Makotic Crack

After listening to the extended version, I'm now basically sure of my theory that Amazing Horse is about Nice Guys.

The woman starts off quite positive towards the man, ready to hear his case even though he and his horse are both pretty ugly. She even licks his horse when he asks, and enjoys doing so. He tempts her with romance and the moment their relationship changes is when he starts talking about the horse's penis - the horse is obviously a metaphor for the man's genitals (it's big and between his legs and SERIOUSLY - "give it a lick", something many men enjoy women doing to penises; "have a stroke of its mane, it turns into a plane, and then it turns back again when you tug on its winky", obviously a metaphor for erection/ejaculation/flaccidity) and when he starts describing his intentions blatantly she figures him out and his later attempts on romance ("I'll take you round the universe and all the other places too") cause her to be unimpressed.

The man isn't interested in romance - his only goal is to get the girl 'on his horse', but he's willing to pretend to be romantic in order to get her on his horse, and when she sees through him he'll become hostile and tell her "shut up woman, get on my horse" - even though she was merely sceptical of him, rather than outright dismissive. In short, he's a textbook Nice Guy.

The cinematography also enhances this. He enters at the start of the cartoon into a scene of idyllic stately home, interrupting the peace with his loud electropop and horse. The camera does subliminal flashes of the horse's ugly face, and zooms into its eternally waiting eyes at the end of each loop - basically, it implies he's going to harass her until she gives in to get some peace and quiet, a typical Nice Guy tactic.

In the extended version available on iTunes, he comes to her later, this time not on his horse but watching it graze elsewhere - promising her that he's not just interested in her for sex - but he quickly proves himself wrong when he mentions the horse's ballsack. Here, she responds with confusion rather than revulsion, but instead of bothering to honour her confusion he tries to force the lemonade on her (strongly implied to be horse urine. I think it's pretty obvious what that part means).

I think what's positive about this cartoon is that even though the dispute is trivial, we sympathise with the woman and laugh at the man for being ridiculous.

Now, I need to get dressed, and do the washing up.

So this was my day today. First, I brought a ticket to see John Foxx from Ultrabox The Four Horsemen Ultravox doing a show in the concert hall attached to my school, because it was £3 and looked fun.

Then, I took out a book from the school library about the music of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly because I was flicking through it out of love for the film and all of a sudden I turned to page 54 and the following passage shot out and punched me in the eye:

In what is perhaps the only erotic moment in the film, Tuco is seen getting out of a bathtub and is completely naked except for the revolver he wears around his neck. He walks over to a closed hotel room door, expecting to surprise whoever is on the other side. Blondie, however, has surprised Tuco by entering the room through another door. He sees Tuco, and while talking to his naked friend, gently caresses the top of a bed post.

...I cannot believe this.

This man is being paid to write down the general slash-goggles stuff that us slash fans pretend only we can hallucinate. And it's not even the point of the book (discussing the film's music). But the author still found it important enough to his interpretation of the film to mention, and did so freely.

And that's the sting. No-one looks at the author of this book and says 'you're interpreting it wrong' or 'you're being disrespectful to the characters and their creators' or 'you just think that because you don't understand the way men act and think' or 'but they can't be gay, they're cowboys' or 'you're just like all the other stupid pervy academics, you make every relationship into sex'.

The author never asks himself 'am I making this up?' or 'was any of this intended at all?' or 'is this just me projecting because I want to hit Tuco/Eli Wallach and can't understand Blondie not wanting to like the stupid pervy academic I am?' He never tells himself that he is a dirtybadwrong, filthy person for even thinking about it. He just saw it and wrote it and his book got published and people read it and agreed.

Well, it's opened my eyes. I'm never going to feel guilty for seeing slash, ever again. If academics see slash, and hold it as a valid interpretation, I don't see why my interpretations are any less valid just because I would rather write fanfiction exploring those interpretations than a book stating those interpretations. Being interested in men does not make you biased or stupid and if you're seeing homoerotic symbolism, that's because you're seeing it. You don't need canon confirmation or creator interviews, because it's what you see. It's a load of sexist shit, since because if you were male and you just wrote down your opinions as an essay, no-one would do anything else besides nod and agree that Blondie's hands were on that bedpost.

At least if the essay was good.

ALRIGHT, I HAVE NOTHING BETTER TO DO AND THE FIRST PAGES OF THE RAYMOND BENSON MGS2 NOVEL ARE UP SO I AM GOING TO SPORK THEM, HERE, IN THIS POST. Come one come all if you appreciate horrible writing.

EVERY SINGLE SENTENCE IS RAGEWORTHY

IF YOU ARE LIKE ME, YOU WILL PROBABLY PUKE

So let's go.

( the graphics are particularly poor in this adaptation )

I understand RBenz wants to show off his new game mechanics they can do now the series is on the PS2, but, seriously, what about the games makes them work? No, not asses, for once, but - TENSION.

YOU YOURSELF, AS THE PLAYER, may slip up, and this creates an element of TENSION. (This also works if you're watching someone else play - at any moment they might get caught.) WHILE GAMEPLAY MANEUVRES MAY SEEM EFFORTLESS WHEN PERFORMED WELL, IT'S NOTHING COMPARED TO THE HEARTSTOPPING TERROR YOU FEEL AS YOU SEE A GUARD TURN AROUND TO FACE YOU AND YOU'VE GOT NOWHERE TO HIDE, OKAY.

