Time Flies

Has it already almost been a week? The big thing over this past weekend was some XBLA stuff, some Rock Band, and gearing up for MGS2. A lot of that time was spent on Puzzle Quest alone. I'm determined to play that game all the way through to the end. I have no clue how far into it I might be, though. It's just too good of a game; that devious combination of puzzle and rpg tropes is the definition of addicting.

I flew a few missions more in Ikaruga, too. I've made it up to around halfway through the 3rd level (on easy with max lives and continues). That game is beautiful in it's simplicity, and it looks great in high-def. Not a bad deal at $10, either.

I found Monster Hunter Freedom for PSP used, and in mint condition, for $20 at EB the other day, so I decided to give it a whirl. My first impressions are "someone please tell me how to play this game." A couple of times now I've gone off on my first quest for the hunter's guild, which from what I can make of the briefing, is just a test to see if you can either survive a trip out into the wilds or if you can actually find this cryptic artifact that I'm assuming actually exists, not having seen any evidence that would lead me to actually believe in it. I've just wandered around so far, attacking random things and wondering where the hell this "paws pass" or whatever it is I'm looking for is. My PSP battery died halfway through my morning commute today, and that didn't help matters.

My first couple of hours with Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance were spent reading the 3 'books' of back story in the "special" menu of the game. It's interesting how those are set up. There is meant to have been a book published by one of the minor characters in the first MGS, detailing the behind-the-scenes happenings in and around the events at Shadow Moses. The first article of interest is a mock book review of said book, the second a mock-noir recounting by a bumbling journalist of his own investigations into the incident and the book (kind of humorous), and the third is the 'book' itself, which reveals a few previously unknown facts about the Patriots, a guy called Richard Ames, and what really happened in those islands north of Alaska's Fox archipelago. Altogether this stage-setting amounts to about 500 'pages' (a paragraph or so each). I try not to dwell on what my reading all of this says about myself.

As far as the game proper, I've made it through the Tanker chapter, and about an hour or so into the Raiden section of the game. I've only played through MGS2 once in the past, so my memories of the story are nebulous at best. I'm thoroughly enjoying it to this point.

Shadow Moses Incident Data Analysis Complete

I just polished off the rest of the original MGS tonight, clocking in a final time of 11:32 and a rank of Iguana (it said I used 120 rations? It must be counting the times I did so and then died).

Those back-to-back Metal Gear Rex fights were giving me fits. This time through the game I was using chaff grenades all over the place, and so when I needed them to avoid Rex's annoying missile attacks, I only had a handful, and it was tough making them stretch long enough to bring the beast down with my Stingers (which I had saved more than enough of).

Then there was the mano-a-mano fight against Liquid... I've always hated that part, but after a few futile attempts, I found a good strategy and was able to knock that bastard out. Not as aggravating as my last couple of times through the game.

And thennnnnnnn.... the jeep escape sequence. I died like 4 times trying that, whereas in the past I can't remember dying at all there. But, in the end, I made it out, with Meryl, since I withstood Ocelot's torture earlier.

I'm still amazed at how well this game holds up. Since this is my first time through since MGS2 came out, I caught a reference by Ocelot to a Colonel Sergei Gurlukovich of the Spetsnaz, who turns up later in Sons of Liberty. I also was able to pinpoint the moment Ocelot showed his hand in betraying Liquid, after Liquid revealed his plan to turn the base into a new Outer Heaven. Yeah, MGS still rocks.

1998 2: 2008

I guess I have a thing for 10-year-old games at the moment. I've been re-playing Metal Gear Solid from the collection I recently picked up. I had only planned to re-play MGS2 as a refresher before 4 comes out in June, but I figured I might as well hop in at MGS1 considering the last two games in the series I played were MGS3 and Portable Ops (and, as anyone reading this no doubt is aware, the series chronology goes: 3>PO>1>2>4).

This is my fourth or fifth time through the game, counting solo and co-op (passing the controller back and forth with a friend) playthroughs. The game holds up amazingly well, especially with the texture smoothing the PS3 can do for it. There's also an option to stretch the image to 16:9, but while that has worked for me in the past with GTA: San Andreas, it makes MGS look really off. Most amazingly, though, is how the actual gameplay holds up. I keep trying to figure out if this is a sign of one amazing game or a whole industry's stagnation.

