See You in the Morning

Between the hours of 4:30 and 8:30am, when the sun is still just remembering that it can peak its fiery head above the small growth of trees in my tiny, overpopulated suburb, there is a man screaming at me. Short bursts come out of the crackled audio of a two-way radio, getting more intense as he realize that I don't respond. Always it is intense, this other man's screaming, though I try to avoid it as best I can. But being the meticulous guy that I am, sometimes the constant chorus of "Snake? SNAKE? SNAAAAKE?!" just cannot be avoided. Like everything, I suppose, you even get to like it.

Let me briefly point out that I'm not being screamed at in this manner --which we can heretofore refer to as "playing Metal Gear Solid V"-- for the four solid hours that I've listed above. Rather, let's call that a very generous range. As the proud-yet-confused father of a 3 week-old baby, I take these fleeting moments of tactical espionage action when I can, and I'm certainly grateful for them. In all seriousness, I didn't expect to have any time playing video games at all for these first few weeks or so as life goes through the typhoon of finding the best way to rear a child while also letting the people that birthed it retain some sanity. Every parent will tell you the same. On the other hand, I've always been an early riser, so the schedule of me putting her down at midnight, my wife feeding her between 2:30 and 3:00, and then me feed her again early in the morning has been found to be most agreeable to both our sleeping schedules, and also my appetite for sneaking up on an unsuspecting military goon and choking the hell out of him. Wouldn't you know it, when she's off her sleeping schedule, that's gratifying for a different reason, too. Metal Gear, man.

It's hard, this whole parenthood thing, but so is Metal Gear Solid V. At least, it is the way I've been playing it. Though I typically go through most video games in as bloodthirsty a manner as possible, and past Metal Gear Solid games have certainly been no exception, I'm doing my best to be as holy and true a pacifist as my tranq gun will let me through the whole ordeal so far. You can perhaps imagine my frustration, then, when I get through 45 minutes of silence --almost surgical in precision from one interrogated mook to the next-- before getting caught by some idiot that catches me in the act of doing good soldier-y spy stuff and blows my cover. Pause. Restart. Contain my screams. Plenty of right-thinking people have written reviews and articles these last few weeks about just saying "well, fuck it" and going pro-lethal, but this has become a hurdle that I simply cannot overcome. Call it pigheadedness, I suppose, but when I finish that mission, when I get that child soldier on the chopper, when I extract the opposing faction's commander, when I swipe all of the fuel that I need and nobody sees me doing any of that stuff? Elation, I tell you. There's a tickle in my chest that, well, I also get when my kid is awake and has just cracked a smile, however briefly.

The first week of fatherhood, honestly, sucks. Not this is bullshit -sucks, but more like Jesus, when is this going to get better -sucks. It is action packed in all of the ways you wish it weren't; the baby is crying, you're trying to figure out why, and sometimes feeding it and changing its diaper actually won't get your baby to stop crying. Figuring all of that out is rough going, man, no matter how much help you might be getting from the kind folks at the hospital. The last two weeks, though, have been better. You're surprised how quickly life finds its own small routines (in between the sleep when you can get it and the shrieks of a 7 pound human you love uncontrollably). Still, everything is challenge. You begin planning your day in 3 hour increments. Often, you get a half a bag of chips and call it dinner because cooking is a luxury of time you don't have. Taking care of yourself and your home must be meticulously timed, and abandoned immediately if necessary. Everything takes planning and a little bit of forethought to be executed with maximum efficiency. That is, until something out of the norm happens (like a short growth spurt that makes a baby scream and eat --somehow at the same time-- for days on end) and you have to adjust on the fly. You know, like Metal Gear.

I feel it burning in there, this new and perhaps final Metal Gear game. It is searing itself into my memories already, and finding a suitable mnemonic host in the first month of my first baby's life. Ever will the two be linked together, as other games in life-altering moments have been. Metal Gear Solid V, and all of its confounded screaming, will remind me when I took her home, fed her, swaddled her, and tried as hard as I could to get her back to sleep at 6:45 when a pivotal cut scene begins. When I look at pictures of her sleeping in mommy's arms, freaking out over the bottle we've just fed her, and wearing her first "future Batgirl" onesie, I will remember when I attached a balloon to a tank and sent it off into the clouds. Somehow, it all makes perfect sense.

At least, that's how I felt at 5:35 this morning.

