Winners and Losers

Perhaps today's Wimbledon final was not quite the equal of last year's Federer-Nadal classic, where both men exhausted one another staving off break points in epic rallies. No, today was a leisurely paced, low-error marathon in which Federer in particular got away with more aces than he probably should have. Before the match began, some might even have argued that he had gotten off easy by not having to face any of the other top four players. But the score speaks for itself; this was anything but easy. Roddick was not going to pull a Soderling and roll over in straight sets. He made Federer earn this feat by ensuring that the path to history lay through one of the greatest Grand Slam finals ever.

Indeed, as that fifth set dragged on and Roddick not only hung in there but matched Federer shot-for-shot, history became an afterthought, and I realized that I was no longer watching to see Federer break a record or reclaim Wimbledon and his No. 1 status. I was watching the other guy playing beyond himself to stun the world, including his opponent who had gone in with an 18-2 record against him. Whatever doubts Federer needed to quell, they were nothing compared to what Roddick has been facing for years now. Nobody, myself included, took him seriously as a contender, not even after he beat Murray, but today he played as though he were the equal of the man who was supposed to set himself apart as the all-time greatest. It didn't seem fair that, after such a monumental effort, Roddick should still come away a loser.

This was the guy who, at the 2003 Australian Open, played to 21-19--a singles record in a Grand Slam tournament--against Younes El Aynaoui. At the time, a part of me thought he was just sandbagging instead of playing to win. But this time it was Roger Federer on the other side of a 14-16 fifth set. If even King Roger could find no way to break that serve in fewer than thirty-eight games, Roddick must deserve some credit. I don't see how there can be any doubt that he was the second best man at this tournament. The Hewitt five-setter was not some duel of fossils, and the win over Murray was not luck. Nadal may have been injured, but that too is a part of sport. If anybody else deserved it more, they would have been there.

Yes, Roddick has millions of dollars and a swimsuit model wife, but the bigger the life, the bigger the expectations and demands. I can scarcely imagine what it feels like to be on the wrong side of a historic match, knowing that Pete Sampras did not show up at Wimbledon for the first time in seven years to watch you.

It seemed a nice gesture for Sampras to fly all the way from California to watch Federer surpass him in career Grand Slam titles. But then Roddick won that fourth set and it became a real contest. Suddenly, Sampras's surprise appearance did not seem so classy anymore. Frankly, I was almost offended by the implication that he was giving his fellow American no chance to win. In fact, it reminded me a little of Sampras's final match against Andre Agassi for the 2002 US Open championship. Despite Agassi being himself one of the greatest and most popular players of all time, the crowd cheered him only insofar as they were glad to have such a distinguished contemporary and rival to fittingly fill the role of final runner-up to punctuate Sampras's more illustrious career. For all the praise that we give Sampras and Federer, it is easy to overlook that it is men like Agassi and Roddick who really allow us to see the greats for the champions that they are. As a runner-up, I don't think Federer himself earned the cheers as well last year as Roddick did today.

The way things have turned over these last few months, I wouldn't be surprised to see Federer extend his own record by a few more titles. I think, years from now, though this match may be recognized as the one that first cemented Federer's status as the best, I will remember it better as the greatest match Andy Roddick ever played.

The Essentials #36: Final Fantasy VIII

SPOILERS

Final Fantasy VIII was the first Final Fantasy I ever played all the way through. Prior to that, I had watched my brother play the domestic releases, and I had myself played enough to be familiar with the basic mechanics, so I was not a complete newbie. But I'll still always consider FFVIII to be my first. Perhaps for that reason, I reserve a special place in my heart for it. Or perhaps it was just a damn fine game that deserves attention even within the context of a stellar series full of other more celebrated installments.

To follow the biggest Japanese role-playing game ever in 1997's Final Fantasy VII, Square set the same team of director Yoshinori Kitase, artist Tetsuya Nomura, and writer Kazushige Nojima to work on the next installment in the company's flagship series. For the 1999 Sony PlayStation release, Hironobu Sakaguchi served as executive producer, Nobuo Uematsu composed four CDs worth of music, and Hiroyuki Ito remained in charge of the systems. The one contributor to every numbered Final Fantasy, Yoshitaka Amano provided the logo illustration meant to convey the game's initially stated theme of love.

