Metal Gear Solid Ghost Babel Review

Before I start this review off, I'm going to say that I don't like the MSX Metal Gear games at all and I found them to be bad if not terrible games. With that said, Metal Gear Solid Ghost Babel turned out to be a pretty decent surprise, I was expecting to play Ghost Babel for a few minutes or maybe an hour or two and then drop it, but to my surprise I actually got to the end of the game. This game is to me for the people who enjoy Metal Gear 2.

The game most certainly does feel like a Metal Gear game when you start it up, you have a pretty lengthy opening cutscene before you even get to start a new game. I'm also well aware that Ghost Babel is non canon and isn't part of the official Metal Gear timeline. With all that said, I did find the story to be decent if nothing special, I don't think it's as good as Metal Gear Solid on the Playstation but the writing in GB isn't as irritatingly ineptly written as the games after MGS1. You at least know a decent bit about the villains before they die even if they do the MGS1 thing of having long winded monologues before they die, all though unlike MGS1, they don't survive more than one encounter against Snake and they don't actively get in the way as much either. I did know more about the villains in Ghost Babel by comparison to say the Cobra Unit in MGS3, it isn't a high standard but it goes to show how much I don't care for MG's story post MGS2 at the most.

The side characters are okay, they are at least somewhat more involved than the support team of MGS3 all though most of their involvement in the story happens at the end.

If anything I can give points to the story is that for a portable game especially for a portable system that couldn't even do 3D graphics or have voice acting, the narrative is at least decent presented with well drawn still images and it did a good enough job at keeping me interested while never reaching the heights of MGS1.

The gameplay however is where Ghost Babel in a number of ways surpasses the console MGs while also being worse in some other ways. I'll start with the good.

In terms of moment to moment sneaking, GB is far better than the MSX games since for one you can actually hug walls to hide from enemies and enemies for the most part tend to get off your tail after being seen without being overly relentless unlike MG2.

Some improvements over MGS1 and 2 is that you actually have to pay attention to the environment where in the former you could just look at the radar screen the whole game and never suffer any consequences. In GB enemy sightlines are visible on radar and you can't see everything in front of you. Unlike MGS2-4, you don't have a tranq pistol with infinite range partnered with first person mode so you can walk into every room and headshot every guard before you even have to engage with the stealth and this is GB on easy no less. Unlike MGS3 and 4, Snake isn't that great at close quarters combat either meaning you have to avoid where in MGS3 anything outside of European Extreme means I can just CQC slam my way out. 

The bosses are also pretty easy but require slightly more thought since there is not first person aiming. 

One major improvement over MGS1 however is that many of the one off mechanics in that game actively pop up in Ghost Babel. Examples include electric floors that you need to remote missiles to destroy switches on, lasers detectable by smoke and thermal goggles, walls destroyed with C4, trap doors, toxic gas rooms, loud floors that alert guards to your presence upon running on them and mines get used far more than in MGS1.

On top of this GB has some ideas of it's own like electrified water, swimming stealth, foilage, guards that get up after a few seconds of being punched and even dark rooms that you can only progress through by using thermal goggles. Some of these I wish were in the game more like foilage and swimming stealth but you can chock this up to me wishing the game having more outdoors levels all though that means more dog enemies which is probably a good thing since trying to avoid them without having a silenced pistol equipped and shooting them is hard to do. I can't for the life of me figure out how to completely avoid them without getting spotted.

This leads me to a major negative that prevents me saying this game is amazing and that is the progression, it's hard to tell where to go for much of the game and even by exploring the rooms, it's hard to tell where to go and which part continues the story, your support team gives you vague hints too and might provide dialogue that don't give you the direction you need. Some parts can be obtuse too. Like how some doors aren't even textured telling you can go into them or with the C4 wall breaking sections none of the walls are textured with a crack telling you that you plat C4 on them.

There is also a part where you need to plant C4 on 4 parts of the map but they are randomized on each playthrough making a walkthrough useless.