Updates From Yesterday

We'll do this in bullet form:

• I still have a baby. She's very cute, if loud at times I wish she wouldn't be
• I still haven't jumped into Metal Gear Solid V yet, but that's not for a lack of wanting. The cool thing about having a baby is that everybody and their brother wants to come over to see her, and they often bring food with them. Sure, that can get kind of old, but since it's mostly in the evenings when less stuff is going on, I'm still fine with it. Currently, though, the TV that is attached to the PlayStation 4 is having a semi-family viewing of Beetlejuice. I don't have it in my heart to stop it.
• On that note, for only being less than a week old at the time, my newborn baby girl has seen a fair amount of the cannon of Movies All Humans Should Watch, and mostly by dumb ass luck since they were on television at one time or another since we got home on Friday. These include: The Dark Knight, ET, Back to the Future, and to a lesser extent, Whiplash (which was good, but a little too new for such a prestigious list). I'm hoping that the teachings of cinematic prophets Spielberg, Zemeckis, and Nolan will somehow seep into her, even if their current track records are a little on the spotty side. 
• Google has a new logo. They didn't need it.
• I am slowly chipping away at compiling interviews for a huge story I'm writing for USGamer next month. Not a whole lot of responses yet, but the key people are already on board, and that's what counts. I don't want to spoil what I'm doing yet, but it's a pretty cool project that I'm super excited to work on. If the stars would have aligned and I would have scored an interview from a specific person, it would have cracked the whole thing open and made this piece my Sistine Chapel, but alas, the world isn't full of people that want to talk about their past work, if you can believe it. 
• Still about half way through the first edit of the book (remember that?), but I'm hoping to get an edit done in the next few weeks and sent out to a few very hip cats and kittens that agreed to proof it. This is a total bullshit vanity project for me, but I still need to constructive criticism, so let's see how that goes. I'm definitely up early enough, now that I think about it, so I should probably start taking advantage of the golden hour to get this mopped up. We'll see, I s'pose.
• Beyond reasoning, my wife has forced me to go to the gym the last few days, and has reasoned enough that I'll be spending an hour or so outside of the house every day for this purpose. I was comfortable with skipping for another week, but sainted woman that she is, she knew that if I didn't stick to some sort of routine in my life I would be kind of a house-dwelling ogre. Nobody needs that. Tomorrow: chest, legs, and vomit.
• Holy shit, Jamestown+ is a smashing video game. I can't even count how long it's been since I've really sat down with a bullet hell shooter, and this really hit the spot for a two hour binge the other night when I was totally wired and couldn't get any sleep. I know that I have a giant funky chunk of open world stealth-ery waiting for me, but goddammit, I want to go back to Jamestown+ right effing now.
• Contrary to that, Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris is...good...I guess. No, it actually is pretty decent. A little more on the shoot-y side compared to it's isometric, more puzzle heavy progenitor Lara Croft and the Mysterious something something I'm too lazy to look up the name. I actually really liked that first game, and I was pretty happy to get this new one as a PS+ download last month. So far, it seems to be a bit more of an overhead metroidvania, but I really only got about an hour or so into it, so I can't tell you for sure. Man, I love unlocking upgrades and digging through environments for secrets and stuff, though, and it kind of felt like this had that kind of thing going on. Compared to Jamestown+ (you know, that game you're downloading right now, right?), I don't want to run right back over to my PS4 to play it, but I can see myself going back to it, post MGSV.
• Yeah right.
• I'm about 60% of the way through a download of Guild Wars 2, a game I have no business getting into at the moment. It probably won't work on this low-rent laptop anyway, but, well...

Huh. A lot happened, didn't it?

This Is Good, Isn't It?

Earlier today, I posted a comment on USGamer.net --a very cool website that's been publishing a lot of my work over the last few months (all of which will renew your faith in whatever you lost faith in)-- that ran along the lines of what you're about to read. After a little more thought, though, I've decided to expand on that because of how important this particular moment in history really is for me. I guess we can couple this with that monstrous write up on Final Fantasy X I did a little while back as another nerd compass-altering moment in my life. Anyway...

In about four hours, which would be midnight Eastern time, Metal Gear Solid V will have completed downloading and will be unlocked for my verbose cut scene-watching pleasure (as if I could stay awake for any of them at that point). As the media has been reporting close to nonstop for months now, this will absolutely be series director Hideo Kojima's final game in a franchise he's shepherded for 25ish years now, and will (maybe) bring the nutty sci-fi saga of a group of cloned soldiers and their genetic "father" to a close.