The basic premise had a group of students from the Balamb Garden military academy fighting as "SeeD" mercenaries in a war engineered by a wicked sorceress. Previous series protagonists had barely been more than kids anyway, so the transition to a school setting seemed a fitting twist. In practice, however, the school aspects were not really played up beyond the first few hours; Balamb resembled an academy, but nobody seemed to give a damn about class. Instead, as always, Final Fantasy was about a band of skilled young fighters saving the world by beating the crap out of evil.


FFVIII employed the Active Time Battle system that had been a distinguishing staple of the series since the 16-bit Final Fantasy IV, but the gameplay otherwise exhibited the most radical changes the series had seen since then. At the highest speed setting, the combat was the fastest ever, and that was just a small part of the initiative to develop a more truly "active" and action-oriented battle system. Main character Squall Leonhart's basic attack could be enhanced by pulling the trigger on his "gunblade" as he slashed an enemy. The timing never changed on this manual critical hit, so players should have been able to pick it up quickly and it would let them feel involved without inducing stress. Squall's "Limit Break" desperation attack, the multi-slashing "Renzokuken," took the mechanic further, operating as a sequence of timed button presses, and some of the other party members' Limit Breaks similarly tested finger skills and real-time awareness in ways no previous numbered installments had.

Instead of featuring a Limit gauge as in FFVII, the Limit command appeared semi-randomly. The more critical a character's condition, the greater the likelihood that it would appear. There was a slim chance that it would be available even to a character in reasonably sound health, whereas, for a character in a poor state, if it did not open up immediately, the player could simply refresh the command list a few times before it came up. Moreover, the probability did not diminish until the ailing party member was healed, so a character could potentially perform Limit Breaks turn after turn. It was up to the player to weigh the risk of leaving a weakened character vulnerable, versus the reward of much greater offense unlocked while in a desperate state.


Key to combat and character development was the "Guardian Force" system. Guardian Forces were the new summon monsters, and, similar to the Espers in Final Fantasy VI, you could "junction" a GF to each character. In addition to allowing the character to call on them during battle, the GF would grant its human partner access to unique commands and stat boosts. The phantom beasts actually had levels and statistics of their own, and, as they gained experience, they would open up new abilities. One of the more useful abilities offered by most GFs was the "Boost" technique, which allowed players to enhance the damage of a summon attack by repeatedly tapping the Square button when prompted during the long spell animation. Pressing it at other times would diminish the attack's power, so some attentiveness was required. This was by far the most effective way Square ever devised to divert players during repetitions of time-sapping summon sequences, and it boggles my mind why it was never reused.

Another handy skill was the "Encounters None" ability, which, as its name suggested, turned off all random encounters. I learned it as quickly as possible and thereafter never had it off. It was not an entirely new concept, but it worked better than in previous games because enemies in FFVIII, instead of having set levels, scaled in power alongside the player characters. So, in theory, there was no point to level-grinding, because fights should only have been as hard as the party was equipped to handle. Additionally, as a member of SeeD, instead of collecting money off slain monsters, Squall received a regular stipend based around the game clock.

By far the most problematic of the unique FFVIII systems was the "Draw" mechanic, whereby characters accumulated consumable spells by drawing them from enemies. Most magic had little practical effectiveness in combat, but the drawn spells were absolutely vital to character development. Levels and weaponry were relatively insignificant in advancing stats, but up to a hundred charges of a spell could be assigned to an attribute. The gain varied according to the nature and number of the spell, but you could build up a monstrous fighter fairly early on just by equipping a hundred of the strongest spell available to a character's attack. Unfortunately, the game did not provide sufficient advice on how to work this new feature, so it began as the most esoteric development system I had yet come across. Whereas, in previous games, it was well understood that a character grew stronger automatically as he gained experience, in FFVIII, a lot of manual configuration was required in order to get anywhere. Final Fantasy had previously been the more mainstream JRPG, requiring little in the way of level-grinding, but that's essentially what I found myself doing in FFVIII. Instead of battling for experience, however, I was basically farming magic, deliberately prolonging fights until I maxed out on whatever spells I could draw from the enemy party. Sometimes I would end up with 600 Float spells that I had no use for, but I was merely cautiously stocking up on everything I came across. The game provided no hints as to how strong my characters should have been at any given time, so I didn't know when to stop.