The last mission however is great and the pathfing issues become less prevelant since there is less rooms to keep track of and since it's a small base, finding the true path becomes less of a large process of elimination. 

Overall, GB is a good game and worth checking out. I'd say check it out even if you are lukewarm on Metal Gear as a whole like I am. 

Slave Zero X Thoughts and Rant

I really wanted to enjoy Slave Zero X, call it a lesser known game of 2024 and say, "you should check this out if you like beat em ups of any kind" but I can't. I've seen many reviews particularly on Steam where they criticized the game as hardcore Devil May Cry and Guilty Gear fans but I'm going to try to approach this review as someone who has played a number of action games and games as a whole over the years.

There is so much wrong with the game and there is SOME moments of fun to be had so much of the game's combat mechanics feel inept, the way they are presented to you is poorly done, the campaign is structure is just lacking and the game as a whole is super unstable.

Slave Zero X on consoles and PC as of now seems to run really poorly. On PS5, I encountered very frequent crashing on Zone 2 where you fight the flame sword mini boss for the first time, got 2 infinite load screens of death and also a crash where the game showed some kind of error could of it's own and then I got booted out of the game. The game has been out for months and it still hasn't gotten patched enough where the game feels like a stable experience.

With that out of the way, there's other issues with Slave Zero X outside of how unstable it is, first of all the tutorial really sucks, it is so amateurish, you don't even get a tutorial where you play out the moves and learn them as you go, instead the game just has a bunch of screens telling you what each button and what each mechanic does and gives you barely much of an understanding how combat works. Here's an idea to fix this, Shou and Isamu are friends so why not put them in a sparring match teaching the player how the combat mechanics work? This seems to be a decent way to teach the player how to engage with it's combat mechanics.

Here's another big issue with Slave Zero X, it's a game inspired by fighting games and Devil May Cry and guess what? You have no move list by pressing the start menu. I'm not the kind of guy who looks into a move list but considering there's attacks I would probably want to know like the Burst EX move, I won't know unless I look it up online.

The checkpoint system is also very inconsistent, I'm already against any game adopting the NES and Arcade philosophy of redoing lots of content upon death but Slave Zero X is very inconsistent regarding this. Some levels have checkpoints while others don't. Some parts of the game checkpoints on the bosses and other parts of the game have you fight waves of enemies before you can fight the mini bosses again, and mini bosses and destroy your health bar pretty quickly. The amount of enemy waves you have to fight before getting to the hard part just makes me feel like the game is wasting my time before the game is getting me to the part that is causing me to get the game overs.

You also never get any new weapons, moves or abilties throughout the whole game, which can make the game feel more monotonous since getting new abilities and or something new is the exciting part of single player action games of any kind, yet Slave Zero just gives you the same toolset the whole game. Which now leads me to my next point.

The mini bosses are a pain in the ass, and they have ridiculous amounts of HP while you die very quickly by them and dispatching many of them pretty much revolves around the same thing: getting lucky. New weapons and abilties could possibly make you more proficient at killing them but killing them revolves around the same tactics, spam ordenace on smaller groups and hopefully hit them and the mini boss at the same time, and hope you can keep wailing on the mini boss as their shield are down so you don't have to fight them. The hammer user mini boss deserves a special reward for being one of the most annoying enemies in a game I have ever fought, he has a grabbing fetish, and there is no way to actively avoid his grab attacks. You can't attack him to stop, you can't dodge out the grab and jumping is too unreliable.

The kicker to all this and this is what made me quit the game is that you have to fight these mini bosses while seemingly infinitely respawning hitscanners are attacking you towards the end of the game. So if the mini bosses aren't eating away large chunks of health, the hitscanners will slowly cut away at your health.

There is also the fact that you get no inviciblity frames upon getting hit which means regular mobs can kill you by juggling you to death. Dodging I'm not sure gives you consistent I frame either.

