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[Oct. 16th, 2009|09:06 am] |
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Computer at home died. For good. Time for a laptop now, I think. Anyway, long overdue:
The Top 10 Most Surprising Games [That I can Remember]
Number 8: Metal Gear Solid
Platform: Playstation; rerelease on Gamecube
Much like Wind Waker, this game feels out of place on a list of surprisingly good games. With its plethora of rave reviews, perfect scores, and overwhelming hype that peppered the pages of gaming magazines across the world before its release, nobody was expecting this game to be anything but spectacular. Its story, its appearance, its overall length: these were just the icing on the metaphorical cake that was its rich, innovative, stealth-based gameplay. It even had a decent amount of replay value, with the player being granted new, overpowered upgrades in the form of things like invisibility and infinite ammunition during sequential play-throughs.
 So what's the catch? It's not surprising to anyone that this game, in a vast majority of gamers' minds, was a paragon of entertainment perfection. Even the criticisms that challenged this game - namely its camera issues (which were fixed in the rerelease for the Gamecube), clumsy action controls, and (later, in its sequels and prequel) convoluted story - couldn't strip away the gravity that pulled at our interest and made us want to never put it down the more we played it.
Published by Konami, Metal Gear Solid was a continuation of a game series no one for the most part had even heard of. The first Metal Gear game, named simply "Metal Gear," was a pseudo-port for the NES of a game originally for the Japanese MSX computer. When it immigrated to the western hemisphere, the game became something that its designer, Hideo Kojima, barely recognized. Changed dialog, changed character names, even the opening half of the game took place in a different location. The biggest transformation, however, was its level of difficulty. The game that challenged its target adult audience in Japan was dumbed down for the children of America who were apparently, according to Nintendo's staff there, the only people that played videogames in the 1980s. Kojima was so put off by the warping of his hard work that it cost us the game's sequel to never reach our shores until early this century.
![Get to za choppa!](http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v50/drakeleonclaw/top%2010/Hind.jpg?t=1255697238" "Did you know he's actually shirtless under that jacket? And he wears it open.") Kojima had a lot to rightfully be mad about. He put a lot of himself into his games and a caricature of one was a slight against himself. We wouldn't see main character Solid Snake in the States again until years and years later; enough time for many gamers to have either forgotten about him or simply be too young to have heard of him at all. It wouldn't be until Kojima released his magnum opus, Metal Gear Solid, that we'd get to see what we'd all been missing. Was it as good as everyone hyped it to be? In this writer's opinion, yes, but that's irrelevant. What's earned it a spot on this list was Kojima's gift that structured the game: detail-heavy storytelling.
Hideo Kojima had an eye for detail that could make Tom Clancy blush. Before creating video games, Kojima directed movies. His business was to keep people rivetted with plot and dialogue and he transitioned it flawlessly into the realm of interactive entertainment. So what does that mean, exactly? Well, nobody begs anyone to play Madden because they want to watch football or to play the Sims because they want to watch reality television. People, however, were asking to watch playthroughs of Metal Gear Solid. In college, this writer at one point lived in a dormitory with eight other people aside from himself. He was asked to coordinate his time playing the game to fit everyone else's schedules and before he knew it, 9 people every night were sitting on couches, chairs, and the hard floor to watch a single-player game from beginning to end.
 That wasn't the only thing, there were little addendums to the phenom of MGS's appeal often hidden within. For example, thanks to the Codec feature, the game was packed with so much detailed and completely optional, trivial information that if you weren't careful, you might have learned something, like:
- Nuclear waste is being improperly stored even today and we have no way to really get rid of it.
- The Eskimo-Indian Olympics held in Alaska features an event called the Ear Pull, a self-explanatory game meant to test the pain thresholds of those involved.
- Cardboard was originally designed to line the insides of mens hats to absorb sweat. With the same amount of wood used to make one wooden box, you can make eight cardboard boxes.
- Cigarettes are bad for you.
Metal Gear Solid wasn't great just for the normal things that make great games great. It was the plot and storytelling elements that made people bring popcorn to a console. It was the little details, the random trivia, the easter eggs that made people keep smiling while playing such a serious game about nuclear war. Metal Gear Solid only appears at number 8 on this list, but honestly it may just be this writer's most favorite game of all time.
