gets around the occasional frustrating mission or boss fight by having probably the most engaging gameplay loop in a metal gear game that isn't MGS2. the mission-based and base-building style gameplay of capturing soldiers to hire them as combatants or R&D members (among other roles) for MSF fits big boss' leadership qualities more than it does solid snake and is engaging in its own right
they didn't really need to continue big boss' story after MGS3 since I think the end of that game already made his motivations for his more cynical point-of-view in MG2 - but peace walker manages to make its story worthwhile by showing him struggling to come to grips with the boss' death and having him slowly develop into his more villainous personality from MG1 and 2 by the end of the game
the best part, however? this game is deeply unserious - moreso than any metal gear game before it. and I kinda love it for that. the comedic briefing tapes substituting for the prior games' codec banter and the various wacky extra ops that see BB doing silly shit like playing pooyan with fultoned soldiers, or going having rough gay sex with miller under a cardboard box. we've come a long way from bisexual vampires

naked snake/big boss may genuinely be one of my favorite characters in this series behind raiden so far largely because of this game. you can very well see how the philosophy that led him to build outer heaven and zanzibar land takes root in how he was used - and how the boss was disposed of - simply to get the US out of hot water; it makes him become incredibly jaded by the end of the game and far removed from the devoted patriot to his mission and his country he was in the beginning. the events of operation snake eater turn him completely cold, contrasting with the joyful applaud of his puppeteers in the room as the president awards him his new title.
MGS3's character writing is unparalleled to the rest of the series in BB's relationship with the boss, EVA, and ocelot - who all prove to great characters in their own right - even if i still prefer MGS2's story overall. every relationship gets the time to fully develop and reach a logical endpoint, whether it be BB's struggle to open up to EVA turning into him prioritizing her dwindling safety over the mission by the time they escape from groznyj grad, or his somewhat-friendly rivalry with a young, inexperienced revolver ocelot ending in a mutual respect for each other, or both BB and the boss desperately trying to push the love between a mother and son away for the sake of the mission.
the boss could not be any more of a fantastic final fight and closer to this game - one last showdown against the woman who taught you everything you know in a bloodied field of flowers, minutes away from annihilation as the legendary vocals of "snake eater" play in the background. tight shit.

while i feel MGS3 is less tightly designed gameplay-wise than 1 and 2 due to the annoyance of sneaking around in certain areas like groznyj grad, the Metal Gear Special™ of telling a beautiful, profound and thrilling story i feel more than makes up for, despite its flaws, what is still the same tension-filled and satisfying gameplay metal gear is at its core.

what a thrill indeed.

took some time to mull it over, but metal gear solid 2 is genuinely such a brilliantly crafted retort and strengthening of 1's ideas of human individuality to where yeah, i'd say this is the best metal gear game yet purely for how well written it is.

the patriots' ideas of an overabundance of information and conflicting and personal so-called "truths" are very well laid out and incredibly topical years later as most have pointed out, backed up by multiple events throughout the game. it's why the patriots being revealed to be long-dead is such a harrowing whammy of a reveal - solidus and ocelot were fighting against an idea that doesn't even fully and tangibly exist anymore.
and that is exactly what the patriots sought to prevent through the GW system, creating one singular "truth" through justified censorship so as to eliminate humanity from spelling its own doom in the confusion.
but i would actually heavily disagree on MGS2 being as cynical as most make it out to be.
thatmagicalmage couldn't have said it any better in their own review where laser-focusing on MGS2's prediction of a misinformation-ridden future misses how it is incredibly hopeful and loving of the human condition in spite of the negative consequences of free will - evidenced by snake's speech in the post-credits scene describing the importance of our works now that we pass on to the future, and raiden's own decision to live his own life not giving a damn about whether or not he's played into the patriots' hands as he's found his own purpose and what gives him satisfaction - and that is the ultimate triumph he could have ever had over the patriots. it's why i bring up MGS1 because it's very reminiscent of the lesson snake learned about choosing his own life to lead and the antithesis he and raiden play to the gene-devout liquid snake. and yet it doesn't feel like a rehash of MGS1's themes of the importance of individuality, it feels like an extension.
snake and otacon choosing to make their own impact through the anti-metal gear "philanthropy" organization in spite of their forefathers' warmongering efforts shows your path in life isn't beholden to the deeds of your ancestry, and raiden's inability to fall into despair by the hands of the patriots shows no matter how much one may try, no force in this universe has the ability or the right to control how you think or feel. the only person who can decide how you want to live your life is you and you alone, and there's no point in living without that individuality. because it's how we connect with other people.

