Metal Gear Solid 4

METAL GEAR SOLID 4: GUNS OF THE PATRIOTS

Platform: Playstation 3, Publisher: Konami

This is an occasionally impressive and often ridiculous 12-hour movie with some often satisfying and occasionally clumsy gameplay thrown in.

Metal Gear Solid 4

is the seventh game in the Metal Gear series. All together, the series tells a sprawling, operatic, and often nonsensical story of two generations of Special Forces paragons, each code-named Snake, as they fight world-spanning conspiracies, whole arrays of superpowered Special Forces lunatics, and their own manipulative superior officers. Like all previous games in the series,

MGS4

’s gameplay emphasizes stealth over combat except for when it doesn’t, such as in (all but one of) the boss fights and the two places where the game turns into a mediocre rail shooter. It also does the whole genre-deconstruction meta-commentary thing that’s popular among certain more highbrow game creators, like how in the middle of the game, the “Game Over: Continue/Exit?” option becomes “Game Over: Continue/Exist?”

Now,

MGS4

is quite solidly the

end

of the story up until now, and the only reason I’m not calling it the end of the story, period, is that it’s a successful franchise and so there’ll always be more sequels. It spends much more time wrapping up dangling plot threads from previous games in the series than it does explaining those plot threads for the benefit of people who haven’t played the previous games. But it goes into enough detail on just who the hell is onscreen now and why they’re talking about memes and genetic legacy and cyborg ninjas that a player needn’t, strictly speaking, have played the earlier games. I think I could have enjoyed the game if it was my first

Metal Gear Solid

game. First-time gamers will miss some of the jokes and emotional beats but won’t be left entirely out in the cold.

The

Splinter Cell

games, old as they are, have more developed stealth mechanics than this. Any given action game has better action gameplay.

No

game has higher production values—you can’t beat

Metal Gear Solid 4

for spectacle. It’s also not a giant bait-and-switch, the way

Metal Gear Solid 2

was. I find it has decent replay value through the multiple difficulties and the badges the game awards you for accomplishments in game, such as no fatalities or lots of headshots (not mutually exclusive, thanks to the tranquilizer gun). I’m not going to praise it to the heavens or anything, but I’m satisfied after having played it.

Still, it wouldn’t be unwise to check out previous games in the series first. They should be available cheap.

THE WORLD ENDS WITH YOU

Platform: Nintendo DS, Publisher: Square Enix

This review is late for two reasons: It takes a while to play through an RPG and get a good feel for it, and also the game is so in demand that it was hard to find a copy. It was worth tracking down, though.

The game is a JRPG centering on a deadly game held in Shibuya, Tokyo. That means you explore, buy items, level up, engage in battles through a subsystem, and, because this is a modern Square Enix title, navigate a story that’s one part collection of JRPG storytelling tropes, one part subversion of JRPG storytelling tropes, and one part incomprehensibility. The problem with talking about the story is that anything I say would be a spoiler, so, um… the game’s main character is Neku, an angsty misanthropic teenage boy, and he fights alongside Shiki, a cheerful teenage girl. Already I’ve told one outright lie and one lie by omission. Anyway, the story fails to capture me because at this point I’ve played a lot of Square JRPGs, and they all start to run together.

What really impressed me with

The World Ends With You

is the gameplay. Gosh, this game has some great gameplay. You control Neku with the stylus on the bottom screen, and Shiki with the D-pad (or face buttons, if you’re left-handed) on the top screen. Neku fights with a set of magic spells granted to him through pins (not, like, sewing pins, but the round pins you attach to your shirt; the ones with slogans and band names on them), while Shiki beats the ever-living hell out of monsters with her telekinetically animated stuffed toy cat. During combat, the characters pass a green glowing “light puck” back and forth between them—whoever has the puck does more damage, providing a hint to players unsure of which character to concentrate on. Shiki also plays on autopilot if you have trouble concentrating on two characters controlled through two entirely different methods simultaneously, as I understand some gamers do. I put some effort into learning the dual controls, though, and the experience is engaging, to say the least.

There’s more to it than that. There’s a fashion minigame (equipment is fashion and provides extra bonuses or penalties depending on what’s fashionable where) and a memetic manipulation minigame (insert ideas into the heads of passersby to provoke behavior). There are multiple axes of adjustable difficulty. The music is catchy and unconventional for the genre. The sprite-based artwork is often beautiful.

I keep coming back to the sheer addictive nature of the combat, though—this is not JRPG-standard menu-driven semi-turn-based stuff. It keeps me playing in the face of a story that seems run-of-the-mill for the genre at this point.

ORDER UP!

Platform: Wii Publisher: Zoo Games

This game is much more engrossing than it has any business being.

It’s a cooking simulator. At its core, it’s a game where you use the Wii remote to mimic gestures such as chopping and flipping food. On top of that, though, are placed a bunch more layers of gameplay. The goal is to cook multiple dishes at once, and each dish has multiple ingredients that must be prepared separately and then combined, either in sequence (you can’t cook the omelet until you’ve grated the cheese) or simultaneously (chop the tomato while cooking the meat patties, but time it wrong and the patties will burn). When preparing multiple dishes for a single table, they all need to be finished before they can be sent out, but if a dish sits on the counter finished for too long, it cools, which lowers your tip. You have to monitor the entire restaurant to ensure you’re cooking food for the grumpy customers first. Then there’s a spicing game that overlies all of that, with each customer preferring different spices. All of this earns money that you can spend on better kitchen equipment, better spices, assistants (of varying skill—and some are more skilled at some tasks than others), more recipes, and eventually whole new restaurants.

The design team clearly put a lot of effort into making the best cooking game they could. They did not fail, and this is not typical Wii shovelware.

BOOM BLOX

Platform: Wii Publisher: Electronic Arts

As much as games lacking narrative to establish context for the player’s actions aren’t usually my thing, I have to applaud

Boom Blox

for tight focus and polished game mechanics.

It’s a game created by Steven Spielberg and EA. The point is to use the Wii remote to manipulate blocks, whose behavior is governed by a physics engine. The remote allows for many types of manipulation, but almost all of them boil down to grabbing blocks, throwing things at blocks, or shooting blocks. A typical play mode would be something like Jenga; alternately, you might need to collapse a castle using the smallest possible number of thrown baseballs. There are single and multiplayer modes, as well as a robust level editor (which keeps eating hours of my time). You can also send created levels to friends using the Wii Friends code system.

Boom Blox

takes a simple premise and mines it to conceptual exhaustion—I have a hard time thinking of a play mode involving stacked blocks that isn’t on this disc somewhere. It’s well made and I don’t have any major criticism of it. If I can’t recommend it with enthusiasm, it’s because this particular sort of game has never suited my specific tastes.