At first it was a bit jarring not to be able to pull off Metal Gear moves I've become accustomed to, like the somersault, rail-hang, or box-climb (let alone first-person aiming). Before long, though, I was once again used to the relatively simplistic control scheme of the original MGS. Even after all this time, the game feels nearly perfectly executed, including the cut-scenes. The character models are now overly blocky, but none of the impact is lost. Truly an amazing feat if there ever was one. And David Hayter just sounds so good. Also, the hand-drawn character portraits present in the codec calls are hella cool, and they should have stuck with those throughout the series.

I'm just past the torture sequence, at around 6-and-a-half hours in, which is somewhere around half-way if I remember correctly. I know I still have the Hind (D), Sniper Wolf, Vulcan Raven, and the Rex/Liquid fights to go. I'll probably finish the game this week and move on the part 2 shortly.

More contemporaneously, I've picked up Ninja Gaiden DS, and it's awesome! This is hands-down the best gameplay use of the stylus I've seen yet. Admittedly, I've not played Zelda yet, but all indicators point to Ninja Gaiden one-upping it in the control department. Ryu controls smoothly and swiftly outside of battle, and quickly and precisely in battle. Like any good ninja, his sole purpose is to flip out and kill people.

This game was created expressly for the DS, and it really shows. Even in DS-as-book orientation, the game just feels awesome to play (even for a lefty like myself, thanks to the flip option). Stabbing and jabbing with the stylus is like second nature, and jumping maneuvers like the Flying Swallow or Izuna Drop also feel great to pull off by flicking the stylus up to jump, then across or up again to perform the attack. When I think of the feeling of playing this game, there's only one other game that comes to mind with such a smooth sense of fighting and mobility, and that's Symphony of the Night, and that's a hell of a game to draw comparison to.

Briefly, I downloaded the demo of Ikaruga on XBLA, and it's pretty cool (and tough). I also popped in Rock Band for a bit, in perverse observance of Europe's plight with this game. And finally, I hit up Puzzle Quest for a few minutes. They really should have created unique quests in that game for each of the character classes. I'm so far in with my Wizard that it'd be a huge waste of time to start over with another character (but I have anyway, once before), but I'd like to try out other classes, such as the 4 new ones they are adding in the ex-pac just over the horizon.

Giving up on a couple.

Meh, I've had enough GTA: San Andreas and Castlevania: Dracula X Chronicles.

I've put in a lot of time and effort with both, and enjoyed them, but I don't think I'm ever going to see them through to the end.

I finally beat Death in Rondo of Blood last time I played, woot! The next level is a boss gauntlet... Oh well, as a kid I never beat Castlevania or Castlevania III, both of which I really loved, so why should Rondo be any different? These old school Castlevanias are just hard as hell. The more forgiving playability (you might say easiness) of Symphony of the Night is a big part of why it's lodged solidly in my top three games of all time.

As for San Andreas, well, I've really just had enough GTA altogether. I was pretty much done after Vice City, and even though I'm sitting at around 75% of the way through the story of San Andreas, I haven't been playing it or having fun with it the way I did with the first two entries in this incarnation of the series. The days of GTA III and Vice City were the halcyon days of collegiate life in the dorm. My roommate and I would trade the controller back and forth over these two games and just have a blast for hours at a time. When I play San Andreas now, I'm solo, and it's just not that involving. I'd rather just cut to the chase, and to play a GTA game that way just isn't right, so I'm going to just walk away.

Lord knows I've got other stuff I could be playing.

I am getting GTA IV, but if I hadn't already had it on order for the awesome bargain price of $42 since a year or more ago, I might have held off for a while. I just hope the jump up to "IV" brings some significant differences to the formula. The story and presentation looks pretty good this time around, at least.

FFVII Crisis Core Solved!

I finished the main quest and story tonight, putting in a total of about 20 hours. I only did around 20% of the missions, but easily spent 4 hours of that 20 on them.

This game is a unique mix of things that are done really well, and things that are done really poorly. The good ultimately outweighs the bad, in my opinion, leaving the score at around 60/40.

The good: amazing production values, awesome soundtrack, fun and addictive battle system, shittons of game content in the mission system, and the cool materia fusion system.