fuck me, MGS2 is awesome. metal gear is awesome.

the foundation of metal gear 2 is preserved to create an absolute masterpiece of a video game - one that expands on MG2's already solid (hold your applause) stealth mechanics by adding additional QOL such as visible enemy FOVs and the much-needed cutback on long-distance backtracking and tedious card management
but most importantly, metal gear solid further explores MG2's focus on the consequences of those who seek to profit off war and the lives that suffer because of it, along with the persistence and importance of individuality and the human connection even in dire circumstances - evidenced by snake's desire to fight for meryl's sake (setting aside the threat of a nuclear war, of course) and his individuality and desire to live for himself at the end of the game contrasting against liquid's goal of following in big boss' footsteps to satisfy his genes telling him to cause problems on purpose
i love the ending split - meryl's ending is, of course, the better outcome as she lives as a direct consequence of snake withstanding ocelot's torture for her sake, but otacon's directly shows the new lease on life he's gained in spite of sniper wolf's death, and is able to encourage snake to move on and not beat himself up over meryl's death knowing her love does not die with her - each ending i think is no better than the other because both of them do a lot for their respective characters

metal gear solid's just fuckin' awesome man, it's true

black mesa flip-flops between wanting to stay beholden to the original game with newer technology and re-contextualization from prior half-life games, and just completely putting a spin on HL1 - but the latter tends to present itself as the game's way, way weaker moments and it absolutely cannot be more frustrating how much they hold they hold this game back.

i can, at least, sing praises for how jaw-droppingly gorgeous black mesa is, especially given the use of the source 1 engine, in addition to just how masterfully the tragedy of the black mesa incident is shown. HL1 had already done a great job in that regard, but BM takes it to another level - extra dialogue, variations of scientists and security guards and added detail to every map make it feel much more like a real workplace, and the absolute tide-turner that are the surface chapters encompass the absolute stress and overwhelming despair of those who didn't make it during the HECU's last stand and eventual retreat so damn well through the soundtrack, setpieces and wonderfully acted radio transmissions blaring various marines' desperate pleas for help and last words. there's a section in around surface tension that really gets me - where a lone marine, echo-3 juliet, weakily calls out on the radio after his team gets ambushed by alien soldiers mortally wounds him. unable to heal himself, he ends up succumbing to his wounds over the radio.
it's little things like that which can go a long way to illustrate how majorly fucked up the black mesa incident was - an otherwise normal workday gone completely awry, dooming many people only trying to survive. HL2's looming presence also benefits the game greatly in this regard, with characters like eli and kleiner retroactively and seamlessly being integrated into the opening chapter, and also as you overhear emergency alerts progress further and further in urgency, to a point where the president orders a total evacuation of new mexico - foreshadowing HL2's threat of the resonance cascade being much, much worse than just a hostile takeover of black mesa.

the fun stops when black mesa isn't riding off HL1's coattails. for starters, multiple maps force you into routes completely different from the original game with the original sections barricaded for seemingly no reason - these tend to take FAR too much longer than the original level design and really just waste far more time
several puzzles and other sections have been significantly dumbed down which as a whole makes them far less uninteresting (and somewhat abandons the "think" in "run, shoot, think, live") - the entire vent maze in "we've got hostiles" is gone, the tripmines in surface tension are completely visible which eliminates you needing to clear them out and turns it into awkwardly tip-toeing around them (and praying you don't activate their hitboxes anyway - by the way, the surrounding areas with enemy encounters, including the helicopter are also completely gone), and on a rail's maze-like level design is now a pathetic straight shot because people kept complaining about it in the original game
the HECU are abominably more retarded compared to their HL1 counterparts - i'm pretty sure their AI is based off the combine soliders from HL2 and it shows in how crazily omnipotent they are, reducing most chances for you to sneak your way around enemy encounters like you originally could to make up for their brilliant strategy of "get directly into freeman's line of fire" - though this at the very least tends to be somewhat alleviated with the map design.

