Contra: Hard Corps opens to a robotic army assaulting a sprawling future city only to be decimated by a charging tank that ejects your character guns blazing into an active warzone. Not only does this succinctly indicate where the game’s tonal priorities are, it’s also the designers giving you some honest advice: charge forward until every enemy is demolished. Contra: Hard Corps distilled Contra III: Alien Wars’ brazen creativity down to its run and gun foundation, creating a single minded epic that is equal parts twitch shooter and blockbuster action flick.
Tag: Konami
Metal Gear Solid Analysis: The Proxy Trilogy Part 3: The Phantom Pain
Over the course of the Cold War, the man known as Snake developed from a lone soldier caught in the struggle between Capitalism and Communism to the living symbol of a nation free of ideology called Big Boss. By the close of Peace Walker, he had become a man with two bodies – one physical, the other conceptual. Ground Zeroes, the first part of Metal Gear Solid V, continues soon after, as word arrives that Paz, the Cipher Agent who infiltrated Mother Base under the guise of a pacifist student to frame the MSF as terrorists, survived and is being held at an American prison in Cuba. Fearing that she’ll reveal their secrets and in time for a United Nations inspection of Mother Base, Snake infiltrates Camp Omega. Safely aboard their chopper, they discover a bomb implanted inside Paz. Though disposed of, one Trojan horse begets another – the UN inspection was a cover to sneak Skull Face’s XOF forces, who proceed to blow the supporting columns and collapse Mother Base from inside. Another explosion rocks the chopper, sending it down in fire and metal. Both of Big Boss’s bodies were destroyed.
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Metal Gear Solid Analysis: The Proxy Trilogy Part 2: Peace Walker
*This revised and expanded version of the essay originally titled ‘Peace Walker’s Military Industrial Complex (Or The Bosses Metamorphosis)’ is part two of a continuing series exploring how the last three Metal Gear Solid games analyze the shift in political strategy that arose in the modern era.
The modern day concept of the nation came about as a byproduct to the spread of enlightenment ideals across the globe. Based on philosophies that defined individuals as absolute agents of their own lives, it ended the subservience to monarchies and united people along territorial, economic, or ideological lines, pooling their resources to live in an economy of production in the knowledge that their collective abilities would greatly outmatch their separate talents. With the advancements in communication and transportation that made the world a smaller place, nations became actors in global politics.
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Metal Gear Solid Analysis: The Proxy Trilogy Part 1: Guns of the Patriots
The Individual And The Society
A textual read of the elements of the first three Metal Gear Solid games reveals an analysis of the creation of both the individual and the societies they form with others. So complete was the deconstruction that they exist thematically separate from the entries that followed, in essence comprising their own complete trilogy. But there was a problem: there was still much story to be told.
With the close of this first ‘identity’ trilogy, Hideo Kojima embarked on a second, expanding on the epistemological convergence between the individual and the society as he’d already explored them – politics. Starting with MGS4, the series worked towards completing its narrative loop while examining the rise of a new type of political strategy that came into vogue in the modern era with the development of a workable model of proxy warfare. Though there are recurring themes throughout these three works, most notably the ideas of transformation and rebirth, the concept of political proxies is the thread that ties them together, first portraying its characteristics and then showing its range of applications.
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Metal Gear Solid 2 and Mass Producing Solid Snake
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty is celebrated for how it critiques social engineering, Hideo Kojima having crafted a theme that shows how controls built into the social fabric of a culture can shape an individual’s thoughts, ideas, and beliefs. The story and game progression do an outstanding job of subtly running players through a simulation of the events of MGS1’s Shadow Moses incident as the rookie Raiden, forcing them to question whether their actions were truly their own or if they had been molded into a clone of Shadow Moses’ legendary hero Solid Snake.
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Policenauts’ Mise-En-Scene
Policenauts was the perfect game to introduce the world to Hideo Kojima’s visual style and keen eye for editing a trailer. Unlike other games at the time, every screenshot from the 1994 ‘Interactive Movie’ could have been ripped from an anime, this one the tale of a man lost in space for the first twenty five years of humanity’s move into off-world colonies. It’s Lethal Weapon in the Gundam timeline with an Aliens setup, starring a blue-haired Mel Gibson. The trailer claims Policenauts is ‘The Next Generation of Snatcher’.
The Disembodied Soul of Ground Zeroes
On my third infiltration into Ground Zeroes’ Camp Omega, I found an electrical panel that allowed me to cut the power to the surrounding facility, disabling all the lights and the several security cameras so I could quietly rescue the prisoner at its belly. It was the latest in dozens of exploitable gameplay options built into Omega that proved it was a dynamic, multi-faceted place that enabled and rewarded a variety of playstyles. The first game powered by the Fox Engine, GZ introduces players to the new levels of agency offered in the second part of the Metal Gear Solid V saga, The Phantom Pain; ideas that evolve the classic Metal Gear design. Continue reading “The Disembodied Soul of Ground Zeroes”
Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance: Cut Off at the Knees
The history of the game once known as Metal Gear Solid: Rising is fascinating. When Kojima Productions Raiden-focused MGS spinoff ran into development troubles, it was passed along to Platinum Games to apply their over the top character action specialties. Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance fuses both development house’s sensibilities into a whole that only offers hints at their respective strengths while highlighting the deficiencies of each and the inherent problems that result when you bring them together.
At its heart, Revengeance is absolutely Platinum’s brand of character action all the way from the quick and violent combat to the diverse moveset. But in trying to grant control of the super agile post-MGS4 lightning god as he fights against the Desperados PMC and its band of ‘Winds of Destruction’ cyborgs, the game has had to make some choices that have hurt itself in the long run.
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Snatcher: A Cyberpunk Adventure
Originally released on Japanese MSX2 and PC-8801 machines in 1988, Snatcher is a cyberpunk adventure dripping in dark themes and dystopic style. In many ways, Snatcher is a classic Adventure game- but this one was designed and directed by Hideo Kojima, his second after Metal Gear. Continue reading “Snatcher: A Cyberpunk Adventure”
Metal Gear Solid Analysis: The Identity Trilogy Part 3: Snake Eater
In the second part of our thematic analysis of the Metal Gear Solid franchise, we took an exhaustive look at the structural subtext of Metal Gear Solid 2: Son’s of Liberty. Starting in that game, a thematic split began to form in the narrative. The story was about the importance of ideas and information to the growth of a single individual but also looked at the interaction of many individuals to form a society. Metal Gear Solid 3 carries it further.
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