What Video Games Are You Wasting Your Life Away on Now? (Vol 2.)

Looking forward to Street Fighter II Collection.

Fantasy Zone II and Penguin Land. Always.

I'm playing mario kart: super circuit (even better than the snes); mario kart: double dash (amazingly, amazing); shenmue; pandora tomorrow; XIII multiplayer; counter-strike, finally; um, other games.

Also resurrected Timesplitters 2 for my PS2 - didn't give it nearly enough attention when I bought it. Most intuitive controls for a console shooter ever.

Bought Starky n Hutch DVD for a friend yesterday and got a free Starsky n Hutch PC game so I might try that over the weekend. Given that it was 'free' I don't have high hopes.

Currently trying to decide whether to upgrade in anticipation of Doom3 & HL2.

If you liked Silent Hill 1 and 2 you'll love 3. Gobsmacking graphics and sound. Improved control. Silly puzzles. Terrifying creatures. Best survival horror since...Silent Hill 2.

xpost

yeah, i haven't even seen the movie but i think the game is brilliant

i'm near certain my box won't run HL2 when it arrives and that makes me :(

Please tell me this will be out for Xbox.

gamecube w/ one controller
memory card
metroit prime
zelda: wind waker

you can have it all for $125.

or!

ps2 w/ one controller
memory card
dynasty warriors 3: xtreme legends
ssx tricky
final fantasy x2
xenosaga vol 1
gta3
robot alchemic drive (BIG STOMPY TRANSFORMING ROBOTS)
ring of red (RETRO STOMPY ROBOTS)
fantavision (DUDE I'M SO HIGH)
ico (BEST GAME EVER)

email me if you're interested in any of the games or the system.

ive been wasting my life playing CIV 3 CONQUESTS. its grebt. its kinda interesting how it seems like a majority of the add-ons in conquests is alot of little things that they eliminated from civ 3 that they had in civ2. and the scenarios are awesome as well. i cant wait to get my new pc to replace my 6 year old piece of shit that has trouble processing the large maps.

There's an extremely extended telephone cutscene between LBJ and Kruschev talking about THE IMPLICATIONS OF THIS NUCLEAR EXPLOSION AT A SECRET RUSSIAN FACILITY when it's nuked in the first part of the game by a guy with electricity powers. It starts with actual audio of LBJ, who is actually LBJ and not "President Ross" or some shit like that. There are portentious scenes with dramatic music behind this boring scene, as live action video of American flags flutter dramatically.

At the very beginning, Snake is named "Jack" like Raiden from MGS2, and has a mask and wig to look like him. For no reason, in case you were wondering. He jumps from an aircraft at high altitude and parachutes into the jungle, then removes the mask to some dramatic music. After The Boss defects (why did she defect? she didn't) and joins Team Evil Deformed Obvious Bad Guys, there's an INCREDIBLY GAY intro sequence straight out of James Bond except with incredibly godawful gay Japanese elevator lounge music filling in for actual music, where Hideo Kojima's name scrolls across the screen as many times as humanly possible. Then after that, you get briefed for the recovery mission where you're supposed to clear America from wrongdoing in this nuking. Then you are fired from a Blackbird straight from the upper atmosphere of the planet, as if jumping off a plane was just a warm up, and the game is like, "wait, let's try this again but try to make it MORE XTREEM." You even land from the parachute in the exact same way.

The commander code names himself Major Tom at the beginning, but then when you start the REAL MISSION FOR REAL THIS TIME REALLY, he says, "well I named myself Tom because it was the tunnel they escaped from in The Great Escape and the tunnel names were Dick, Harry, and Tom, but it turned out that the tunnel they escaped from was Harry, I even ordered a print of the movie from the film company so just call me Major Zero." Yes, he really says all of these things. And yes, he named himself Major Tom BECAUSE OF THE MOVIE THE GREAT ESCAPE. He might as well say "I also named myself after a David Bowie song that doesn't exist yet," and then Snake will say "David Bowie, I've never heard of him." Then a long discussion about pop music, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, an interesting up and coming band called The Doors, then Elvis, then jazz music, and then Snake will say "I wonder if David Bowie will write a song about someone named Major Tom."