and then there's xen.

what the fuck happened here?
i think it's already one thing to completely turn xen's barely hospitable, logic-defying, foreboding wasteland into this pretty, serene, teeming-with-beautiful-life alien planet-looking area, and is it pretty? yeah, admittedly, it's one of the best looking maps i've seen in the source engine, but xen is supposed to be an interdimensional train station hurriedly converted into something the nihilanth's troops could live in. "oh but it's just a different interpretation" isn't an excuse - you might as well have sent freeman to an alien planet with BM's take on it.
that having been said, it wouldn't actually sour my opinion on BM's take on xen all that much if it wasn't dramatically worse than the original game's area in terms of level design.
for some reason, crowbar collective thought it wise to comically extend the playtime of HL1's most scorned chapters in an attempt to.. address those complaints? interloper alone can take up to a whopping two hours of basic-yet-repetitive "insert plug into socket" puzzles and visually aggressive combat sequences compared to the original's relatively short platforming sections. you're no longer turning the hunter gonarch into the hunted, you're now spending an hour running away from the damn thing before you tackle it head-on one last time. i don't understand why the devs decided xen needed to be this much longer - nobody does, really!

crowbar collective's ambitions end up souring the game at multiple points, and while i can't fault them for being passionate about the franchise and wanting to one-up half-life source by giving HL1 the remake it truly deserves, i can fault them for misunderstanding many things which make HL1 so good. the airtight pacing, the brain-scratching puzzles, the tense combat sections - black mesa is not a bad game by any stretch of the imagination and i love a lot of when it does for HL1 storytelling-wise, but unless it's directly borrowing from valve's work, those three core values of HL1's gameplay really aren't done the service they truly deserve.

one of my favorite chapters in the game is highway 17 - a chapter that sees you traveling along the coast of city 17 in a little cobbled-together buggy on your way to rescue eli vance at the combine supermax prison, nova prospekt.
there's one section where you have to make a stop and hop out of the buggy to cut the power to a combine forcefield blocking your way.
the underside of that bridge as you make your way to the power station remains one of my favorite moments across the entire franchise. it's not some climatic or action-packed gunfight, or fighting for your life against horrors beyond your comprehension.
just a short trek across the underside of a bridge.
and yet, it allows you to fully soak in just how disastrous the combine's invasion on earth has been. the oceans have been massively drained, the sky cloudy and gray with not a single hint of sunshine to be seen, as you feel the rumble combine train overhead, transporting stalkers barely recognizable as humans, stripped of everything that makes them, to eternally serve the menial tasks waiting for them in the citadel. making your way over burnt corpses that were simply holding their own against a force that brought humanity to its knees in just seven whole hours, and paying the price of failed rebellion. "lab practicum", an altered version of the same alien, droning tune from the game's introduction, sounds off in the background as if to remind you how far you've come since the g-man's initial cryptic wake-up call, but also to put into perspective the sorry state the planet finds itself in.
and to think, what seems to the now adrenaline-and-morphine-fueled, battle-scarred gordon freeman looking over the horizon a week ago, he was running late for another day in the daily grind at black mesa, anticipating when he'd get to clock out and have a beer with barney. now it's 20 whole years later and he's seen his loved ones escape hell and come out the other end tired and aged, the little baby he saw his colleague eli vance take care of now a grown woman leading the charge against the combine's rebellion. and as if to make things stranger, despite having a hand in dooming the world to the husk of a rock it is now, he's now.. this messiah. this one hero all of humanity is pining all of their hopes on.

