I've always wanted to play through the MGS Series and I'm almost there, so im going to make March the month were I play though MGS 4, MGS GZ and MGS 5 and write about it.

A little background into my love for the series and where it started. I first played Metal Gear Solid back in 2010, on a psp, yes the part where you had to repeatdly press O sucked. After starting to follow this site and hearing Metal Gear pop up every now and again I got intrigued. I played through the first one and loved it. I've never been big on stealth games but the writing, bosses and general style and presentation made me a big fan. I decided around then that this would be a series I had to play.

Life happened and it wasn't until 2015 that played through MGS 2. Again its a game I look back on very fondly and might be my favorite so far. I got obsessed with reading about post modernism after I beat it and I think I'm one of the few people that really liked the Rose codec conversations and philosophical meanderings.

I finished MGS 3 a week ago and this is where I screwed up. I read the ending and entire plot. At some point I decided I'd skip MGS 3 and MGS 4 and just play MGS 5, I've put about 23 hours into TPP. I wanted the background of Snake Eater for The Phantom Pain and figured I would just watch Metal Gear Scanlon and read up on the plot. About 4 episodes in I knew I had to play through Snake Eater myself. It's a great game and I'm glad I did but a part of me can't help but wonder how much more I would have liked it if I hadn't spoiled it for myself.

So here I am staring at the install screen of Metal Gear Solid 4, after aquiring a PS3 on loan from a friend. I'm super excited to play and I'm going to document my progress every few days as I am dedicated to finishing up the series by the end of March so I'm conpletely free for Persona 5.

Words of encouragement, tips and general stories and love for Metal Gear Solid are all welcome!

So with a lot more free time on my hands lately I'd really like to get back into the habit of blogging on here and writing original pieces. I have done some reviews and such here before but I'd like to get in the habit of writing more and improving my abilities. I'll hope to do a what I've been playing type post and an original thing once or so a week. For now this will be a quick write up of the things game wise that have got me excited.

For the most part lately I have been playing a lot of non story based games, Downwell and Overwatch mostly. This is odd for me because if you'd asked a few years ago I'd would say I exclusively play narritive driven games. For me though those types of games haven't been as abundant. Besides Uncharted 4 I haven't really beaten a story based game in awhile. I'd love to sink my teeth into a 50+ hour RPG but the past few I've tried haven't grabbed me. I've put significant time into both The Witcher 3 and Fallout 4 but I've have very little draw to finish them.

I'd like to chalk up my newfound apprectiation for non narrative games with my increased skill in playing games. I've never been great at games for whatever reason playing competively with friends as a kid I always farred poorly. But as I've grown up I've found that I appreciate the challenge of a tough game more.

Which brings me to Downwell. This game is tough, I've been playing it off an on since it came out and have bought it three times. It wasn't until the PS4 release that I really started to hunker down and even start to think about finishing it. I've been playing it almost daily for about a month now and have reached 4-1. The joy in this game is reaching a new part and realizing that you are totally capable of making progress and once you do it is incredibly satisfying. I'm on a mission to finish this game and have been enjoying every second of it. It's the game that made me understand and appreciate rouge likes and challegning games as well. So far it's easily my 2016's 2015's game of the year.

Overwatch is another game that I've been playing a ton of and really like. It's my most played and most liked game of 2016 and I imagine I'll continue to keep playing it for a long time to come. There isn't much to say about this game that hasn't been already said so I'll keep it brief, just know it's incredibly fun, balanced and rewarding.

No Man's Sky has been on my radar for awhile but it hasn't been until recently that I've let myself get super excited about it. I've been watching and rewatching videos on it, checking the subreddit daily, I preordered it (something I as a rule never do). The promise of the game is grand, and I'm sure I could be setting myself up to be let down but I haven't been this pumped about a game in a long time. A space exploration game is something I've always loved the idea of but the technical and simulation side of some of those games have put me off. This game with its arcade like approach to the genre has got me really excited. Although I have been loving Downwell and Overwatch those are both games I've been playing for awhile and to be honest this year hasn't had me nearly as excited about games as 2015 did, so I'm hoping for this game to take hold and not let go.