AND THAT'S WHAT RBENZ NEEDS.

LESS PLAY-BY-PLAY, MORE FEELING.




...I will give him credit for two things, though

1) He has resisted, whether intentionally or unintentionally, the ridiculous craving so many hetero male fanwriters succumb to to make Snake into a one-note badass with no feelings. This is especially good since MGS2 Snake is the 'nice' Snake, and seeing him act like an asshole is painful. Embarrassing as it is, I'll take references to manga and Transformers any day over that kind of fanonSnake. (And, hell, he's a movie fanboy in canon, and he had to do something in Alaska.)

2) This book could contain a scene where Vamp, Otacon and Fatman perform a tap-dancing musical number to the Super Mario theme and it'd still be ten million times better than the MGS2 comic.



I'm tempted to buy the book, but - oh god, how much am I willing to shell out for a book I know I'm just going to hate?

Okay, the product-placement iPod in MGS4 makes a lot of sense.

Saph's already pointed out the fairly obvious 'lol, a guy called Snake is trying to sell you an Apple product' play, but I was researching something about the iPod for an MGS fic (if I tell you it was the date it was first released, that won't spoil anything, right?) and found this on Wikipedia -

The name iPod was proposed by Vinnie Chieco, a freelance copywriter, who (with others) was called by Apple to figure out how to introduce the new player to the public. After Chieco saw a prototype, he thought of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey and the phrase "Open the pod bay door, Hal!", which refers to the white EVA Pods of the Discovery One spaceship.

...I refuse to believe this is just coincidence. Kojima is too careful for that. Oh mi Pod.

Sigh. Shipwars. I have to admit, it is my fault. I linked the comments to the first anon, and she started posting. And then.

WHAT HAPPENED OUR FANDOM USED TO BE SUCH GOOD FRIENDS whine moan gnash teeth etc.. But it wasn't actually that bad, we got a lot of wanking out in the open, and I have a sneaking suspicion that it wasn't about ships at all - it felt to me more like a combination of 1) semantics and 2) what can be treated as canon or not.

And I've come to realise I am insanely liberal about canon. I don't even really care what canon is so much any more. All I know is that I have this great, big, beautiful universe filled with sexy men and sexy women and sexy dynamics and sexy detail porn and occasionally a sexy plot, too. So when I write something or play something, my canon is - what I want to use at that time, screw everyone else. And when I read something or thread with someone, my canon is - theirs. I do not have to do mental gymnastics to force my oh so perfect headcanon interp into their headcanon interp, because fanwriting isn't about what some random person on the internet thinks about what Snake's dick looks like, it is what the author thinks about what Snake's dick looks like, why they think this, why they think it matters, and whether they can make us random people on the internet believe what they think until the fic or the thread is done.

saiph_nebula was, last time I checked, writing a pretty good fic about Snake being a honey trap in the CIA, which she set after MG2, because according to the Database Snake was in the CIA after he went to Zanzibar Land (and this was a plot point, because Holly was the person who got him the job). Anon on the kink meme wrote a fanfic about Snake being a honey trap in the CIA set before MG2, because it says in the MG2 manual that Snake was in the CIA before he went to Zanzibar Land (and this was also a plot point, because the fic is about him trying to hunt down Fox who had recently defected to Zanzibar Land). Who's canon? Who's right?

No-one is. They are both right. They are using different interpretations of the same information.

I don't mind picking and choosing! The canon has gone past 'sprawl' and into 'spaghetti'. I would not mind if you told me that your Snake/Naomi fic (why does no-one write this pairing, by the way, I suppose I should do it once I get through my massive S/O backlog) was based mostly on MGS1 canon, but using the Saga canon that Snake never knew who his father was until Liquid told him, and the In The Darkness Of Shadow Moses canon that Naomi was a child soldier and fell in love with Snake during her two-year obsession with killing him. This would be completely allowed, completely awesome, and totally cool.

Let's be honest here. I've played quite a lot of video games, some of which were mindless and awful, some of which were clever and fantastic and drove my emotions right to exactly the right points they needed to be. I have never played another game, in my whole life, where the end of one of the games is literally a character talking to the audience about how picking and choosing your own canon is fine as long as you don't force it on anyone else. In game, he had gone, and the person he was talking to was with someone else, but over red-tinted footage of the people in New York, he carried on talking about our right as players to interpret what we want from the story presented in the game.

And people are fighting over whether Snake and Otacon are gay.

The answer is that they are exactly as gay as I want them to be at any one time, based on whatever bits of canon I want to remember and whatever bits of canon I want to forget about. Me. My opinion. And you have no right to question my opinion, because they are also exactly as gay as you want them to be at any one time, based on whatever bits of canon you want to remember and whatever bits of canon you want to forget about. And I am in love with your opinion, it is a beautiful opinion, and I want you to write about it. I want you to thread your opinion with me until I forget I have freedom to decide and believe your opinion, until the thread is over and I go back to having my own interp.

