The Stack

Seven Pokémon Leaders down, one to go. The first seven have their names and locations listed in the manual; the eighth is something of a mystery. I could find out where he is by reading spoilers online, but for the moment, I’d rather search for him myself. After all, I’m going to have to spend some time just wandering around in order to level up my team. I might as well have a goal in mind while I do it.

Thus begins the phase of the game wherein one revisits all the previous areas and looks for places that were previously impassable, but which one now has the tools to pass. This is always a fairly satisfying part of a game, for the same reason that hunting for secrets is satisfying — indeed, in many games this is the secret-hunting phase. Here, I’m hunting not for secrets but for the last remaining plot token. But in the process, I’m finding secrets. In particular, I’ve found Zapdos, another of the Legendary Birds.

Now, since my TPK, I’ve managed to capture Articuno (who, thanks to the trainer’s naming privilege, is now known as Loolah). Capturing a pokémon is much harder than defeating it, especially if it’s stronger than your own pokémon. At bottom, all you have to do to capture a pokémon is get into a fight with it, then throw an empy pokéball at it (by selecting the pokéball in the “use item” menu). But there’s a chance that you’ll miss, and even if you hit, there’s a chance that the victim will break free and continue the fight. More expensive balls are harder to break, and you can get an advantage by beating up on it first: the lower you get its hit points, the lower its chance of breaking free. But you have to be careful not to do too much damage and inadvertently end the battle. (I’d say that they’re useless to you dead, but technically, pokémon never die as a result of fighting; they just “faint”. This makes more sense of the ability to revive your fainted pokémon, but less sense of the fact that you can’t capture them in that state.) So you’re pulling your punches, but your opponent isn’t.

After a couple of failures, I bagged Articuno with a team that, between them, had the following crucial abilities:

• Sleep attacks: not only does a sleeping opponent not attack, it’s a lot easier to hit with the pokéball.
• Accuracy-reduction attacks: to make it less likely that it’ll wipe you out when it wakes up.
• Wrap: This is a move learnable by things with vines or tentacles. It’s an attack that lasts multiple turns, until you decide to break it off or the opponent breaks free; while wrapped, the opponent doesn’t get to attack and receives a small amount of damage every turn. I had almost written this off as useless — why do a small amount of damage over multiple turns when you can do a whole lot of damage all at once? But turns out to be ideal for edging the opponent’s hit points down to just short of fainting.
• Surf: needed just to get to Articuno’s hideout in the first place.

Also, of course, the team had to minimize vulnerability to Articuno’s cold-based attacks. Even with all this planning, the sleeping bird managed to break six or seven Ultra pokéballs before it stayed caught.

Capturing Zapdos will probably be broadly similar, but with the additional constraint that I need both Surf and Cut to reach it, and the attacks are electrical this time. A glance at the vulnerability chart shows that my best bet here is probably ground-type pokémon. Do I even have any ground types with the abilities listed above? I don’t know; I haven’t had to face situation like this before.

On the whole, I’m enjoying the challenge of the difficult captures much more than the XP grind: reviewing my lists, picking out a team with just the right skills like it’s Mission: Impossible or something. Unfortunately, the game is really geared more towards the grind. There’s an XP reward for defeating the same enemies over and over, but no real motivation to capture more than one of each species. You’re even punished a little for capturing a difficult high-level pokémon instead of capturing a low-level one and levelling it up: the latter results in pokémon with higher stats. I’d call this a flaw, but it’s probably part of what made the game a success. The fact that persistence is more valuable than skill or cleverness makes the game more accesible.

There are three reasons to trade pokémon. First, as I’ve said before, there are some species that can only be obtained in a specific version of the game. Pokémon (Red Version) provides oddishes but not bellsprouts, Pokémon (Blue Version) is the reverse. Since oddishes and bellsprouts fill similar niches, it’s reasonable for two people with different colors to trade the one for the other. There are other similar cases.

Second, there are some species that are native to no version of the game. I’ve talked about how some species “evolve” into new forms in response to some stimulus. In most cases, the stimulus is reaching a certain experience level. In a few cases, it’s being exposed to a special object. The eevee is notable in that it can evolve into three separate forms depending on which of three objects is used on it: fire stone, thunder stone, or water stone. But in four particular cases, the stimulus that triggers evolution is being traded. You give someone a graveler, and it immediately starts turning into a golem. At one point, an associate and I traded a kadabra for a haunter, then immediately traded the resulting alakazam and gengar back, giving us both the benefit of having “caught” all four species.