Final Fantasy VIII also introduced the series's first major side game in the form of "Triple Triad." The player could challenge most NPCs to the card game, and the winner would claim a card from the loser's hand. The game was incredibly simple and linear; there was no point to playing anything but your best cards. Occasionally, opponents would attempt to complicate matters by insisting on playing with regional rules, but as long as you had the more dominating cards, winning still came easily. I mostly played only until I completed my collection of cards, and I would not waste my time with players who had nothing to offer. I learned too late that the cards could be converted into magic and items, making Triple Triad actually the most efficient way to build up a large stock of spells.


Final Fantasy VIII is perhaps not as well remembered these days as some of the other numbered installments because, simply put, the story did not feature as many memorable moments. I blame this partially on the presentation. Square, at the time gearing up for production on the Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within movie, was in the process of establishing itself as a computer animation powerhouse. The pre-rendered cut scenes in FFVIII were an enormous step up from FFVII or any other title of that generation, and the game also leaned more heavily on its cinematics. The ballroom sequence was the game's most hyped scene, but, at the time, I felt it was lacking something. This was still years before they implemented voice acting in Final Fantasy, and so these cut scenes felt almost like silent movie clips. In contrast with the text-heavy real-time segments, there was zero dialogue in these movies, and not even the characters' grunts and gasps were audible. That, combined with the obvious disparity in visual quality between the real-time and pre-rendered elements, left the narrative feeling disjointed. The story was being carried consequently by moments that took the player out of the game instead of immersing them further in.

The game also suffered from a cast of underdeveloped characters. Whereas previous installments had always made sure to give each party member his or her own chapter in the story, the supporting cast of FFVIII didn't really do much besides provide support for Squall, both in and out of combat. Some personality was further lost in Square's switch to realistically proportioned character models on hardware that was not equipped to render detailed faces. Nobuo also decided against composing character-specific themes.

Looking back now, I can find the characters kind of cute in their adolescent teen ways. I think every JRPG player should be able to identify with Seifer, the overzealous youth playing knight. I also quite liked Irvine, the sad sack marksman who, in the story's most absurd twist, was the only one who remembered that all of the characters had grown up together years before they met again as SeeDs. The amnesia was explained away as a side effect of GF use, but I preferred to believe that Irvine was just the only one clinging to the past, never moving on and losing who he was as he grew up.

Of course, the story really centered on Squall, and, for many players, that was the game's biggest problem. If the villainous Seifer was an unflattering caricature of the JRPG-playing dreamer, the portrayal of the "hero" Squall as a disagreeable and asocial loner rubbed a lot of fans the wrong way, either because they could not relate to it, or because they could in ways that brought to light the traits they most loathed about themselves. His dialogue consisted of a lot of "whatever," "I don't know," and "....." But Nojima added a new dimension to his character study by allowing players peeks into Squall's thoughts, offering insights into his private anxieties, although they could also be even more scathing than his speech. I did find him to be rather an incorrigible jerk when I first played the game, but I gradually came to appreciate the story Nojima was trying to tell. Squall really wasn't the badass hero that the player wanted to be. He was a young guy growing through his issues to bloom into a well-balanced human being. Maybe many players were secure enough that they didn't need to hear his story, but I imagine there were quite a few teenage shut-ins Nojima was speaking to, who might have benefited from trying to understand Squall. His journey beyond his own one-note cynicism was more real than most character arcs in the series. In FFVIII's defining moment, Squall carried a comatose Rinoa on his back as he walked a bridge to cross an ocean. Stopping midway through to take a breather, he sat and confessed his fears and constraints to the unconscious Rinoa. Although nobody else could hear this self-aware monologue, the entire story had been building up to this admission to himself, and I think the game pulled it off rather well.


My favorite character, however, was Laguna Loire. Along with Squall, he was one of the first two characters revealed, and originally the idea was supposedly to have the player alternate between the two contrasting personalities. To some extent, that concept carried through to the final game, as Squall would periodically dream sequences that put players in Laguna's shoes. Amusingly, Squall's interior commentary remained active even during these dreams, and he was never more critical than when observing the clownish Laguna, who, the very opposite of the reserved Squall, laid it all out there at all times. It would have been easy to view Laguna as a buffoon, as Squall did, but if you were to step back and view his stories objectively, it would have become apparent that he was coping more calmly with traumatic events, including his team's near death in battle, the abduction of his adopted daughter, and the death of his wife while he was away. Squall was outwardly cool, but the thought boxes revealed the tempest within him. Laguna never sounded cool, yet his unflagging optimism was strangely encouraging, and he seemed almost unstoppable in a more desperate and barren world.