Canon's just a word for the lists of facts we see. It doesn't mean anything, especially in MGS, where we've been told the canon doesn't mean anything by one of the actual, canon characters. Whether we're Manipulating Genuine Scenes for Made-up Gay Sex or for Making Guys Straight, it is still MGS.

It's what Kojima would want.

So I'm pretty curious about podfic. My big problems with it are -

1) I am so sodding British it is nauseating. And, somehow, it just feels really, really wrong to read out MGS fic, for a mostly American audience, in a British accent. Yes, I know the MGS Saga DVD had an inexplicably British in-universe narrator who I would really love to flesh out into an actual character some day but I don't sound as creepy and omniscient as him and anyway the DVD contradicted canon all over so STFU. I can just about imitate an American accent enough to convince other Brits, but I know what it sounds like when Americans imitate Brits so I have reservations about doing this. And a recording shouldn't be hard work to listen to.

2) I wouldn't want to record a fic that didn't need recording. Some things work better on a screen. So, logically, some things should work better read out, and until I can think of a really good reason why I can tell the story better with voice, I don't see why I should bother doing podfic at all.

And on that point, what can you do with sound you can't do with text to make a story better? I mean, considering I come from an audiovisual fandom, I could use clips of audio from the games here and there, but that would only serve to underscore the futility of my whiny British little-girl voice compared to all those sultry Americans. Unless I could use that to make a point. But about what?

3) IT JUST FEELS WRONG READING OUT SNAKE'S DIALOGUE WITHOUT IMITATING HIS VOICE. I do it naturally. I read my fics out loud as part of the editing/word checking process and if my voice naturally shifts into a low gravelly register when I'm reading Snake's dialogue, it means I've done it right. And even if I let myself shift into a low gravelly register and start unconciously imitating his speech mannerisms (like the - way he ends sentences, I can't really explain, but you know what I mean), the fact is it's still going to be a low gravelly British female voice that you are listening to.


Any thoughts?


...Also, here, for those of you who have it legally and want to have it in digital format too -



Torchwood - Children of Earth OST

It's really rather nice. Less Doctor Who-ey than I expected (weirdly MGS3-ey in some places, which some of you may appreciate), but still very enjoyable.

Here, have a sample.

I was just thinking about why I loved the MGS4 opening TV shows so much, and I think it's because even in that horrible, horrible verse with nothing to look forward to, the people in the shows are still nice. Melissa's going on a sadistic game show where she's asked questions by a cyborg zombie octopus head about PMCs, but she's doing it because she wants to win an RV for her husband so they can go on a second honeymoon. The chef in the Bomb Shelter Buffet makes his creepy jungle food, but he makes it for his wife who even the vapid hostess refers to by first name. Ginger Vaspüro's testimonial might be vain and totally ridiculous and she's advertising Body Horror The Exercise Program ('Metabolism is myth!'), but it's still almost comforting to see how pleased she is with the results, and even the Drill Seargent looks genuine. Everything keeps coming back to these fairly innocent, quirky, good people with families, and it's only the PMC ads which are devoid of humanity.

Incidentally, for my own amusement, here's a transcript of the news tickers on Ocean of Gossip so you know what passes for news in a verse where vampires are encouraged to become Navy SEALs -

( TOP TICKER )

( BOTTOM TICKER )

Poll #1420671 poll 1
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 64

Overall, how would you feel if you found out the creator of your fandom's canon was reading your fic/looking at your art/stalking your RP?

Poll #1420672 poll 2
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 54

I got my sexual education from fandom.

Two-tan

She is very unpopular with other people, because she likes playing tricks on other people and laughing at them, is very talkative (particularly about the boy she likes), and most of the things she says are tall stories anyway. She sometimes pretends to be someone else when talking on the phone, and switches back to being herself when she thinks it would be funny. She's found out a lot of things this way no-one wanted to tell her. Despite this, she isn't very malicious, although she does admit her favourite thing is seeing other people confused and bothered.

Apart from annoying people, Two-tan's favourite hobbies are skateboarding and playing computer games. She reads lots of long books and enjoys gossiping to her sisters, and is a good photographer. Her special relationship is with her younger sister Four-tan, who likes to solve her problems and comfort her when she's upset, as long as Two-tan helps her play tricks on people. She's very respectful to her big sister One-tan and wishes she was more like her, but when Three-tan teases her about her extremely feminine dress sense and her unpopularity she takes it quite personally.

Two is smart, but very proud, and doesn't like to be seen making mistakes. When she does do something wrong, she'll say she meant to do it as a social experiment and no-one can tell when she is kidding or not.

She has white blond hair and always wears orange sunglasses. She also has a watch so that other people can know how long she has been talking to them for.


Four-tan

Four-tan is a very sad girl who has constant fits of melancholy. She's also very moody and often loses her temper over minor things. But because of her moodiness, she's the most compassionate sister. If one of the others doesn't understand something, or has a problem, Four-tan will dedicate herself entirely to solving the problem or explaining it, even though some of her solutions are messy and her ideas aren't always good. Sometimes she burns herself out trying to handle everyone's problems at once, but she's never happier than when she's too tired to sort out her own problems.