The third reason is that traded pokémon get a substantial bonus to all experience they earn, making them advance faster than non-traded pokémon. This provides a motivation to trade even when you don’t gain a species you didn’t have otherwise. Interestingly, there are several non-player characters in the game who will trade pokémon with the player — there are even some species that can only be obtained from trades with NPCs. The pokémon obtained this way are treated by the game as obtained in trades, and thus get the same experience bonus as ones obtained in a real trade between two players. ¹ Or at least two Gameboys. There are probably people who trade with themselves, but that’s getting into “what’s the point” territory if you ask me. Cinnabar Island, which I have just reached, has at least three NPCs who trade pokemon, making it the densest trade center in the world; the rest of the traders are just scattered around on roadways and the like. I haven’t been taking advantage of the offered trades, because pokemon that are raised by hand from an early level get better stats than ones produced by the game. But maybe I should. When I’m racing to get the entire collection to their final evolutions, that experience bonus would come in handy.

At any rate, my trade list is now online.

Exploring the Safari Zone yielded the two HMs that I was missing. In fact I really only needed one of them, as I had acquired in a trade a pokémon with the Strength skill. But the other one held the secret of Surf, which allows a swimming pokémon to carry its trainer over water. This is a pretty big deal, because it opens up the few remaining unexplored corners of the map. Choosing a random direction, I found myself at the Seafoam Islands.

Now, in this game, when you enter a new area for the first time, you immediately start encountering new types of pokémon. I picked up several new specimens in the water, and another in an island cave. Every single one of the new finds is a species that can evolve with experience, so it’s clear that I’m going to have to spend some time XP farming. An exploration into that cave shows that the random encounters are around level 30, the highest level I’ve seen yet, which makes it the ideal place for this. I go back to the nearest pokémon center ¹ The pokémon centers are like your base camps. There’s one in every town, and you can access your stored pokémon and alter your party roster there, as well as heal your wounded pokémon for free. and pick out some water-resistant pokémon in in the 20-30 range that I want to advance. Blenkinsop I leave behind. He doesn’t need the exercise.

My first few sallies go according to the usual formula: I wander around looking for stuff to beat up until my own guys are significantly hurt, then fall back to the pokémon center for healing. But the center is inconveniently far away. What I really want to do is find a way through the cave, in the hope of finding a route to Cinnabar Island, where the next Pokémon Leader lives. I figure there’s got to be a pokémon center there, like in every other town I’ve been to. So I start delving deeper.

The caves contain a puzzle involving pushing boulders around to ultimately block a stream so you can get across it without being carried away by the current. There’s a little bit of Sokoban action involved, but mainly there’s a part where you push a boulder down a series of holes to successively lower levels, then climb back up to the first level, then push another boulder down a different series of holes. All the while fending off level 30 pokémon. By the time I finished this, a couple of my pokémon were down for the count — pokémon never really die in this game, they just fall unconscious until you revive them — and the rest were at least somewhat hurt. But it was a long way back, so I kept going.

Reaching an unexplored level, I spied a little bird sitting on a rock. I did what you always do on seeing something novel: I walked up to it and pressed the A button. It turned out to be Articuno, one of the three Legendary Birds, each unique. It’s level 50, and quite capable of wiping out anything I have with me in a single blow. So do I flee? Goodness no. This is a one-time encounter! If I flee, I’ll never get another chance to catch Articuno.

I suppose I should have used the unescapable Master Ball at this point, but it didn’t even occur to me. Instead, I had my first TPK ² Total Party Kill in quite some time, and switched the Gameboy off without saving.

A TPK in Pokémon isn’t as bad as it is in most games. It doesn’t end the game, and the only consequence is that you get sent back to the last pokémon center with half your cash gone. If I had less cash, I might be willing to accept that price. My pokémon had gained a lot of XP in that last adventure, after all. But I’m saving up for a porygon. The porygon is a pokémon that can only be obtained from a Team Rocket casino as a prize. It costs 6500 coins, where coins are either obtained from slot machines (the only game the casino runs) or, if necessary, purchased outright from the casino, 1000 units of money ³ I don’t think the monetary unit in this game has a name! Strange that I never noticed this before. for 50 coins. Now, the slot machines have a skill element — it’s one of those things where pictures go whizzing by very fast and you press a button to make them stop. But this is difficult enough for me that I’ve pretty much given up on the prospect of ever winning 6500 coins, and have decided to just pay 130000 moneys for them. Which I’ve been very close to being able to afford for a while.