And that's that, hope to do a lot more writing in the future. I'm gunna be sure and stream some No Man's Sky when it come out and Ill be doing runs of Downwell on https://www.twitch.tv/sagesebas11.

Thanks for reading!

2015 was a good year for games, nay a great year for games. To be honest this year has been the most I have played games in my entire life. The last time I played this many videogames was 2011 and I couldn't be happier. This is the year I fell back in love with the medium, the year all I wanted to do was play games. I do have some regrets from this year, I was dead set on catching up with the MGS series to be able to play MGS5, that I unfortuantly didn't do ( I only got to MGS2, and I loved it.) I didn't finish Witcher 3 or Bloodborne. I did however listen to every single week of the bombcast and beastcast, I found one of my favorite voices in the industry, Austin Walker, I bought into the new generation of consoles and overall had a great experience with it all. Oh and non videogame stuff, I went to New York, got a raise at my job, and saw a ton of concerts from musicians I love.

Now on to honorable mentions, I played a lot of games this year that weren't from this year. I started the year off with Metal Gear Rising and MGS 2 back to back. Both fantastic games, that I enjoyed very much. I was actually surprised at how much I liked MGS 2 seeing as it has such a divisive following. People who played it at the time seem to really dislike it now. I however loved the fact that it was kind of a middle finger to Metal Gear Solid by Kojima.

At 24 years old I don’t have much nostalgia for the NES. By the time I was born the NES was already six years old and it would be another six or so years until I started playing games. I have fond memories of the Super Nintendo though, Donkey Kong Country is one of my all-time favorite games and I had fun with the odd game or so I got a year. At that point in my life I was still too young to really get invested in games. I don’t think I finished one game from that system, most of the time I didn’t even realize that those games could be beaten. Most of my nostalgia and reverence for gaming comes from the original Playstation. Final Fantasy VII and VIII were some of my fondest memories as a kid. I played the hell out of Crash Bandicoot and I even loved WCW/NWO Thunder even though I’m not actually sure it was a good game. I mention all of this because I feel like the NES is a giant blind spot in my gaming history. Sure I have gone back and played the seminal games on an emulator but it’s not quite the same. I could never get past the concessions you would have to make for older game design and never finished a game from that era. I don’t have the same reverence for Metroid or Mega Man or Zelda that most people do. Which is why Shovel Knight is the best facsimile I could have asked for and how it scratches that NES itch.

Shovel Knight is basically an amalgamation of a lot of NES games, the Super Mario Bros 3 map system, the pogo bounce from Duck Tales, the axe toss from Castlevania, the town set up from Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. It’s a blatant love letter to everything early Nintendo, but at the same time it works on its own as a fantastic side scrolling adventure platformer. It’s not to say though that it holds strictly to NES game design philosophy. It features mechanics that make it feel more of an updated version of those games with its nods to Souls style regaining of gold.

Shovel Knight is a fantastic game that recalls older games but has the gameplay tightness and replay ability that allows it to stand on its own. The difficulty in Shovel Knight is one of the most interesting aspects of it and is potentially the biggest sticking point for hardcore NES fans. Super Mario Bros 3 is a hard game, Mega Man is a hard game, Shovel Knight is not particularly hard but rather challenging. There were spots in the game that gave me trouble; I rarely made it through the later stages with much of my gold intact. I never felt like I couldn’t overcome the challenges it set forth. I never stopped playing because it got too frustrating. There was a period where I felt like I wasn’t very good at this game and then I beat the Tinker Knight and went back and beat all of the wanderers in one sitting and the game clicked with me in a way that made the rest of the game much easier. The boss gauntlet where you play through all the bosses took me over two hours to beat but I had a blast doing it. It was so rewarding finally beating that last boss in the gauntlet and jumping up fist clenched in victory. Never have I had so much fun picking apart bosses than I did in this game. Every single one was an absolute joy to play. It’s challenging while at the same time never being frustrating. Which is what ultimately makes Shovel Knight the best NES experience I never had.