Four has issues with her older sisters. While she loves them dearly, she feels burdened by them. She feels that because all her sisters are so good at what they do, she has no niche of her own, and so she considers her purpose to be taking care of her sisters. Her biggest fear is that she will get a younger sister.

In her free time, Four listens to her iPod and does charity work and gardening. She's a brilliant actress and the best one out of all her sisters, and when she can be persuaded by her favourite sister, Two-tan, to talk about her dreams, she says it's to write, direct and star in her very own movie.

Four often gets Two to help her play tricks on people, but where Two plays tricks on people to show that she likes them, Four pulls nasty, mean-spirited tricks on anyone she thinks has hurt her feelings. Most of her sisters have had one embarrassing or painful trick played on them by Four. Three is still mad at her over one of these.

Four-tan has white hair and a large mole on the right of her face which she is somewhat shy about. Her eyesight is quite bad, so she wears glasses which she takes off when she wants to look pretty.

Unlike her sisters, she likes to use physical means to solve problems. She thinks her sisters are weak for hiding all the time.

♪I am a hated character, and I don't understand
Is it because I'm girly, or don't look like a man
I think it's kind of unfair, to blame me for it all
Because this whole game's basically a massive massive troll♫

So anyway.

On Tuesday I have a Physics exam which is a synoptic (everything from the whole year ever) paper. On Wednesday I have a Biology exam (Applied Ecology, dead simple). On Saturday I have Music Theory. Then I'm done forever (hopefully).

Herp, good things in life - yesterday, Miri and I went to the beach and talked about Racefail and people using fanon to reclaim stereotypical characters (which I think I might make a big post about later). Then she wanted to play MGS2 so I started a new game on the Plant chapter and made lots of stupid Twilight jokes about Vamp and that was really nice.

(Vamp: (Sniffing Pliskin's neck) You smell like...
Me: Freesias.)

Also, I'm coming to the conclusion that a lot of the hate for Raiden was similar to the hate for Scrappy Doo in that his addition as a protagonist coincided with the series itself changing drastically in formula. Raiden was a target upon which blame could be applied for the genre shift from grim sci-fi into fantasy horror with cracky humour, for the retcons of the previous game, for the addition of a villain who you could neither fight nor fully understand and a Metal Gear too big to be fought, and for the shut-up-and-let-me-play cutscene-a-go-go "gameplay". I think that's one of the reasons why people hate him. (I'll honestly admit my dislike of Sunny is mostly me subliming my dislikes about MGS4 into one central object so I can enjoy the bits of it I liked, like the gorgeous old people and stuff, so I think this is a natural reaction albiet an unfair one and if you do it you should really be aware).

But Raiden is such a fun character, I forgot how awesome he is. I like how he smacks the Colonel around for being a douche and yells at him about why the stuff he does is wrong, as opposed to Snake's passive bitching. I love how he pretends to be Solid Snake when the mission starts and gets disappointed when he's told he has to stop. I love his awkward relationship with Rose and him telling her to look stuff up for him and not quite liking the fact that he's now in professional superiority above his girlfriend. Goddamn it, I even love Rose, and I don't think there's a flaw people hate in Rose (she's chatty! she lies to Raiden! she manipulates Raiden's emotions! she's too focused and selfish about getting her own happy family! she talks about her feelings!) which isn't a quality Otacon has as well, but doesn't get flak for because he's in great proximity for gorgeous manly sex with Snake. (It's nice to see after MGS4 people being understanding re. Rose and giving flak to Otacon for his flaws, which is why I love this fandom. LESS FANDOM MISOGYNY IS ALWAYS GOOD WITH ME.)

Talking of pretending to be Snake, the nice blond guy who works down at the game shop injured his eye a couple of days back and spent the day with an eyepatch popping up from behind the counter and making the '!' noise and scaring customers. I am so depressed I missed it.

Was this what it felt like to win something?

He stood and regarded it. Its four legs, crossed in a lotus position - the firm taut canvas forming its noble back. It was what he'd been gunning for since 2005. Something always outside his grasp.

"They want me," he whispered, and he felt his legs buckle at the sensation. For once, the universe's hate, the single-minded disgust at his very existence, had cooled, and he was at peace.

But Snake merely shook his noble head. The tails of his bandanna tossed around his shoulders.

"Don't sit down in that thing. You don't know for sure yet."

"You're jealous, aren't you?" Raiden accused, narrowing his pale blue eyes. "You want the chair for yourself."

"Raiden - "

"Still, I guess you're a protagonist from the Eighties. It's nice to see you've internalised your own persecution complex. So you died in every room back then, huh? Well, I'm sorry. I guess you think I'm softcore too since I'm going to come out for a console which doesn't cost three hundred bucks."

"Are you kidding?" Snake scowled. "I don't want that thing. You can keep it. I still can't go into the microwave cooking section at Wal-Mart. I'm done with that part of my life. Otacon and I are going to move to a private island somewhere, and it will have - " his eyes glazed over, " - a woodland where I can hunt for food, and a beach, and he will rub lotion on my back."

"Er," Raiden said.

