MGS: Peace Walker English Demo

This is a quick post. I don't think I've ever mentioned you can easily download the english demo for Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker.

Get it directly from Konami right HERE.

Enjoy!

The 101st PS One Classic Was Just Released

It's Star Wars: Dark Forces. Hooray! Guess what the 100th PlayStation One classic was?

XS Junior League Dodgeball

What the hell is that game? I have no idea.

I wish Sony would have just reversed the two. My brain prefers that the Star Wars game would have been the 100th release. Oh well.

Dark Forces is a very early 1st person shooter, we're talking about the era when the original Doom games were released. It looks, sounds and feels dated. It's a treat for Star Wars fans or those of the game itself. I get a kick outta playing it on my PSP. It takes me back to kinder, gentler time.

I wouldn't recommend it for everyone. Check it out if your a Star Wars fan. It's not bad for 6 bucks.

Snake Walks For Peace In Japan

Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker just released in Japan TODAY!

The biggest Metal Gear game in history is exclusive to the PSP platform and for those who can speak Japanese, order here. Enjoy you lucky Japanese folks. *sniff* :(

The perfect Famitsu scoring game will be released in North America on June 8th. Yep. A Month and a half later. *double sniff* :(

Monsters (Probably) Stole My PSP Minis

When the PSP GO launched in North America on October 1st, 2009, the PlayStation Network Store was updated with a ton of PSP specific content.

UMD Legacy titles such as the Sega Genesis Collection, Sonic Rivals and God of War: Chains of Olympus, hit the network alongside the long awaited PSP edition of Gran Turismo. Another great addition was adding a library of budgeted, smaller PSP games.

Apple's iPhone/iTouch has a vast variety of unique, budget style games available numbering in the thousands. Development is very cheap for Apple's platform, so cheap in fact you can get cracking at it right HERE. Wow! That wasn't so hard, was it?

Sony saw a great opportunity in this new market and introduced their version entitled PSP Minis. This library has grown significant over time. I'll start reviewing some of these little pieces of heaven.

Monster's (Probably) Stole My Princess is an old school, action packed platformer in which you star as The Duke, aka Dracula. In it you take down giant monsters who (probably) stole your princess. The Duke jumps atop ledges as the monsters climb high to escape. Each ledge you jump on acquires a bonus point. This increases if you don't jump on the same ledge twice. As you climb higher and higher, attacking the monster with a third strike defeats him. The levels are intense as one tries to acquire a high bonus while attacking a quickly escaping monster.

Production value's are high. Beautifully animated creatures and detailed environments are all here. The audio is also impressive. This Mini is definitely worth it's $4.99 admission price. It is great stuff.

Solid Gold Walker

1UP.COM has highlights of a recent Hideo Kojima interview with Famitsu Magazine celebrating Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker going gold. Going "gold" in the video game development world simply means that the game is complete. It's ready to be shipped to retailers for happy boys and girls.

Highlights of the interview include -

"Nearly all the things one can do with a portable system are in here... It's just a huge amount of volume! I can hardly even ponder over it all. We wound up having to shift the release date as a result, but there was so much content that there was no way we could run QA on it all in time. I've never experienced anything like this before."

Cool! Sounds awesome Hideo Kojima! What else you say?

"This is only the beginning. I have things I want to do in the future that I can't do on the PSP -- but I can see, thanks to Peace Walker, that game design is not the problem with my new ideas. My take-home from this project is as massive as it was with the first Metal Gear Solid, but it's sort of hard to put it into words. We did too much here, really, and so if I list it all out, it'll sound like the project was a failure. Really, I just want people to try it out, to give it a play. Some aspects of it are experiments for the future, but I think the core game design is as true as it's ever been. In my mind, I've got the same 'Now I've done it!' feeling going that I had when we made the very first Metal Gear."

Bitchin'! I need a time machine to zip me ahead to June 8th.

3D Gaming At A Graphical Price

The news isn't a shocker. To produce a game in stereoscopic 3D, the hardware that's spitting out the image literally has to produce two images of the same game to create the effect. The hardware of course, is working a little harder resulting in the 3D effect requiring graphical sacrifices of the overall game. However, these sacrifices appear to be not crushing.

"WipEout HD was originally 1080p at 60Hz - obviously a good foundation to start from but in making the 3D build of this we had to go for two 720p images... Because it was 60Hz we could just drop to 30Hz and in actual fact that was it. There was no more work to do. That worked. It took very little time getting the game into 3D; there were very few problems with WipEout.", SCEE Senior Development Manager Simon Benson.

Sweet! Sounds great. What about bigger retail, graphical experiences like Motorstorm: Pacific Rift? Benson explains...

"Our geometry was already fine and we had lower resolution/lower fidelity models that would render at 30Hz for the split-screen mode, so we started with that... All we need to do now is find some pixels, so we turned to the hardware upscaling and again tried to squeeze as much as we could from optimization. But given that the game was already finished, there wasn't much headroom to find there. The compromise of some hardware upscaling and some more optimization managed to get us to the point where we could get the game working. But the important point was to avoid the frame-tearing... In the original game we varied field-of-view a lot to give speed cuing and acceleration cuing to the player, But in the 3D you don't really need that any more - you get it for free. 3D gives you that regardless. So we just made the field of view more natural."

Cool!

Check out the entire interview at EuroGamer. It's fascinating, awesome stuff!

Snake Recieves Another Perfect Score

Big time Japanese video game publication Famitsu, has awarded Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker a perfect score. Snake receives a 40 outta 40. It now joins the ranks of such legendary epics as The Legend of Zelda: Orcarina of Time, Soul Calibur and Kojima's own Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of The Patriots.

Congratuations to Kojima Productions!

I can't wait to play this!