Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Essentials (PlayStation Portable) Review

Splinter Cell used to be Ubisoft's "it" franchise, much like Assassin's Creed is now. We got an entry pretty much every year, up until the meandering (and frequently delayed) Double Agent. Splinter Cell's plot wasn't complex but people were generally invested in Sam Fisher as a character. Double Agent looked to push Sam to the brink, and it was exciting. We knew that Double Agent would have branching paths, choices to make, so on and so forth. The final choice would involve the death of a character crucial to the franchise. He either dies by Sam's hand, or Sam saves him.

Everyone knew that there had to be a canonical ending, and Splinter Cell: Essentials was set to confirm which ending it was. There's a couple of problems with that. Essentials came out months before Double Agent and it only came out on the PSP. So, anyone with an eye on the franchise already knew what happened. That's... problematic. I was aware of what happened in Essentials because I knew I didn't have a PSP to play it, so I looked up what happened. I'm sure a lot of people did for this same reason. How was I supposed to know that Essentials would give Double Agent a canonical ending months before I (or anyone else) had the chance to play it? This sort of nullified some of the thrill of Double Agent, and I went with the canonical ending. It didn't feel like there was a purpose in any other choice.

So, Essentials spoiled everything for most of the diehard fans. For some reason everyone was waiting for Splinter Cell: Conviction to confirm the ending, when Essentials actually gave it to us before Double Agent came out. You would think that this meant Essentials was a sad excuse of a game that was best forgotten. Reviews from the time were pretty harsh, but I'm not sure it was entirely warranted.

Splinter Cell: Essentials plays out, for the most part, as a flashback. Sam Fisher is interrogated and recounts certain missions, leading up to that crucial point in Double Agent. This is not unlike the plot framing device of Conviction, with Douglas Shetland recounting events. Most of the levels are taken from the three preceding games, with a few original levels thrown in for good measure. The levels actually translate to the PSP's hardware very well. Graphics are grainy, but the remade levels are brought over with few compromises. There are more loading points and, seeing as this is the PSP, the loads are long.

The PSP translation actually seems to have been very well thought out by the developers. The controls are hampered by a lack of a second analog stick. An attempt was made to rectify this by having the circle button activate a free camera mode or recenter the camera with two taps. It's not completely successful, but it works. The best thing that the developers did to smooth the changeover was to dumb down the AI. The AI is now painfully dumb, but it gives you that extra second to orient yourself and react. If nothing had been done in this regard, the game would be impossibly frustrating. Interactivity with the environment has been toned down a bit, there are fewer lights that you can successfully shoot out but levels seem to be darker than the console counterparts, giving you more areas to hide. Otherwise, all of the features are present.

The levels are about a 50-50 mix of old and new. No levels from Pandora Tomorrow feature in the campaign (which is a shame, I personally think Pandora Tomorrow is a great game), but there are three levels from Pandora Tomorrow included as a bonus feature. It seems like these were possibly cut as a result of rushed development. The plot is... jumpy, to say the least. I was never fully on board with exactly why it was crucial to revisit these points. In particular, the GFO Oil Rig from the original game has never been a level that I particularly enjoyed. The way the game is patched together with new and old makes me wonder if it wasn't planned to be a wholly original title that was abandoned at some point. Including bonus levels from Pandora Tomorrow makes it seem like the developers were just kind of toying around with the PSP at some point to see what they could throw at it.

The real knock against Essentials is exactly that; I'm not sure what the point is. It's really an oddity in the franchise. It spoiled a main game, ported older levels and just sort of seemed superfluous. Is it as bad as the reviews suggested? No, I don't think so. The new levels actually work well and fit with the design of the original levels. They completely hold their own. If I didn't know that the new levels weren't from a main game, I wouldn't know. That said, it's a problem that I even have to compare the new content to old content in the same game. 

This is a short review because there's not much to say for Essentials. It's a rehash of earlier content with a dash of new thrown in and it plays the same way. If you've played Splinter Cell or Chaos Theory, you've already played half of the game. Is Essentials worth it? Not particularly, no. With Conviction reconfirming this game's confirmation of Double Agent's true ending (and replicating and improving upon its storytelling style), Essentials is anything but. It's not a bad game but it's skippable, even for the most die hard fan.

The Score: 7.5/10

Knuckles' Chaotix (Sega 32X) Review

The Sonic franchise, like Sega itself, has seen better days. The Sega Genesis outings were truly sublime, and I believe that Sonic 3 & Knuckles (the combined Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles) is truly the best platforming game of all time. I don't think it gets the love it deserves due to the way it was released. Sonic 3 & Knuckles was always intended to be one game, but due to the size of the game it was too expansive to put on one cartridge in a cost effective way. It was split into Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles to keep costs down for everyone.

Those games were the last real Sonic games for most people. Sonic 3D Blast came out later, but it was clear that it was never really intended to be a true successor. Sonic Xtreme, the planned Sega Saturn outing, never came to be and we were left without a true Sonic game until Sonic Adventure. There was another game, though... on the immediately deserted Sega 32X. I remember this game coming out, and the Archie Sonic comic series had a special tie-in issue for the game (most of the games had some sort of tie-in issue).