With all this said, there is an interesting concept here. The idea of playing a beat em up where juggling and crowd control is the name of the game is a cool if even innovating but due to the reasons I mentioned, it feels like a half baked idea. It's trying to beat a beat em up and a fighting game and isn't that great at it.

Overall, Slave Zero X was something I waned to enjoy but there are so many other 2D beat em ups from this era alone you could be playing instead.

House of the Dead Overkill(Playstation 3) Review

I'm not that big of a rail/light gun shooter player, I've played a couple and I do enjoy them but they just feel like quick one and done kind of games, I do like Dead Space Extraction with that said. I played the House of the Dead remake that came out a few years ago and I didn't think much of it and I randomly saw House of the Dead Overkill on PS3 at a convention for a somewhat hefty asking price but I decided to buy it anyway.

With all that said, I didn't play HOTD Overkill with a Playstation Move controller which probably does hurt the enjoyment I could be getting from the game all though in all honesty the hard part playing the game with a PS3 controller are the bosses more so than the railing shooting enemy guanlets.

The gameplay is pretty fun, the AMS Magnum starting weapon felt pretty good to use, it sounded loud and powerful and killing enemies with it fely stimulating. I mainly used that and upgraded it since buying extra weapons felt like it had a steep asking price and it can be annoying watching characters hold different guns in a cutscene but you mainly used the AMS Magnum. That and it could be me playing on a PS3 controller but I could never find enough money in the levels to afford new guns or me moving the stick fast enough to pick up the random pieces of cash lying in the levels, the same can be said for getting health packs too.

I'm not even sure you can get a hard game over since I never got one and I was using analog stick aiming even when the bosses were really challenging with said analog stick aiming.

I'll talk about the bosses since the easiest one with analog stick aiming was the first and maybe the final boss, the latter is easy since you have a powerful chaingun that is more powerful than the Ars Magnum pistol and can do a lot of damage to the blue health bars.

This is where the challenge of many of the bosses past the first one comes from, with a Move, mouse or Wii Mote, this probably isn't too hard but with a controller, the hard part comes from depleting the blue boss attack health bar in time so you can damage them and prevent yourself from losing health. If you don't deplete this blue health bar in time, it regenerates, you lose health and you have to do the bosses patterns all over again and then the blue boss attack health bar pops up again. These parts are the hardest sections of the game with analog aiming. They are doable but if you are one of those people who want to play with a high score on the PS3 version without a Move controller, be warned.

Another small gripe is that my finger got tired a good number of times mashing the R1 button and the bosses does require you to have a fast trigger finger which can make the blue health bar depleting even more of an annoyance.

However, one thing about HOTD Overkill I do really like and this is surprising since I don't value it as much as some other people in the gaming community: the story. No, the story isn't going to be some deep thought provoking masterpiece, but it is really entertaining and fun to watch unfold. What carries much of it is the banter between Issac Washington and Agent G, the former is one of the funniest characters in a video game I have ever seen, if you ever watched the Boondocks animated series, Issac talks like one of the side characters from that series. His voice actor delivers his high strung profanity filled dialogue with absolute conviction and it's just super fun to watch him go crazy over the top and play off Agent G. The other characters besides Issac and Agent G are decent with Clement being a standout in how much of a crazy over the top seemingly Norman Bates inspired character he is. His voice actor also does a good enough job too.

The tone is also very over the top and doesn't take itself very seriously and I normally never use the "not taking itself seriously" as a get of a jail free card, but outside of the story shoving in a werid amount of incest subplots, the story just knows that it is stupid over the top stuff. It's clear from the start that the story is just insane absurdity.

Overall, HOTD Overkill is a solid time, and you might get even more enjoyment out of it with a mouse or motion controller. I do think the story is up there with Dead Space Extraction when it comes to be an engaging for an on rails shooter but for different reasons. The PS3 version of the game can be a little too steep for my tastes so definetely get the PC version which seems to be the easiest way to play the game.