I am one of those who can easily fall into the evil power that is the hype machine. Ever willing to invest in something based on its hype index alone. As a result, truck lots of rubbish in the room, although few of them did turn out actually good. So it’s no surprise that I, who never played an MGS game before, quickly fall into the hype machine of MGS PO.

Disclaimer: I actually has no experience playing any of the Metal Gear Solid games. In fact, the PSP is the first ever console I owned. So certain content of this diary may sound like an alien playing game.

So despite having troubles paying my car installment, I have MGS PO now and sneaking around abandoned warehouses or dragging passed out enemies to trucks as Snake or one of his recruits.

While developers have their own game development diary, I thought gamers should have theirs as well, this is actually inspire by Monster Hunter Portable’s diaries I seen in some Japanese websites. Players or even magazine editors happily record their progress and tell their findings. So without further ado, here’s my own version.

I am one of those who actually read game manuals, even though I will end up remember none of the tricks, I feel like I need to be mentally prepared to start a new game. But MGS PO’s manual isn’t interesting enough, I fall asleep every time I try to read it, so heck it, I probably won’t start the game in weeks if I have to finish it. I hope publishers will put more efforts in their manuals, take some time to check out Japanese game manuals, they are alway nicely done.

My progress in the game (”Normal” difficulty setting) so far is right before the Research Lab, to look for some Malaria cures for everyone. As a newbie into the MGS universe, I started very badly. Failing to realise that I need to equip myself with the weapon until after at least 4 tries. During this time, I actually thought I was suppose to fight with the CQC, i.e. punching and kicking, I tasted success with the first two or three enemies, however, those who lost consciousness earlier eventually wakes up, alerting their colleagues, and I fell into this never ending loops. Funny eh?

Oh, my fellow prisoners actually trying to show me how to use the weapon, I was just too eager to rush out to the door. So that’s it, for this mission, as long as you know how to use your weapon, you are through.

Things got easier for the next mission, and I must say I fell in love with the way the cut scenes are done. Even though it was just cutting out the characters that Illustrator Ashley Wood have drawn on paper and keyframed to move various directions, the voice over and the art style just make everything looked so interesting.

Through some lengthy dialogs, I learned how to recruit partners somewhere in between. Although the situation do creates some discomfort for the soldiers, I will doubt any of them will join Snake in real life given the odds before them. But anyway, it is at this point that I realize the true fun of Access Point Scan.

AP Scan allows you to beefed up your recruits almost effortlessly by generating some random numbers based on the AP id and unlock some characters in the UMD. Successful connection will give you some great buddies without dragging a single dead body. Today, I just leave my PSP on in my car and keep pressing the O button until a higher signal was detected (while stucked in traffics of course) and I recruited 4 partners using this process alone. Even my wife got interested in this. It’s just so fun.

So without much problems, I arrive at the hospital, I was suppose to steal some drugs for my ailing partner Roy Campbell. And even though the mission brief clearly asked me to sneak in, for dozens of time, I went in sneaking but ended up with 3 or 4 enemies pointing their guns at my head. I struggled for a few hours in this hospital alone, only realizing that making use of the map and recruits are the way to do it. And agonizingly, perhaps in their efforts to make the game more life-like, the developers decided to make me feel extremely disappointed. The drugs have been moved to a Research Lab, which means all the previous efforts (even though it will probably be too easy for everyone but me) was wasted.

Yeap, after more than 10 paragraphs of text I am still just out of hospital. Even a newbie would consider this as lamb. But that’s me.

Posted in Blog, PSP on Friday, December 15th, 2006 at 9:29 am | Comments Feed | Leave a response | Trackback