Sonic is NOT in the game, though.

This was a treasured issue of mine, just because that red "Super" Metal Sonic is so fucking badass. The Archie Sonic series was actually pretty well done from what I remember, and the important bit is that Sonic's friends didn't suck in this series. That's another story for another time though.

My parents were (shockingly) aware that I couldn't get Knuckles' Chaotix though, as I didn't have the needed 32X mushroom. Now that I do, this was the game I was looking forward to the most by far. Knuckles' Chaotix has been something of a lost game in the Sonic canon. In all of the many emulated collections (Sonic Mega Collection, Sonic's Classic Genesis Collection, XBLA ports, so on and so forth), Knuckles' Chaotix has never been re-released in any form. There's a few rumors about the game, one of them being that Sega asked that Sonic be removed from the game because they had concerns about the format of the game. It surely seems possible as there is an early prototype of the game that can be found online that runs on Sega Genesis known as Sonic Crackers.

Instead of Sonic and Tails, we get Knuckles and his group of friends, the Chaotix. Mighty the Armadillo (who had actually appeared earlier in SegaSonic the Hedgehog, an arcade game), Charmy Bee, Vector the Crocodile and Espio the Chameleon. Utterly forgettable, and they wouldn't appear again until Sonic Heroes (which was also utterly forgettable). It manages to add to the Sonic-Knuckles rivalry that used to be a thing though, making it seem like Knuckles' has his group just as Sonic has his own.

Knuckles' Chaotix differs from traditional Sonic games in the fact that you use two characters. The characters are bound together by a chain of rings which essentially functions as a rubber band. One of the key gameplay elements is to use the hold button, which makes the non-player character stand in place while the other character runs until the chain is stretched, and then shoots forward.

This is admittedly awkward at first, but it adds a great sense of speed to the game and it becomes second nature once you understand the limitations of the mechanic and when the best times to use it are. The game makes a pretty admirable attempt at the physics of this idea, but sometimes it's just outright glitchy. It's not unusual or uncommon for the characters to just kind of spaz out and sling around all over the place when you're bouncing off a spring or moving between two different heights. This isn't surprising considering the age of the game, but it is disappointing that it happens since this is the key idea of the game. You can also pick the second character up and throw them to higher platforms or to hit switches, though this isn't used much. The rest of the game is essentially identical to other Sonic games in terms of mechanics.

Unfortunately, the level design is a bit scattershot. Most of the team that worked on Sonic CD worked on Knuckles' Chaotix and the level design shows. Where the numbered Sonic entries have multiple clear paths through the levels, Sonic CD and Chaotix just kind of have paths all over the place with no real single route. It is more bearable here than it was in Sonic CD since you won't be traveling back and forth in time, but the confusion takes away from the game. This group of developers did seem to be capable of relatively straightforward level design; the Speed Slider levels are fantastic and wouldn't feel out of place in a main series game. Would you like to replay those levels...?

Good luck. Knuckles' Chaotix decided everything needed to be random. The only real choice you have is which character you're controlling when the game starts. From there? Random. The character following you is picked from a claw machine which scrolls back and forth of its own accord.

There are two useless characters in this situation (the robots), and if you end up with one, you're stuck with them. You re-pick every time you reload the game. In addition to the claw moving back and forth, characters drop off the bottom of the screen and pop back up. Your best strategy here is to just immediately hit A to get the character directly under the claw. If you're playing as Knuckles, it's always Vector. As long as you end up with a character that isn't one of the useless ones, you're good. Levels are also selected in a random order. A cursor moves over all of the levels until you stop it, then it moves a few more times and lands on a level. Chaotix's levels are broken into acts just like other Sonic games, but there are 5 acts for each level. Once you complete an act, you go back out into the hub area and pick another random level. Once you've completed all five acts, that level is taken out of the selections and it can't be picked again.

The really strange part is that you can never freely pick levels. One of Sonic 3's best features was the ability to go back and pick levels freely once you finished the game. You could also collect any missing Chaos Emeralds and replay the last level to get to the better ending. Once you've beaten Knuckles' Chaotix it just replays the final boss fight. You have to start a new game and play levels randomly to revisit anything. It's really weird to play the acts in a random order and you never really get into a groove with any of the levels. Where the acts in previous games introduced a mechanic and then ramped up the difficulty, the acts here are just... randomly strewn about.

Anyways, this game is a 32X exclusive. Does it benefit from it? Not really. The graphics aren't anything that couldn't be done on the Genesis. The color count is obviously much better and there's no dithering in sight. It actually kind of makes me wish that Ristar would've been a 32X game. Both games have very similar styles, and it would be nice to see Ristar without all of the dithering. There are some 3D effects in the game, some levels have platforms that are 3D and can be seen from slightly different perspectives. The bonus stages are also fully 3D and play out like a more advanced version of the bonus stages in Sonic 2. The game also relies heavily on sprite scaling effects, which wasn't possible on the standard Genesis hardware (scaling was also possible on the Sega CD). There are some very nice parallax effects as well but it's nothing that would've been missed had this just been a Genesis game.