In fact, now that I’ve checked, I see that I now actually have enough. Next stop: the casino, where my wad of cash will no doubt help to fund Team Rocket’s nefarious activities well into the next year. And then: exploration without fear of death!

Six badges now. Blenkinsop is level 46, and the only thing I’ve faced that posed any difficulty for him (or his assistant, Pratchett the Hypno) was Sabrina, Pokémon Leader of Saffron City. She specializes in psychic pokémon, and has a high-level alakazam of her own. Mine was bigger, but the key problem is that her alakazam knows Recover, a move that lets it heal itself in battle. At first, I was powerless to do more damage than it could recover in a single round. I eventually managed to give it the “paralysis” status effect, which makes it randomly skip turns, and then reduced its “special” rating, which seems to govern how much it can heal in a turn. After simply overpowering things for so long, it was nice to have a battle that actually required some tactics.

Before I could challenge Sabrina, I had to chase Team Rocket out of town. Team Rocket is one of those things that was drastically changed in the cartoon, which turned them into bumbling comic villains. Here, they’re more sinister and menacing, or at least as sinister and menacing as you can get when you’re displayed in a severely chibi style most of the time. They’re somewhere between gangsters and nazis, and their stated goal is to take over the world using an army of enslaved pokémon. I’m not quite clear on how this enslaving pokemon differs from what the player character does, but presumably it’s somehow worse than beating them up until they can’t resist being imprisoned in a pokéball from which they’re only taken out to fight other captives for their master’s amusement.

Before I kicked them out, Team Rocket was infesting the headquarters the Silph Company, which does pokémon-related research. The Silph Building is an eleven-story teleporter maze. As such, it constitutes a puzzle unrelated to the game’s core mechanic. I noticed a couple of other sections like that when I was wandering around trying to figure out what to do. For example, one town has a building with a maze of arrows, where stepping on an arrow tile makes you keep going in that direction until you hit an obstacle. I had solved that maze during my first Pokémon kick, but had completely forgotten that it existed. The memorable thing, the distinctive thing, in this game is obviously the pokémon. Mazes of this sort have nothing to do with pokémon; they could be shoved into any game, and often are. You can call it variety elements, varying the gameplay to keep unrelieved fight scenes from getting tedious ¹ Speaking of tedious, unrelieved fight scenes, I saw the Michael Bay Transformers movie recently. Is there a videogame adaptation of this flick yet? Such a thing would be an oddity to rival Lego Star Wars: an adaptation chain that goes toys — cartoon — movie — game. , or you can call it filler. If you ask me, what it shows in this particular game is a certain lack of confidence on the part of the designers. I mean, Pokémon took risks. For all that it’s based on established RPG mechanics, it was a new paradigm, and no one knew how successful it would be, so can they be blamed for hedging their bets by throwing in some relatively safe generic content? I know that something of this sort happened in the development of Thief: The Dark Project, resulting in the combat-oriented “monster” levels that are generally regarded as the game’s weak spot. It’s not even really a phenomenon unique to games. Consider Don Quixote: Book 1 contains numerous digressions, essentially embedded novellas detailing the backstories of various secondary characters and the like, apparently because Cervantes didn’t think that the satire of chivalric romance would maintain the reader’s interest. By the time he wrote book 2, he knew better, and the digressions disappeared.

I’m in a bit of a hurry to get today’s post up, so I’ll be brief. I have already had several acquaintances on the east coast say that I should have picked Pokémon up again before moving, that they would have been willing to trade with me at that point. Unfortunately, I was saving Pokémon as something to play during the move — something I could play while my other gaming devices were packed up. But as it turned out, moving occupies enough of one’s attention that I didn’t do any gaming at all until I had the PS2 set up, so that was futile.

Well, I do intend to come back east once in a while. I have parents out there, and will probably come back sometime around Christmas, if not sooner. Will I still want to trade pokémon then? Quite possibly; I’m seeing this as something of a long-term project. Catching ’em all can’t be done all at once. If you try, you’ll be bored to tears.

Beating the eight Pokémon Leaders and completing the plot of the game is another matter. I’ll probably make a run for that soon — I think I have the fighting power to do it, and just need to find the rest of the HMs to get past the obstacles on the way. (HM stands for Hidden Machine; they’re a variant of the TM, or Technical Machine. Both varieties are used to teach special moves, but HMs teach skills that can be used outside of combat, such as cutting through brush or lifting heavy rocks.) I could be wrong about having the power, of course, but my toughest contender, a level 42 alakazam ¹ Blenkinsop, as you may remember from the previous post , is currently defeating everything he meets with a single blow of his psychically-endowed brain.