Instead of changing your camoflagesfd for you, it makes you do it manually. The purpose of this is to draw the game out by going into pause menus. Switching to a nice camo for some area and then having to change to another one because you left the grass makes you want to give up hope on the whole camoflage concept and just go in cutting necks. Which is at the very least satisfying, but apparently not stealthy so they try to punish you as much as they can for it.

The save chick in this game is more annoying than ever, some preachy medic girl who talks about movies, including Godzilla which "is mostly fantasy but has a strong anti-nuke message!" Apparently she makes some reference to a movie about cloning, and Snake says "I wonder if that will happen to me." Wow how subtlely they edge these anachronistic references in there. Because Solid Snake is a clone of Big Boss/Snake, get it! Every single character from MGS1 and 2 have grandparents or other relatives in MGS3.

There are many scenes where characters talk to themselves or talk to characters who have left the scene entirely. The Boss says "DRIFT AWAY, YOU WERE NOT READY YOU DID NOT FIND YOUR EMOTION FOR BEING A SOLDIER" to Snake after he's a mile down stream. After Boss kicks your ass, throws you off a bridge into a river, and then says this shit, you get a huge CODEC call with the medic showing you how to use the CURE MENU. For lacerations first you must select the laceration in your body system menu, use antiseptic, then styptic to stop bleeding, suture to close the wound, then bandage it (then close the menu of course). You have to do all these things in the menu by selecting the area you want to "cure" (and by cure they probably mean heal?) and select each of these items and use them then move to the next item, apparently in a specific order. Why the game doesn't just say "you wanna heal this?" and then uses all these things itself is unknown, much like how it doesn't just change to the optimal camo by itself is unknown. Or hey here's a novel idea, just make a health bar that goes up and down when you use curative items.

At the end of the game, Snake is getting the Medal of Honor and President Johnson goes to shake his hand, but Snake refuses. I guess Snake is a staunch Nixon republican. (after the end credits, Snake walks into a voting booth and votes for Nixon.)

I like how there is a black dude as your equipment specialist, who mentions that he doesn't get hired by a lot of places even though he is an expert, probably because he's black! And then perhaps racism will still exist in the 21st century. Wow, that really makes me stop and think. Jump cut to Volgin groping Eva's tit and then zapping her directly in the booblage with electricity while holding her in the air by her throat. Special zoom in on her nylons as they rip open. There's another scene implying that she likes that sort of thing. Much like Meryl being juggled through the air by sniper bullets. Aside from that, every time Eva is alone with Snake she's unzipping her jump suit or changing clothes or bobbling her tits around in some way. Hold R1 to go into Snake's view, as he stares at her ass or tits or legs.

One of the last dudes of the Cobra Unit (the bosses you fight) is named The Sorrow, and is dead. You walk down a long boring river full of the people you've killed in the game as they try to spirit your health away and shame you from killing so many people in the game (even though all of them tried to kill you at some point), until the end when you find his skeleton and a cutscene about how The Boss killed him, which apparently made him sorrowful. So is this why he's named The Sorrow? Does that mean he only joined Cobra Unit AFTER he died and The Boss killed him? Or was he named The Sorrow before being killed by The Boss? Apparently, it's just a lucky coincidence that he was named The Sorrow and then The Boss (a.k.a. The Joy) killed him. WOW THIS IS GREAT WRITING, IT'S ALMOST LIKE THEY WERE INSPIRED BY SOME DIVINE HAND!