As it stands, Knuckles' Chaotix will likely forever remain a curiosity in Sonic, and even Sega, canon. This is not a bad game by any means. It's much more deserving of a spot in compilation releases than Sonic 3D Blast, but it looks like it will never get any kind of rerelease treatment. If you're looking for some classic Sonic, this will scratch the itch. You'll need a 32X or an emulator, though.

The Score: 8/10

Selfbooting Dreamcast Games, Part 1: The Basics

I was exchanging emails with someone recently and they asked me if I had a video tutorial for ripping games since I was no longer doing it. This was.. bothersome. I know that the internet has more or less become a glorified on-demand service for videos served on YouTube but, good god. If it was so easy, why wouldn't everyone be doing it? There's only been a few really excellent Dreamcast rippers since the Echelon and Kalisto days because it isn't easy. You need to have a keen eye for detail, you need to have time and you need to think. I make no guarantees that I'll even finish this, but it may provide some interesting perspective for some people.

We'll start off by looking at the basics and busting some myths so that we can get to the actual process.

The Dreamcast came out in 1998 in Japan, DVD existed at this time but was still prohibitively expensive. Sega knew that they would need more storage space (and.. copy protection), and DVD was the only real option at the time. In order to avoid skyrocketing the price of their console, they turned to Yamaha for a different solution. Yamaha developed a new disc format called the GD-ROM (Gigabyte Disc Read Only Memory) which stores a gigabyte (shockingly enough). The Dreamcast verifies that the disc is a GD-ROM, and starts the game. Problem solved, no piracy.

Except...

Sega had an idea for a new kind of multimedia disc, called MIL-CD. MIL-CDs would only work on Dreamcast, and they would offer additional content on a music CD (or just any other CD, I guess; MIL-CD never really took off obviously) by including video and other extras. So, we have a way to boot a regular CD with Dreamcast data on disc? There's our way in.

Look at any article on the Dreamcast and you'll always see remarks that "THERE WAS NO COPY PROTECTION!" This is incredibly false. It's there, it was just defeated by the pioneers of Dreamcast ripping. The earliest Dreamcast rips required a boot disc to use and would not boot on their own. Eventually the way the boot disc is set up was mimicked and now Dreamcast games start up all on their own.

There's a few issues with Dreamcast rips, which is why people are still doing and re-doing Dreamcast rips. Our first limitation is obviously the size disparity between media. CDs can only hold 700mb while the GD-ROM was over 1gb. This typically isn't too huge of a problem as a lot of games simply didn't cross over the 700mb threshold. There are a lot of PlayStation ports that just weren't that big and a lot of games just didn't need to be. There's usually workable solutions to the size disparity. The other key difference that can cause problems with game performance is the difference in read speed. The Dreamcast reads GD-ROMs at 12x while reading CDs at 6x. This causes some limitations with how fast we can get data off of CDs versus the GD. The speed difference can manifest in longer loading times, stuttering in FMV or audio not loading in time (particularly an issue for fighting games). Internet was slower back when Echelon was at work and as a consequence, games with CDDA audio suffered. A lot of games used CDDA and in order to keep file size down (WAV data doesn't compress much) the CDDA tracks were encoded to MP3s which were then converted back to WAV files and inserted into the disc image. In case you don't know, MP3s get small by basically throwing away huge amounts of the data in the audio and converting it back to a WAV file doesn't restore that data.

Another reason Dreamcast rips are still being done and redone is that the methods of dumping data from the GD-ROM have become more reliable over time. Back in the good old days, discs were dumped using a serial port connection. This could take almost a full day and sometimes data was missing. This resulted in repacks, patches, workarounds, you name it. These days the easiest way to dump games is with an SD card adapter and jj10dm's SD ripper application. This takes around 30 minutes in a worst case scenario.

Ripping methods have improved over time as well. If you've been around Dreamcast stuff for a long time, you've undoubtedly seen some dipshit say "well, the rippers eventually figured out how to interrupt the burning of the disc to make multiple data sessions so that the game boots on Dreamcast." Holy fuck, that is a stupid statement. Preparing a Dreamcast game to selfboot is precise. There is no mystery about anything happening. Dipshit is right though, we do need multiple data sessions.

Another reason that Dreamcast games are being redone is because of the selfboot method. Echelon and all the scene groups used what's known as an audio/data selfboot. The smallest CDDA track possible was burned as the first data session. This took a few mb and the following multisession data track killed a few more mb before we got to the actual game data. Disc space is precious, and this was inefficient. Modern selfbooting uses two data tracks which the file system treats as one uninterrupted ISO, so we get some precious mbs back. This is called data/data. This selfboot style also lets us imitate the Dreamcast's original boot LBA, 45000.

What's an LBA? An LBA is a logical block address. In essence, it tells a computer where data is located by breaking so many bytes into a block. For data, 2048 bytes are in a block and for audio 2352 are in a block. This is important for later.

