Like Snake Eater itself, I've seen another week lost in a dream of boxes and bipedal robots. I should've realized something was up when I was informed that it could take hundreds of hours to beat Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. Big RPGs and open-world games can take me that long as a matter of course, so I was ill-equipped to deal with just how big this game actually is. Still, there are worst things to spend an entire month doing. Like the time I was trapped down a well for twenty-nine days back in '87. If you ask me, it was the fault of that baby in Texas who copied my whole style and got the world's attention instead. I'm not bitter though. I used that time to learn how to macramé with whatever weeds were in reach, so it was time well (agh, trauma) spent.

Well (agh!), that's quite enough talk about that. We have some summaries of the week to come - and the week that's been - to discuss. Now that we're finally emerging from that cold, dark Summer, we have the warm embrace of the Autumn and Winter release schedules to look forward to, so expect to see things ramp up in the months to come. I mean, in the world of gaming in general, not from me. I'll be playing MGSV missions.

Forever.

New Games!

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided sneaked up on us in a manner similar to Mirror's Edge Catalyst a couple months back. For being two long-awaited sequels to last-gen bangers, they sure arrived without a whole lot of fanfare, though I suspect for the latter it had the enormous shadow of No Man's Sky to hide in. That suits Adam Jensen just fine; he operates better from the shadows. I'm looking forward to this game a great deal, though at the same time it's one of a few releases this year where I'm happy to have my usual six month plus gap between when a game comes out and when I finally get around to playing it. The reason for that, of course, is because I've been playing MGSV since the start of this month and I could really use a break from open-world stealth once it's over. From reports, such as Jeff's review, it looks to be more of the same with certain aspects gratefully pared down (boss fights) and others beefed up (skill trees? side-quest quality?) but perhaps not as impactful overall as Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Like I've always said about sequels, if you're building a game to follow up a lemon like Invisible War, that's a far easier job than following up the well-regarded sequel you just made. If nothing else, it's not difficult for your game to look more enticing by comparison.

Another big release is King of Fighters XIV, one for all the SNK fighter fans out there who have stuck with that series for decades. SNK's whole library has always been an intimidating thing to jump into for me; if a game wasn't Arcade (or Neo Geo, which might as well be the same thing) exclusive, it was a region exclusive for Japan. I guess it's different for UK folk, since Arcade machines never really made the splash here that they did in Japan and the US. We had 'em, of course, but you had to live in a big city to see any on a regular basis. For me, it was rare trips to theme parks and city centers, and only for as long as I could spare before joining the rest of the family on a spinning teacups ride or heading to my job interview, depending on which year we're talking about. At any rate, I'll readily admit that I'm not an authority on SNK fighters and their enormous rosters, but I hope this one does well by the fans. It's been a rough year for the FGC what with the half-finished Street Fighter V and a relative dearth of anything noteworthy from that genre in 2016.

I'm looking forward to finally playing Inside before the end of the year, and I think the PS4 version due out this week was always going to be my best option. I'm sure it wouldn't be incredibly taxing for my PC - having very few colors helps (maybe) (look, I'm not a "tech guy", all right?) - but the whole point of having a console is that I don't need to have those worries. In some sort of monochrome platformer exchange program, Steam is getting PS4's bastard-hard N++ this week in return. Coincidence I'm sure, but I like the idea of those two bartering new releases. As long as more games reach as many systems as possible and we can get past this whole "my system's better because exclusives" mindset the better.

Other worthy mentions this week, and it's a surprisingly busy one to signal the end of the Summer slump: Worms WMD, the revamp that got Dan reinvested in Team 17's violent vermiforms; Madden NFL '17, the handegg juggernaut that won't ever be stopped; the curious and thoughtful adventure game Obduction, from the creators of Myst and Riven; the bouncy first-person adventure game Valley; and a hell of a lot of Wii U and 3DS games joining the Nintendo Selects range, perfect for extending your Wii U backlog in preparation for its imminent demise. A price drop might finally convince me to pick up Nintendo Land and Wind Waker HD.

Wiki!