Unexpectedly tying the two stories together was the series's first vocal theme, "Eyes on Me," composed by Nobuo Uematsu and sung in English by Chinese pop superstar Faye Wong. Within the game, the song was actually written by Laguna's first love, Julia, who would later be revealed to be the mother of Squall's love interest, Rinoa. Laguna and Julia never got their chance, but "Eyes on Me" would become the theme for Squall and Rinoa. It was a rather generic pop ballad, but pleasant enough anyhow.

"Eyes on Me" notwithstanding, this was probably Nobuo's most understated Final Fantasy score, which was in fitting with the rest of the game. Just as FFVIII gave the player little instruction on how to play correctly, I found that the narrative rarely told the player how to feel. Characters were unapologetically who they were, the protagonist was unreliable, and there were more quiet moments than in any previous entry. This may have made it harder for players to grow attached to the world, leaving them instead feeling lost and adrift.

FFVIII was not necessarily a challenging work, but it was hard to grasp because of how misshapen and half-formed it often felt. Its world was a mildly perplexing, slightly disturbing, altogether nonsensical dream. In another maybe unintentionally meta aspect, I considered that its design may have reflected the outlandish yet incomplete imaginings of a juvenile fantasy weaver, selectively filling the space with idealized yet illogical elements. The world was huge yet mostly empty, containing only a few spread out nations. That apparently couldn't stop them from hating one another, because the very existence of the mercenary force SeeD, which had almost as many locations as there were countries, suggested that war was an ever-present element. Characters would behave irrationally, as when Balamb's students inexplicably elected Squall their leader, even though his personality should have rendered him the least likely candidate. It was some sort of wish fulfillment fantasy, but presented in such a brazenly incoherent manner as to highlight the foolishness of the fantasy in the first place.

One of the most anticipated video games of all time, Final Fantasy VIII was hugely popular in its day, and it's a testament to its quality that, despite the incomparably passionate nature of its predecessor's followers, the game has never faced the sort of mass antipathy that typically characterizes any discussions of, say, Chrono Cross or Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. Perhaps, because FFVIII was not actually a sequel to VII, those disappointed were more comfortable just ignoring it. While there has never been any strong anti-FFVIII sentiment, the game also does not enjoy the ardent fan bases of VI and VII. I won't say that VIII was a better game, but I think it was a good and important one, and I increasingly find myself wishing that more JRPGs would follow its lead. The battle system was the most fun and action-packed of any turn-based RPG I ever played. With its enemy-leveling and "Encounters None" option, it was the only game I can think of to almost fulfill my long-held request to do away with non-boss encounters. Although I earlier accused the game of lacking "moments," this was a story where the characters staged a concert, starred in a movie, flew to outer space and back, and traveled forward and backward through time. So, yes, there was some cool stuff in there. And the fifteen-minute pre-rendered ending remains, in my opinion, the most satisfying in the series.

Wimbledon 2009 Quarterfinals

I haven't been able to watch any Wimbledon because I actually have a job, and those darned Brits refuse to schedule the matches around my work shift. Nevertheless, today's results have brought some exciting numbers. The men's quarterfinals included five Grand Slam champions, four former World No. 1s, and four players older than Roger Federer.

With 2008 champion and current World No. 1 Rafael Nadal unable to defend his title, Federer became the odds-on favorite to win it all, Andy Murray (3) and Novak Djokovic (4) being the major obstacles standing in the way of him claiming a record-breaking 15th Grand Slam title. Some enthusiasts, however, may have been hoping that fan favorite Marat Safin, having declared this his final year on tour, would pull off the Cinderella story following his impressive performance last year. That didn't happen--Safin lost in the first round--but we did get glimmers of former excellence from Lleyton Hewitt and Juan Carlos Ferrero, each coming in unseeded and playing their best tennis in years. Wild card Ferrero beat some top ten players (Fernando Gonzalez (10) and Gilles Simon (7)) before falling in straight sets to Murray. As for Hewitt, it's appropriate that, after having knocked off rising star Juan Martin Del Potro (5), he would lose finally to old rival Andy Roddick, whom he used to regularly terrorize, and nearly did so again today before losing in an epic five sets. For Roddick, a year younger than Hewitt, this may well be his last, best chance to win Wimbledon (or any other major again).