(you can also view it here on my blog where I have other stuff i've written too http://startsavedgame.wordpress.com)

Tonight after work I settled in to play some games and after starting and stopping several games I am starting to feel like I'm in a lull right now. I previously finished two fantastic games back to back, Axiom Verge and Hotline Miami 2. Both games hooked me and I played each straight through without much of anything else in between. Titan Souls was my next game up after Hotline Miami 2 and as much as I want to be absolutely in love with Titan Souls I just can't seem to muster up much of anything for it. Before I get too much further into talking about Titan Souls, because I want to dedicate some space to it, I'm playing a few other things too.

I'm finding Rogue Legacy to be a really good, relaxing podcast game. I haven't beaten any bosses and I feel like I'm not really progressing much but it kind of doesn't matter for me with that game. It's nice to just jump in mess around unlock a few tiers in the skill tree and then quit. It's a very low impact game for me, it's nice to have something to zone out too. I started Valiant Hearts. I'm not sure how much further I'll go since I had the end spoiled for me on the GOTY bombcasts. It looks absolutely gorgeous, I'm just not sure a two dimensional puzzle adventure game heavy on the puzzles is something I'm interested in right now. Some games I have on the back burner; Bloodborne another game I will start get to the title screen and say 'eh maybe another time'. Don't know if I'll get back to Shadow of Mordor, everything about that game seems to rub me the wrong way. From how character movement feels to seeming like I can't go any where without getting mobbed by Orcs. It makes me feel like I'm playing it wrong and I very well might be. That's about it, after two amazing experiences in Axiom Verge and Hotline Miami 2 I'm left finding that next game that will hook me.

Which brings me to Titan Souls. I had high hopes for this game, I played the demo on Steam and while it was challenging I felt like I could overcome the bosses once I got a little practice. Before playing the game I felt like a pretty big proponent for it. The idea of limiting a player in what they could do combat wise seemed like a really interesting idea. So many games deal in maxed out everything that some one would come along and say no, one weapon, one arrow, a bunch of difficult unforgiving bosses go. All that seemed really cool. I love the look and world even if there isn't too much in it. The game goes against pretty much everything modern AAA games are. It seemed like the consummate indie game. It's rare in games that a developer takes a stand and has a singular vision even if that vision might not be the most popular route. In almost all the talk you hear about this game, the comments you read on reviews, are how the lack of features turn people away. “Oh only one arrow?” “ I wish there had been an rpg mechanic.” All the stuff that made me really excited. It bums me out because I'd like games to be in a place where not every game has to appeal to every person. That a game can take a risk and try to tell their version of what a game could be. I want there to be creative, unique games coming out and that those games don't always have to be everything to everyone.

The problem where this breaks for me is that I personally, four hours in having beaten five bosses, am not really having that much fun with it. I might be in the wrong place for where I am in the game. While the bosses in the beginning felt doable, the latter stage bosses simply don't. I feel like more often than not I die without gaining a greater insight into the strategy, I die out of the blue, and nothing about that experience seems satisfying. I'm currently fighting in the forest area with the mushroom. I might just need to go back to the ice area but I'm having such a hard time with it, it doesn't really seem worth the toil.

So I'm left wondering should I stick with Titan Souls, has anyone come out the other end a true believer? Or should, however much I don't want to, count my losses and move on to something like Shovel Knight or I'm not sure. I have The Witcher 2 in my backlog and MGS 3. Anything that catches me would be nice, the next game I'm really excited about is Batman: Arkham Knight.

I've recently been playing more games and wanted to start having a place to update, hopefully weekly about the games I've been playing to share my thoughts in a way that is less than formal. I might work my way up to writing reviews and more in depth stuff. Anyways I am on vacation, I got ten days off which means among other things I've been playing a good amount of games.