Managed twelve pages this week, which is more than last time but hardly the sort of pace needed to complete the Super Nintendo's 1995 catalog by the end of this month. By my count, I've still got 25 game pages left to polish off in the next nine days. Maybe if my completionist tendencies get the better of me I might complete the last few in a rare burst of industry on the final day, but let's not let my keyboard write any checks my wiki-ing can't cover.

Back to a summary of the more notable games this week, since these were all Japanese exclusives and many are as uninteresting as they are obscure. One whole third of this week's batch were new pages too: EMIT: Value Set, Honke Sankyo Fever Jikki Simulation 2, Seijuu Maden Beasts & Blades and Shounin yo, Taishi o Dake!!. Read more about those (or at least as much as I was able to dig up) by either perusing their linked pages or checking the usual list of Super Famicom Super Also-Rans.

With the remaining eight, there's only really four games of note. The other four include two (!) licensed bass fishing games (released on the same day even: the 15th of December, like everything else this week), a generic Go Go Ackman platformer sequel based on a Toriyama comic with little Western exposure, and an odd comedic virtual board game involving heists and the pulling thereof.

Jikkyou Oshaberi Parodius is the fourth Parodius game, though the first to be console exclusive. It's also the first Parodius game to have voiced commentary - its title basically means "chatty commentary Parodius" - but it is, of course, as nonsense as everything else going on. Like previous console versions, Konami threw in a handful of their legacy characters too: the babies of Bio Miracle Bokutte Upa and the heroes of the TwinBee series, but unfortunately no Goemon and Ebisumaru this time. Worth playing for its ridiculous bosses and levels and for its decent Gradius-inspired shoot 'em up core. Like many games released around this particular moment in time, it saw enhanced CD versions for the two new consoles: PlayStation and Saturn.

Nichibutsu Arcade Classics 2: Heiankyo Alien is the follow-up to Nichibutsu (a.k.a. Nihon-Bussan)'s compilation of Arcade games, but focuses on a single title this time: the influential 1979 maze game Heiankyo Alien. Players can choose to dig holes to trap aliens in the original 1979 blocky PC-8001 style or in a 16-bit enhanced mode that adds extra obstacles. The game even has competitive multiplayer, where burying aliens simply drops them on your opponent's grid for them to deal with.

Princess Maker: Legend of Another World is a Super Famicom exclusive entry in the Princess Maker series, the second of which would find some internet notoriety due to a leaked complete translation that would never become a commercially available product for its localizers for various unfortunate reasons. Raising a pre-teen girl to become a confident young woman by organizing her education and balancing that with maintaining her physical well-being and happiness, each Princess Maker can end in several ways depending on how effective a guardian you were and the sort of woman you molded your daughter into being. Legend of Another World was heavily based on the mechanics of Princess Maker 2, but a lot of characters and events were reworked.

Tales of Phantasia is the inaugural game of one of the most influential and expansive RPG series of all time: Bandai-Namco's Tales, which just last week saw the Japanese debut of its sixteenth core entry Tales of Berseria. Introducing a lot of concepts that would become trademark to the series - the real-time action-based LMB system, which allowed for fighter game-style control over your character in combat, as well as the many recurring item names, themes, concepts and the series' penchant for changing its tone from serious to jovial in a heartbeat - Phantasia now seems fairly anodyne compared to its more narratively and mechanically complex sequels, but was a revelation at the time for its innovations, character work and ludicrous time-travelling story. It also has the Tales record for most ports and remakes: the game is presently available for Super Famicom, PlayStation, GBA, PSP and iOS. Now let me tell you where I dwell...

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain!