"But trust me, kid." His hand came down on Raiden's shoulder, warm and firm. "You don't want that thing."

Raiden frowned.

"Are you kidding? I couldn't even kill your father, so I had to do it the other way. I worked so hard to get accepted by them, and then I managed to get the chair. And all I had to do," he rounded on Snake, "was to sacrifice every single likeable thing about my character." He nodded at Rose, who was getting the champagne out of the fridge while furiously Twittering on her product placement Ericsson with her left hand, probably about how amazing he was - "Also, you know, she finds the high heels kind of hot."

"Do you ever wonder about her?" Snake asked, and then thought better of it. "Never mind. Just take my advice. You've got custody of the chair. No sensible person will fight you for it. It's all yours, when you want to take it. But keep in mind. It's going to be a hard road for you."

"But Rose will - "

"I don't care what Rose will. You want a happy ending, you stay the hell away from that thing."

Raiden looked at Snake, then at Rose, at the banner she'd put up on the wall, at the chair, and then sighed.

"I guess - " he said, "I guess I can just leave it here. If no-one else wants it."

"Good thinking," Snake responded, and smiled. "Wonder if Rose will let me cook."

Raiden followed him. He didn't notice the brown eye, watching them through the crack on the door, the shape of the chair reflected in its pupil.

- I think it's really ironic that the game was called Snake's Revenge, when pretty much the most sympathetic trait canon!Snake gets is that he never takes revenge on anything for anyone ever, even when he wants to. He's so impersonal, it's sweet.


- Also, I only realised how dire the whole female-characters-in-stuff situation is when I was toying around with a genderswap MGS verse in my head last night. I was thinking it might be better to actually change characters's names instead of just add '-ie's and '-ina's to the end of their male names and call it a night. So I wanted a name for genderflipped Snake and Otacon, and while I realised I would not be able to stuff the incredible layers of connotation Kojima managed to stuff into 'David' into girlSnake's name, I thought I'd settle for 1) Otacon having a human-sounding computer name; 2) Snake having a name of a character from the same thing as the computer, preferably a character who actually does something with the computer; and 3) Snake's name is a biblical one. Then I realised just how few sci-fi things have a female character in them at all, let alone ones that have a female computer and a female character with a biblical name.

After a lot of brain-racking the best I could come up with was Kristine and Holly (Kristine is from 'Christ', and if Otacon likes to be called 'Holl' that sounds like 'Hal' enough to be a nice bonus), and that's from Red Dwarf of all things and Kristine is a love-interest-character who only showed up when the series got really bad. I really really really wanted to call Snake Sarah after Sarah Connor, but that would leave her best friend with the name Terminatrix Emmerich and while Otacon's dad was awful I don't think he's that awful. Can anyone come up with anything at all?


- REVISION POST

( How to learn to weird funny key signatures really quickly )

Last night I had a dream in which I was explaining to President Obama that the difference between MGS2 and MGS4 was 'the difference between giving your coworker the wrong address so that they end up at the funfair instead of your house, and giving your date the wrong time so that they end up at the funfair waiting for you to show up'.

I don't get it.

I forgot how good MGS1 was. Out of all the games, it has the best atmosphere, hands down.

I also just remembered why I like Otacon so much and I think I kind of ship him and Meryl a bit because she's constantly being all 'GRRR MUST SAVE THE DOCTOR :))))' and Otacon's all 'she's really pretty but she's so tough' and it would be adorable, they could fuss over Snake together

I never called Otacon after Psycho Mantis's fight before, but aaaaah he's lovely ♥ and I ship Snake and Otacon all over again because it is so obvious he's talking about Snake there as well

Also, this was the first time I beat Mantis by blowing away the statues instead of changing my controller port. Most interesting part was that I found, even during the necessary suicide-play you have to do before the game will let you shoot the statues, there's times when you can hit Mantis. You have to be dead on with your aim, though, and hit him when he's recovering and it has to be absolutely frame perfect. I wonder if anyone's beaten him without using the controllers or the statues? I had Vibration turned off in the options, and all it did was skip the controller-telekinesis trick.

Miller calls him a 'pathetic man. He had all the right tools, but didn't know how to use them', and knowing Liquid it might be RRRGH HOW DARE HE BE FERTILE AND CELIBATE

I don't honestly think Mantis is asexual, I'm sorry. I think he does have sexual urges, but they've been very very very very very very messed up by his childhood and his cf_hardcore attitude. I mean, he was seeing sexual feelings at the back of his own father's mind when he was, like, four. It was probably the psychological equivilent of a child rape. I don't honestly think he could be so obsessed with hating it if he didn't have some element of sexual desire inside himself which he tried to hide. Also, he wears bondage gear. Shinkawa has art of him and he has a genital piercing. I don't know if I want or not.

MGS1 does for the MG series what MGS4 did for the MGS series.

If you haven't played the eight bit games, you are doing yourself a disservice. Once you've played them, it's a hell of a lot easier to see that 1) MGS1 is cleverer than first assumed and 2) what the game is trying to achieve. It doesn't pause to analyse it like MGS2 does, but it has the same elements of level repetition. I'm playing the fight with the Ninja now, and it is dead clever. It's very similar to the final battle with Liquid in MGS4 with what it does.