So, my plan right now is to get through the story, become the ultimate trainer or whatever, and then put Pokémon on the back burner for a while. When I have a chance, I’ll post my list here to facilitate arranging trades. It’s probably going to be tricky to get unevolved charmander and bulbasaur, which can only be gotten once, at the very beginning of the game — there’s an initial choice of three, and I chose the squirtle. The point being, if you haven’t turned yours into a charmeleon and/or ivysaur yet, you probably aren’t into the game enough to dig your cartridge out of storage and arrange a time and place to meet. But hey, maybe you saw someone playing the DS version and got nostalgic for your first Pokémon experience. Maybe you want to start over, classic-style. And if you do, maybe you want to start over with a golem or a gengar or a level 42 alakazam instead of that wimpy bulbasaur.

I’ve been slowly easing myself back into this game. Refamiliarlizing myself with the combat mechanics didn’t take long. It’s pretty simple: first, you choose one of the pokémon that you’re carrying with you at the moment (you can carry at most six at a time); if you’re facing another trainer rather than a solitary wild pokémon, he does the same. Then, in each round of combat, both sides choose an attack, and watch the results. Every attack, even the mundane ones equivalent to throwing a punch, can only be used so many times per sally, like D&D spells. All pokémon are, in effect, magic users.

A more difficult issue is trying to remember where I’ve been and what I’ve done. Up to a certain point, the game is linear, providing a single clear path ahead and a single subquest at every juncture. I’m well past that point. It pretty much ends the moment you teach one of your flying pokémon to carry you from town to town. Still, in my current state, wandering over my traces is no bad thing. I’m still trying to level up my weaker pokémon, after all. Not so much because I want to use them in battle — the ones I’ve already levelled up can pretty much take care of that — but because I want them to “evolve”. You see, some kinds of pokémon go through multi-stage life cycles, with each stage counting as a separate type of pokemon. A squirtle, for example, turns into a wartortle at level 16, and then into a blastoise at level 36. The magikarp, the booby-prize of pokémon, famous for its complete uselessness in battle, possessing at the beginning only a “splash” attack that never does any damage, transforms at level 20 into a gyarados, one of the most fearsome creatures in the game, capable of learning the “dragon rage” attack. “Evolution” is a clever trick that the game designer uses to make the player voluntarily use many different pokémon, with different capabilities, rather than settling on a single favorite. But it also means lots of grind as you try to level everything up evenly.

Another obstacle to picking up from where I left off is simply remembering all the pokémon. Twice already I’ve seen what I believed to be a previously-unseen variety in the wild, only to discover after catching it that I already had one in my collection. I suppose I should write these things down rather than rely on the lists available in the game, which can’t be accessed during an encounter. I’ve kind of made this unnecessarily hard for myself, too, by giving all my pokémon names. Whenever you catch a pokémon, you’re given the option of naming it. I get the impression that most people don’t bother, calling their pokemon solely by their species name like in the cartoon, but it seems like it would be useful if you decided to catch multiple individuals of the same species. I’m not doing that — not deliberately, anyway — but I give my pokémon names anyway. It just seemed more proper that way. So I’ve got Godwin the Wartortle, Sheridan the Butterfree, Blenkinsop the Alakazam, Vivien the Snorlax, Morgoth the Pikachu, and so forth. But even ignoring that, I currently have 61 pokemon in my collection, and I don’t remember what they all do. But I imagine I’ll get used to them all again as I trot them out and give them their five minutes in the arena. Pokémon is one of those games that’s also a body of knowledge. The more you play, the deeper that knowledge goes into your brain.

Gotta catch ’em all! What better expression of the completist urge is there? But, for reasons I’ll go into later, this is something of a cruel joke applied to Pokémon.