I recently finished Axiom Verge, overall I had a blast with it. I've played a few metroidvania style games but never finished any of them. I had a few problems with Axiom Verge, I got lost a few times mainly because I thought I couldn't make a certain jump and then backtracked over the entire map looking for a power up to help me. I got lost like that just before the last two areas opened up and spent a few nights completely stuck only to find out I had to make a jump that was a little tricky for me. The boss fights too weren't my favorite, they seemed challenging in a way that wasn't particularly satisfying. Mostly when I beat them I was happy they were over with, even though only a few really gave me trouble. Otherwise it was trial and error, figure out the pattern and execute. I do understand the difficulty in designing boss fights for this type of game, where your movement is relatively restricted. Those were about the only gripes I had with the game though to be honest. The art was gorgeous, the giant bosses where stunning, the music was fantastic. Even though I don't have nostalgia for this particular style of game it really brought me back to my childhood where every game seemed like an immense world that was never ending and had millions of possibilities. It was a fantastic experience that I won't soon forget.

I took a break from Bloodborne and it worries me because this is about the point in all of the souls games that I have stopped and not come back. At about the 20 hour mark, I’ve beaten several bosses and just kind of gotten stuck knowing that I've got about 20 or more hours to go of the same sort of thing. It's not to say I haven't enjoyed it but it just seems like an uphill battle that’s just exhausting to beat. It makes it really hard on the few nights I have to play games when I spend two or three hours making absolutely no progress. So I put it on the back burner, in favor of some smaller indie stuff.

I've come back to Hotline Miami 2, I'm at the eighth scene and I've been enjoying it. I don't mind that they've put a larger focus on the guns and I'm still finding it just as valid to go through with melee weapons or just my fists, with Tony of course. I'm not super far in the game but I've been enjoying the story. I do find that it is as purposefully vague as the first game was but I have been digging all of the cut scenes a lot. They really went all out with the weird creative things they could do and I'm looking forward to seeing what else they do. Being able to play as different characters other than the masked dudes is fun and makes the game play varied since those characters play different in some ways than the regular masked guys.

That’s mostly what I've been playing, I'm excited to play Hohokum when it gets put on free PS+ and I've got a pretty big back log of games I wanna play once I finish my current stuff. I'm really excited to try out Titan Souls and Shovel Knight, I played a bit of the Titan Souls demo and for the few bosses I beat it was really satisfying. Other than that I wanna get back to playing the Metal Gear Solid series. I finished MGS 2 this year and I'd like to finish Snake Eater before the end of the year.

Some non-gaming stuff, I finished season four of Louie with my girlfriend, the two part episodes about him catching his daughter smoking pot were some of the best Louie episodes ever, they were movie quality episodes. Whenever he does flashback stuff it is always so good. I got a subscription to Game Informer, I haven't kept up on it since I was a kid but I've been really wanting a physical game magazine to read. I've also been very interested in picking up a book from Boss Fight Books. The idea of an entire book dedicated to a game is really exciting to me and I like what it does for games writing. I might check out the Galaga one and I'll probably pick up the Shadow of the Colossus one when it comes out.

Otherwise I'll try and update this once a week and work in a few other stuff hopefully, I'm pretty excited about keeping this a thing I do regularly. Thanks for reading and if you wanna check out my blog I'm going to post this there too.

Writing about games and expressing my thoughts on them is something I've wanted to do for awhile. I'm going to use this and a blog I made to improve my writing and share my opinions on games I'm playing. Please be nice. I loved The Last of Us and cherished my time with it, I really don't want to start any negative arguments and tried not to make any inflammitory statements in my post. Hope you enjoy! Constructive, nice criticism is very welcome.

The Last of Us is a game that has stuck with me for quite some time after beating it. As all know it is a bleak look at a post-apocalyptic future that doesn't hold back the horrors of what life would be like in this situation. It treats the characters of Joel and Ellie with a respect that most videogames don't offer its lead characters and is a completely honest and unflinching game unlike anything I have ever played. I fell in love with Joel and Ellie, their emotions, their plight became my emotions and my plight. I have never felt so connected and in turn related so much to characters in a game. It's not that I’ve ever been close to being in such a traumatic situation as theirs but that I could relate in a human way to the pain and emotions they were feeling. The characters and story spoke to very real fears that I and many other human beings have. Fears like isolation, hopelessness and most of all the fear of death. All of these reasons are why I am so bothered by the fact that I felt I cheated my self out of the game side of the experience. I played the game on medium about half way through brought it down to easy and very shortly after that turned on lock on aiming. My need and want to see the next story moment aggressively beat out my desire to have a satisfying gameplay experience.

