I just realized that I had completely stopped caring about Little Big Planet. When it was first shown a little over a year ago it seemed like just the thing to pull people towards the PS3, a task similar in difficulty to pulling teeth.* It was cute, little burlap sac men/ladies running around attempting to conquer physics with their box of toys. You could even make your own levels and share them with your friends.

When the game was shown it was not only playable, but it also had the world creator already done. I’m not really all that sure what the wait is for. I mean, perhaps the game was far less along than it looked at GDC ‘07, but then I have to say: Bad Sony. You blew your marketing load on interest too early in the game’s launch schedule to keep things alive. The PR is falling in on itself like a deflating balloon. When the game is finally released, who knows, the PS3 may be in the lead of the “console warz,” or something.

Sorry, I’m not trying to sound like a hardened jaded punk who’s just too cool for burlap sac men inside a physics playground. It’s just that I don’t have the same drive or desire to play the game like I use to. There’s been so much footage of gameplay shown that I kind of feel like this is a game that my friends have had for months and I just haven’t gotten around to picking it up yet. When it finally is released what difference does it make if I wait a couple weeks or months before I finally get around to it.

*Unless you also wanted a blu-ray player, in which case it’s not that hard.

After some prodding from a friend I finally got of my ass and decided to track down a copy of the pre-order bonus for Metal Gear Solid 4: Metal Gear Saga Vol. 2. Now, I looked and it doesn’t seem like I chronicled my experiences with obtaining Vol. 1 of the Saga, so I’ll give a brief story on how it came about.

About six months after New Orleans was ravaged by hurricane Katrina I was back in the city living in a hotel room paid for by my job. This hotel room was about a 30 min walk from a GameStop in a mall. The next closest GameStop was over an hour drive, and most others had been shutdown. When I found out that MGS3: Subsistance was being released I knew I had to get a copy. The thing of it was that you had to be one of the few early pre-orders not only to get the collectors edition of the game (with the MSX ports of the very first non-Solid MG games), but you also had to be there on like day-1 when the Metal Gear Saga Vol. 1 discs were handed out. Now for myself this wasn’t much of an issue, but it did involve a lot of constant tracking and calling to make sure I didn’t miss this.

Shortly after I had figured out my plan on obtaining these my friend Andrew Toups (living not to far away in Lafayette) called and said that he needed help because he couldn’t get a copy of either the special edition or MG Saga Vol. 1 in his town. So I now had to figure out how to do this for two copies of the game and the bonus. It was quite a bit of work, but I managed to get both of them in perfect condition and was quite pleased with the quality and frank nature of Kojima in Saga Vol. 1.

So, of course, I’m not online as much when the plans are all laid out for Vol. 2, and MG-Online Beta codes are anounced. Luckily I have friends looking out for me and constantly text messaging me about this information, so I was only about a week behind. After the fiasco last time, I figured that being informed a week late meant that I was shit outta luck on this, but I drove out into my new town and spat in the face of bad odds.

After getting to two stores and being told that they’d basically gone through 50+ copies of the pre-order bonus each I didn’t feel like I had good luck on my last hope. When I got there I asked “If I preorder MGS4 do you have any copies of the Metal Gear Saga Vol. 2 discs left.” It felt futile but I had to try. I must have looked desperate–or defeated–because the clerk said “Yes” and asked if it was hard to find or something. I told him about the previous two stores and saw him slyly grab a few copies from behind the counter and put them under it.

Upon getting home I couldn’t hold back and had to watch Saga Vol. 2. I loved the first one with the bold Kojima talking about many of the behind the scenes and early development details I hadn’t heard before. Vol. 2 is not quite the same. It’s more of a re-cap of all of the MGS games focusing on the Snake lineage. Most of the information is told in a very bland and detail-less way by a third party that we haven’t been introduced to. He has a British accent and meets snake for the first time during the events of MGS4. Due to this the whole thing kind of feels watered down in comparison to the first Saga.

Like the first Saga, this comes with all the currently released MGS4 trailers included (Documents of MGS2 has all the trailers for MGS2, and Metal Gear Saga Vol. 1 has all of them for MGS3). I remember when I was at E3 2006 and was completely blown away by the graphics presented to me in that trailer. There were facts like Old Snake’s mustache has more polygons than the PS1 could display at once tossed around that made it seem even less improbable. I kept thinking that when the game was released it wouldn’t look anything like what we were watching in the convention center in LA.

Not too long ago I was going through my Documents of MGS2 disc and noticed that the very early trailers for MGS2 actually looked worse than the final product did, and I remember thinking that those looked gorgeous coming from the PS1 era of games. So I started to think, perhaps that MGS4 trailer isn’t all bullshit after all. Now, watching it again almost two years since I saw it last I realize that not only are those graphics going to be what we see in game, they’re not as impressive as they were before. Watching what I see now I relize that a lot has changed in the face of gaming. Being bombarded with fantastic looking visuals from games like Gears of War, Bioshock, and Uncharted leave me feeling a bit more complacent about how MGS4 is going to look, and that’s a good thing.

Getting a bit more back on track, I just wanted to comment that the Metal Gear Saga Vol. 2 disc is no where near as good or interesting as the first one. If it weren’t for the Metal Gear Online Beta code I got with it I probably would have felt like I had wasted some time.

Though, I wouldn’t have you know. Because it would have bugged me forever that I didn’t end up picking it up.

So, I’m not dead, vanished or anything. I’m just in a bit of a game slump and I’m still moving into my new house. There’s going to be a large announcement about The Gamer’s Quarter very soon, so keep your eyes open for that.

The new house is really fantastic, and part of what it’s allowed me is access to all of my videogame items. Since mid-November last year I’ve only had access to some of my videogame consoles which I brought with me while staying with my parents for a while. I also didn’t have nearly full access to a television* which hindered not only my game time in general, but also majorly effected the flow of my gameplay so I found many things not as enjoyable as normal. I did fall back in love with PC gaming since that time and greatly explored its realms.

With the access (and organization) to all of my retro gaming items, I was dearly looking over my PS1 collection with shockingly loving memories. The irony in this is that the early years of CD-ROM based 32bit gaming is a pretty bad memory for me. During that time I thought an awful trend was started that has unfortunately continued: putting graphics over games. Some really awful tripe was concocted during those years in the early nineties, and even as a kid I could tell that it was tarnishing what I considered games. But when I picked up my copy of Mega Man Legends I saw that it was just a rough spot that I’d despised for so long and shouldn’t effect the actual gems of the bunch.

It seems as though I’m not alone in my fond nature of the good items in that early 3D history, everyone else is too. After reading an article at I looked at some of my favorite games being up there with top sellers. I know there are many others that didn’t make that list and are still worth much more than the $10 copies I was finding in used game stores no less than two years ago. It seems that the first generation of Sony’s consoles games is ripe for harvesting. Not that I say this in a greedy way, in fact I’m a bit sad that I didn’t finish up my collection sooner.

This same price hike happen with the Dreamcast before I finished my collection, and it’s been slow work since games like Bangaioh moving from commonly seen at $10 new to over $50 in disc only condition. I feel stupid for missing on this and it just means harder work for me in the future. Part of me wants to say “who cares” in a much more digital age where these things are a mouse click away. The other half misses opening a package with a game and a loving manual in it.

These are strange times in gaming for me, and I think that the pricing of the PS1 is one of the signs. So in these moments of slight grief I turn something I never in my wildest dreams imagined I’d say, World of Warcraft with friends now distant from me. I leave you with the best picture in my collection of my wife and I playing together:

* which didn’t suck