There was going to be a post of actual substance here earlier but I put it off to play FFXIII HA HA HOW SILLY OF ME

PS SHUT THE FUCK UP VANILLE

edit: Man I made two posts in a row yelling at someone to fuck off normally I wouldn't want to do that but Goddamn shut the everloving fuck up tim rogers

ahaha go fuck yourself ea

So Project Needlemouse turned out to be Sonic 4, a new 2D Sonic for direct download. "Sonic 4" somehow manages to carry an even greater weight of "no, we're going back to the old school, serious this time" than calling the 2006 game Sonic the Hedgehog did, although we all know how well that turned out.

I hold no hopes for the game, as anyone familiar with the Sonic series shouldn't. But to be honest, my problem is not so much that I'm worried they'll screw it up, but that I don't know that I care. Maybe it's just because I wasn't a Genesis owner growing up, but the 16-bit Sonics are not actually that great as games. This was an argument people had repeatedly when discussions would come up on how to "fix" Sonic -- maybe the original game concept itself is simply too limited. When levels were fast they were over too quickly, when they were slow they were plodding and dull. I'll admit I haven't played any of the Rush games, which were apparently well-received, to see if anything's changed in modern times.

They released a short trailer, which is below. One shouldn't judge based on 3 seconds of footage, but the animation seems strangely slow, especially in direct comparison to the old Sonic sprites (which they chose to do in their own trailer).

It's a bit of a shame that this perpetuates the idea that modern 2D games belong only on portables or as downloadables, though the market for a traditional Sonic may be so small at this point that pitching it as a download is the only way it could get made.

(don't click that at work for God's sake)

(don't click it at home either)

(don't click)

And to make things a little more uncomfortable, Nippon Ichi has recently announced Prinny 2: Dawn of the Great Pantsu War. The plot involves recovering panties belonging to Etna, who you may recall is the girl from the Disgaea series who looks about 12.

Thank you, Japan. I'd admonish you for shitting all over yourself with fetishistic nonsense if I didn't know that saying so would give you an erection. And thank God American publishers are finally bringing some of that sweet cartoon porn/tepid knock-off RPG hybrid action to our shores, because we as a nation have suffered too long from the lack of a proper successor to the throne of Cobra Mission.

Ponder the photo of the man himself, towering over three Japanese Cammy cosplayers. Take note of the hockey jersey. Review his ideas for fan fiction. Observe one such idea born shortly after September 11, 2001, in which Cammy hunts for Osama Bin Laden. Decide if you agree with his assessment that it would be "really fun" to "mix reality and Cammy." Contrast and compare Capcom's official storyline for Street Fighter 4 with the webmaster's own concept created nine years earlier, in which Cammy partners with a trained cat that can spy.

Just... just think about it.

Nakagawa: …Yes. That’s why we thought we could work on the Nintendo 64 too. But, the Nintendo 64 … sure was something (bitter laughter).

Iwata: (laughs) It was a machine that was hard to create things for and didn’t work at all.

Nakagawa: Y-Yes. It didn’t work at all…

Nothing like hearing the president of one of the biggest video game companies in history say "Hey, remember that old thing we made? What a piece of shit!" And then Nakagawa has half a second to decide if he's being lured into a trap.

But Illusion of Gaia is where things started to get a little weird.

First, there's the game's infamous raft sequence, a scene in which the player and his token female friend stand around on a raft in the middle of the ocean for a long time. It's not a cutscene, because you still have control of your character, but you literally have nothing to do but walk back and forth on a square about a quarter the size of the screen, talk to the girl a couple times, and then wait for the next day to come so you can do it again. You have never seen a game stop so suddenly and dramatically in its tracks.

Later, you enter into a Russian Roulette game played with a glass of poison instead of a bullet. You and the champion take turns drinking from a selection of glasses until one glass is left, which must be the poisoned one. It's the champ's turn, so he must be the loser, except:

He insists on drinking it anyway, essentially committing suicide. (Despite how it may appear, this scene is not taking place on a raft.) You report back to his pregnant wife (!), only to find:

Kruks conveniently being the animals you need to ride to get across the desert to the next dungeon. How does she feel about this?

But the person you love just offed himself and left your only worthwhile possessions to the kids who blew into town this morning.

Still later into the game, your intrepid party gets captured by some starving tribesmen who intend to eat you. Just before they dig in, however, token female friend's pet pig comes running in and throws itself on a fire, cooking itself alive to feed the tribe and spare your lives. Also your dead mother's soul pops out.