Equally nutty is how buying this game for me was far from a no-brainer with what I'm about to tell you. I soured on the series a bit over time, and Kojima's quirks and odd personal obsessions have gone from charming, if a little obtuse over the years to grating and often childish. I agree that he's a very intelligent guy that's done some really great things, but having nearly absolute control over that which he had made was slowly turning Metal Gear into a shell of itself. But that's an argument for another time.

What's important is this:

Without Metal Gear Solid, video games would no longer exist to me.

Hyperbolic, sure, but from where I'm sitting --especially this far after the fact-- it's no less true. I have a friend that likes to tell me that he simply gave up on playing video games after he played Super Mario Bros. 3 as a little kid. In his mind, nothing would be as great ever again, so there was no point in continuing on. Yes, I certainly find this to be defeatist reasoning, but I can't really call him out on his choice; Mario 3 is pretty much a masterpiece by all accounts, and if you're going to hang it up somewhere, that's as good a place as any.

After many, many mowed lawns and shoveled snow, I had owned a PlayStation since its launch. The first year or so was kind of rough, really. Only the first Wipeout was a standout game to me (and I'm not into racing games), while Toshinden and Jumping Flash, however swell they may have looked, just weren't really good games. After the languish of the launch window had ended, though, legitimate, great games were starting to trickle out before the deluge of spectacular software arrived that the PSOne is now known for. Resident Evil. Tekken 2. Final Fantasy VII. All good, and even one or two deservedly revered games (though I've warmed to FF7 over the years). This was a pretty exciting time, really. Studios and publishers could still make high quality games relatively cheaply, and the advent of accessible 3D technology for consumers meant that it was the dawn of the gaming medium's angsty adolescence --one we're just on the verge of moving past now, sort of. By the end of '97, though, none of that heady shit mattered.

Castlevania Symphony of the Night, set up next to its contemporaries, looked old as frozen dog turds thawed from a late spring. It had the nerve to a pixel sprite game in an age where it had no business sitting on the same shelves as most other releases during such a monumental year. But that's just what the publishers and certain corners of the gaming press wanted you to believe at the time. History has proven my, and I suppose the entire world's opinion valid in saying that it is a strikingly beautiful game, then and now, with a soundtrack that just about any video game since Spacewar! would kill their mothers to have. I don't need to get into what makes SotN such a transcendent masterwork (though I probably have before) since it's been universally praised these last 18 or so years. But it's not a joke when I say that if a gun was held to my head, Symphony of the Night is probably my favorite video game of all time. Full stop.

It was also a game that was released during the middle of my final year of high school, though. So, for as optimistic as I was for the future of gaming at a time when astounding evolution was happening at such a rapid pace, life for me was changing right along with it, just in its own, almost mundane way. I played through it at least five times before my prom, and once or twice more over that terrifying limbo summer leading up to moving into a dorm, so I was firmly entrenched in SotN and made no bones about telling whomever that would listen how much of a goddamn buffoon they were for not playing this game. But, you know, life isn't all about that when your comfort level is blown all to hell during your first few months of college.

Honestly, games were starting to kind of leave me cold when I was a confused college freshmen in 1998. I had plenty of other things to deal with, like school work, meeting new people, trying to meet girls, hoping I didn't gain the Freshmen 15, freaking out that I didn't belong where I was, and wishing that life was back to the way it had been 12 months earlier. I had brought my PSOne and my Genesis with me to school and still lived on a steady diet of Tekken 3 with the poor saps on my floor that dared throw down with me, but new games weren't that exciting anymore. I had given up reading magazines, and only checked the Imagine Games Network site once in a while when I was bored. By then, I was getting comfortable with the idea of letting go, and finding other hobbies to fill my time, like, you know, college.

My roommate, though, contended with his own home sickness in the polar opposite way. A nice guy, and not a really hardcore gamer, he came from a somewhat affluent background that meant that if he needed or wanted something, it was only a phone call and a UPS box away. This included games. Normally, I wasn't interested; they were mostly N64 games that nobody gave two shits about (ok, until Mario Party came out and the entire end of our campus flooded into our room for nightly screaming matches that, to this day, makes a vein pop from my forehead. I hate Mario Party). But when Metal Gear Solid found its way to our disproportionately small PO box that October, our poor post-high school brains were blown all over the dorm room walls. Nobody had seen a game like this before, with its cinematic production value and sweeping, well-voice narrative. Word got out around the rest of the floor, and long, nightly parties playing MGS began in earnest; jumping from room to room, an ever growing crowd of guys following a couple of CDs and a memory card from one PlayStation to the next. It was all anyone wanted to talk about. But not for me.

