Mission report

I’m pleased to report that Operation: Diligent Slacking was a resounding success, though not without some small casualties.

Objective One: Portal
Status: Complete
These 200 minutes of entertainment fully justified my purchase of The Orange Box, although I guess eventually I’ll play the Half-Life Episodes, too. But what is this hole in my heart? It appears to be a void in the shape of a weighted companion cube.

Objective Two: Crackdown
Status: Essentially Complete
Having initially played through the game on an Xbox 360 debug, I didn’t quite have the time take down the last couple of bosses and sort of ran out of steam with my immediate replay of the retail version. That is no longer a concern! The completist in me does feel somewhat compelled to round out that Achievement list, though I am suppressing that urge. Curiously, I found myself playing the game far more effectively this time, the skills and tactics honed by my many hours of Halo 3 transferring rather effectively into this third-person perspective.

Objective Three: Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence
Status: Complete
Finally. Great game, but very unforgiving if, say, you have to stop playing midway through the quest and spend two months working on reviews of other titles, thereby losing your feel for the controls, the sneaking and the tactics. Also, whoever told me that the battle with The End is more than 2/3 of the way to the actual end is a stinking liar who tricked me into thinking, “Well, I can easily complete the rest of the game in a sitting!” Which I did, but not without repercussions…

Casualty Report
Auditory damage: Subject’s right ear suffers from temporarily muted hearing and a low ringing sensation likely caused by 13 hours of sustained headphone use.
Exhaustion: Subject is very tired because freaking MGS3 just kept going and going way after it should have ended. Due to an excess of Volgin battles and a tension-killing escort mission, subject did not complete this objective until well after 3 a.m.
Recommendations: Pace yourself, dude. This isn’t a race.

18 thoughts on “Mission report”

  1. Hooray for shacking!

    Doesn’t MGS3 totally make up for MGS2? It’s just meta enough to make you think, but not so extremely meta that everything is immediately annoying. I can’t say enough good things about this game – it’s like walking around in a great movie, and all the ridiculous little details (you can see everything your escort has been eating in the health viewer!) make it that much more immersive.

    I love fighting Volgin (he’s fun to stamina-kill; somersaults for the win), but I hate the Fury. Cheap fire-spewing cosmonaut bastard.

    Portal makes me miss Old Man Murray that much more, the dialogue is so good. I’ll load up the final scene and get neurotoxined just to listen to the boss’s amazing smack talk.

  3. Why is it that the image links on the main page are always broken, regardless of what computer or browser I’m using? Just out of idle curiosity?

  4. BECAUSE YOU ARE ACCESSING THE PAGE THROUGH TOASTYFROG.COM WHICH IS TEMPORARILY NOT WORKING CORRECTLY AND I HAVE ANSWERED THIS QUESTION SEVERAL TIMES

  5. If I were you, Parish, I would just go the whole hog and break toastyfrog.com, with a small notice saying to use gamespite.com instead, it’s not like the site hasn’t been called that for a year now.

  6. Oops…sorry about that. But from a marketing standpoint, you ought to be happy–you’ve successfully built up a high level of name recognition/customer loyalty. Next step: profit!

  8. Ah, but I’m fickle. I can’t decide what I want to call the site. Best to leave it to reader discretion… once toastyfrog.com is fixed.

    Also, I did not cry at MGS3’s ending but I did find myself slightly choked up at the graveyard scene. That may have been exhaustion, though. I don’t remember my last 14-hour gaming session.

  9. Yeah, when you are old (er), you’ll miss those minutes you wasted reacting to shiny stimuli like an idiot infront of a T.V.

  11. I finished MGS1 last night and got the ‘bad’ ending. It’s overt homo-eroticism was totally worth the ten-hour price of admission!

  13. What, they’re just friends! I ride snow mobiles that snugly with my friends all the time!

    …

    …uh oh.

  14. What you consider the ‘bad’ ending is obviously quite different from what I think. In my mind the male bonding was much better than the world’s greatest soldier making goo-goo eyes at a girl he’s known less than half a day and spent most of that time being a frustrating hindrance.

    Also, STEALTH CAMO. Better loot = better ending.

  15. I always considered the Meryl ending best since Snake didn’t buckle and cause her to die. The fact that she’s alive for MGS4 suggests it’s also the “correct” ending, unless of course she’s an elaborate fake. Which is entirely possible given that, you know, Kojima.

  16. Meryl’s escape was mentioned in In the Darkness of Shadow Moses: The Unofficial Truth.

    (yeah, I didn’t read through it either – I’m taking Wikipedia’s word for it here)

  18. I actually did read through In the Darkness of Shadow Moses. It was pretty interesting!

    PS2 doesn’t look so good on my TV, but PS2 games run through the PS3 upscaling look great!

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