The suck: long-ass, un-skippable cut-scenes (often before boss battles), unintelligible faux-profound ramblings from the character Genesis, encounter triggers and encounter frequency, bland and empty environments, the DMW system constantly interrupting your battle flow for non-interactive slot machine randomness, long-ass, unskippable limit break animations.

There are also issues with over-leveling as a by-product of doing the side missions. As I mentioned, at the end of the game I had only done around 20% of them, and I was able to beat the ever-loving shit out of all the final bosses without breaking a sweat. This was on normal. I'm told hard mode is just obnoxious because all it does is up enemy HP by insane amounts without really changing enemy tactics at all.

As for the plot, and it's connections to FFVII proper, well, that's more of a subjective thing. There's a good 9 or 10 years between me and familiarity with FFVII, but for the most part it didn't matter. Zack's story is pretty compelling in it's own right, and even without being able to nail down every single reference or thing corresponding to something else in FFVII, I got a sense of what Cloud's motivation should be going into that game (even if he's an amnesiac or whatever for a while, there). Zack is also a really likable character, especially considering he's a Final Fantasy protagonist post-FFVI.

While the game has some issues, it's a lot of fun, and it's definitely one of the very top echelon of PSP titles, leaving most portable games far, far behind in the dust. So, a flawed gem, but a shiny and valuable one nonetheless.

March pick-up post!

Top to bottom:

1)A second DS for my wife, a kanji study aid from Japan, and a couple of new DS titles

2)Non-MGS Playstation Family titles.  CC: FFVII is the "limited" Best Buy edition.

3)The Metal Gear Solid Essential Collection. The cover art is universally an improvment over the original versions.  At the bottom is the inside cover art for the MGS Digital Graphic Novel.

4)To the right is the Metal Gear Saga Vol. 2 disc I got from Game Crazy when I reserved MGS4.

5)StarCraft, and a bluetooth mighty mouse to play it with.

I suck at StarCraft

It took me an hour and a half the other night to beat one of the missions of the Terran campaign. I'm only on the 6th or 7th one, but the game is still pretty tough. I'm starting to learn the hotkeys for stuff, and that's helping some, but I am still a total noob.

I'm on this mission now where I have to send some guys to rescue some other guys who are surrounded by a freakin' ton of Zerg. I can't seem to win anytime I throw my guys at the Zerg encampments along the way to where I need to go. I don't think I'm taking enough guys or something. I'll typically send 8 or so marines and/or firebats along with 2 to 4 each of the vultures and wraiths. Looks like I need to amass a larger force before sending them out to kill a bunch of Zergs and Zerg buildings.

I popped in Oblivion the other night, for the first time in forever. I've decided to try and at least get through the main quest of the game, and then maybe later go and do all the guilds and factions and stuff. I still can't see myself burning through enough of the game to necessitate buying Shivering Isles, the expansion pack. During this session, I did a couple of legs of the main campaign, and picked up a couple more pieces of the Daedric armor set, which I think is best in the game, though I could be mistaken. I'm beginning to agree with what seems to be the popular consensus--that this game is broken. Specifically, the bit about monsters leveling up just as you do. I saw a sage bit of advice online, though, which for the most part fixes the problems this causes: set the difficulty slider all the way down.

Also, I've been playing a lot more of Crisis Core: FFVII at home and on my commute. Good game, though in places I've thought the encounter rate was too high. I'm just at the part where Zack has met Cloud for the first time. The narrative so far is better than I'd thought it would be, but that's not really saying a lot. My favorite character is probably Angeal, followed by Zack himself, and then Sephiroth, who seems surprisingly more normal and level-headed here than he becomes in FFVII proper.

Going Mobile

I've been stuck to my portables lately. Partly it is because I've been using public transport some days, partly because console & TV gaming requires me to sit up and pay attention (either my couch is too far away, or I need a bigger TV), and partly just because I got some wicked awesome games for DS and PSP.

I finally got my DS to cooperate with my wireless setup's security settings, so I was able to try out the rescue features for Shiren the Wanderer. I ventured down to the 8th floor to rescue one guy, and after the rescue was complete I found I was able to keep all of the items I'd found during the run. None of the EXP, but it's still a cool incentive nonetheless. Later, after one of my own failed attempts at the main dungeon, I called for a rescue from the 10th floor. When I checked back the next day, some kind wanderer had rez'd me, and I was able to continue from that spot with items and EXP intact. I made it another couple of floors in before getting owned again. So far the furthest I've made it is to the third town, just before the 15th floor. This game is tough, but enjoyable.