but hey, among all the confusion and years lost, at least barney remembers he still owes me a beer.

i may not like half-life 2 as much as i do the first game - i think the combat took quite the beating due to the far less interesting weapon selection and incredibly braindead combine AI that sees them thinking walking directly into your line of fire or standing perfectly still are foolproof combat strategies, and some parts of the game do start to wear out their welcome - HL2 does see itself pacing chapters slower on average, sometimes to its benefit, sometimes to its detriment. i think the gameplay could have been a bit better because valve had, in fact, done better before.
but i do still think about that bridge.
as i mulled my thoughts on this game over, i realize that damn bridge and all the other moments like it define half-life 2 far more than its shoddy firefights.

opposing force does a lot to distance itself from its parent game through new weapons, enemy types, mechanics, the works - which is something i can give it that i can't give blue shift. but despite its best efforts at making the most of being an expansion pack, opposing force gets way too annoying consistently over the course of the game for me to really like it much more than i already do

adrian shephard is noticeably lacking in defense compared to gordon freeman's HEV suit and the weapons op-for brings to the table end up taking priority in usefulness over the returning weapons from half-life 1, but the ammo for the new weapons, medkits, and armor batteries feel noticeably scare
this SHOULD, on paper, sound like a fair challenge if the game properly accommodates for shephard's attributes - but it doesn't. you NEED that extra ammo going up against stronger enemies like the black ops and race-x, and good luck counting on your comrades to back you up in a firefight for maybe, at most, 30 seconds, before they're torn through like paper. the black ops and shock troopers are far stronger than their HL1 counterparts in the HECU marines (and I guess the vortigaunts are the closest thing to compare the shock troopers to) and they can absolutely obliterate you in no time flat. it rarely feels like a fair challenge going up against them when i constantly lack health and ammo without really understanding where i went wrong

and it's not like op-for really makes the best use of its new mechanics - nothing interesting is ever really done with the barnacle grappling hook and rope climbing, you need to call on an engineer maybe TWICE across the main game, and in the middle chapters your fellow troops are nowhere to be seen anyway

at least, it's a VERY commendable effort to spice up half-life 1's gameplay and I don't think it's actually that bad - but i've seen more consistently better game design in unofficial half-life mods than in this one. only kind of impressed with this one, and really this game just makes me feel tired more than anything

simple yet fun, and with massive respect to the spider-man mythos; insomniac knows what makes a good spider-man game pretty damn well in my book.

web swinging feels extremely fluid and stylish, and I always get a kick out of gaining as much momentum as I can and keeping it going by running on buildings, jumping off poles and ledges, or even zipping through water towers mostly for the hell of it - and it flows together so damn seamlessly. I'd argue it's a bit too easy to reach top speed, and I do wish there was a bit more of a higher skill ceiling as you can admittedly master web swinging pretty quickly, but I am still very impressed with the effort put into making the web swinging feel as smooth as possible.

some side content in the game is better than others as you have some pretty unremarkable black cat stakeouts to do that's really just setup for the DLC, and I think this game could do without the ubisoft towers that really just makes using the map a bit more of an unnecessary hassle than it needed to be.
on the other hand, however, I love the little backpack collectibles that give insight to different things that happened over the course of the course of peter's at-the-time eight-year tenure as spider-man (among a lot of other cheeky nods, call-backs, and call-forwards to different spider-man stories throughout the game), and the side missions and Harry's research labs are always nice little sidestories to supplement the main story. the bases and taskmaster challenges are some of the most fun I have with the game, as the different requirements incentivize improving at the game to get rewarded more tokens to unlock cool suits from spider-man's long, long history (mainly played with the scarlet spider, 2099 and raimi suits).

the combat in this game actually holds up better than I remember; while not incredibly difficult even on the spectacular difficulty, you start to make better use of the gadgets you have as more powerful enemies come into the picture, and using them in tandem with your web swinging and melee combat allows you to clear fights efficiently and stylishly in a way that feels so damn satisfying. I only wish they took more inspiration from web of shadows' insane movement and combo potential, something I hope spider-man 2 has rectified.
also, yes the mj and miles stealth missions suck. but there also like, four of them in total and none of them take that long. they're ass but also not that big of a deal.