Lastly, you deal with one of the game's villains by setting off a fire trap he's standing next to. In most games he'd just fall over, or perhaps flicker and disappear, but here he has to collapse into a flaming heap and crawl after you like the Terminator as his flesh continues to burn before finally expiring at your feet. He wasn't even a monster or something, he was just a regular man and then you set him on fire.

This is all ignoring the more subtle, less graphic weirdness to the game's story, such as the fact that all this magical crap is taking place on Earth somehow, as evidenced by visits to famous locations like Angkor Wat and the Great Wall of China.

The continuous bleakness of Illusion of Gaia lets up a bit in Terranigma. But the seemingly blase attitude towards death doesn't disappear entirely, as evidenced when you wake up in a cavern after barely surviving an avalanche.

Always a sign you drank too much.

The goat explains to you that she and her husband got stuck here in the avalanche too, and her husband didn't make it. As any grieving widow would, she then suggests you both eat him.

This isn't the first time he's been in my mouth, that's all I'm saying.

Iron-clad logic. But your prudish main character still isn't convinced, and says he can't eat.

That's a shame. I just.. I just really wanted you to help me devour my husband.

Later, you come to a kingdom with a princess who has been stricken mute. She was adopted by the king and queen from a village that was destroyed, and thus the boneheaded magical girl you're traveling with at the time suggests the way to snap her out of it would be to create the spectral illusion of her dead parents.

For some reason you go through with this plan. (Surely there were other options; I hear flowers work well.) I dunno about the princess, but the king sure finds it interesting:

I really should stop thinking out loud!

Yes, the resolution to this entire side plot is having the king casually mention that these two people look like some folks he had murdered. But it seems dead people don't fluster anyone around here:

Careful, it smells like something died out there. Because it did. It was the king. The king died. Out there.

But even without the occasional corpse, Terranigma is odd enough on its own. It expands on Illusion of Gaia's idea of a fantasy RPG taking place on the real-world Earth to a great degree, tasking your character with resurrecting what is essentially modern civilization. The world map is actually a simplified map of Earth, and you wander around locations like the Sahara and Arabia and Spain, whacking monsters with sticks to revive the world's plants and animals and people. Once you bring back people, you can start visiting towns, including a city in North America called... Freedom.

America, it would seem, is populated entirely by trollops, grizzled prospectors and black people. Seriously, you never see black people prior to this and then you go to Freedom and suddenly they're everywhere.

At least in Illusion of Gaia, signs of the real world were ancient artifacts like the Nazca Lines, which already feel otherworldly enough. But it feels weird walking around in a jRPG and stumbling across things like this:

This raises far more questions than it can answer. So Jesus existed in the world of Terranigma? Why didn't he fix all this crap then so I don't have to do it? Am.. am I Jesus?

To cap off all this oddity, Quintet put themselves in the game, in an office located (naturally) in Japan.

I imagine that's supposed to be a mustache, but instead it looks as if even the man on the sign is depressed. Inside, the developers are all represented by talking chickens sitting at computers. The office also contains a trash-strewn room where the team apparently sleeps when they're too busy to go home, which is suitably horrifying.

Later in the story, everyone in this building will die when a killer virus is released in Neotokio. I suppose they would want it that way.

"What you'll be able to do is download 3 games from a selection of 17; these can either be games from your current UMD collection or 3 new titles," Sony explains. The selections are:

* Killzone Liberation
* Medievil
* Wipeout Pure
* Buzz Brain Bender
* Buzz Master Quiz
* SOCOM U.S. Navy SEALs: Fireteam Bravo
* Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters
* Everybody's Golf
* Resistance: Retribution
* Syphon Filter Dark Mirror
* Lemmings
* LocoRoco
* Patapon
* Syphon Filter: Logan's Shadow
* Echochrome
* Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice
* Daxter

Wowzers, what a deal! Sure, it's dropping $250 for essentially the same system I already have but with a smaller screen and it won't play any of the games I already own. But I get the chance to own two different Buzz titles!