Week... three? I've been playing this game for so long now, but I'm determined to finish it. I did reach two milestones last night: Mission 30, which looks to be a conclusive story mission in one fashion or another, and 50% completion. That percentage is, I'm hoping, the overall completion including optional stuff like side ops, bonus mission objectives, catching all the animals, completing all the development projects, building all the Mother Base platforms, etc. rather than recording the progress I've made in the main game, because I think I'm going to have to set a hard deadline for the end of this month. I have so much in my backlog left to play - more so now that I've bought Divinity: Original Sin and Xenoblade Chronicles X (why do I keep buying these enormous games?!) - and I refuse to let MGSV turn into another Stardew Valley where I feel obligated to write an entire blog narrowing down a good place to call it quits. I can be too obsessive for my good, though I suppose a lot of that can also be a compliment to the long-term appeal of a fantastic game like MGSV. It's not like I won't frequently quit games cold turkey only a few hours in if they're not speaking to me at all. Like Stardew, I'll reach a self-determined point where I need to move on already, abd probably come back to it a few hours a week to move inexorably closer to that golden 100% between sessions of whatever else I happen to be focused on at that time.

That said, I'm still way into getting Big Boss into various scrapes. The missions continue to be hit and miss in the most basic metric that is my enjoyment of them, but they're all at least distinctive and well-considered. The creep of new developments adding new venues for stealth approaches, the simple joys of taking out an entire guardpost or outpost without getting spotted and the game's trademark ludicrous story are all doing their part to maintain my interest too. I will finish this game, not because I feel obligated to do so by some odd personality quirk, but because the game deserves it. Even with all the tales I've heard about the game's abrupt and disappointingly inconclusive end, I owe it and the overall series that much.

Visceral Cleanup Detail!

Talking of games ideal for short intermittent playthroughs, I decided to check out the core Viscera Cleanup Detail game this week a few months after playing its Shadow Warrior-themed demo/tie-in because I was curious to see what sort of additional features the full game enjoyed.

I think what's immediately striking is that there's a heck of a lot of game here. I was expecting maybe four or five scenarios of comparative size to the singular VCD: Shadow Warrior area, but there's actually eighteen right now. Each has a distinct environment, though most share the same sanitation problems to tackle: bloodstains, dismembered body parts, bullet casings, regular trash, radioactive materials, etc. In addition, the number of tools the player is given access to has increased, along with a device that can boost you up for the sake of removing all that awkwardly high blood splatter. Naturally, this device is as low-rent as the rest of your janitorial equipment and frequently jams. The game also has a plot of sorts for each of its levels. While you can glean what happened in the Shadow Warrior level from context alone - Lo Wang happened, is what - in the core game there are data pads and notes to read while picking through debris both organic and otherwise that help fill in some extra backstory regarding what sort of horrific event occurred and why. The other big addition is a hub-like "office", actually just a leaky janitor closet, where you can decorate the shelves with any "keepsakes" you stole from the levels.

I didn't do so hot on my first level, Athena's Wrath, a well-lit corridor that had some elevated window ledges that housed some of the more elusive viscera and trash to eliminate. I neglected to fix any of the bulletholes, largely because I didn't realize that was something you could buff out. (How do you clean a hole? Best not answer that, actually.) I appreciated that each of the dead "employees" scattered around the environment had punch-out cards like mine, and I figured I might get a bonus if I brought them all to the punch-out machine used to quit the level - they made a noise and vanished, but nothing came of it at the end so it might be that a missed one or the game has yet to incorporate additional mission tasks (or I just didn't notice if they got added after the first clear, like MGSV's missions). The 87% cleaning rate I ended up with was apparently dissatisfying enough to my superiors for a demotion, but I'm not sure how much further down the totem pole I can really go, so... hey, NBD.

If I play VCD again, and I just might because the game still has this relaxing zen-like quality to its repetitive routine and completionist-baiting tendencies that folk these days generally refer to as "podcast gaming", I'll be sure to try another of its many scenarios. I can definitely appreciate that this game is meant for multiple people - many hands make light work, as I've said before about this game, and particularly-synchronized players can delegate specific chores to each other, whether that's fetching new buckets or carrying garbage to the incinerator and so on in a manner similar to that recent Overcooked! game. However, there's also something inherently amusing about the janky Unreal Engine physics that only a casual multiplayer environment could really capitalize on. I'd like to see a few knuckleheads like the Giant Bomb Squad tackle a four-player co-operative clean-up and see how quickly it takes them to complete it; or rather, how quickly it takes for them to descend into chaos, sabotage and bickering.