The Dreamcast boots files by looking for bootsector data at the start of the second session, this is known as an IP.BIN. An IP.BIN is not an actual file that can be located in the disc, as it is placed at the start of the ISO information. Once the IP.BIN is found, the Dreamcast loads up the data and the IP.BIN points the system towards the 1ST_READ.BIN, essentially our main executable. The 1ST_READ.BIN then wants to know what LBA the IP.BIN is at. If it doesn't match, the boot fails and kicks you back to the Dreamcast BIOS screen. If it doesn't fail, sweet success. This is what I meant when I said Dreamcast ripping is precise. So, when we say the boot LBA is 45000 it means that the end of the 1st data session and the multi session data stops at 44999. The IP.BIN is located at 45000. Echelon's old audio/data style selfboot had a boot LBA of 11700, though most people's burners couldn't burn this file in the correct manner. Typically you'll end up with 11702 if you use the old method.

I think that's about enough for today, next time I'll post some tools and dig into even more technical details.

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (PlayStation 3) Review

What the hell is wrong with Snake's ear on that cover? Really, look at it. It's so fucked up. Look really closely. You'll never see the cover without immediately noticing the ear again.

Since I've recently been getting my hands on more and more Sony consoles, I was mostly experiencing the parts of Metal Gear that didn't really see other platforms. Peace Walker, Portable Ops, Metal Gear Solid 3 (which.. are all on other consoles now, except Portable Ops). All of those games were intriguing in their own way, mostly because of Big Boss. Big Boss is a fascinating character; flawed, misguided, foolish, conflicted. He was thrust into something far greater than himself and did what he believed was right at that moment. Big Boss' story has developed into a tragedy, and we'll hopefully see it reach its climax sometime soon with The Phantom Pain. This made me somewhat apprehensive to return to a Solid Snake helmed game. 

Snake is badass, but he's a bit of a boy scout. He's got a sturdy moral compass throughout his appearances, which isn't quite as interesting as Big Boss' constant turmoil. For the most part, Big Boss' entries seem to keep Hideo Kojima's (somewhat poor) sense of humor in check as well, not to mention the welcome lack of deux ex nanomachine in the early (in the series' timeline) entries. 

Goddammit.

MGS4 finds Snake having aged considerably due to the failings of the cloning process used for himself and Liquid. This is hammered home constantly, with Snake clutching his back if you crouch for too long and hacking up a lung while smoking. Strangely, Old Snake works out well. The Colonel from MGS is back, and he's asking Snake to assassinate Ocelot to halt his uprising. Snake is clearly a bit uncomfortable with the thought of outright murdering Ocelot, but accepts. There's an understandably ridiculous number of plot threads that come together in this game, and summarizing them all would result in a week's worth of reading. In the best interests of everyone, I'll refrain from going much further.

Personally, I didn't have any issues keeping track of what was going on. If you've played the other games then everything you've seen before comes to a fine point here. If you haven't, this game may as well be Japanese. If you're unfamiliar and you do want to play this game, there is a companion app that can be downloaded from PlayStation Network that acts as an encyclopedia for the game's history. It's actually very interesting to go through if you're familiar with the plot, but if you aren't then it would be about as interesting as eating a bowl of Cheerios without sugar and reading a medical journal style summary of Tom Clancy's literary output. 

It's worth noting that while the plot does move along at a good pace, it takes a while to get started. In addition, there is a plot thread that runs throughout the game that amounts to "WHOSE SIDE ARE THEY ON??" which gets old about... well, the moment it's introduced. Kojima's eye for directing has taken a step up here as well, and the (then) new tech afforded by the PS3 is used well.

24-ish.

Since I brought that up, I have to say that I fucking hate it when Kojima gets cute. There's a cutscene in the fucking game, that occurs during normal gameplay where another character prompts you to change the disc... then goes "oh, whoops, this is the PS3, it has Blu-Ray technology and we don't need to do that!" 

Are you fucking kidding me? In the middle of your game about a man who is on his death mission, you stop to talk about the PS3's Blu-Ray technology?

Speaking of which, let's talk about the tone of the game. It's all very final, and we're very much under the impression that this is it. This is the end for Snake. We're on a final tour, even heading back to Shadow Moses. From Snake's age to the title screen, this is the end. Yes, even the title screen carriers a ridiculous seriousness. If you press start immediately, all you see is Snake standing in a cemetery in front of The Boss' grave. If you wait and give time for the camera to move closer to Snake, you'll see that he's holding a gun and clearly contemplating suicide. Aaand we just took a break to talk about Blu-Ray discs.

Let's talk about that Blu-Ray disc more then since we've opened that can of worms. One of the primary talking points about this game was just the sheer amount of data. It uses a full 50gb Blu-Ray disc. I'm not really sure what for. Don't get me wrong, I love the fact that PS3 games can use uncompressed audio (and I'm all about the surround sound) but this game would not have been hurt with a bit of texture and audio compression to be on the 360. The graphics are unfortunately not that impressive. The art style still cuts close to the one seen in the PS2 entries, which means the characters still have a bit of an anime flair to them in their styling. They're not really meant to look real. It's a bit disappointing given the storytelling. It was acceptable in the older games as we really didn't expect photorealism at the time. Obviously true photorealism is still a stretch, but it seems as though the idea to try to look real wasn't quite on the table for the developers yet. Metal Gear Solid V has moved on to a more realistic style, and it paid off for everything about the game.

