CUTE RPGS FOREVER

Paul Eiding (voice actor for Colonel Campbell) is really skilled at voice acting in-game tutorials. I don't think anyone can quite nail the lines involving "left analog stick" like he does.

He gave himself away because I was playing Dark Cloud 2 last night and Cedric was a little too patient explaining how to do things to me... and sure enough, he's voiced by Campbell. When he's explaining things, I seem to really pay attention!

It's pretty fun. Basically you become one of those hundreds of random soldiers that Snake snaps the neck of and immediately forgets about, and you fight against other random soldiers to the background music of various Metal Gear games.

You can customize your appearance, face, voice, clothing, etc. Unfortunately you can only be a male character, and unfortunately for all you fans of guys out there, they're all pretty ugly. You can cover them up enough to where you can't tell, though. Still, I'd like to be able to be some hot girl or a bishy boy if I so desired, that's probably my major gripe with the game.

Anyway, then you get to assign various skills like being better with sniper rifles or setting up traps faster to your character. You can equip/unequip these at your leisure, so you can do a total 180 with what your character specializes in if you change your mind. The skills level up as you use them, which makes them improve. My specialty is sniper rifles, CQC, and girly mags, if you're wondering.

The rounds consist of various rules, such as team vs team, deathmatch, capture the flag (actually, it's capture the GA-KO and Kerotan), etc. The best one is Sneaking, when one lucky individual gets to be Old Snake equipped with OctoCamo, and he has to steal a certain number of dog tags from players to win. Unfortunately this means that everyone else is supposed to either kill the other team or Snake, and going after and killing Snake is just sad and I don't want to do it, dammit. I kill the other team instead ;D

I had my first encounter with someone telling me "u suck" the other night while I was playing :D It was... so awesome. See, I don't play online games like... ever, so this was all so new to me. He told several other people they sucked too, but I still felt special.

Oh yeah, krile was listening to boyband CDs while watching all of this. Did I just blow your mind?

In the end this probably isn't the kind of game I'd bother with if it was a separate thing, but because it's included with MGS4 it's a fun distraction. Plus I think if you try to connect but have some kind of issues sprite!Otacon shows up to guide you through troubleshooting or something. I should really yank out my wireless router and try that.

Since school has been out, I've been trying to get out more and have some summer fun, which to me always includes epic gaming sessions along with going out, swimming, sweating, etc.

So anyway, here's a giant post about things, LJ-cut into bite-sized pieces for your convenience.

( Games I've been playing lately, including the newest Tales of Phantasia Playstation Ver. translation, Wild Arms 5, and Nightmare of Druaga: FUSHIGINO DUNGEON )

( Product review! Star Ocean: Second Evolution Accessory set for PSP )

Phew! Well, now that's out of my system, at least. Looking forward to MGS4 coming out soon, but I'm hoping to polish off Portable Ops before then. Enjoy this summer weather, everyone~

This picture makes me lol, feel happy and feel sad at the same time =(

Also I'm sorry to all the scientists I accidentally killed while trying to interrogate them. I really suck at pressing L3 without moving the analog stick I guess xD;

I'm going to be in New York next week. Like, the city. I've never been there. Naturally I'm planning to visit the Nintendo Store while I'm there... and I guess that Statue of Whatever and the Museum of Natural.. somethings.

Decided to pick up Tales of Phantasia for GBA for the trip. They really butchered the translation in places and took out fun stuff like the opening theme, renaming function and sound test. I'm really hoping they bring out the new and improved PSP version out here, but in the meantime I'm enjoying the GBA version simply for the fact that it's ToP, and portable at that.

Oh and I beat Metal Gear Solid. Meryl ending of course, but immediately krile made me promise to get the Otacon ending on the Gamecube version. Because, you know, love can bloom on the battlefield............ in the butt.

(Now I'm waiting for MGS2 to come in the mail, I actually found MGS3 at the mall so I'm in the awkward situation of being tempted to play them out of order. It might not even really matter if I do or not, but oh well~)