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ROSS FOUBISTER
DATE OF BIRTH: 12/08/1987
HEIGHT: 6"0'
BLOOD TYPE: [UNKNOWN]
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Favorite Games

Super Mario World
Super Mario World
God Hand
God Hand
Metal Gear Solid
Metal Gear Solid
Resident Evil 4
Resident Evil 4
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

628

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015

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000

Games Backloggd


Recently Played See More

Gitaroo Man
Gitaroo Man

Mar 24

Vampire Survivors
Vampire Survivors

Mar 22

Metal Gear
Metal Gear

Mar 18

Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty - HD Edition
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty - HD Edition

Mar 13

Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth
Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth

Mar 06

Recently Reviewed See More

They will never make a better rhythm game than Gitaroo Man

INFINITY==================
Not in a hundred-million years!
===============IMPOSSIBLE

When I've been away from Gitaroo Man, I always have a tentative worry. Does it still hold its power? Have I lost it? By the end of Flyin' To Your Heart, I'm back in. I am the True Gitaroo Man. "We've forgotten this sound for so long!"

Gitaroo Man seems self-aware in a way that its contemporaries don't. I don't just mean in its fun, jokey tone. It knows how to be an hour-long game. Each level presents a new storybeat, and a distinctive musical genre in this shonen anime fairytale musical, introducing enough to keep each idea fun and peppy without ever detailing anything too deeply. It's bright, exciting and fantastical, and that brief running time is the key to so much of that.

The thing that draws you in is how good the music is. It's proper game music. So often, I'll play a music game, and feel let down over how little thought was put into the music. They're often either not very musical, or negligent of how they'll feel to play. Gitaroo Man's music is brilliantly structured for gameplay, with distinct phrases for the moments they're complementing, and the whole thing's so inherently videogamey. Levels are split up into CHARGE, ATTACK, DEFEND and ENDING phases, with the music working so well to convey. Charge sequences have you building your life bar, calmly gaining strength through long, sustained notes. Defend stages have you dodging vicious staccato attacks, that come in the form of rapid button prompts that zoom in from each side of the screen. Attack and Ending phases are the catharsis, with you taking revenge, sustaining long notes to do maximum damage, but if you miss any entirely, that's a knock against you. You've got big Street Fighter life bars at the top of the screen. I don't think there's any piece of imagery you could conjure that could so effectively illustrate the nature of a battle to videogame players. The gameplay mainly takes the form of following "trace lines", which are big bendy lines that converge onto the centre of the screen. You have to react to each one, right on the beat, and follow their bends with the direction of the analogue stick. Bending guitar notes swoop and curve around the screen, in synchronisation with the music, and when you're playing well, you feel like you're nailing a solo, trying your best to resist making Steve Vai faces. It's a similar system to Keiichi Yano's later Ouendan and Elite Beat Agents games, but it feels so much more aggressive with all of the prompts zooming into the middle of the screen. It's combat, it's war!

There's a crucial hook to the game, and something that's deeply undervalued in it. Gitaroo Man adapts to how well you play. It has about a million alternate music bars up its sleeve, determining which would be the best to throw at a player of your skill level. In most levels, you'll very rarely hear the same song twice. I've been returning to Gitaroo Man over and over again for around 20 years, and I still don't think I've heard every bit of Bee Jam Blues hidden on the disc. It's exciting every time, and really encourages multiple playthroughs. This stuff rarely gets talked about, but it's a real feat of both game design and musical composition. You never feel like a phrase is being pulled out from a list of suitable candidates and loaded in. It's all seamless, and given its response to your skill level, it feels both rewarding and emotional. It's the feeling of getting lost in a solo. I have little doubt that the lukewarm response to Project Rap Rabbit's failed Kickstarter pitch was on the fault of the public's ignorance towards this aspect of Gitaroo Man.

It's clear that the game never would have been made without the precedent set by PaRappa the Rapper, and back when PS2 games were all at the same RRP, I can see why so few would have been willing to take a chance on something they'd already dismissed as a flash-in-the-pan novelty, but Gitaroo Man is so much more thoughtfully designed and satisfying to play. 326's artwork doesn't have the broad appeal of Rodney Greenblat's funny animal people. Ignoring the wild rendering techniques of PaRappa and just focusing on what the artists drew, Gitaroo Man's designs are weirder, and pulls more from eccentric 70s robot toys and gag manga. Everything's covered in colourful dials and buttons, and all the faces are bizarre. The visual style is both geekier and cooler than PaRappa, and I've really grown affection for it over the years, but who doesn't love Puma?

The game is so aware of its length. It knows how to use ten levels to tell a Hero's Journey. It never gets too full of itself, or takes itself too seriously, but that doesn't prevent it from doing something beautiful. The story is broad, silly and simplistic, but that's great for a short, E for Everyone game that you'll come back to again and again. The adventure takes the form of one of those Wizard of Oz-style dream scenarios, only a little more ambiguous, where we're returned to the status quo at the end, but one where the hero has learned their lesson. For me, the real ambiguity is in whether or not we're supposed to think U-1 punched Kazuya in the face.

The downsides? Uh... the compression in the FMV cutscenes is a little much. The game makes a great argument for concave analogue sticks, as you might find your thumb sliding a lot on an official Dualshock 2. I don't like that you have to navigate to the Options menu each time you want to load a save... Look - not only is this a 2001 PS2 game, it's a fucking KOEI game. It's amazing that the game came out nearly as slick as it did, drowning out developer talk from the Kessen offices next door.