Oh, and that fantastic Blu-Ray disc? The game installs about 4gb of data per chapter. Between chapters, the game rewrites the old data and installs the new data needed for the next chapter. The most recent update to the game will let you install all of the needed data, coming in at about 10gb. Unless you like watching Snake smoke while the game installs, then you can stick with those per chapter installs.

There are a lot of nice details in the graphics which pay help to reinforce character traits and themes in the game. Meryl returns after a disappointing absence in Metal Gear Solid 2, and is now wielding a desert eagle comfortably; the same gun that Snake had mocked her for previously. I believe the wording was "that's a pretty big gun for a woman." Snake is seen using a 1911, a gun that is regarded as old but reliable (and fun to shoot). I'm not 100% positive, but I don't think Snake used a 1911 in previous entries.

The gunplay in the game is vastly improved. It's no longer a ridiculous 3 button combo to bring up your gun, go into first person and shoot the gun. You just bring up the sights and shoot, and it changes the game completely. Stealth is still a viable option (and the most desirable in most situations), but going all out guns blazing is an option now as well. In fact, there are sections where going all out is necessary. The best gameplay change?

YOU CAN CROUCH! Holy shit. Only 6 years after Sam Fisher first crouched, Snake can now crouch. It completely changes the stealth. It's much easier now to sneak up on a guard and grab them, where before it was crawl as close as possible, stand up, and hope you're not too loud. MGS3's camouflage system is also implemented here, in a more hands-off way. Snake's sneaking suit will automatically match the environment when you stay still for a period of time. For the most part it comes off as novelty, but it will save your ass occasionally.

MGS4 is an excellent game. There will be times when it feels like more of a movie, but it's probably the most fully realized Metal Gear game. The plot is well defined and moves to a satisfying conclusion. All questions are answered and basically every living character returns to play their part. If this had truly ended up being Kojima's last Metal Gear, it would have been an entirely satisfying ending.

The Score: 9/10

The Last of Us (PlayStation 3) Review

Even though I don't write these reviews very formally, you still need some sort of a thesis to start things off. A lot has been said about this game and I'm not entirely sure where to start. I'll start at the very beginning. There's going to be a couple of spoilers, but I'll keep the big stuff out of it.

From the moment you put the game into your PlayStation 3, it's made apparently that this is a game of a serious nature. The background on the XMB is a dramatic black and white rendering of our main characters, Joel and Ellie. Once you load up the game, you're greeted with what is instantly recognizable as Gustavo Santaolalla's unique composition. He's an excellent composer, with his soundtrack to The Motorcycle Diaries being one of my favorite movie scores.

This struck me as a bit odd. I watched The Motorcycle Diaries dozens of times (usually sandwiched between readings on Che Guevara) in my teens. His score is perfectly suited for the movie, but it seemed odd here. A zombie cordyceps fungus monster game is something fundamentally American. Santaolalla's music has a distinctly South American edge to it. My initial thought was that this would end up in a sort of mismatch between environment and music, but it was actually quite the opposite. It fits; in the same way the score emphasized Che's early years and spirit to go out and do something, the music here emphasizes the same sense of scale and adventure.

It's fitting that they sprang for Santaolalla to do the score, as the story has the same weight as his music does. The writing here is a thing to behold; the characterization is the best of any game I've ever played. There's a myriad of games with powerful stories and excellent performances from voice actors (Robert Carlyle as Gabriel Belmont in the end of Castlevania: Lords of Shadow comes to mind), but we've never had such well rounded characters. Joel and Ellie are believable and real. We're not just treated to their personalities in cutscenes, they have banter while just walking around. Ellie spazzes out and acts weird like a kid would. You come to care for both of them and understand their actions.

Strong characterization drives home moments in a story. You could have the most dramatic moment imaginable, but if your characters are as paper thin as those in an SNL sketch, the moment will fall flat. The confidence in the characters is immediate and I think that this game has probably the finest opening moments of any game. Our zombies infected are here due to a mutated strain of a real life parasitic fungus that takes over ants and kills them, then uses their bodies to spread the fungus to other ants. This is a pretty clever idea, but really it's just another way to say zombie without being so cliche (I'll accept it because I'm so fucking tired of zombies everywhere). 

The introductory sequence is set in 2013 with Joel and his daughter just as the fungus is beginning to spread. They make an attempt to escape the town that they live in as all hell is breaking lose. They've almost made it to the road, when a soldier orders them to stop and shoots Joel's daughter dead. Bring up the Santaolalla soundtrack, smash cut to the title card and all of your feels are on fire.

We pick up 20 years later with Joel a (predictably) broken and changed man, working with a woman named Tess (voiced excellently by Annie Wersching, aka the reason Jack Bauer went full Bauer). They're into some shady thug shit, and are expecting a large shipment of guns. It turns out they were stolen and traded to a group called the Fireflies, who work in opposition to the government in trying to bring order back to society. Jeol and Tess are told that they can get the guns back if they take Ellie, a girl infected with the fungus but not changing, to a Firefly lab to be studied for a possible cure. Society has collapsed at this point in time, with survivors mostly packed into tightly controlled quarantine zones in major cities. Tess doesn't make the escape from the quarantine zone (Surprised? There's only two people on the cover, this isn't really a spoiler..), leaving Joel alone in taking Ellie to the Fireflies.