Meanwhile, the oldest player still in the tournament, Tommy Haas (24th seed, despite being ranked outside the top 32) managed to upset Djokovic for a spot in the semifinal against Federer, for whom Haas has been a legitimate threat in the past, including as recently as the French Open, where Federer was forced to come back from two sets-to-love. In his prime, Tommy Haas looked like he had game enough to match the Hewitts and Gustavo Kuertens of the world, but, when it counted, he never did. Then Roger Federer arrived. With today's victory, the man has now made it to twenty-one straight Grand Slam semifinals, losing only three of those to the eventual champions. In other words, since Wimbledon 2004, nobody has won a major without having to go through Federer.

Roger Federer, only two victories away from standing alone as "the greatest," remains the favorite, but there is much at stake to drive the other three semifinalists as well. Before a partisan UK crowd that has been starving for Wimbledon's first native champion since Fred Perry in 1936, the burden of history is no less heavy on Andy Murray. But he has winning records against all the remaining players, and he may be due for his first major championship. Roddick would, at the very least, like to take things back to 2005, when he was Federer's would-be rival. For Haas, at age 31, the end is surely approaching, but even now, if he can keep his emotions in check, he should be capable of beating any of the other men. However things turn out, the next few days should provide some exciting matches.

One more Metal Gear anecdote

Along with my purchase of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, I also picked up the collector's edition of Prima's official guide. The book was actually put together by Piggyback, a UK publisher of video game strategy guides that certain nuts have, for years, held as far superior to any of the domestic BradyGames and Prima stuff. I can't personally attest to its quality because, for fear of spoilers, I didn't consult it on my playthrough. It was a very sleekly built hardcover, however, and I bought it primarily as a collector's item.

Besides being hardcover, the "limited edition" bonuses were a few pages of artwork and the inclusion of a numbered lithograph illustrated by Yoji Shinkawa. Still nothing too exciting, until I took a closer look and immediately recognized the five-digit number on my lithograph. It was the first five digits of my bank account number. A meaningless coincidence, but an eerie one, given that this was the series that had brought us Psycho Mantis and "Fission Mailed." Almost as bad as that Silent Hill 4 demo...

The Essentials #35: Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots

SPOILERS

Arriving ten years after Konami's seminal Metal Gear Solid, 2008's Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots for the Sony PlayStation 3 was to be Solid Snake's final mission, as well as (once again) the last Metal Gear helmed by Hideo Kojima. Kojima, having expressed his desire to step back after Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, had already assigned Shuyo Murata, writer and director of Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner, to succeed him as director of MGS4, but, supposedly acceding to demands of both fans and crew, Kojima decided to return after all to direct alongside Murata, and the end result was a work permeated with the sense and soul of the series's original creator.

Picking up several years after Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, Guns of the Patriots finally put players back in the role of Solid Snake for the entire game. But it would not be the Solid Snake that players had been anticipating. An early piece of promotional artwork depicting a slew of returning characters, including Raiden with sword in one hand and his other arm cradling a baby, had given fans some idea of what to look forward to in the all-encompassing magnum opus. Solid Snake, front and center, resembled his gruff and bearded MGS2 self. By the time the first trailer debuted, however, Kojima Productions had evidently gone in a different direction. Snake was now an old man sporting a questionable mustache. He was not too worn to kick ass, but his deteriorating condition added a sad angle to his return.


If Snake looked a little worse for wear, at least players could still be excited by the transition to a new generation of console hardware. After two installments on the PS2, Metal Gear was ready to take advantage of the power of the PS3 by delivering a gorgeous game that also broke significantly from the past in its mechanics.

Like Snake Eater before it, Guns of the Patriots introduced a number of annoying and largely extraneous new systems, although they were integrated more organically this time around. Though heavily promoted during pre-release, the new camouflage system again saw little practical use for most of the game. Removing the need to go into a menu and continually select different camo patterns, Snake's "OctoCamo" suit, like an octopus, could take on the color and texture of the surfaces that it touched. Again, I found little use for it and mostly ignored it, but at least, when Snake did adopt new camo, it happened dynamically with little thought on my part. The new "Psyche" gauge was similar to but a little more obtrusive than the MGS3 stamina system, since you could not as easily hunt and hoard supplies to keep it steady. Its hindering effects manifested with greater frequency than in MGS3, but it was still just an occasional irritation that would be dealt with as needed with items. The "Threat Ring," functionally comparable to the radar from Portable Ops, surrounded Snake only when he was crouching or prone and warned players when enemies were close.