First of all, it takes advantage of gaming assumptions to trick you. Littered around the arena and around the 'carnage corridor' are bullets for the FAMAS. Like good little gamers, we've been conditioned to assume that if there's huge amounts of ammo being dropped before and during a boss battle, it's telling us what to do, so automatically we whip out our FAMAS and start shooting, to no effect. The weapons system in MGS, with targeting and invisible bullets, is entirely foreign to the system in the eight-bit games. And so, it has to go. The Ninja even taunts, "the old Solid Snake would never rely on a weapon like that!", reminding the player of the way the 'old' Solid Snake fought, with white ball bullets and a single punch.

So the weapon goes, and the combat becomes hand-to-hand. However, it's not that simple. So far, the fight recalls the battle against Black Color/Kyle Schneider in Metal Gear 2 - a boss battle against a speedy cybernetic ninja encountered while attempting to rescue a hostage scientist (Marv) - and so continues the feel of the fight. While Snake is restricted to a punch-punch-kick combo, the ninja flips around the arena, constantly running from Snake and then darting back in to attack. Ironically, his speed means that he is usually not close enough to Snake to attack, and he is at his easiest to beat at this stage.

When two-thirds of the Ninja's health bar has been depleted, another stage in the fight begins - Night Sight's stage. Like the boss in Metal Gear 2, Night Sight, the Ninja becomes invisible using camouflage, and the gamer's task is to chase him and hit him without being able to see him. In both cases, the fight is made easier by imperfections in the camouflage; in Night Sight's case, the sound he makes as he moves - in the Ninja's case, the slight artefacts caused by the stealth camo reflecting what is behind him. The Ninja taunts Snake from his hiding place, providing a sound clue - his voice comes from the place the Ninja is in the stereo picture, allowing Snake to hunt him down even when the top-down perspective obscures the Ninja. The boss battle with Night Sight was another one preceding a scientist's rescue, this time the rescue of Pettrovich, and the person providing advice to Snake during that battle was none other than 'Snake's #1 Fan' - revealed to be Gray Fox.

Then, in the third phase of the fight, everything changes. The Ninja, wherever he is on the stage, will move into a small square area between a few desks to perform an interbattle cutscene. All of the flashy Ninja moves are gone - he can still turn invisible, but uses this mostly to appear behind you. His new strategy restricts him to a single attack - a strong, single punch. This, of course, recalls the way Snake and Fox punched in Metal Gear 2, due to technology limitations. The Ninja's punch takes off about the same amount of LIFE from your (now far smaller) health bar as Fox's did in Metal Gear 2, which means being hit is difficult, and his speed means moving fast or far from the centre of the area is too dangerous. So, like in the battle with Gray Fox in Metal Gear 2, it is reduced to two men, punching each other - the Ninja moving around, and Snake remaining in roughly the same spot and punching when the Ninja gets too close, exactly the strategy used in the 'Chicken Fight'.

And then it's all over. The Ninja destroys the rest of the room, taking full advantage of the new 3D system and strong hardware, and Snake must shoot him, as he now cannot be approached. No music plays during this encounter, and it is a callous killing blow, both to the Ninja, shooting electricity as a reminder of its cyborg nature, and to the eight-bit generation. It reminds you - that was then, and this is now. Back then, video game characters fighting like that was acceptable - but now, in this beautiful new world, with hardware that would have been unthinkable then, it is not. The game drenches you with nostalgia, only to twist it on its head at the last second.

Found as one of those side-columns in the Times. It's tastefully and not-scaremongeringly-at-all called 'Death vision'.

New York Sight can be improved and deterioration delayed by violent video games, a study has found.

Playing them enhanced contrast sensitivity, the ability to discern subtle changes of light and dark against a uniform background, US and Israeli scientists said. The effect was not seen in non-violent games. Subsequent tests showed that the benefits lasted more than two years.

The research, led by Daphne Bavelier, of the University of Rochester in New York State, is reported in the journal Nature Neuroscience.


I was puzzled for a while as to why the effect might happen only in 'violent' games. Then I realised. Then I lolled.

Thank god for brown and bloom.

How do you do gameiness in fanfic for games?

Most games are pretty 'gamey' - aware that they're games and aren't real in whatever way that may manifest. That's because games, for a long time, weren't able to represent realism, and so self-awareness got grandfathered in. Some games go further with it than others. Some keep it as a joke, like Star Ocean 2's piano ("Something tells me a legendary hero shouldn't have to carry this around, you know?"). Sometimes it's necessary for the player, like the Beginner's Hall in Final Fantasy VII. Sometimes it's used to actually make character observations, like Psycho Mantis in MGS, or how Snake will draw an overlarge weapon or item he couldn't realistically have been carrying before when a very 'gamey' segment is coming up (like how he whips out his SOCOM before he and Meryl fight off the soldiers in MGS, or when he pulls out the Railgun to fend off the Suicide Gekkos in MGS4, overshadowed by the slick 'realism' of Raiden and Vamp's fight).