Gitaroo Man was lightning in a bottle. I don't think we'll ever get a better collaboration of game designers, concept artists and musicians again, and if we do, it won't be with this budget or freedom. I mean, unless the Splatoon team decided it was time to do a narrative-focused Squid Sisters rhythm action spin-off. I don't know. Maybe Nintendo don't have the guts to become the hero.

I appreciate NSO's week-long trials. They're liked being lowered into hell and then hoisted out before it consumes me completely. I don't respect Vampire Survivors. I get it, though. It's a simulacrum of a game. It's satisfying to move the analogue stick in a circle for thirty minutes and watch the upgrades come flooding in. As an unabashed timewaster, it's pretty effective, but that's not the nature of this, is it? I will never play it again in my life. I know it's what awaits me afterwards.

Metal Gear's biggest crime is putting people off from giving Metal Gear 2 a proper go.

This is a very rudimentary version of this concept. Practically a prototype. They haven't learned all the beats yet. Screens exist as their own self-contained states, resetting after you walk into a new one. The radio only works on a handful of screens, and there's little indication of where you ought to be using it. There are also so many leaps in logic and entirely hidden primary objectives, that a walkthrough becomes a requirement. At one point, with no hints or guidance, you need to find an item by exploding your way into a secret room, and unlike the version of this puzzle that appeared in an incomparably superior sequel, the walls are not a different colour.

This was made on a tight schedule from inexperienced staff, and it doesn't do a lot of the things that fans of the later games may be looking for. If Zelda 1 seems too barebones for you, you ought to remember that game was from world-class pros who'd already made Super Mario Bros and Donkey Kong. If any of the staff of Metal Gear 1 had worked on anything before, it was stuff like Magical Tree and Monkey Academy.

Still here? What the game has to offer is atmosphere. It's very much an 80s videogame, but the theming is so much grittier than anything that tried to cover the topic of war or militaries. Outer Heaven is a dark, depressing location. It's all these wide, unpopulated corridors, weird pillars and army trucks. Like it was a third world factory that had been gutted and repurposed by a would-be dictator, or something. Of course, it's all just playing pieces in an action game, but there's a lot of space for headcanon. Indoors, it's unlit and under constant patrol from guards, and outside is covered with landmines and attack dogs. It feels precarious and desperate. There's constant suspicion and danger, and the THEME OF TARA completes the package beautifully.

Metal Gear has a bunch of ideas. Most of them take the form of one-use items, but they're ideas nonetheless. You disguise yourself as the enemy to gain entry to a building, gain a parachute to drop into a blocked-off courtyard, and most iconically - hide inside a cardboard box to bypass security cameras. Using a remote-control missile to blow up a generator for an electrified floor? That's been part of Metal Gear since 1987, baby. There's also a ranking system, based on how many hostages you've freed, determining how much health and ammo you can have - something that's secretly still in the series as late as MGS1 (when Snake eats a ration after a boss and gets a bigger life bar). These little ideas break up the simplistic gameplay, and when it works well, it stops feeling like the Tiger LCD game it often resembles and becomes a top secret mission.

It's easy to see why Kojima thought he'd be better suited to text-based adventure games than free-roaming action games, as the flights of fancy don't often complement the core gameplay, but there is a bit of the explorational appeal that would be developed in later Metal Gears, the Zelda sequels, and games like Metroid and Resident Evil. There's always a bit of excitement to discovering a new key card, wondering which of the previously inaccessible doors you'll be able to open. It's tangible progress, and it feels dead cheeky bypassing each subsequent clearance level in this regimented military fortress.

Does it hold up without association with the later games? I mean, it does as an MSX2 game. Games of this vintage don't often offer Metal Gear's depth, unless they're RPGs, and most of those are far more tedious and scrappily designed than this. I refute the notion that old games can only be appreciated for their historical merit. Super Mario Bros 3 is brilliant fun, whether you're playing it on a NES or discovering it for the first time on the Switch. People were happy to pay full-price for it as GBA title, 15 years after its original release, and rightfully so. Metal Gear requires much more patience and open-mindedness to play. Yes, there's an appeal for series fans to see the first time many of its ideas were attempted, but that only takes you so far. This is a very bullshitty old game. Checkpoints are only logged at each elevator entrance, and there can be a hell of a lot of progress between each visit. Metal Gear TX-55 itself needs to be defeated by memorising a 16-part sequence of which leg to place each explosive on, and if you get any part of it wrong, you have to start over. And the "plot"? Even in this post-Subsistence localisation, it only amounts to about five dialogue boxes, and you won't know which of them are supposed to be significant unless you've heard how those moments are mythologised (and massively expanded upon) by the sequels. We've osmosised ideas about Gray Fox and Big Boss and Outer Heaven over the years, but the reality is no match for the legend, I'm afraid. Don't let anyone tell you you're missing out on a crucial part of the series if you skip this one.

It will add to your appreciation for the later games, though, if only because you'll see how much better these ideas can be done. And people who have played both MSX Metal Gears tend to be far kinder to MGSV's ending than those who only know the Solids. If you're a big fan of the series, I won't tell you not to play this. Just make sure you stick with it, at least until the first boss. I promise it picks up after that.