Let’s back up a moment. Even though it’s well-known, or at least well-heard-of, Pokémon requires a little explanation. A lot of people know of it primarily from the cartoon show and the card game, unaware that the Gameboy cartridge came first. I suppose this is because it only came first in Japan. By the time it hit the West, it was already a multi-channel media phenomenon that would change the way videogames are developed and marketed. A phenomenon, moreover, that the original game didn’t fit into all that well. The original Pokémon game was released in two versions, Red and Blue ¹ I speak of the American versions. Apparently things get more complicated when you consider the Japanese versions: the blue version is called green and there’s a third version called blue, or something like that. , essentially differing only in their wandering monster tables. (I have the Blue version.) After the cartoon became such a hit, a third version, Yellow, was released, which altered things a lot more in order to make it more similar to the cartoon based on the Red and Blue versions than the Red and Blue versions themselves: changing the artwork, adding characters, giving the player Pikachu ² If you don’t know what Pikachu is: Picture a pokémon right now. That’s Pikachu. It’s the one that you’ve seen even if you’ve only had minimal Pokémon exposure. right at the beginning, etc. An unusual development indeed! The only thing similar I can think of is Earthworm Jim 3D, which drew more heavily from the Earthworm Jim cartoon show than the original game. (And, as with Pokémon, I’ve encountered people who didn’t know that Earthworm Jim was a videogame first.)

In format, Pokémon is basically a party-based RPG with abstract turn-based combat. You play the part of an 11-year-old pokémon trainer, wandering from town to town in a tile-based world (conspicuously similar to Zelda: Link’s Awakening in graphical style), fighting monsters for treasure and experience points. Except you don’t fight personally — you have monsters of your own for that. And sometimes the treasure is the monster itself. There are two types of encounter: against wild pokémon, and against other pokémon trainers. When fighting a wild pokémon, you have the choice of vanquishing it for XP or attempting to capture it for your collection, from where you can swap it into your party.

There are 150 ³ Mew doesn’t count. species of pokémon in the original game, although sequels have expanded this greatly. There are 15 broader types that the species belong to: normal (which seems to just be the null type, assigned to any species that doesn’t fit any other types), fire, water, electric (that’s Pikachu’s type), grass (plant life in general, really, but they call it grass), ice, fighting (they all fight, but this means martial arts stuff), poison, ground (dirt-based or burrowing animals), flying, psychic, bug, rock, ghost, and dragon. A species can belong to either one or two types, so you can have flying bugs and poisonous vegetation and the like. You’ve probably noticed that several of the types are traditional RPG “elemental damage” types, and yes, the various types determine the kinds of attacks the pokémon can do, as well as their special vulnerabilities: a fire pokémon is weak against water-based attacks, a flying pokémon is nearly immune to ground-based attacks, and so on. Psychic pokémon seem to be really strong against everything except bugs. There’s a chart in the manual. So it’s an extended rock-paper-scissors, except that the difference can be overwhelmed by sheer force of experience level; instead of “paper covers rock”, it’s “paper covers rock, unless it’s a really big rock, in which case it can slowly grind the paper into pulp”.

Speaking of slowly grinding, there’s enough XP-farming in this game that I’ve decided to continue from where I left off years ago rather than starting over from scratch. I was pretty far advanced in the game, having beaten four of the eight Pokémon Leaders that form the game’s other overall goal. It really is a pretty well-designed game, and I can see why it was such a hit with the junior high set. It’s got complexity to master, if mastering complexity is your thing. If not, you can just level up your favorite pokémon until it’s nearly unbeatable. It’s designed for a lengthy campaign, but can be played in short sessions, with tangible progress each time. And it’s social. If you really want to achieve the stated goal of catching ’em all, you can’t play alone. The red version provides the possibility of capturing pokémon that are never seen wild in the blue version, and vice versa. The only way to get the ones not in your version is to trade with other players (which you do by linking your Gameboys together). Even worse: one of each cartridge won’t do it. There are multiple points in the game where you have to choose between three different pokémon, so unless you have a friend who’s willing to play through a large portion of the game twice in order to supply you, or are willing to buy two Gameboys and play through the game three times yourself, you need multiple friends who are playing Pokémon at more or less the same rate as you. So there’s an abnormal incentive to get people around you to play it.

Alas, this is easier for its target audience. When I was first playing this game, I was well beyond normal pokémon age, but was fortunate enough to be working at a game-oriented dot-com, where two other people were also curious enough about the Pokémon phenomenon to give it a try. But I’m far from catching ’em all, and have more or less lost the opportunity for casual lunch-break trades. This is what I dislike most about social games: the difficulty of resuming them years later. Maybe I’ll put an ad on Craigslist. In the meantime, if anyone reading this blog is in the San Francisco area and has both the will and the equipment to do some trades, feel free to post a comment.

It’s July 4th, American Independence Day, and high time for me to finish my writeup on fighting the Patriots.

