02.29.08

Break On Through

Posted in Gaming, Rants at 6:21 pm

A day or so ago, Konami announced details about the upcoming release of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, one of the few Playstation 3-exclusive games to have been announced as such and maintained that status throughout its development. When it is released on June 12th, 2008, I will be in line to pick it up, in the form of the also-announced bundle package that includes the Playstation 3. At that point, my standards for what appears to be a good game to try on the machine will be greatly lowered.

Don’t get me wrong; the games I’m looking forward to playing (Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, The Eye of Judgement and its expansion, and possibly Folklore) are fairly good in and of themselves. But there are a ton of multiplatform games that I’m looking to try out, as well (prime among them Sonic the Hedgehog– though it left a bitter taste in my mouth by crashing mere seconds after I started playing it at E3, it was far and away better-looking than the 360 version), and while I could play them on the 360 now, there’s little reason to add more games to the already-too-large Backlog of Dread. When I get my hands on a PS3 of my own, my options expand slightly wider than I’m expecting them to.

It’s an odd effect that I’m sure I’m not alone in experiencing. When you buy a new console, all those games that your eye passed over when you were evaluating the machine suddenly go from background noise to being viable options. In the anecdotal evidence department, I know many gamers who bought, say, the Wii for one game alone and found themselves enjoying a larger portion of the library than they imagined they would. Same goes for the DS, the 360, etc., all the way back to the NES. It often works in reverse, too– I was so completely hot on the Atari 7800 to the exclusion of all other machines, and it turned out that there wasn’t even anything all that great on that device, including Ms. Pac-Man; and yet, the NES my uncle gave us that year wound up being the proverbial start of a beautiful friendship.

It’s strange, though, in analyzing what I’m interested in that the game that breaks my barrier to entry would be Metal Gear. It was MGS2, coupled with Final Fantasy X, that got me to get a Playstation 2 at the end of 2001. For me, Metal Gear and Final Fantasy are two series that, despite the somewhat lukewarm reception they might get critically, always seem to attract me. It could be just blind fanboy devotion– and I know one person out there who will not hesitate to lay that particular cross on my shoulders– but I’ll be honest, for all the grief the games have given me, they still do enough right in my eyes that I’m unwilling to abandon them completely. It would take a travesty– an absolute unplayable mess on the order of, say, Big Rigs– to get me to cease buying those games. Again, it might be hopeless optimism, but then again, if I were to be so anal as to ignore all of the good to focus on the irritating or the bad, I’d have bigger problems than just dithering over buying a new machine.

That’s not to say I take every series to their end. The Mana series has degraded so badly since Legend of Mana that I didn’t even bother with Dawn of Mana; Heroes of Mana is still more or less sitting untouched while I wait to see if I really want to go through it. The announcement of a new Zelda game does virtually nothing for me these days; the same goes for Mega Man, though that’s more due to the complete and total disaster that was the splintering of that particular property (it’s been almost a complete decade since the last real Classic-series game has been released– and any amount of time greater than about a year or so is far too long between releases in the Legends/DASH set). I seriously regret having followed Starfox down the dark alleys it’s traveled since 2001, with the exception of Assault– and it’s also telling that, like Sonic, the best game of those series in recent memory is the one not made by the original company.

But ultimately, I’m sure that as time goes on, I’ll warm up to some of the less-impressive PS3 titles that I currently disregard, like Ratchet and Clank or Resistance. It’s not like there’s nothing for me to play right now; my backlog is already far too big for me to be considering buying a new console, but I have a good three months yet to try to pare it down somewhat. This weekend I’m going to try to blaze through a couple of shorter titles to get March off to a good start– holy crap, it’s March already! Catch you folks on Monday at the LJ, with the report on February’s gaming. As long as nothing earth-shattering happens in the world of gaming between now and then, that’s likely to be the only post for the day there.

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