I find myself most critical with the story - while I think it's wholly solid and gets peter parker pretty damn well as a character (yuri lowenthal probably tying with christopher daniel barnes of the 90's cartoon as my second favorite peter parker VA), in addition to a fantastic take on dr. octavius with him playing the mentor role to peter, and slowly watching him lose his sanity over the course of the game - that's the most I have to say about it? not bad by any means but there were only really a few moments that really stuck out to me after finishing the game and granted, they are fantastically written moments. as a spider-man story it's fine but gets far outdone in concepts and writing by other spider-man media, such as edge of time, keeping it to the same medium.

regardless though, there's a lot of heart put into this game from people who really love spider-man, and in spite of its flaws made a pretty damn fun game that, in my opinion, gets how spider-man should play and act pretty damn well.

stoked to be able to play spider-man 2 in three years

it's like a look into the alternate timeline where zero was the true main character of megaman x, and a pretty damn convincing one at that.
really impressed with this hack and how it handles the more powerful zero, adjusting the game to give him a proper challenge while still showing the absolute powerhouse in damage he is compared to x, in addition to going out of their way to rewrite dialogue to suit zero as the main character with some fun little call-forwarding to future games.
my only real complaints are in that a boss or two felt a little too hard to me in this rom hack (namely launch octopus and armored armadillo) and i find the double-maverick refights a bit questionable, but nothing that really detracts much from the hack's quality.
it's a really cool hack with a lot of love clearly poured into it, and i liked it! massive props to CF, the creator for seeing it through.

hot damn if this isn't stylish! a kickass, jazzy ost from prolific sega composers naofumi hataya and tomoya ohtani, a sense of style feeling like a mixture of jet set radio, puyo puyo, and a bit of professor layton, and ridiculously satisfying and fun minigames topped off with a simple yet fun (and kind of nuts) story make this quite the hidden gem of the 3DS.

desperately, desperately could do with a sequel - some minigames are burdened with questionable gyro controls and poorly-timed button prompts and a refinement could do wonders for the gameplay of rhythm thief, not to mention the painful cliffhanger the story ends on..

here's to hoping, because phantom r deserves another shot to dance in the moonlight!

replayed this game using the restored patch and god damn, it's pretty jarring how someone like kiryu tends to be more soft-spoken than he usually is, I assume because takaya kuroda was younger during the release of this game (which is why he's able to reach higher pitches far more easily compared to his performances in kiwami 1; no shade to that game's voice acting bc it's still good, just something me and others have noticed) and they didn't really know how stoic they wanted kiryu to be yet. in general the voice direction for this game seems to be far more low-key than other yakuza games

on a different note man! I actually kinda jive with this game's combat more! it still unfortunately has that unavoidable jank with the unreliable lock-on, and what I'm about to tell you of course needs a bit of progress on your end which is kind of a shame
that being said, upgrading your dash enough and achieving the komaki fist reversal (which isn't actually that hard) brings kiryu a little closer to his y2 counterpart
combined with the more heavy movement in this game, I think this makes for a really interesting take on yakuza's combat (retroactively, of course) where you have to work around kiryu's sluggish movement and make good use of heat actions, the grab, and the fist reversal - you're being attacked basically on all sides and you don't have the speed necessary to go all in like you would in yakuza 2 onward. landing hits and managing to get away in time is more harder in this game, which I think makes every hit you do land and every enemy you defeat feel INCREDIBLY satisfying

needless to say I actually enjoyed my time with this y1 replay quite a bit! it still manages to have that awesome moody and gritty flair unique to the ps2 games and a rock solid introduction to the world of yakuza.
this replay was mainly to have y1 fresh in my mind for when I play k1, so this should prove very interesting..