All that remained after last session was two boss fights and a whole lot of exposition. The first boss fight was against a bunch of autonomous Metal Gears, part of the armada guarding Arsenal Gear, the mobile complex housing the Patriots’ computer system, which was advancing on New York City. Since these Metal Gears lack human drivers, I find it impossible to keep thinking of them as anthropomorphic tanks. They’re robots, pure and simple. They’re a variant of Metal Gear Ray, the model seen in chapter 1, which was designed specifically to fight other Metal Gears. This explains why they’re so bad against a single human opponent.

The second fight was a sword duel against Solidus, who was by that point clearly the end boss. I should have picked up on this sooner: Solidus’ true goal was not to destroy the computer, but to seize control of Arsenal Gear for himself. This explains why his lackeys in Dead Cell were trying to stop me from completing their own stated aims. At the end, we find out that he didn’t want Arsenal for its own sake, but as a way to learn the identities of the Patriots: as he points out, part of its function is to find and destroy that information anywhere it exists, so it must have some record of what it’s supposed to destroy.

Some more revelations happen after that, but to me, this is the point where the willing suspension of disbelief reaches its limit. According to Revolver Ocelot, who’s been working for the Patriots all along, Solidus, and everyone else, is just a dupe, acting out their roles in the S3 Program, a project to turn Raiden into a super-soldier like Solid Snake by subjecting him to a scenario similar in many details to the Shadow Moses incedent (the plot of Metal Gear Solid 1). Except that’s a lie too: according to the artificial intelligence program we know by the name “Colonel Campbell”, the real purpose of the S3 Program is social control, and by winning the game you’ve proved that it works. Or something like that. So in a way the Patriots win, but at the same time, you’ve fulfilled your “role” and are suddenly free, or as free as anyone else in the world, and Raiden and Solid Snake have a long talk about the meaning of freedom over a montage of New York street scenes. Perhaps the gradual loss of interactivity over the course of the game is supposed to be part of this theme, but I kind of doubt it. Then, after the credits show, we find out that the twelve people named as the leaders of the Patriots have all been dead for a hundred years.

It’s clear by now that the writers are thinking of this more like an anime than a videogame — specifically, something like Evangelion or Lain that abandons the story in favor of philosophy at the end. I don’t know a lot about how the development of this project went, and can’t really say that there’s a cause-effect relationship here, but there were also some expected boss fights that just didn’t happen. One of the members of Dead Cell is a woman called Fortune who can’t be killed: bullets veer away from her, grenades become duds until she’s out of range. There’s an encounter with her earlier in the game, the sort where you can’t actually do anything effective and just have to avoid getting killed until the timer runs out and the scene ends. Structurally, it seems like a demonstration-of-power encounter, a way to establish her invulnerability so that you’ll be both more prepared and more emotionally engaged when you fight her again later. But that never happens: in the end, she gets killed in a cutscene by Revolver Ocelot, who you never get to fight either.

Other impressions: First, it’s a very slick package. The controls, the music, the way the camera automatically swoops from overhead to horizontal views as appropriate: the production values are very high. Second, there are a lot of pin-up girly posters scattered around on walls and inside lockers, including product placement for FHM, clearly pandering to the core adolescent male audience. I suppose it’s realistic for a game involving soldiers, but they stick out somewhat as photographs in a rendered world. When you have a person who’s actually present standing next to a poster, it’s weird for the poster to look more real.

Finally, there’s the matter of the dog tags. These are the game’s collectible items, used to unlock bonus items. But the process of getting them is fairly involved: you have to “stick up” a soldier by sneaking up behind him with a gun, then search him using the thermal goggles, apparently. This isn’t easily discoverable, and I didn’t read the part in the manual that explains it. My completism is itching, but although I certainly want to try to get some of them, I really don’t think I’ll try to get them all — apparently you have to replay the game on all of the difficulty settings to do so, and I don’t think I’ll be able to maintain that level of interest. It is, after all, primarily a story-game, and I’ve already seen the story. The fact that they put something like the dog tags in a game like this at all is a little strange, if you ask me, but it’s just a standard part of console games. You have to include something to give it “replay value”, even if it’s not something you’d really want to replay. Somehow, PC games have managed to avoid this — maybe because they’ve longer had the possibility of extending the game with add-ons and fan-made levels and other downloadable content. Are the newer consoles abandoning replay enhancers, now that they have the same content-downloading capability as PCs? I don’t know. If they aren’t yet, I expect they will eventually.