Joel resents this at first and sees it as a job, but eventually comes to care for Ellie. Their journey takes them across the country over the course of about a year, as they are always just slightly too late to meet up with the Fireflies. I won't spoil the ending, but it does bring up an interesting morality question which I may write about separately at another time. This was the talk of the internet when the game came out, and I managed to avoid spoilers. You probably should, too. The idea presented isn't necessarily unique, but the way the game forces you to consider it in the ending is.

I have nothing but praise for the story and soundtrack, but let's actually dig in to the gameplay. That's why we're really here, right? 

Weeeeelll.....

I'm going to be straight up. There's very little that's actually enjoyable about playing this game. You're either fucked or you're taking a casual walk to the next place that you'll be fucked. Supplies are limited in this game since we're 20 years into such a catastrophe. You don't have a lot of ammo, and you've got to scrounge supplies to put together makeshift grenades and weapons. There is still a healthy amount of ammo around, but the gun mechanics are just plain bad. Take a look at this screenshot from multiplayer (because I couldn't find any screenshots that actually showed the reticule on screen except this one):

The camera zooms into your character so tight and at such an odd angle that the reticule seems to have no actual relation to the position of your character and the gun. About midway through the game you begin to compensate for this and focus solely on the reticule, but then they pull the rug out from under you and the enemies all get armor and are almost impossible to kill. That midway point when you get comfortable with it? The game is fun to play at that point. 

This is largely set up as a stealth game, but it's infuriating beyond belief. I'm a big fan of stealth games, but The Last of Us doesn't really look at what other games have done in the genre. Take Splinter Cell, a game from 2002. If there is a light that's causing you difficulty in moving through an area you can A) shoot it or B) find the switch and shut it off. The Last of Us does no such thing. 

The shaky gunplay is basically a death sentence for you in almost every situation. There are enemies called clickers which typically take multiple hits to kill and if they get to you, you are IMMEDIATELY dead. You CAN level up a skill so that you have the ability to stab them, but it is one of the costliest skill upgrades in the game. It's not easy to upgrade your skills either; you have to collect pills that are hidden around levels. There are several other essential skills to upgrade, and by the time I got those to an acceptable level and went to get the stabbing skill, I didn't even end up using it because those enemies were hardly around anymore.

When you encounter enemies, you're usually greatly outnumbered. The game wants you to sneak around and stealthily deal with them one by one. This is... a lot to ask, and I'm patient with games. One misstep and you're fucked. The enemies have a pretty uncanny ability to shoot you consecutively until you die. You can sneak by enemies too, but there are times when the game has given you impossible odds and virtually forces you to fight by placing enemies in spots that you can't really draw them away from without exposing yourself. You will die a lot, it will be immediate, and it will be frustrating. To its credit the game does checkpoint frequently, but it still doesn't offset the frustration. 

The Last of Us is a movie of unusual power. But the bits of game inbetween? Those bits are deeply flawed on a fundamental level.

I believe that games have to be scored as a sum of their parts. I don't think one part can override others. Case in point, Mass Effect 3. Most people loved the gameplay. The story was a disaster, which had always been touted as a key point of the Mass Effect series. Yet, we had a game that was highly controversial because of all of the 9.0 reviews with the little "well, the story sucks" caveat.

In that spirit...

The Score: 7.5/10

This is an above average game with a lot of effort put into it, but it's just not fun to play. If I were to disregard the gameplay and reward it on its story merits alone, it would be a solid 9.

The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap (Game Boy Advance) Review

In my opinion, the Legend of Zelda is a series of ups and downs (usually within the same game). The Wind Waker era was a huge down, and I never really had much interest in The Minish Cap. However, who can resist when you find the game at Goodwill right after you install a backlit screen (I'll write about that some day) in your original Game Boy Advance? I'll gladly pay $3 for that.

My main disappointment in the series stems from the over-reliance on gimmicks. This seems to be a recurring theme in recent Nintendo games. For Zelda, we've had transformative masks, a sailboat, the Four Sword, the titular Minish Cap, the wolf transformation in Twilight Princess, a boat again combined with an all out touchscreen assault... and whatever obstructs you in Skyward Sword and Spirit Tracks (I haven't played those two, but I did recently buy Skyward Sword). I'll say that I love Majora's Mask though, as the masks didn't really fundamentally change the game or hamper it. I said in my God of War review that there's something to be said for perfecting the wheel instead of reinventing it and this is something that Nintendo has no grasp on.

I mean, really, how good would it be to just get a straightforward Zelda adventure through Hyrule again? No fucking around, just doing what you need to do to kill Ganon.

Thankfully, Capcom developed The Minish Cap. Capcom knows not to fuck with a good thing too much. Well, not really. They knew for about 7 years before they started up with Street Fighter again.

Fuck you guys.

The gimmick of the hour for Minish Cap is the ability to shrink down in size. Thankfully, this gimmick is limited to puzzle solving and exploration. It is used in some boss battles, but it works out surprisingly well. The artwork for the areas you can only access when you're shrunk down is really quite stunning, too.