No, for me, Metal Gear Solid was downright seismic. I resigned to play the game on my own, with nobody else present, and between the larger sessions that were happening all around me. I was so entranced with the game and transfixed with playing it on my own terms that I would avoid conversations about it, and even proto-internet spoilers that happened in the campus rec center or in the cafeterias were met with loud grunts of displeasure and looks of savage disgust. MGS was something that we could talk about, but we will talk about it after I finished it on my terms, and in my own way. This made me something of the dorm floor asshole for a minute, but the fury of mostly drunk 18 year-olds was a repute I was willing to accept. Metal Gear was changing me. It made video games mine again.

I don't often think about this, actually, which is really sort of strange for how important it turned out to become in the long term. I mean, college has plenty of pivitol memories attached to it no matter who you are, so when I think about that 4ish year stretch of my life, for whatever reason, MGS gets a little lost in the shuffle. Whenever I read a retrospective, though, my heart flutters a little bit, and  I drift back to punching Liquid in the mouth and going toe to toe with Ocelot. Getting the unlimited ammo bandanna for my next playthrough where I would intentionally save Otacon instead of Meryl. Killing Raven with claymore mines and not conventional weapons around the corner. I don't really love military-based games, and again, haven't been too psyched about the rest of the series for a long, long time, but Metal Gear Solid spoke to me in a way that was profound enough to drag me back into video games by the scruff of my neck.

Last week, my wife and I had our first baby. During the five days we spent in the hospital, I finally got a chance to steal about an hour or so of silence (at roughly 4:00am on Thursday) to listen to my early backer episode of this week's Retronauts retrospective on the series leading up to tonight's release of Phantom Pain. And I sat there, stupid grin from ear to ear, taking stock of not only the moment in time I found myself in, but how far I had come since 1998. It wasn't nostalgia, it was legitimate, bittersweet growth. All in the span of a podcast. It's been a long, strange, sometimes brutal and absolutely irreplaceable 17 years.

I have a different problem now compared to then, I suppose. Where I was getting to the point that I was fine with giving up on playing video games altogether --Symphony of the Night winding up being my Super Mario Bros. 3-- I'm in a place now that I want to play games more than ever, and one of them in particular. But who knows if I can anymore? I'm guessing probably a lot less, but I suppose you never can tell. I have something else going on for the next 17 years.

I'll let you know what happens.

Ahoy, January

Another year, another year. These things sure happen like clockwork, don't they? Life's been busy these past few months. Bought a house, taught a class, stopped writing, etc. Some of those things were fine. Others, less so. The whole house-buying thing was pretty stressful (like everybody says), but the payoff has been worth it. Sooner or later, I'll have a whole room to stash my stuff instead of pockets of space inside of a tiny apartment. Not being able to write, though? Pretty lousy, but let's not kid ourselves; I had a lot on my plate in the fall (and a lot more in the hopper now) and that can get in the way of writing for personal fulfillment, but I've been a little lazy these past few months.

So, what do you say we clean out some cobwebs? Like last January, here's a brief list of what I played these last few months in order of which I can remember them:

Catherine: See, the funny thing about Catherine is that I really wanted to play it, but I never wanted it in my house. The marketing for the game was a little on the salacious side, mostly having to do with the cover art it's accompanied promo materials. Now, my spicy wife is not a judgmental person and I'm certainly no prude, but even though I knew that the game wasn't that pervy from everything I heard about it, I never jumped that hurdle. Lucky for me, I have friend that will buy any video game if it's cheap enough, and he loaned me a copy of it roughly eight months ago. So, yeah. The irony that I never wanted to buy it because I though it might be sleezy never mattered because it sat firmly in my home for close to a year unplayed is not lost on me.

This same friend loaned me a stack of other games in October, so in an effort to clear the backlog of stuff that I didn't actually own, I bum rushed through all of them between December and last week. Of them, Catherine was the undisputed champ. A great, complex puzzle game and goofball anti-dating sim rolled into one, it was the unholy union of two genres I don't really care about made into something kind of brilliant. Sadly, it was the last of this round of borrowed games that I went through, so I forced myself to ratchet down the difficulty to Easy so I could finish it, but this might also wind up being the rare video game that I end up buying anyway because of how unique the whole thing was. I'm all talk, so we'll see about that, but still. I call that a good recommendation.

Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance: This is Catherine's counterpoint in just about every way. An action game made by Platinum set in the Metal Gear Solid universe, it is both absurdly precise in its combat and stupidly verbose in everything else; a combination that made me want to turn it off for good more than once. Still weirdly satisfying until right at the end of the game which featured a final boss that was close to being another deal-breaker. I get that action games like this, especially ones made by the mad scientists behind Bayonetta and Godhand, want you to have intimate knowledge of their systems and mechanics and be able to prove that with a challenging final encounter. What I don't get is the spike in difficulty from tough-but-fair to do-this-right-the-first-time-or-tough-shit. This was a late night that should have been an early evening. To me, Platinum's games have always been like a glass of wine: I'll drink one if it's in front of me, but I'll never order it myself. Revengeance is a stupid name, but it was an ok game. And I'm Platinum-ed out for a while.

Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes: Is there any way to make Master Miller shut up? This is a serious question.

Tales of Graces F: Holy shit. This game was actually pretty good, and nobody is as shocked as I am. For all of the flak I can throw at JRPGs, this wound up being a good time. FULL DISCLOSURE: I skipped probably 85% of the cutscenes, and during the ones that I did let play I was probably fiddling with Spotify or something, so this might have played a significant factor in my enjoyment, but fun is fun. I didn't wind up completing the post-game epilogue before giving it back to my pal, and I kind of regret it. That's ok, though, because...

Dragon Age: Inquisition: Pretty much the first game to come out for current-gen systems that I couldn't wait to buy, it was my sole purpose for the month after it was released. My first run clocked in at some big dumb number like 85 hours, but being a nutcase, I cranked up the challenge to Nightmare and started over immediately after finishing with a new character so I could get that equally dumb platinum trophy. Truth time: I was a little underwhelmed, even after all of that.

Ok, I loved The Gaslight Anthem's breakout album, The '59 Sound. It was unquestionably the best record I had heard that year, and I eagerly awaited everything that came after it. Of course, nothing will ever come close. Being the first album I had heard from the band, and something of a renewal of my vows with the fickle mistress that is post punk, it was everything that I needed in my musical life without knowing it. Great works of art blindside you that way. Their next album, American Slang, went noticeably mid-tempo. This wasn't a bad choice, but it wasn't exactly what I was expecting, and ultimately wound up being a letdown because it didn't re-bottle that lightning from the previous record. Everything they've released since has been a mixed bag of genius and garbage. Would I feel this way if I had heard Handwritten first? I can't say. Dragon Age: Origins, then, was my '59 Sound. It came out at the tail end of a particularly great year as far as my personal gaming tastes are concerned (Street Figher IV! Borderlands! Demon's Souls, for God's sake!), and was so consuming that I spent hundreds of hours digging through every square inch of content. Dragon Age II has gotten a lot of poop on the internet for being a lesser game, and it definitely was. But, like American Slang, it did its own thing for better or for worse. There are certainly things to hate about it, but there was that much more to love. DA2 is not a terrible video game, but it would never have filled the hole in my heart for more of the exact same thing --which I know that I don't really want anyway-- no matter how astounding it could have been.

Inquisition, then, is actually that kind of astounding. The characters are great, the world is bafflingly big, and the whole things is stunning to look at. But the magic isn't there anymore; at least, not like it was. Still a great game by most means, and I certainly have the hours put into it to prove that I must have enjoyed it somehow.

I took a break from games for a little over a week after it was over and I obtained the platinum trophy to ponder it. I wondered if this was indicative of something larger. Is this it, I would posit. Is the thrill really gone? Of course I went back, but the older I get, the more this gives me pause. It's hard to be as excited for new experiences as I was as a younger man, and I have become more interested in preserving that which gave me pleasure a lot more often than I used to. The fact that I'm still regularly playing Third Strike every week with friends (gentlemen's game that it is) is proof of this all of these years later. For now, it's nice to know that I'll always have interesting things to play, whether they're new games that come down the line or old stuff that will rekindle my interest in the medium. There's comfort in that.

I've been forcing myself to play through Resonance of Fate over the last week or so on the recommendations of the internet as a whole. It is not without its problems, but I think that, now in its final two thirds, I've hit enough of a stride that I get why people like it. It's the kind of RPG I would have been all over about 10 years ago. Now, it's a bit of a chore, but I'm finding myself perversely happy that games like this still exist. This past weekend, my friend and I met and exchanged the usual stack of games that we've finished, and now I have Shadow of Mordor, Wolfenstein: The New Order, and Darksiders II waiting for me when it's finished. I'm not expecting any of them to really blow my hair back, but hey.

It's a new year. You never know.