Throughout the game, Japanese food (and general culture) is mentioned as being superior to all other food. If you find a packet of instant noodles, GOD HELP YOU if you ask Para-Medic about them (her name is Para-Medic, WOW!). She will drone on and on about how THEY'RE A NEW INVENTION IN JAPAN (America invents radar, microwave, space rockets, the internet, TV, thrust vectoring, while Japan invents... instant noodles), and how they're so delicious, and Snake is like WOW I HAD SOME AND THEY ARE DELICIOUS, MMMMM and then the game insists that you love them in the description of the instant noodles. I've had noodles before. Noodles are the kind of thing you eat with boiled chicken and a Miracle Whip sandwich while in England. They aren't really that good. Anyway, Snake is eventually like WOW JAPAN SOUNDS INTERESTING. Follow this up with every character eventually mentioning some awesome thing in Japan or THERE'S THIS NEW MOVIE IN JAPAN and so on. Eva wants you to take her out to a real dinner "after all this is over" (I haven't finished the game yet but I assume that she dies now, since she said this). She wants perhaps sushi. SUSHI? Yeah, it's all the rage in Japan! It's supposed to be made of raw fish! WOW RAW FISH THAT FITS IN WITH MY SURVIVAL TRAINING (HIT X TO SKIP). This kind of dialogue comprises half the game script.

A crocodile. You mean... like the reptile? Wow Snake and game writers. Just.......... wow. Every time a character makes a statement to Snake, Snake then reasks it as a question. If the character then answers that question might depend on what kind of camoflage you're wearing.

In a further attempt to shame you into not killing anyone, you get special camoflage items from defeating bosses by draining their stamina instead of killing them. Even though everyone in the game will shoot you with everything they have on sight with guns or rockets or grenades or missiles or flamethrowers or machine guns or knives or shields or punches or magic electricity powers or ghosts or zombies or mean words. While they're at it, why doesn't the game request you give your enemies a stern talking to as well?

When you're in prison, the Johnny guard, who is apparently such a great character that he has to be in every single game, asks, "why do we have to have a Cold War?" Yes, I'm sure that prison guards in the early 60s all over the planet were going around asking their prisoners, "why do we have to have a Cold War?"

PS. At the end of the game, you kill a giant flying George Washington, the leader of -THE PATRIOTS-, made out of water vapor who flies around as a giant sentient cloud and reforms made entirely out of mist. You use the codec as a weapon to call a therapist and help George Washington talk out his problems. Which kills him.

Um, could it not have been after the actual real-life escape, not the movie?

Cuz all that stuff in Zelda and Metroid really happened, you know.

then i sold my ps2...

good write-up of MGS3, too

I need to find the script for Xenosaga somewhere. There really is some absolutely priceless bullshit going on in that story.

THAT IS WHY MGS IS AWESOME! Fuck Splinter Cell and its Clancy/Fascist "realism".

I'm not playing anything right now, just waiting for KOTOR2 and GTA:SA to come out on PC (I know, I have a long wait for San Andreas. Video games rot your mind anyway, right?).

http://mywebpages.comcast.net/jccable/mevsxenosagafans.jpg

I'm pretty sure that the dudes who made Xenosaga were trying to communicate that they fantasize about raping little girls, and that probably still wasn't the most offensive thing about the game. And it didn't even have a hilarious Chu-Chu crucifixion scene ("he died for chu sins")

Solid Snake: During those two days, he survived by feeding on the blood of his family to quench his thirst. That was how he acquired a taste for blood...
Raiden: So that's why they call him "Vamp"...
Solid Snake: No. Vamp isn't for vampire. It's because he's bisexual.

BUT DON'T YOU WANT TO FIND OUT IF LOVE CAN BLOOM ON A BATTLEFIELD????

best part of MGS1. 10 minute long death soliloquoys!

yeah, the game where the hero runs around in a cardboard box takes itself too seriously.

Video Game Life-Wasting Thread 3: Snake Eater

Video Game Life-Wasting Thread 3: Snake Eater

and more folks need to play Psychonauts. It's coming out for PS2 very soon, tho it's cheaper on PC.