It's not that I didn't enjoy the combat, in many ways it was satisfying when I felt like I was in control of the situation. I had my gripes with it, the one hit kills from clickers were frustrating. I'm not particularly fond of stealth and the fact that it was front loaded so much in the first half of the game didn't help. But once I got more weapons and projectiles the combat opened up in a much more appealing way. Sure it still wasn't my favorite thing about the game but it wasn't bad. On the other hand though having my progress stopped in that game by having to repeatedly retry sections completely killed the momentum I was feeling on the story side.

I'm super jealous of all the stories I heard of people playing the entire game on hard. Having to use all your senses to survive, methodically plotting your way through enemy encounters. Using stealth and cunning to get the upper hand. It sounds super awesome and I did absolutely none of it. I was sloppy in the way I feel like I am in all games that involve stealth. More so than any pride associated with playing the game on an elevated difficulty, I feel guilty that I played the game on easy because I feel like the game on hard is the most mechanically analogous to the actual situation of trying to stay alive. At a certain point though I stopped having fun replaying sections, dieing in the game brought everything to a screeching halt. I wasn't playing the game for the pure fun of playing the game but rather to see the story continue. Which isn't to say that juggling a story of this magnitude with gameplay isn't extremely difficult. Having such a grounded, human story and having to add “game mechanics” to it must have been a constant struggle to balance out correctly. I certainly don't envy the trouble they must have gone through to craft such a fantastic game given the circumstances. At every step of the way it seems like they were absolutely pushing the boundaries of what you can do with story in such a traditional style game. Looking back on recent memory the games with really stand out stories have been very mechanics low and are not typically action games. Gone Home and Portal 2 both come to mind as having some of the best stories in the last five years yet relatively speaking they are aren’t heavy on the gameplay side of things.

When I look back on The Last of Us I will have very fond memories. I will remember the final moments and how heartbreaking and beautiful they were. I will remember how Ellie switched from one moment a playful, funny, sarcastic teenager to a survivor slitting throats and doing anything not to die. I'll remember racing through the hospital trying to save my girl. I probably wont remember how I retried certain sections numerous times and got bit by a clicker to many times to count. I wont look too fondly on the fact that I got so tired with the combat that I turned the game into basically a shooting gallery and to be honest I'm not sure if that’s my fault or the game's.

link to my blog https://startsavedgame.wordpress.com/2015/04/20/i-played-the-last-of-us-on-easy-with-lock-on/

I noticed in 2010 that several high profile games used a specific mechanic that was not highly used before it and hasn't really been used much this year. The mechanic I'm speaking of is during a moment in the game typically a moment of importance to the story we breifly play the game as another character and experience the situation through another perspective. Mass Effect 2 did it Red Dead Redemption did it, and Batman Arkham Asylum did it the year before. Is this enough evidence of a trend has it happened since and I'm just missing it. I find it slightly odd that such a specific thing happened so often in the past few years. Has anyone else noticed it or am I just going crazy?

Release season is here and I couldn't be more excited. The past several months for me have been dry, I've mostly been playing the uncharted 2 multiplayer and limbo. Limbo for me was an amazing experience, never have I been both so thoroughly impressed with game design and the direction. So far I feel like this year hasn't been as important as 2010 some amazing games came out last year. Although I could not be more excited for the coming months skyrim uncharted 3 and arkham city will all be day one purchases for me. I just wanted to share my thoughts and excitement I've really been looking to get deeply invested in a game and I haven't had that since since portal 2. So what is everyone looking forward to most?

That game is fucking cool most fun I have had playing a game in a long time, I can't wait to finish it!