I’ve said before that the writers of the Metal Gear games ¹ Hideo Kojima and Tomokazu Fukushima, for what it’s worth. I keep talking about them without mentioning their names. are not at all shy about having the characters comment on the game mechanics. It’s not unusual for characters in games to refer to the controls during tutorial sections, of course, and only a few games try to disguise this as something that could plausibly occur in the gameworld. And the occasional sly nod to the fictionality of the setting is a long-standing tradition in games, going back at least to the first Scott Adams adventure, which included a room described as “in the ROM of a TRS-80. I think I made a wrong turn!” But the Metal Gear games really revel in ignoring the line between content and architecture.

In MGS1, the high point of this tendency was the encounter with Psycho Mantis, who demonstrated his psychic powers with feats such as peeking at the console’s memory card and commenting on what other games had saves there. These references to non-diegetic elements were something of a hint for the non-diegetic key to beating him: Psycho Mantis could react instantly to the player’s movements, but only if the controller was plugged into socket 1. Hot-swap it and you had him flummoxed. Unfortunately, playing on a PC, I missed most of this.

In MGS2, the self-reference really starts when “Colonel Campbell” goes Shodan. At a certain point in the game, Raiden and Snake succeed in uploading a virus to the computer system. It doesn’t have the effect they wanted (the code may have been tampered with by the Patriots), but apparently Campbell is an AI running on the same system, and he starts behaving oddly, repeatedly calling Raiden to gabble nonsense at him in a sometimes synthetic-sounding voice, including bits of dialogue from the previous games, as well as this choice exchange:

Campbell: Your role — that is, mission — is to infiltrate the structure and disarm the terrorists —
Raiden: My role? Why do you keep saying that.
Campbell: Why not? This is a type of role-playing game.

And, shortly afterward, this:

Campbell: Raiden, turn the game console off right now!
Raiden: What did you say?
Campbell: The mission is a failure! Cut the power right now!
Raiden: What’s wrong with you?
Campbell: Don’t worry, it’s a game! It’s a game just like usual.
Rose (replacing Campbell): You’ll ruin your eyes playing so close to the TV.
Raiden: What are you talking about!?

The effect here is a frisson. There’s that uncanny sense that something has happened that really isn’t supposed to happen, and that you can’t rely on the comfortable rules you’re used to. I’ve seen things like this in literature — heck, it’s practically the definition of postmodernism. But, as always, interactivity enhances the sense of danger.

(Speaking of postmodern literature, the game has a minor character named Peter Stillman. This is the name of a few characters in Paul Auster’s identity-bending New York Trilogy. I don’t think this is accidental. At the very least, the writers are playing similar tricks by reusing the name Snake. Raiden, remember, was also using the code-name Snake in the beginning.)

Not long after this scene is another choice bit of fourth wall demolition. In the middle of a big fight scene, you suddenly hear the familiar “game over” chord, and the game goes to the “Mission Failed” screen. Except it’s not quite right; among other things, it says “Fission Mailed” instead, and the screenshot in the upper left corner, showing your moment of death? It’s still moving. The fight isn’t over. It’s just a trick to distract you for a moment, to fool you into thinking you’ve already lost so that you’ll stop fighting. I’ve seen fake deaths like this in a few adventure games, but I don’t recall seeing it in an action game before. The effect isn’t a frisson this time: the fakeout aspect makes it more like a joke. At least, I chuckled when I realized what had happened.

I haven’t finished the game yet, so there’s probably more of this foolishness to come.

The Big Shell, ostensibly a oil spill clean-up facility, consists of two hexagonal structures called Shell 1 and Shell 2, each made of six buildings, joined by bridges, around a central core. Raiden’s mission starts on Shell 1, and as long as he’s there, the player enjoys considerable freedom. You pretty much have the run of the complex, and your mission objectives take you all over the place and back. This changes when the action shifts to Shell 2, which is heavily damaged. Suddenly there are fewer places to go. The action becomes more linear, the cutscenes more frequent. In some cases, all you have to do between two lengthy cutscenes is walk across a room. If this continues, maybe the game will turn out to be mostly plot after all.

After Shell 2 comes the descent into the secret depths of the complex, and it is here that things seem to start getting seriously weird. The web of deceit and double-cross is already pretty hard to follow by this point, and this may well be my last chance to make sense of it. Spoilers ho. Let’s start by listing the sides.

Philanthropy: Solid Snake and his tech support. Their mandate is to destroy Metal Gears. Part of the fallout from the previous game was that the Metal Gear schematics were leaked to the public, and now every armed force in the world is trying to build one.