It's good enough that it makes the rest of the areas almost disappointing. It's the same 2D Zelda you've always known, with a brighter coat of paint. The art style is similar to The Wind Waker, which is probably the best thing they could've taken from that game.

Minish Cap is the second game in the series chronology, following Skyward Sword. It explores the origin of the Four Sword, which approximately no one gave a fuck about since no one had four friends and four GBAs and four copies of the GBA version of A Link to the Past to actually play Four Swords. There's no Ganon here, instead your enemy is the wizard Vaati, who promptly turns Zelda to stone. Shit goes down and Link gets paired up with Ezlo, a bird-like thing who is actually your hat. He allows Link to shrink down to be the same size as the Minish, a race of microscopic beings that live in Hyrule. They help Link to take his sword and infuse it with four elements, making it the Four Sword. 

Unfortunately, the quest is neither lengthy or difficult. There are more than four dungeons, but they're all short and there's really nothing challenging about them. It takes about 6 or so hours to finish the game. The game lacks the expansiveness to fuel the feeling that you're really on some grand adventure. It has nothing to do with the fact that it's 2D, either. Hell, the original Zelda on NES feels like it plays out on a grander scale.

There are attempts to make the game longer but they don't offer enough to bring you back into it. You'll collect things called Kinstones from chests and cutting down grass, which you combine with an NPC's Kinstone (there are also slots on walls for them in some places) for some kind of a reward somewhere on the map. Initially, hunting down Kinstones and matching them up is a fun distraction but it eventually reveals itself as shallow busywork. The vast majority of the rewards are simply not worth the effort of finding the person who has a Kinstone to match and then traveling to the location of the item. The other piece of busywork is collecting shells and trading them for figurines. This really isn't anything complicated, but getting the figurines is what's tedious.

You go to a store to exchange the shells. You walk to the right and pick how many shells you want to give for your random figure. There's an animation for this. Then the figurine appears across the store. There's an animation for this. Then you walk over and pick up the figure. There's an animation for this. Christ almighty, what a waste of fucking time. Again, it's just fucking busywork and it's not worth collecting them all.

As far as the gameplay goes, it's your traditional 2D Zelda. The usual weapons appear, the usual enemies appear. Like all Zelda games, there'll be a new item that the game will have an over-reliance on. Our culprit here is the Wind Jar. It either sucks things up, or blows gusts of air. Predictably, this plays into a lot of puzzles. Infuriatingly, it becomes necessary for moving around certain environments. You'll be given a leaf on the water, and you've got to use the gust jar to blow yourself (ha) around, like a sail boat without a sail. It's.. tedious (there's a pattern here). The other thing of note here is the Four Sword. As you add elements, you'll be able to make copies of Link (so if you have two of the four elements, you have two Links). You'll need your copies to push blocks or defeat some bosses. There's a few bosses that require you to do this to beat them, and it is infuriating. You have to charge your sword fully in order to spawn your copies, and then stand on specific tiles. If you get hit, your sword stops charging. If one of your copies gets hit, they all disappear. You can figure out how that goes if you put it in the context of a boss.

I've done a good job of pointing out the bad, but there's a considerable amount of good as well. The music is truly excellent, and it's a bit shocking at what the GBA can do with sound. While the dungeons are short, the level design is excellent. It's always clear what you need to do, which is important for a 2D game. 

I really had a whole lot of fun with the game. Most of the things I pointed out as negatives are things that you can (for the most part) ignore. The price is really the barrier to entry here. I couldn't recommend this as a $30 game, which is the typical asking price for a legitimate copy on eBay. There's a lot of fake cartridges out there for this game, but if you've got a keen eye then this may drive down the price of legitimate copies. If you can have it for less than that or if you don't mind a pirated cart, then I'd say it's worth it. It's good, but there's just not a lot of game here.

The Score: 8/10

PlayStation 2 Refurb and HDD Mod

Riiiiight.

The early models of the original PlayStation 2 are... difficult. That's my PlayStation 2. It was "refurbished." Which is why it ended up in Goodwill with disc read errors. Last January when I first started this blog, I had bought a slim PlayStation 2. I ended up hating it and buying a fat shortly after. Since the slim PlayStation 2 has a flip top lid instead of a DVD drive with a tray, it has some problems. Hoping to prevent the disc swap piracy circumvention of the PSX (and even the PS2), Sony put two lid sensors in the slim. One sits in the front corner of the disc area and one in the back. This wouldn't be a real problem, except for the fact that the rear lid sensor doesn't stay depressed very well. I was putting a book on top of it to keep it from thinking that the lid opened, and even then it didn't always help.

On top of this, the PS2 slim has compatibility issues with some games. The original PS2's processor was 294mhz, with the slim coming in at 300mhz. This breaks a few PS2 games and the slim has more compatibility issues with original PlayStation games, you can see these games here. Really, the fat PS2 is anything but a downgrade.. not to mention out of the box HDD support (some PS2 slims support the HDD with modding).

HDD support is one of the lesser known features of the PS2. It was pretty well supported in Japan, with games featuring installs and caching to speed up loading. In the US, it was pretty much only used for Final Fantasy XI. There are US games which take advantage of the drive, but it's nowhere near what it was in Japan. We'll get into that later.