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strife2002's journal
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Serious Sam, for those unaware, is a relatively short, vastly simple-in-scope first-person shooter. Its protagonist, Sam "Serious" Stone, is a 'roid-ridden Cro-Magnon with a shoot-first-ask-questions-never attitude and a penchant for snappy one-liners and really tight t-shirts and jeans. Throughout the game he does battle with invading hordes of aliens in an attempt to save mankind from certain annihilation (or something, the plot and conflict therein is so unimportant that it leaves about as much concern within the player as a opossum does to a semi-truck). Are you still with me?
And here forms the cusp of the reason Serious Sam has made it to my list of surprisingly good games. As stated earlier, Croteam had reshaped itself from just another game developer to exclusively designing state-of-the-art 3D graphics engines for other companies to buy. Their magnum opus was the Serious Engine, a 3D graphics engine that could support huge, expansive levels with impressive numbers of enemies on screen at once while at the same time neither compromising the quality and beauty of how it all looked nor reducing the frame rate to a snail's pace. In order to demonstrate their accomplishment, they threw together a little number called Serious Sam, a game designed to show off all of these great features.
Oh and by the way, the game was and still is fantastic. The final battle was with a single creature literally 50 to 100 times your size; the enemies were unique in their looks and purposes - not just alien A who shoots projectile 3 at you; the secrets that were littered in each level often had hilarious features about them meant to serve as easter-eggs to reward the fastidious; plus on the normal to higher difficulty settings, it could actually kill you (something I have a hard time encountering in a game). Gamers weren't the only ones who noticed its appeal, either. As simple as the game is in its concept, it has won numerous and numerous awards for excellence. It even sparked a franchise as 3 other games have been released under its label with a 5th game on the way in development. I'm currently playing it all over again after having written this.
Being me, it feels WEIRD putting a Zelda game anywhere within this list, rank 10 or not. Admittedly, like a lot of people I was confused when I first saw the early pieces of footage from this game while it was in production. The Hero of Time, so bad ass we could ignore the fact he wore tights, had been morphed into something from South Park. I felt like Shigeru Miyamoto had betrayed us, his diehard fans in the western world, with this redesigned Link; his head so bulbous and eyes so huge it was no secret it came out of the rainbow panda fantasy land that is Japan. I felt like that loyal Star Wars fan who had to convince HIMSELF as well as others that the series was still good after walking out of a Phantom Menace screening for the first time.
Furthermore, the time of it's release simply added insult to injury. Wind Waker was released during the zenith of Nintendo's kiddie-game label. Nintendo fans everywhere were having a hard time defending themselves against PS2 and Xbox owners' jives and comments that the system, and really the company, had abandoned the generation that made them rich by buying their games. Suddenly myself and the other kids that resurrected the games industry after its collapse in 1984 were seen as too old to make games for. There was more money in making kid friendly games, games that everyone [read: children and their parents] could play together and enjoy (kids aren't as discriminating and don't read review sites, after all). Maybe in Japan, I guess. When the first shots of a new Zelda game for the Gamecube hit the Internet, though, it was like Christmas for all of the big N's weary American soldiers. We were treated to screenshots of Link locked in mortal combat with the King of the Gerudo himself, their fully rendered and realistic avatars looking like something from the Twilight Princess of today. This was it! This was the companion to Metroid Prime, till then the only weapon Nintendo fans had to defend that the Gamecube hadn't abandoned adult gamers! Alas, the game took its infamous dramatic graphical overhaul and was devolved into something from Saturday morning kids TV programming.
True, the game hadn't even come out yet. How could any of us predict the quality of its gameplay based on its graphics alone? Graphics, a great game don't make. It's true then, and it's still true now. However many of us were just desperate for a Gamecube game with a little bite to it. We wanted to feel heroic in a game, not like we could survive an anvil falling on our heads. We were bitter and we wanted more for our loyalty to the 'Cube than this. Graphics, in this case, mattered tons. (Fun fact: I myself boycotted reading any of the Harry Potter novels in college due to the fact that the titular character looked like white Urkel. I got over it.)
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