I went to Best Buy the other day looking for Rondo of Swords, another DS game, an SRPG with an interesting battle mechanic where you draw your path of movement through all the enemies you want to attack on your turn. It's an Atlus game, so the idea is to buy it first, decide whether you want it later. Unfortunately, BB didn't have it, so I'm still looking.

They did have Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, though. While I hadn't been exactly looking forward to it (the internet holds me in a state of perpetual FFVII fatigue, even not having played the game since like 1999), I had heard good things, and it seemed like it might be a good idea to pick it up in the limited edition packaging if at all (for resale value later if it turned out to suck).

I can happily say that it does not suck. Actually, it seems pretty awesome, so far. The production values are really something, despite the game suffering from the bland, empty 3D environment syndrome that a lot of PSP (and DreamCast before it) games seem to. The voice acting is surprisingly good, and the music is awesome. I love the J-metal butt rock you get during the missions and fight sequences.

The narrative I've yet to uncover much of (not expecting much, to be honest), but the battle system is really cool. It's the latest in a stream of SE's action/turn-based hybrid battle systems (including Vagrant Story, FFXI, FFXII, and others), and it blends the two styles so well that it feels like you're dodging and attacking in real time even when there is a slight animation or turn delay.

I like the side missions you get to do, also. There are tons of them, and they are accessible from any save point, so at just about any time you can hop from the main linear quest to somewhere completely different for a short action fix. So far they're all combat-focused, and take like 5 minutes max to complete, so they're perfect for a quick diversion and to pick up some loot. I've only done a few of these, but I already have 2 pretty sweet items earned from doing them.

So many awesome games to play, so little time.

Party like it's 1998

Being ten years late to the party is a good excuse to suck at StarCraft, don't you think? I've got to learn how they do this keyboard & mouse stuff that I hear is so good for RTS and FPS. It's got to be good, because those seem to be the only genres (besides the cash-grab MMORPG) that computer games come in.

It took me a couple of tries just to beat the third mission of the Terran campaign in StarCraft. You're given a corner of the map, some resources, and you just have to survive for 30 minutes against a pretty modest Zerg siege. My problem is that I just don't know what to do. Or rather, how to go about it quickly enough. I'll click a unit, then lead it somewhere, then tell it to do something, and sit there and watch the whole time. I get the feeling I should be issuing commands non-stop, but I'm just not good enough with the interface to jump my focus around the map constantly, and of course I'm not familiar with the hotkeys (or really hotkey interfaces in general). I've just never extensively gamed with keyboard & mouse enough to get accustomed to it in the way I am with a gamepad.

I think StarCraft is a good place to really jump into it, though. It's really a seminal example of a computer game (note that I don't say PC, since I'm running it on my Mac). I'm going to pick up the Diablo Battle Chest at some point, too. I did play that quite a lot when it came out, but I've never touched D2 at all, and I've had some very strong recommendations toward it (hi Secksi).

Otherwise, I've been knocking around in WoW a little. My trial will end any day now, but I'm not going to subscribe. For now, at least. I figure I've got enough other games to play through, and scarcely can afford the time to spend even a few hours a week in Azeroth. I've made it over to the second zone, and hit level 7 with my Hunter. I wonder how long I'd have to play to get a pet.

I also spent a ton of time playing Etrian Odyssey this week. See, I started to ride the local public transport some this past week. Only two days of the five, but that bus and train time really starts to add up... to nearly 3 hours a day, in my case. So, I've made it down into the 3rd stratum of the dungeon (B11F). There was this sick quest for the 8th floor that involved staying down there for 5 full days (which equated to something like 3,200 steps taken and/or turns taken in the random battles), during which I became grossly over-leveled, and that made plowing through to the end of the stratum a cinch (after finishing all of the mapping and questing to be done there, naturally). I might take a break from the game again, as I did after completing the first stratum. There are five strata in the main campaign, and a sixth postgame stratum featuring crazy hard bosses and such. At this rate I'll finish the game by like September.

Calls

I just finished the single-player campaign of Call of Duty 4. It was incredible! Not to mention very intense. I'd heard how good it was, but I'd also heard about how totally staged everything felt. Both are true, but I was expecting the latter to overshadow the former, but I was pleasantly surprised when it didn't, really. The weapons were great, and the settings and plot were also excellent.