In fairness, I should mention that this is Europe's rewards program, and it just came out of TGS so people haven't had the time to pester Sony with questions about it. There are some holding out the hope that this isn't the full extent of Sony's supposed "goodwill program" for Go owners, but come on. This is "no more PS2 backwards compatibility on the PS3 no one wants that old stuff oh by the way we're going to sell PS2 games on PSN" Sony. Legacy support takes a backseat to trying to pull their system out of a ditch.

but hey guys it has rick astley in it isn't that wacky and random

That's not to say MGS4 is a small production. There are still big action scenes and robots and big action scenes with robots in. But the game makes no attempt to go above and beyond its predecessors conceptually, and in fact spends most of its time sorting through them. With the exception of the BB Corps and Drebin, there are no new characters introduced -- everyone you meet is always somebody from somewhere you've been before. Even the Corps girls are named to recall old enemies, though the Corps in general feels a bit tacked on. There's not really a new plot, just a game-long attempt to tie all the old threads together and finish what was already started.

It works for the most part, I think. The plot is easy enough to follow and doesn't require the Olympic mental gymnastics (or maybe just the brain damage) the ending of MGS2 asked for. The dialog is still as artless and meandering as its ever been, but the story does a good job of making an understandable course through the Metal Gear series while allowing you to ignore some of the more incomprehensible details (did we ever find out what the crotch grabbing was about?).

The idea that Kojima wasn't coming back to the series became a running joke after he claimed he wouldn't direct 3 and later 4. I don't know that anyone took it that seriously. But if someone had told me (prior to E3, anyway) he genuinely didn't want anything to do with Metal Gear after 4, I'd believe them. Making Snake old originally seemed like a gimmick, but instead it becomes almost the point of the game -- it's been too long and too much, and now Snake is quite literally too old for this shit. The game goes from being nostalgic to being downright funereal at times, as if taking one last look at the accumulated story of the last ten years before burying it all for good.

What makes this striking is the change in tone it presents. The MGS series has always had plenty of melodrama and overwrought speeches about superbabies, but it also had a goofy and exuberant side. You could take pictures of Japanese idol posters to embarass Otacon or talk to Sigint for five minutes about every gun you had in your inventory. MGS4 isn't completely without those moments, but they're fewer and farther between. You hardly have reason to talk to anyone through the codec, and the game never approaches the sheer wackiness of Campbell's VR meltdown or running around wearing a crocodile head. By the time Otacon is making a fourth-wall breaking joke about Blu-ray discs, it seems almost out of place.

All told, then, MGS4 is a very solid (no pun intended) game that brings closure to the story as well as anyone could, but doesn't quite have the magic to unseat 3 as my favorite. I'd probably play through it again if I didn't have a billion other things waiting to be played. I'm hoping that the new MGS titles already announced (and any that may be yet to come) don't dig back into this material and undo all the work that 4 has done. It was bad enough that the final debriefing scene sucked a lot of energy out of what was otherwise a really good ending.

Let MGS4 stand as both closure to the story and as a monument to Kojima's most enduring legacy: That over the course of ten years, he transformed The Guy Who Poops Too Much into an important supporting character.

1. As I said, I've only really seen the PS3 Phat encased in its bulletproof chrysalis in retail outlets where it's hard to get a sense of scale. But after pulling out my new PS3 and setting it on top of my 360, I realize that "Slim" should be considered a relative term. It's still big enough that its little rubber feet hang just over the edge of the 360, leaving it to slide around a little if something were to nudge it. And, of course, it's still rounded on top so you can't set the 360 on top of it instead.

2. This Goddamned thing beeps when you hit the power button. No One Needs This.

3. I spent a minute hitting the eject button before I realized there was no disc tray, only a slot. In my defense, it.. it was kind of dark in here?

4. I was pleasantly surprised to see that I could run through the store and quickly rack up a download queue of all the demos I wanted to catch up on, without any limit. I was unpleasantly surprised to find that, after downloading the Wipeout HD demo, I then had to install the Wipeout HD demo. And after several minutes of that, I found that I then had to download a 100 meg patch for the Wipeout HD demo. Then that had to be installed. I started this thinking Sony had done something better than Microsoft, then came to understand that they had actually just agreed to screw up different parts.

5. Remote Play should really be a useless gimmick, but I have to say it's handy for managing downloads and installs without having to actually use your TV or monitor. I'm installing the Infamous demo right now through my PSP, which is helpful because my PC's asshole video drivers won't let me have my PS3's HDMI hooked up to the monitor at the same time I'm trying to use the computer.

7. Oh thank God the controller has real triggers.

I've started my PS3 career with the first Resistance, the title of which seems to refer to the game's staunch rebellion against being interesting. For Chrissakes, you're making a launch game that can show off the system, the least you can do is make between-level cutscenes that use moving pictures.

It's just you and me now, you son of a bitch. Let's do this.