But, you know, those are all statements made for that medium and that medium only. How do you convert it to fanfic? Do you ignore or accept certain things based on the game? If I was writing an FF7 fanfic I'd reject Barret's suggestion that he 'doesn't know how to use materia' because, considering how readily available the things are in the FF7 world, it doesn't make sense to assume a thirty-five year old terrorist wouldn't know how to at least cast a healing spell - that, I'd write off as a necessity on the part of the player temporarily hijacking Barret's characterisation.

But his response was IC - he yells at Cloud for patronising him, and if you bother to give him the tutorial you get affection points for his date. The same goes for Snake's tutorial segments - it's hard for me to believe that a legendary soldier wouldn't know how to punch someone, even if, to him, 'punch' means 'push the circle button'. But it's all part of their characters and both Snake and Barret respond ICly, so who am I to discount that as part of their characters?

MGS plays a lot faster and looser with the fourth wall, though. I wouldn't mind accepting Snake's tutorials as a joke, because the characters in the whole series have always been aware that they're in games - at dramatic points, too. One of my favourites was a conversation with Sigint in Portable Ops where Snake talks about how everything feels all light and portable, but he likes that he can take it outside. Sigint doesn't understand it. But, at other times, Sigint talks happily about menus and your Camo Index and other things he shouldn't know about. So, Sigint knows as much as the game needs him to know. If the game consciously decides how much Sigint is allowed to break the fourth wall, is that part of his character? Can I?

This article has a few good points about fourth-wall breaking in games (it mentions MGS, Zork, Sonic, Eternal Darkness and so on in order to demonstrate different forms of fourth-wall breaking) and is absolutely fascinating, but it's not really the point I'm trying to ramble about. Games, like the article says, act differently to text. So I'll get back to that:

How would I keep close to the source material by playing with the fourth wall?

Is it right to make references to Game Overs and Action Buttons and R1, genre conventions that no longer apply? (I've seen this done in - and done it myself in - RP, but you can't really do that.)

Or should I be making references to the way fanfiction or RP works?

And if so, how? It's easy to do it in RP, because RP is a kind of 'game' itself. I recently made my MG2 Snake (at damned) praise that the new system let him do more things, but say he didn't like waiting turns - a bit fourth-wally, but in-character (well, I think it was). Nothing the games didn't do.

But, with fanfiction, how do you do it? What genre conventions does fanfic have, anyway? It doesn't feel like published work, even when it's equal quality - I've seen fanwriters discouraged from using certain techniques I've seen used in published books. But when you say a published work feels like a fanfiction, it's usually an insult. So you'd write bad, wish-fulfilment porn, but... knowingly?

I would love to play with the genre conventions and problems caused by taking games into fanfic, but I seriously don't know how, yet. I have tried, but not only did it not make sense, I didn't like it.

This is the only reason I haven't written anything specifically for an audio format, too. I wouldn't know how to write something specifically for audio.

Opinion piece says Crisis Core blends gameplay, narrative in revolutionary ways

Since the beginning of cinematic gaming, there has always been this struggle between balancing the experiences of both narrative and gameplay.... So how do these two seemingly opposed forces integrate smoothly? For some games, there's too much traditional story-telling which detracts from this core gameplay fun factor (take PS3's Metal Gear Solid 4 for example)

I WILL TOTALLY AGREE THAT MGS4 IS CUTSCENETASTIC BUT DID YOU JUST SERIOUSLY JUST IMPLY THAT MGS4 DOESN'T USE ITS GAMEPLAY TO TELL THE STORY

SO

MUCH

RAGE

Thing is, the article it links to is actually intelligent and well-written and makes points I don't disagree with. But that swipe at MGS4 was NOT DESERVED AND PATENTLY WRONG

YOU SIR

ARE THE REASON THAT SLASH FANGIRLS ARE THE ONLY PEOPLE WHO LIKED MGS2

AND THE REASON THAT CLOUD GOT RETCONNED INTO A TOTALLY UNIRONIC WHINY HERO FOR ADVENT CHILDREN

AND THE REASON THAT PEOPLE LOOK AT YOU FUNNY WHEN YOU SAY YOU THINK VIDEO GAMES ARE A CLEVER AND WONDERFUL MEDIUM FOR STORYTELLING


GRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGHGSJGF

SO I BEAT CRISIS CORE

AND

WOW


Why the hell couldn't they have made that game first and spared us all Dirge? I mean, really? That way they could have killed off you-know-who at the end, too.

That game was moving, fun, occasionally cruel and meta. as. hell.


LET'S GET THE BAD BITS OUT OF THE WAY:

- I really would have appreciated fewer invisible walls. The original game was really good about that - you could walk into all kinds of weird places where there was no reason for you to go. As it was, the game world, while beautiful, didn't really feel 'big'.

- More NPCs. As it was, there was a choice between about eight - civilian man, civilian man 2, civilian woman, little boy, little boy 2, little girl, little girl 2, business woman (white), business woman (black), business man (white), business man (black), and researcher. Even when you go to Nibelheim, everyone's just a pallet swap of those people. It makes everything seem so drab compared to the supposed wild clutter of the slums.

