profitable speculative bubbles, drunken first-person shooter-induced projectile vomiting, assorted angst-ridden bishonen both likable and unlikable, and Russo-Japanese shapeshifters making appalling puns about cunnilingus. A true golden age.

Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker to feature 40-minute Revolver Ocelot monologue about the Pepsi Challenge

The upcoming Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, a prequel set in the 1970's starring Naked Snake/Big Boss, will will contain some rather garish product placement for real-world products including Axe Body Spray, Mountain Dew, Pepsi, and Doritos. (See here and here.) This has led to some pretty severe criticism from some fans, because apparently the verisimilitude of Metal Gear Solid's heretofore grittily realistic world of military action, international intrigue, evil sentient amputated limbs, casual fourth wall-breaking, men made out of bees, and postmodern hyperreality will be shattered by the presence of anachronistic soda logos.

Admittedly, a lot of the placement's look pretty tacky, but I think the products chosen are actually a good thematic fit. With the possible exception of the Kingdom Hearts series, I can't think of any other franchise that screams "stuff someone thought up sitting in a huge cloud of marijuana smoke at 2 AM" more than Metal Gear Solid. So, really, having part of the gameplay revolve around searching for Doritos seems entirely appropriate.

41m@ \/\/i11 pwnzor j00, p01ntm@n LOL!!1!!1, (Or, existence of F.E.A.R. 3 revealed)

The good news just keeps rolling in for me. A promotional image for the third game in the F.E.A.R. first-person shooter series has appeared in a Spanish gaming magazine, featuring recurring series antagonist/spooky psychic chick Alma, some creepy undead-looking guy, and what appears to be an enraged rifle-wielding Jesus all surmounted by the title "F.3.A.R." Should be good times.

About that title, though. I love the F.E.A.R,. series, and it's out of that very love that I say this: Using numbers as substitutes for letters is the most obnoxious form of communication ever conceived by human beings. Unless you're a time-traveling hacker who needs to send a coded message to your past self in 1989 and/or The Artist Formerly Known As Prince, just don't. When people hear that a new F.E.A.R sequel is coming out, they should be thinking "dramatic shootouts, creepy horror, and pissed-off brunettes who kill people with psychokinetic powers," not "subliterate 14-year-old on the Xbox Live support forums demanding to know why he's not allowed to use ''B1tchslapRaH0Wa420' as his gamertag."

Persona 5 announced: I am far too masculine and dignified to make “squee” noises, but if that were not the case I would do so here

Katsura Hashino of Atlus, director of Persona 3 and producer of Persona 4, has announced that work is now under way on the fifth game in the popular RPG series. Virtually nothing else is known at this point; even the system it's being made for is still a mystery. Atlus USA has been doing a nice job making the various Shin Megami Tensei-related games available in America, and Persona 3 and 4 were two of my favorite games on the PS2, so confirmation that there will be a Persona 5 is great news for me.

I'm curious to see where they take it. One of the interesting things about parts 3 and 4 was that, despite sharing a setting and having the same basic mechanics, the tone of the games was strikingly different. This extended from the plot and characters into subtle things like the color of the in-game menus (dark and somber-looking in 3, lots of cheery yellow and orange for 4) and whether the majority of the game's important events too place at night (Persona 3) or during the day (Persona 4). It was quite a shift.

Which made sense, given that the dominant theme of Persona 4 was the pursuit of truth, self-understanding and acceptance, and the overcoming of illusions and ignorance, whereas the theme of Persona 3 was DEATH IS INEVITABLE AND INESCAPABLE, ESPECIALLY FOR YOU. (I hasten to add that the game is much more fun than that probably makes it sound.) I thought that they did both styles extremely well, so I look forward to seeing what's next.

Just Cause 2: The Grappling Hookening

The release is just a few days away, so I wanted to put in a good word for Just Cause 2. I downloaded the PS3 version of the demo, and it blew me away like nothing else has in years. The demo has a half-hour time limit in which you can run around a small portion of the game world, and I have played it at least eight times; that's how addicted to it I am. I'm incredibly cheap and usually have a decent-sized backlog of games to play through, so I rarely buy games as soon as they come out; Just Cause 2 is the first game released by a company not named Atlus that I've ever been excited enough about to actually preorder.

It's a third-person open world action game game where you roam around the fictional island nation of Panau, destroying facilities, assassinating enemy leaders, and doing missions for various factions to overthrow the tyrannical government of the island. In addition to the various weapons you can wield and vehicles you can commandeer, you have a grappling hook and reloadable parachute you can use to rapidly travel across the terrain, zip to advantageous positions to attack, escape from pursuing enemies, and destroy things in various creative ways. It's sort of like Mercenaries meets Red Faction: Guerrilla meets Bionic Commando meets gleefully over-the-top action movies like The Transporter.