The truly drastic changes came at the more basic level. The controls were completely overhauled. Although I had found the old Metal Gear Solid controls to be highly functional once picked up, they had, even by the time of Snake Eater, begun to feel outdated and clunky, with key functions spread across too many buttons. For Guns of the Patriots, Kojima Productions took some inspiration from Western-developed shooters, placing the fire button on the shoulder for a more natural pistol grip feel. Combined with a camera that built upon Subsistence's third-person view, adding an over-the-shoulder angle and the ability to move in first-person, the new controls allowed players to approach parts of the game almost like a third-person shooter.

These more action-oriented controls were important too, because the stealth elements were now far removed from the action puzzle feel of Metal Gear Solid. As advertised, the game largely dispensed with the old process of hiding in one place and slipping through observed holes in patrol routes. Security was tighter and Snake was slower, so it was now very difficult to progress without some proactive approach toward enemies. Moreover, in a world run on the "war economy," Snake would find himself walking into battlefields where mercenaries engaged rebels. Kojima Productions played up this element as one of MGS4's revolutionary bullet points, as Snake would have to progress through dynamic situations between hostiles and neutrals, and it was up to the player to what extent to involve Snake. In the finished product, however, this element turned out to be a minor feature during the first two missions, after which the rebels never reappeared. The hostile mercenaries would always hunt Snake, so the player's only choice was whether to aid, ignore, or antagonize the rebels. The latter option was idiotic (though easy to do accidentally), so, in practice, the decision was between moving along using the rebels as a diversion, or stopping to help the cause and earn some items as rewards.


Reinforcing the interpretation of Guns of the Patriot as more of an action game was the alarming abundance of firearms. Snake's MGS4 arsenal was several times greater than in all of the previous games put together. All of those guns could furthermore be tuned and modified by paying the arms dealer Drebin.

Crammed full of set piece battles, some memorable sneaking sections, and multiple vehicular segments, it was the most varied Metal Gear yet, delivered in the most linear fashion. As far back as the original 8-bit Metal Gear, the series had employed Zelda-style "overworld" maps paired with an overhead camera. Even Snake Eater, although relatively free of backtracking, contained many large open environments to provide the illusion of a world to explore. Guns of the Patriots proceeded practically on rails. In fact, as noted, there were multiple on-rails sequences throughout the game, which was broken up into five acts set in self-contained locales. For a final installment, I thought the mission structure was a great idea that allowed MGS4, now a globe-trotting adventure spanning multiple diverse and exquisitely detailed environments, to be greater in scope yet tighter in presentation. And each successive act brought new highlights, including the spectacular return of Raiden in the epic Act 2, the confrontation with the ghosts of Snake Eater in the revelatory Act 3, and the haunting return to Shadow Moses in Act 4.

The downside was that you had to install each act separately. During my initial playthrough, I actually kind of appreciated the breaks that the installation periods represented, but the process made it beyond inconvenient to return to earlier segments, since you could not have more than one act installed at a time. MGS4 needed these installs supposedly because of how hard it was pushing the still young system. It was already the largest PS3 game yet, allegedly taking up the whole of a dual-layer Blu-ray disc only after cuts allowed it to fit. The only possible evidence of cuts was in the Codec conversations, which were scaled back considerably from previous games. The Codec screen presented a wide frequency band, but, across that entire span, there would remain for the entire game only two numbers, one at each end, that Snake could dial out to. It stuck me as odd visually to have all that empty space, but if cuts were made in that area, the decision must have been made early on. Snake had enough allies who would contact him from frequencies in that blank middle range, but it would not have made sense for him to call characters like Raiden and Meryl, who would not always be around or cooperative.

One guy you probably should have been able to call was Drebin. He certainly had a lot of nonsense to spew, as he would call Snake after every battle against the "Beauty and the Beast Corps" to tell you the tear-jerking life story of the poor girl you just obliterated. Somewhere between the sentimental personal narratives of Metal Gear Solid and the voiceless villains of Snake Eater, this was probably the worst approach yet, but the Beauty and the Beast Corps members themselves may have been the most awesome boss designs. No more giant shamans, bisexual vampires, or bee men. Yoji Shinkawa's designs blended, yes, beauty with beastliness, but also endowed them with the cool mechanical intricacy of his Zone of the Enders mechs.