- More music! The music that it had was fairly nice, but dull, and the main theme really didn't have enough power behind it to stand up for the whole of the game (when a version of the FF7 theme played over the end credits, it was just so much a better tune that it was difficult to express). The theme would have made a better character theme than a general theme for the game, I think. When the soundtrack tried to sound like the Black Mages, it was really pretty bad. ON THE BRIGHT SIDE, when it was trying to sound like Silent Hill, it ranged from 'great' to 'awesome'. And the remixes of the original game were fantastic. They managed to sound like what the music from the original sounded like in my head while riffing on them a little with some soft Portable Ops-style breakbeats.

- The plot was a strangled mess. But so was the plot of the original game. There. I've said it. Much as I love it, it's its characters and atmosphere, not its plot, that explains why it stood the test of time.

- I did not like the ending FMV. I know you wanted the hit song, and the song itself was lovely, but could you have waited just a bit longer after Cloud, with a bloodied face, gives a scream of utter anguish and succumbs to insanity, before you break out the happy bubbly guitar J-pop and the Really Dead Montage? I'd say it was done to be intentionally jarring, it's so bad, but while this game's smart it's not that smart.

- Caps of the FMVs in the DWM. Most are nice, but there's a few of the stills which are just hilariously out-of-context. Like the one of Zack with his fist up and his mouth open. And the one of him looking like he's straining to pass a stool with a sword in front of his nose. Fail.

- What was with the thing where certain cutscenes were saved as video? All it did was give cutscene graphics at low jpg quality. I don't even see how it'd help with disc space, so what the hell.



Alright. Now for the meta, which, of course, is good stuff.

( SPOILERS - ZACK DIES AT THE END OF CRISIS CORE )

All in all, I actually like FF7 more after playing that game, which is exactly what a prequel should do. It doesn't do what the other games do and try to have their cake and eat it too - try to write new story without changing the arch canon. I liked the way the plot explained certain things (such as Hojo's desperation to create Sephiroth clones), and, all in all, that's the best game I've played for a long time. Wow.


BONUS SECTION




Fulfilled Desire (ending theme)
Moonlight Wandering (sniping mission - the 'protect Cloud' theme)
The World's Enemy (CC's version of One Winged Angel and my favourite one so far)

Metal Gear Bechdel Test Scorecard

Metal Gear - Fail (Two female characters, who don't acknowledge each others's existence.)
Metal Gear 2 - Fail (Two female characters, who don't acknowledge each other's existence.)
Metal Gear Solid - Fail (Five female characters, none of whom talk to each other on-screen, although the game implies a few times that Mei Ling and Naomi are chatting together off screen.)
Metal Gear Solid 2 - Fail (Four female characters, who don't talk to each other. Interestingly, a planned fifth female character was turned male in development - if she had remained female the game would have passed with flying colours.)
Metal Gear Solid 3 - Fail (Three female characters. Two talk off-screen, but it's about a man.)
Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops - Fail - ish (Four female characters (with speaking roles), two of whom are split personalities of the same person. These two talk to 'each other', but about a man. Or rather about two men. It's complicated.)
Metal Gear Solid Mobile - Fail (Only one female character).
Metal Gear Solid 4 - Pass, but in the most sexist way possible (Ten female characters. Two of those female characters talk about chemistry, cookery, and about looking pretty. The other female characters don't talk, although Mei Ling is seen fussing over Meryl at the end.)

Metal Gear: Ghost Babel - Fail (Three female characters. They don't talk, but two of them stand next to each other at the ending.)
Metal Gear Ac!d - Pass! (Four female characters, one androgenous character whose gender is never made clear, and two female dolls. These dolls talk to each other, but they're avatars of a third female character. It's implied two female characters were talking off-screen, but the details of their conversation aren't revealed. Alice talks to Teliko at one point, but it's about Snake. However, the pass is when one female character talks to another about how to diffuse a bomb. The conversation is quite extended and ends up with them discussing their personal lives and characters.)
Metal Gear Ac!d² - Pass! (Five female characters, with one very minor and the other dead as part of the set-up. The remaining three talk multiple times about the plot, themselves, each other, and their goals. Two womens's goals revolve around themselves, and the third's revolves around a fourth woman.)
Snake's Revenge - Fail (Only one female character.)
MGS: Digital Graphic Novel - Pass, but barely (One of the additional scenes includes Wolf torturing the captive Meryl. She mocks and humiliates her.)
MGS2 Comic - I don't know (It's way too painful to read).

The real irony is that games like MG2, MGS2, MGS3 and Portable Ops, all of which failed, felt more feminist than games like Ac!d² and MGS4, which passed. The former four all starred strong, independent, highly capable women who didn't rely on Snake (or Raiden) as much as he relied on them, and all had their own goals and ideals and were as competent as anyone else in the MGS universe. Ac!d² countered its awesome girliness with way too much fanservice, and MGS4 was blatantly misogynistic in terms of symbolism.

Ah well. At least it explains why it's so hard to write femmeslash for this fandom. (I do ship Ursula/Elisa and Venus/Takiyama and 17/104 and EVA/Boss and Mei Ling/Naomi and Naomi/Nastasha and Chris/Sophie and Holly/Natasha and Olga/Fortune and Laughing Octopus/Everyone like I'm on fire, though.)