There are some really cool moments in there, but I'm glad I only played it as a loaner, because it's probably not a campaign I'd ever play again (as it's pretty linear, and not really compelling for a replay, awesome as it is), and because I'm not about to get involved in CoD4 multiplayer. From what I hear it's buckets of fun, and I don't doubt it, but I'd rather play multiplayer Team Fortress 2 than just about any other shooter--when I decide to spend some time playing anything multiplayer, that is. I've got plenty of single-player stuff on my plate, and lined up on the buffet table taking up half of the room.

Speaking of which, I've been playing Etrian Odyssey a lot this week. Imagine my surprise when, on B7F, I discovered an item that opened up whole new wings of floors B5F through B3F(as far as I've delved so far)! Damn, I thought I was done with those floors! This game is serious business. I've been reading some about the sequel that just came out in Japan, and it sounds even greater. I'm hoping I can finish the first sometime before the sequel is released stateside (it's yet to be announced at all, so there's a decent chance of it).

I've felt an odd calling back to FFXI lately. It's as if a million gil farmers cried out at once, and were silenced. But seriously, I don't know what it is. I know I shouldn't get into that again, but I miss the friends I made there, and I'll be damned if I didn't have some amazing gear for Nascia (kinda miss her too...). I'm looking into things.

I've also heard a call to a couple of Blizzard products, oddly enough. I wouldn't call myself a PC gamer at all, but waaaay back in the day I did play some stuff. I owned both Warcraft 2 and Diablo (still got them somewhere). To see if I could stem my FFXI yearning, I downloaded the free 10 day WoW trial, as much just to see if it'd run on my MacBook as anything. It runs, alright. I don't care for the trackpad in WoW, so I'd have to get a mouse, but it does run. At the moment I have a level 3 Night Elf Hunter. I had a level 8 Human Warrior on my brother-in-law's PC, but I'm sure that guy's long gone. Jeff doesn't even play WoW anymore, as far as I know.

Then today, I was listening to some Starcraft 2 talk on a podcast (GFW radio--The Brodeo, for the win), and thought I might try to pick up the original. I'm pretty sure Blizzard games are dual Windows-Mac OS compatible as a rule, and Starcraft is basically the paragon of RTS excellence. I played the demo way back in the day, but that was it.

Game Trader and DS Love

There's this place called Game Trader near where I live, and it's the best game store I've ever been to in the United States. These guys are awesome. The guys that work there are hardcore gamers who actually know about the stuff they're selling, from current-gen stuff going all the way back past the NES.

I traded in my PS2 and a bunch of other stuff there a few weeks ago, and I got into a conversation on FFXI with a couple of the dudes who work there, and actually both of them still play it. To give you an idea of how cool this store is, they gave me $30 in trade-in credit for a FFXI art book and three 3-4 year old (and thus obsolete) Japanese language guides for the game. I got no end of use out of these books while I was living in Japan and playing FFXI religiously, so they were well used, and I wringed every yen/cent of value out of them while I had them. To be able to wring yet more worth out of them by trading them into this place is unheard of levels of awesome. I was convinced that I'd end up having to throw them out, which would be a real shame seeing as how awesome the guides are (even when the info inside is outdated)! So, thanks to the awesome store Game Trader, the guides live on in other people's collections, and in a straight trade, I picked up a new DS game: Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer.

Shiren is something new to me. It's an example of a genre called the "roguelike." I had never heard of such until just recently, mostly just from reading NeoGAF. But now, having played it, I remember seeing these all over game centers (arcades) in Japan. I don't know why I never tried them, but they're pretty damn fun, or at least Shiren is. The best I can do to describe the game with my gaming vocabulary is to say that it's kind of a cross between an action-rpg and a jrpg, taking some elements from both, but also really hardcore and unforgiving. You're apparently supposed to play through the whole game without ever dying, to complete it. When you do die, you find yourself back in the first town area, stripped of all your items and back at exp. level 1.

So far I've managed to make it to the 7th level of who knows how many... I'm going to guess 50. It seems like there's going to a ton of trial-and-error in learning the proper tactics and techniques to make it through the game, but that's cool, since the dungeons are all randomly generated, and the gameplay is fast and smooth. The game really hearkens back to the 16-bit era, too, because it's pretty much a port of a SNES game, from what I've read.