“FOXHOUND”: Supposedly an elite anti-terrorist unit, Solid Snake’s alma mater, now represented by Raiden (the player character), led by Colonel Campbell. I say “supposedly” because we’re pretty sure that the real FOXHOUND was disbanded following the events of Metal Gear Solid, and it’s abundantly clear by now that just about everything that the man claiming to be the Colonel says is a lie. He’s probably tampered with Raiden’s memory, and may well not even be a real person: Raiden comments pointedly at one juncture that he’s never met the Colonel face-to-face, only talked with him over their comm link. Raiden’s girlfriend is also doing mission support through that comm link, and I don’t think she’s real either.

The Patriots: Twelve people who secretly ¹ Although not too secretly. An awful lot of the NPCs know all about them. rule the world, controlling the outcome of presidential elections and suchlike. They’re apparently the prime movers of most of the plot, and any random plot event can, without warning, turn out to have always been an essential part of their master plan. Their ultimate interest here is in the vast implausible computer system they’ve built under the ocean (the real purpose of the Big Shell), which they will use to control all the world’s information, invisibly censoring anything that might threaten them. They control the Metal Gear project, and probably did all along. In fact, they’re mass-producing Metal Gears to protect the computer. Note that the end boss in the previous games was a single Metal Gear. ² To go off on a wild tangent, I’ve long thought that one of the weaknesses of Return of the Jedi is that it tries to show how ill-prepared and outclassed the rebels are by revealing that the in-progress Death Star’s weapon systems are already operational. Big deal, we already saw them fight a fully complete Death Star and win in the first film. In my opinion, a much better big reveal would have been multiple Death Stars — a Death Star factory, filling the sky, gearing up to put one in permanent orbit around every inhabited planet in the galaxy. Plus, that way they could end the film with a whole series of Death Star explosions. Perhaps accompanied by the 1812 Overture.

The Sons of Liberty: The people who attacked the Big Shell. It’s not at all clear to me if there’s actually anyone calling themselves by this name; it might have just come out of Raiden’s mission briefing, which I won’t even bother describing here, because it was all lies. But given that it means the people that the “Colonel” wants you to fight, it seems to refer to an alliance of Solidus Snake (another of Solid Snake’s evil twins), Revolver Ocelot ³ All the henchmen in Metal Gear Solid had code names consisting of their preferred weapon and an animal. The resulting names are strikingly similar to the main enemies in the Mega Man X series, but there, Revolver Ocelot would be a cat-shaped robot with special attacks based on making things spin. (Liquid Snake’s sole surviving henchman), Dead Cell (a small clan of creepy level bosses, one of whom seems to be a vampire), Olga Gurlukovich (enemy of Solid Snake from Chapter 1, now leader of the Russian mercenaries that form the game’s grunt force), and the President of the United States. They’re basically opposed to the Patriots, and their goal is to destroy the aforementioned megacomputer. They had first tried to do this by means of the electromagnetic pulse created by detonating a nuclear missile in the atmosphere. These are the people that Raiden was sent to fight, which I suppose means that “Colonel Campbell” is a tool of the Patriots.

It’s not quite that simple, though. The Sons of Liberty all have personal agendas, and some of them betray their cause. The President really believes that having the Patriots in charge is preferable to the chaos that would result otherwise. Ocelot, who lost an arm in the previous game, had Liquid Snake’s arm grafted on in its place, and it periodically tries to take over his mind. Olga, blackmailed by the Patriots (who hold her child hostage), has been donning a disguise and helping Raiden fight the troops under her command. Solidus seems to have some plan of his own, although I don’t know what; he just doesn’t seem the public-spirited type. The freaking vampire just out and attacks the one person who has a chance of stopping the computer from going online at one point. I don’t know what his problem is. Maybe it’s just uncontrollable vampire urges.

Solid Snake cooperates with Raiden for most of the game, but abruptly betrays him at the end of the Shell 2 sequence. This came as a surprise, but in retrospect it makes a certain amount of sense. They were never really on the same side, whatever Raiden thought. They just had some common goals for a while. Solid Snake is the Good Guy. He wants to rescue the hostages, which means getting past the Sons’ defenses and preventing the Big Shell from being destroyed with everyone inside. Raiden is a well-meaning dupe of the Patriots. His assigned mission is to get past the Sons’ defenses in order to “rescue” the President, and preserve the Big Shell from harm until it’s fully operational. He’s also okay with helping to rescue the hostages, even though the “Colonel” keeps reminding him that it’s not part of his mission. But in the end, Raiden’s masters are building Metal Gears, and Snake can’t abide that.