Intended to tie up every series loose end and conclude the story of Solid Snake, the plot would be incomprehensible to anyone who had not played through the previous MGS titles. But that baggage that was its greatest barrier to mainstream acceptance would also be MGS4's greatest asset to those legions of loyal fans who had been following the series for years. At times billed as the true sequel to MGS2, Guns of the Patriots managed almost miraculously to address all of the unbelievable questions raised in Sons of Liberty, albeit it had to cheat for some of its answers. Even more surprisingly, it added a whole new dimension to MGS3, tying it into the "La-li-lu-le-lo" convolutions in unexpected ways that gave the third installment brand new relevance, while completely altering how I perceived the story and characters of Snake Eater.

Few works of any medium have ever earned the emotional investment that this series had over its seven installments across more than two decades. Its fans had shared in the life of Solid Snake and the story of Hideo Kojima for maybe ten or even twenty of their own years. The finale to that arc delivered one of gaming's truly cathartic moments, as Snake walked, then crawled his way down that microwave corridor. Helping him along, the player needed only to press forward while tapping one button repeatedly to keep his health from depleting too rapidly due to the radiation. Mechanically, it was the simplest sort of gameplay the medium could offer, yet it was also one of the most awe-inspiring and emotionally rewarding moments in video game history. I've traditionally regarded rapid-button-press sequences as degenerate game design, the Metal Gear Solid torture sequence included, but, given all the buildup to that moment, I simply could not have lived with myself had I let Snake down. Pushing myself to my limit tapping that stupid button as fast as I could, I felt connected to Snake's drama in a way that just doesn't happen in non-interactive media.

No bizarre post-credits questions this time, Guns of the Patriots was as ever a story about existence and life, but it was this time less about seeking answers, more about living. Transcending the anguished explorations of gene, meme, and scene, it arrived finally at a simple peace for a simple man who, ever the dupe in a struggle between forces beyond his comprehension, had been stuck repeatedly undertaking the same bloody task he never enjoyed in the first place. It gave fans a conclusive and poignant ending to a saga that had allowed us for a short while to live beyond ourselves. Mechanically and narratively, the game's flaws were not hard to point out--the gameplay systems were bloated and its cut scenes, the longest ever, were even more so--but its grandness outshone any defects. Even as it catered to its hardcore fans, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots remained utterly true to its creators. As long as that was the case, it could never be a disappointment to me.

6/25/2009

Perhaps the signs were there, but the facts do not lessen the shock. It is not my intention to understate the sadness of the other all too abundant celebrity passings of late, but this breaks my heart. The enormity of this loss owes to the stature of the man. I understand there are now generations of kids who do not know Michael Jackson, do not know why they should care. They probably won't believe me when I say to them that he was the biggest, he was the best. So vast was the shadow he cast that I cannot pinpoint how he affected the world and my own life. But I know that he did. He was a peculiar genius who could not live by society's conventions, and the same uniqueness that made him great was surely the source of his later difficulties. I grew up loving his music, and I wanted to remain his fan and defend him, but the more he spoke, the less I knew him, the harder it became to like him. We'll never know if he was just too weird or if the media was making a point that it could build up and tear down anybody. I think a part of me always believed that he would come back, that there was another act, one more period of greatness in his life. A part of me wanted Michael Jackson to one day puzzle out his own story and then triumphantly deliver the answers to all the cosmic mysteries of life. That part of me has died along with him, in its place the profound sense of so many doors closing. I feel the transience of life in the near certainty that no star his equal will emerge in my lifetime. For the first time, I fear and anticipate the approach of that pivotal moment I've heard older folks speak of, when you stop following new things and only hold on in vain to what you have and know. Things will be different now that he's gone.

Back Where I Belong

I had a dream that I had a dream that I was extraordinary. In the dream's dream, I had composed a song of such power that anyone who attempted to sing it would die in the process, yet its beauty would bring both singer and listener to complete life fulfillment. Waking within the dream, I knew that I could improve my life and the world if only I could recall the song, but I could remember only the effect of the song and nothing of the song itself. So, having had that glimpse of an unattainable better world, I faded bitterly back into the false reality, my life a misery ever after. Thank goodness it was all just a nightmare.