Based on my experiences with the demo, I would enthusiastically recommend this game if you are interested in any of the following:

Zipping from building to building and vehicle to vehicle with a grappling hook while your enemies are in hot pursuit, sort of like Spider-Man if Spider-Man spent more time killing people in Third World countries.

Blowing lots of things up.

Advancing beyond mundane forms of transport acquisition like running up to vehicles and carjacking them at intersections, and having the option of alternative methods such as parachuting off a cliff that overlooks a busy road, landing on the roof of a moving car, forcing your way in through the window, and seizing the wheel, all while the car continues barreling down the highway at fifty miles an hour.

An open-world game where you run around kicking ass, wreaking havoc, and fleeing from the pursuing authorities with a main character who's not a sociopathic hooker-killing gangster.

Leaping off the roof of a four-story building, firing a grappling hook at an attacking enemy helicopter in mid-air, reeling yourself in, spraying submachine gun fire at the crew while hanging on to the outside of the cockpit, hauling the pilot out of his seat and hurling him to his doom, seizing control of the helicopter in mid air, and unleashing a torrent of rockets and gatling gun fire at the enemy troops gathered below.

If you own a PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, or PC, try out the demo if you haven't already. The full game is coming out on March 23rd. Amazon.com has a nice deal where you get $15 credit towards the next game you buy from them if you preorder Just Cause 2, so if you do any new game shopping there you can essentially get it for $45. I'm definitely looking forward to this one.

(Note: This ought to go without saying, but I receive no compensation from either Square Enix or Eidos for this post. Sadly, despite the boundless potential for niche marketing offered by the internet, the "video game fans who like jokes about particle physics and Oliver Cromwell" demographic is not large enough to make corrupting me worthwhile. I do get a small percentage through if anyone buys the game via the Amazon link in this post, but be assured that the emotional and spiritual satisfaction I would gain from the knowledge that I helped someone find a game they enjoyed would vastly overshadow any merely material gain that... Hell, I can't even type that sentence with a straight face.)

Must.... resist... disgusting... Wiimote joke...

Microsoft is going to try to market the Xbox360's motion control system, Project Natal, through celebrity endorsements in women's fashion/relationship/celebrity magazines such as Vogue and Glamour, presumedly in the hope of using motion-controlled games to reach beyond the existing gamer market in the same way the Nintendo Wii has done. It really is quite remarkable, when you think about it. The idea of stuff about video games in something like Vogue really drives home how much things have changed since I was a kid. I grew up in a time and place where a significant interest in gaming was extremely uncool, and where female gamers were like alien civilizations or tachyons- we didn't rule out the theoretical possibility of such a thing, but the idea had no empirical support and the actual sighting of one would have been a major discovery.

It does seem like an interesting idea- if it works, it would give Microsoft an untapped new market that the more family-focused Wii doesn't already dominate. I'm really not sure how many different games you can make in the Top 14 Positions to Make Your Man A Groveling Sex Slave/Summer Outfits to Conceal Your Colossal Buttocks/Yet Another Goddamn Article About Anne Hathaway's Hair genre before the market is oversaturated, so hopefully Microsoft will show a little more imagination than we've seen in past attempts to market games to women.

Star Trek Online not yet making players suffer enough, executive producer says

In response to complaints about the new Star Trek Online MMORPG's lack of a significant penalty for death, Craig Zinkievich of Cryptic has said that the developers are looking into ways to “give players a deeper sense of loss when something bad happens,” but that he doesn't like the the type of penalties usually used by the genre, saying:

“I get that people want to feel a sense of risk when they’re fighting in battles, but if the only emotion you feel when you’re playing a game is fear that you’re going to lose some time due to an arbitrary gameplay mechanic, we’re probably not doing something right, ” he said.

Originally, I was going to suggest that Cryptic buy the rights to Star Trek: Insurrection and force players to sit through a brief clip of it while their characters respawn. Then I remembered that he said he wanted to create a “sense of loss,” not a “sense of dismay, nausea, and revulsion, coupled with indignation that Paramount tried to pass off a really bad rejected script from the TV show as a feature film.” So, back to the drawing board.

You know, the first time I glanced at the source article, I immediately thought, “Wait, the Federation doesn't have the death penalty anymore. It's one of those things they've somehow 'evolved beyond,' like greed and racism and dignified military uniforms that don't look like something from the Men's Sleepwear section at Sears.” I hate it when I get my wires crossed like that.

(Yes, I'm aware of General Order 7. Don't imagine you can outgeek me on this, poindexter.)