PixlBit

Ok so Julian's obsession with Nightwish got me all curious like so I hooked myself up with Google Play Radio starting with Oceanborn. So far I'm loving it and her soprano makes me weep. So yeah, thanks for that.

This seriously made me so happy!

I loved hearing Julian's first rock concert story. I actually forgot I was the one that introduced him to Nightwish years ago, so that makes me super happy to remember that now. I never heard Delain before but I love Nightwish and Sabaton. Sabaton really had to grow on me for a while, I thought their music was super silly for a long time, but I kept listening to more songs from different albums and eventually fell in love with the overblown epic sound of it all. I always loved power metal and melodic choruses for years but it took a while for me to understand Sabaton's brand of it.

You should definitely listen to the Sabaton songs called "The Lion of the North", "The Carolean's Prayer", "40:1", and "Resist & Bite", those are probably my favorites. The song 40:1 is all about the fight the Polish army put up against Hitler at the border when he invaded. The Polish soldiers were outnumbered 40:1 and held the line for 3 days against the staggeringly more powerful blitzkrieg. It was the closest thing we have to a modern day Thermopylae not unlike the last stand of the 300 spartans and it's one of the many small stories of World War 2 that nobody learns about. In general Sabaton sing a lot of factual history based songs about the lesser known heroes and tragedies of modern warfare and the cost it tolls on the soldiers and civilians. In some ways they're kind of the Hideo Kojima of power metal lol. It seems ridiculous, macho, and simple at the surface level but when you dig in it's full of soul and intent.

Sabaton is a metal band that has led me to literally go online to libraries and study more history as crazy as that sounds. The entire album Carolus Rex is about the real life King Charles the 12th of Sweden who was a teenage boy that ascended the throne and had a giant alliance of surrounding nations inclding Russia rise up to destroy the Swedish empire because they thought the new boy-king would be a pushover and therefore the perfect time to take lands from his empire. It turns out the kid was a math whiz, military genius, he was famous for being abstained from women and alchohol, and he defeated every enemy he had and became the last warrior-king the Swedes ever had. There's a lot of tragedy, hubris, and religious fanaticism that the songs describe, so it isn't all gung-ho nationalist nonsense. By the end of the album you hear about the conspiracy fueled death of the boy-king and the epic fall of the Swedish empire. It's fascinating and tragic, and somehow hearing it through a concept metal album is pretty effective.

If you're thinking about giving Sabaton a listen, THE album to check out is Carolus Rex. Good song writing, great melodies, and interesting subject matter.

This is already a wall of text because of how neat I think Sabaton is, but I still need to talk about Metal Gear so this will only get longer! Last episode I told Julian I was going to buy the Metal Gear HD collection and start playing Solid's 2 and 3 for the first times, and boy have I. The second the game arrived I installed them on the harddrive and marathoned Solid 2 and 3 back to back.

I've stated in the past that stealth games are my favorite genre historically and even contemporarily. I love Deus Ex, Thief, Dishonored, and I've been a Splinter Cell nerd since day one and I own every SC game including the different versions for different platforms. But it's hard to call yourself a stealth connoisseure if you've only played MGS1, so this year I promised myself I would play all the Metal Gears I could get my hands on, especially considering the fact that I'm planning to transfer from my community college computer science program over to Digipen next year to finally study honest to God game design, programming, and mathematics. When I get to design school I plan on trying to evangelize stealth gameplay a great deal and make stealth game projects in 2D and eventually 3D once we get that far that we start programming our own 3D engines from scratch (seems like that happens Sophmore year).

Anyway, after playing Snake Eater and Sons of Liberty I totally get where people are coming from when they praise Kojima finally. I didn't think the level design was particularly great in either game but the robust design of the mechanics and the agency the player has to do clever things goes a long way to create a pretty revelatory experience. I especially fell in love with the feel and look of Snake Eater. I love the camoflauge system, love the CQB, and the diving, rolling, the feel of dropping to your belly and crawling like a snake in order to make Snake sneakier lol. The mechanical feel, the gameplay design, and the third person camera are all fantastic (the HD collection has the Substance and Subsistence versions of the games I think they're called, and Subsistence has the new camera option for MGS3).

I have a huge man-crush on Big Boss now, he's probably the sexiest raddest dude in video games. He's like my video game Jason Statham. The cutscene during Virtuous Mission where Big Boss meets Ocelot for the first time and he's surrounded by Ocelot squad, but proceeds to non-lethally disarm and knock-out ALL of the squad including Ocelot himself using CQB was the moment I fell in love with Snake and it's definitely one of the best cutscenes I've seen in a game, even though from an action sense it's very subdued and brief. In that scene you learn everything you need to about Big Boss at the time. It feels weird to be so on-board with a dude who's eventually the main villian of the first two original Metal Gear 2D games. Once I started playing Peacewalker I started having a slight falling-out with Big Boss once he began recruiting what are essentially child-soliders in Cuba, but part of me still knows that there's a man deep inside Big Boss that's redeemable, similar to Darth Vader. I love him but I'm watching him go down a deep rabbit hole full of tragedy with each prequel that comes out.

I've spent way too much time on the wiki as well brushing up on lore and trying to keep the plot twists straight. Confession hour. Last weekend I spent Saturday and Sunday watching all 9 hours of cutscenes from Guns of the Patriots in HD on youtube so that I could see how Solid Snakes story arc ended (since I don't have a PS3 to play it). I watched 5 hours Saturday, the last 4 hours Sunday. And I kind of loved it all. Is something wrong, what is even happening anymore? It was really well done, this dude cut all the scenes together into a giant movie and included gameplay when it was appropriate to tell the story that way (like the during the Metal Gear Rex battle with Metal Gear Ray for example).

Now that I've played MGS1, MGS2, and have watched the whole story of MGS4 I'm all caught-up on the Solid Snake story arc. MGS3 and Peacewalker are out of the way so I only need Phantom Pain in order to see how Big Boss' prequel ends. I'm in WAY too deep to stop now, I don't even remember what life was like before I dropped into the Metal Gear rabbit hole anymore. I still have the 2D Metal Gears I can play since they're included in the HD collection, so I'll do those soon and see Solid Snake back in action again, but this time at the very beginning of his story.

Metal Gear is pretty good.

Metal Gear IS really good! I love that you've gone back recently to discover two of my favorite PSX/PS2 era franchises: Resident Evil and this. I still can't really say which MGS is my favorite. I've played MGS 1 the most. MGS 2, while I loved it at the time and still love Kojima's sheer balls to REMOVE the main character from the game only 2 hours in, I don't care for the final act very much. MGS 3 is the slowest to start for me (I literally began that game about 5 times before I finally got into it), but has some of my all-time favorite moments in the series. MGS 4 MAY be my favorite, but I have not played it since 2008.

I will need to look into Sabaton more. It's such an interesting idea, a band having this very specific niche. Sort of like Alestorm with their pirate gimmick.