Archive for November, 2007

I’ve recently finished MGS3 and am still recovering from what a masterpiece this is. I had obviously heard a ton of praises of it, but have avoided it for so long for two reasons: it contained two themes that I quite hate, war and stealth/patience in games. I’m absolutelly not sorry, on the contrary. It’s one of those very rare masterpieces that actually impressed me much more as I went along and discovered the continued attention to detail and greatness, as oposed to it throwing it all at me in the first hours of the game.

First and foremost I have to praise the games cinematics. They were done with great care and impressive skils. They totally took me away from the awareness of the ps2′s technical limitations and into the realm of fascination and respect for cinematic style. Oh, did I mention? … I do believe they are in-engine cinematics… yet they look amazing! A little blur here, a little hue shift there, and a ton of little details like a bird flying off in the distance or a little bit of dust and motion blur make a world of difference.

Secondly the story is deliciously intricate and I must say this is the best spy type story I have encountered in any movie, game, or book. The characters evolve with amazing depth and it has a way of constantly throwing at you believable problems that turn apparently straight forward things into twisted pathways of problem solving.

Well, in a sea of goodness… let’s give a try to the bad stuff: well, I would say the stealth and patience required, but the game is delightful in that the difficulty if set low enough (I obviously played it on easiest level) can actually be played like a total action game, with total dissregard for the way it was meant to be played: stealth and patience. It was really great, because I would still do the stealth part because it was fun, but I wasn’t getting frustrated or retrying when things got difficutl. Getting the player to actually play the steath because he wants to, not because he has to: ***wonderful***. … umm… what else? Well, it’s so easy to forgive the game for all the bad stuff because of the amazing cinematics. Tens of minutes at a time (or so it felt) and yet I was always on the edge of my seat waiting for what’s goign to happen, which character would turn on which, what story twist would occur… Also on that topic: the game has one of the best self refferencing parody I’ve seen. Possibly the best one ever. It manages to be in-character and yet outrageous at the same time. Now I should mention at this point that I very much dislike 95% of parody stuff. I strongly believe in serious treatment of serious topics so I hate it when gratuitous humour is used. Luckily the game has a quite serious treatment throughout the solid 24h of gameplay that it took me and only has these parody cinematics as extras. And amazing extras they are too… but only if you’ve seen the actual serious tone cinematics. And it’s none of that "bloopers" stuff either… they could be short films in themselves. I’ll risk partially spoiling one, just because they’re so many: for example there’s this really intricate long cinematic and gameplay experience inside a might-crash airplane, one that starts off with the "villain" (so many layers upon layers…) breaks through a door, anyway, there’s this bonus scene "the quick version" in which that results not in him starting the fight, but in him falling out the other door. It may sound like a standar silly "blooper", but these extras have the same attention to detail and video editing and postprocessing like the normal cinematics, so much so … well, you just have to see it to believe it. Or there’s this quite long one that uses story elements and yet feels like it’s a reference to that I believe "Eraser" movie, with time travel that manages to insert itself into a lot of moments in the story in subtle, almost believable ways, explaining things not shown… I’ll stop now: it’s no fun unless you see them, and even then it’s no fun unless you’ve seen all the serious toned cinematics throghout the game.

I’ll end my impressions with two notes:

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