The PS2 is not a difficult console to work with, but it is finnicky. I think about older consoles like this somewhat like classic cars. You either can't be afraid to get your hands dirty, or you need to find a good mechanic who won't charge too much and will be honest with you. First, let's address one of the most blatant and annoying problems.

Not all PS2 games come on DVDs. Some come on CDs, particularly the earlier games. CDs come on blue backed discs and DVDs are silver/gold. I think everyone has a copy of Tekken Tag Tournament, and I think everyone has probably also noticed that playing the game results in a pretty horrible squealing noise coming from the PS2. I googled this and it apparently has to do with the fact that CDs read at 12x and DVDs read at 6x (those speeds may not be accurate, but CD is faster and that's what's important). The higher rate of speed causes the magnetic locking..top part.. thing of the drive to slip. There's a pretty ghetto solution going around:

Put tape on the top of the disc to give the the top part a better grip. Yeah.. I don't want to tape up all of my CD based games. If you look closely at that picture, you can see near the center of the disc that some of the printing has rubbed off where the spindle contacts the disc and it's even more apparent on my copy of Tekken Tag Tournament. This needs to be fixed if it's actually damaging the disc. Instead of putting the tape on the disc, I decided to put the tape on the top part.

Some simple painters' tape fixed the problem right up, and now I don't have to tape all of my discs like some kind of psychotic. I don't have to hear a banshee squealing anymore, either.

The next problem is the laser. Early models of the PlayStation 2 used the KHS-400B laser. This is the laser that lead to all of those infamous disc read errors. The first 3 revisions of the PS2 use the KHS-400B. The 400B was later retired in favor of the KHS-400C, a much more reliable piece of hardware. The 400C can go into most consoles with the 400B, but there are issues with the length of the flex cable which puts stress on it, causing a worse problem. Luckly, I have the 4th revision. It had a 400B in it, but the 400C goes in without problem.

I had originally replaced the laser with another 400B. It worked, but it had issues. CD based games started quickly, but DVD based games took a while to boot. In addition, there could be some hiccups with loading things fast enough. I got tired of it and decided to pop in a 400C. The 400C works much better. DVD and CD based games load in a similar time and there's no issue with loading assets quickly enough in game.

Don't forget to remove the antistatic solder.

The fat PS2's teardown is a bit more involved than the slim, but there's plenty of guides out there. Replacing lasers is pretty much the same for every console, though. Get in there, unplug the old one, drop the new one in. We've now addressed two of the most critical problems with the original PS2. Now, let's improve.

Here's the back of the PS2 network adapter. These are common as hell and cheap, too. The official PS2 HDD kit had a 40gb HDD paired with... just this network adapter. Well, the good news is that we don't need the official Sony kit. Those are standard connectors that any IDE HDD will have. There is a company that sells a SATA upgrade as well, which you basically just plug right into the existing network adapter. Their website is a little sketchy, though.

If you're into modding and whatnot, then you've surely heard of FMCB for the PS2. It exploits a memory card function to load custom code. I don't have anything against FMCB... but there's a better way. That's the HDD OSD mod and it is really easy. I actually used that guide myself. For actually playing games, there's a few different options. OPL is the best option, but I don't really like it aesthetically. Thankfully, there's HDLGame Installer. If you've never used a PS2, the memory card screen has these nifty little 3D icons for each game that are usually characters in the game animated somehow. The PS2 HDD uses this same interface, and it lets you install games to the HDD and launch them from the PS2 browser and associates the little icon with the game as well. Neat.

There's actually a lot of cool stuff you can do with the HDD mod. My favorite thing is probably the ability to back up memory card save files to the HDD (this works for PS2 and PS1 saves). For getting games on the HDD, WinHIIP is probably your best option even though it's a bit old. There's also a PlayStation emulator called POPStarter that you can use to load PS1 games on the HDD. HDD installation doesn't work with all PS2 games, but the compatibility is high. POPStarter doesn't work with all PS1 games either, but that's to be expected since it's an emulator. The HDD mod here is probably not for the faint of heart though, as it's not easy to work with in some regards. It's definitely more involved than an Xbox mod. On the other hand, it's not as pants shittingly terrifying as the Wii softmod with its risk of being bricked with anything you change on the system.

This video kind of shows what it's like. Now your HDD mod is working and you've put it in your PS2... but contrary to what everyone online said, it's not a very good fit. The official PS2 kit had HDD rails which held it steady. Obviously, we don't have that. This bothered me quite a bit as you could hear the HDD rocking around if you just slightly bump the PS2. Let's fix that too.

This is shielding from an original Xbox 360 HDD. It's pretty malleable, and already has holes drilled in it that will be the right size for the holes on any HDD. There's really not a lot of space in the PS2 HDD bay, so we'll just need to cut a thin strip of this and mold it to the side of the HDD and screw it in.

That's another 500GB Hitachi Deskstar like I used for the Xbox mod. You can see the strip there that I attached. I was planing on doing both sides, but this one side was actually enough to hold the drive firmly in place.

Now that PS2 warrants the refurbished sticker.

Just kidding, I removed it.