I love games like this. The DS is a huge boon to gamers, being the last bastion for titles like this and Etrian Odyssey and stuff like Ace Attorney or Hotel Dusk or Contra 4 or the Castlevania series.

Not falling for it.

I really enjoyed the demo I got for God of War: Chains of Olympus, but there are two reasons why I'm not going to buy the game:

A) I'm pretty sure that, like any somewhat decent PSP game from a western developer, it will see an enhanced PS2 release before the year is up, and no doubt shortly thereafter all three God of War games will be available for $29.99 in a boxed trilogy pack, a la GTA, DMC, Hitman, Resident Evil, MGS, and even those WWE games, ffs.

B) Quick-time events suck. They are the most contrived bullshit play mechanic to come out of the last generation of console gaming. Chains of Olympus takes their suckitude that much further by placing them in the middle of boss fights. So yeah, if you don't manage to hit X or the Circle or whatever the fuck button in the half-second window you have, the boss recovers from their stun state and gains back a whole shitton of health. As far as I can discern from the demo, there is no way to defeat the bosses without succeeding at this retarded crap. They aren't even the same each time you try it, either, so you can't just memorize the necessary sequence of buttons to hit. Who the hell thought this was a good idea?

Who the hell thought QTE's were a good idea in the first place? You'd think that something being the one real flaw in a game like RE4 would let people know that, hey, this mechanic sucks shit, and maybe they shouldn't put it in their game. Maybe this is just par for the course with GoW games. I wouldn't know; this is the first one I ever tried.

So, I had a $30 gift card to use at Circuit City, and if you got GoW:CoO there, you could get half off any PSP accessory, such as a bigger memory stick, which I could probably use. However, due to the reasons I outlined above, I held off on the game, and instead picked up the newest Gyakuten Saiban/Ace Attorney game, Apollo Justice, purely on faith (and because I already have the first three, and I might as well get it too, at this point).

A coworker lent me his copy of Call of Duty 4, too, so I'm giving that a run-through, and I want to try the multiplayer, even though I have no time to really spend on that, and would really prefer to dig deeper into Team Fortress 2 if I came across time to do so. Meanwhile, my DS pile of shame continues to mount, and so I've taken some time over the last two evenings to venture forth into Sekaiju no Meikyuu, that forest labyrinth of Etrian Odyssey (another game I need to complete before the sequel arrives)!

TIME PARADOX

Here on Blogger there doesn't seem to be any way to post retro-actively, so the only way I have of establishing a continuity between 9 Parsecs from Caladan here and my 1up.com page blog, which this is meant to parallel and eventually replace, is a link.

My 1up Blog

knockin' 'em down

This was a good weekend for the Pile of Shame. I woke up on Saturday and finally managed to knock out Rez HD (for the first time). The end sequence with the computer program lady was giving me trouble, but I managed to get up to that part still in the highest evolution state (the infant), and so had enough life to withstand a few hits in the course of zapping her to death. Maybe I zapped her to life? It's a very psychedelic encounter.

Then, tonight, in the culmination of a good two-to-three week run, I finished Jeanne D'Arc's crusade to save France (and all the world) from demonically possessed English king Henry VI. There exists additional content within the game, but if you take one glance over at the Pile of Shame, you'll understand why I don't dig deeper. A few of the last battles proved pretty difficult, and it wasn't until I turned to Rufus, who had sucked for most of the game, that I was able to defeat the child-king. I gave Rufus the Two Rounds stone that let him get in back-to-back swings with his big axe, and his newfound might was such that it could cleave the boy ruler's mighty demonic defenses and lay bare the foul possessor to my squad's fell magicks and sharp steel.

So kick another two up on to the 2008 pile o' skulls (of defeated videogames). This year, we dine in Hell!

Speaking of Spartans, I got a free demo of the soon-to-be-released God of War: Chains of Olympus when I pre-ordered said game at my local EB. If I don't like the demo, I'll just move my pre-order over to Ninja Gaiden DS or something. I went in there to put some money down on MGS4, to ensure I get into the Metal Gear Online beta (though the guys in the store of course had no clue what I was talking about when I mentioned it), and I also found a copy of the MGS Digital Graphic Novel, so I picked that up for about 12 bucks. The PSP is starting to really rival the DS for the spot of my favorite portable this generation.