Sunday Summaries 07/08/2016: Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

Hey all, how's the Summer treating you? I guess the Olympics started this week, despite everything threatening to fall apart, but I don't know how much of it I'll end up watching. Probably just intermittently side-eye the medal tables as soon as all the rich people sports start up, like fancy cycling and fancy boats and fancy horses, and Team GB starts earning some of that cheddar. That gold medal cheddar. Gold Cheddal.

Not at all prompted by the new Batman animated movie, or the new Batman Telltale game, or the new movie with Batman villains in it. I think there's just always a lot of Batman going on any given moment.

In personal gaming news, I've purchased two new games this week, continuing to expand my PS4 and Steam backlogs ever upwards. The first is Batman: Arkham Knight, which I guess got enough mixed press that it dropped to a reasonable price fairly quickly. I've been a fan of the way Rocksteady's Batman series handles stealth and collectibles (each one's a little puzzle!) so I'm not going to throw it under a batbus just yet, but I also suspect that it might be one of the many open-world franchises I'll have to drop in the future for time reasons. I've noticed that a majority of the small list of games I've played this year have been enormous open-world games and... well, I get attached easily to the exploration and completionist aspects, but I'm not sure if I can stand too many more and it's really making my intermittent games writing suffer with how difficult it is to get around their similarities from case to case. On an incidental tangent about episodic RPGs, I spoke to former mod and current internet pal @sparky_buzzsaw about how I might be ready for an RPG with a bit more linearity and story focus to it, if only because this procession of immense open-world games is beginning to take its toll.

So I'm thankful that Indie games are around to provide bite-sized palate cleansers between these bloated "retail" industry games. I'm actually really looking forward to playing and writing about Lumo, my second purchase and the isometric spiritual successor to Rare's early output and games like my beloved Equinox, at some point next week. Now that I'm yet again caught in another giant open-world game - that would be Metal Gear Solid V, which I'm still enjoying but am on the fence about whether or not I can go the distance - I'll be once again implementing my "Indie Intermission" approach to ensure I'll have something else to write about in these summaries other than MGSV week after week. For reasons related to my other blogging activity, I both don't want to and can't write too much about MGSV here anyway.

New Games!

That's probably not Ramiel, but I don't think we should count out any Neon Genesis Evangelion kaiju from showing up.

No getting around No Man's Sky this week. It's going to be everywhere on video game sites and podcasts come August 9th, and then everywhere again on the 12th when the PC version shows up. The game's taken on a mythical quality since its first breathless reveal at E3 2014, making promises both real and imagined that it would be the sort of procedurally generated space exploration game that you could feasibly play for hundreds of hours and still be discovering new things. Between the early leaks that suggest it's a great but not life-changing game, to those obstinately convinced by its potential to be the one video game to end all video games, you have poor wildman-bearded Sean Murray and his hardworking team at Hello Games stuck somewhere in the middle who just wanted to make a great game that would resonate with people and sell a lot of copies. It's perhaps for the best that there won't be any early reviews - the day one patch wiping all progress will ensure that much - because I can imagine any comment section to a "8.8"-style early professional outlet review will be horrific to watch. I've kept my expectations in check, as I'm sure have most of you, and will find out for myself how good No Man's Sky is eventually. Long after all seventy trillion of its planets have been named after internet memes, most likely, but around to it I will most assuredly get.

"Your webcam feed is a bit blurry, what body part is that?" "Oh, U no."

Surprisingly, there are other games coming out this week too, though it's still barely a smattering. Comedy rhythm endless runner hybrid doodad Tadpole Treble is out this week for Wii U, having already hit Steam to high praise back in May, and it reminds me of those musical stages from Rayman Legends. The enhanced Kingdom: New Lands, coming to XBOne and Steam on August 9th, adds more content to last year's gorgeous-looking side-scrolling monarch strategy sim that also slipped me by. Online Uno's coming back for PS4 and Steam (with the XBOne version out next week), presumably with less webcam nudity this time around. Honestly, though, that was the soul of the experience. Couldn't get ten minutes into one of those games without someone showing you their "wild card" unprompted.

Also out on Steam, since every other system is taking a siesta, we have a port of the Vita turn-based RPG Ray Gigant, the new "executive decisions simulator" Reigns from Devolver Digital, the competitive robot arena fighting game Blade Ballet, the visual novel spin-off set in the BlazBlue universe (what?) XBLAZE Lost Memories, and something called Malazard: The Master of Magic which, I discovered, is some VR thing and has nothing to do with empire sim ne plus ultra Master of Magic. Don't get my hopes up like that, jerks.

Wiki!

Wiki work is going to slow down a lot now that the mod team has live Bombcasts to monitor, but I'm still hopeful I can achieve my goal of completing the final month of 1995 before the end of August, and thus the end of Summer. That means an average of fifteen games a week if I'm going to complete all sixty (actually sixty-one, I miscounted last time) games in December 1995's SNES/SFC line-up. I only managed fourteen pages this week, two of which had already been covered in a previous Wiki Project, but thankfully this week is an Adventure Zone week so maybe that extra podcast hour can give me a chance to catch up. December is the Japanese holiday rush for new games, so expect many more Super Famicom obscurities (and a few SFC entries for well-known RPG franchises) in the coming weeks.

Right, so those fourteen games. They included three new pages, so be sure to check in on my latest Super Famicom Super Also-Ran list for more info on those forgotten non-classics. This week actually saw an even spread of East and West: seven Japan debuts (all but one of which were exclusive to that region), six North American debuts and a European PAL exclusive. Let's just whiz through the highlights:

Not the 16-bit era's proudest moment.

On the North American side, we have: the nausea-inducing Boogerman: A Pick and Flick Adventure; the video game adaptation of Toy Story (weird to think that a Pixar movie could be old enough for a SNES licensed game); and the inimitable (because why would you want to copy it?) Aerosmith on-rails shooter Revolution X. As always, the North American studios continue to bring out their best and brightest.

On the Japanese side, we have: Dokapon Gaiden: Honoo no Audition, the third game in the abjectly cruel Dokapon RPG/board game franchise; Fushigi no Dungeon 2: Fuurai no Shiren, which remained a Japan exclusive until its DS localization in 2008 as Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer; Ochan no Oekaki Logic, the first of three picross games headlined by Hebereke characters; and a little game called Mega Man X3, featuring some kind of blue robot gun boy.

Metal Gear Solid V!

Sorry folks! I'm saving every tidbit and opinion regarding Metal Gear Solid V for my ongoing reaction series, the first two parts can be found here and here. I'm putting it all out on the table with those blogs, which leaves little extra to remark upon for these Sunday Summaries.

How about some statistics, instead? Doesn't feel right to leave you with nothing but a couple of links. Let's see what the numbers say about my MGSV progress...

So far I've completed ten missions, one of those with an S rank and four others without raising any alarms. My overall completion is at 11% which... isn't promising after a whole week. At least my mission completion is at the slightly better 17%. It's still early days yet, but I better get a move on if I hope to beat this game before the end of Summer.