I hate print video game magazine. Maybe it's because I haven't been reading the good ones, or maybe it's because I've been soured by the death of NextGen magazine. They're all the same. Gushy hype filled previews and reviews that rehash what you've read on the back of the box plus a score number. Boring. This leads us to Tim Rogers. Tim Rigers is my favourite games jouralist, bar none. Yeah, sure, he's long winded and takes pages to get to the meat, but he sure knows how to entertain while you wait. He's the only gaming journalist that got Metal Gear Solid 2, turning me onto Haruki Murakami in the process. He just posted his retrospective on 2004 which is full of gaming goodies. My favourite bit so far is his take of the Big Metal Gear Solid 3 Secret.
Know this: Hideo Kojima had considered, for the longest time, making Metal Gear Solid 3 impossible to continue. It was his deepest wish. It was more than his deepest wish that the game would not allow you to continue if you died. The game nearly ended up published this way. It would have been completely unknown to the players of the world until the game's release, at which point the "great spoiler" would hit the internet within twenty minutes, freaking the hell out of everyone about as badly as Raiden freaked everyone out. It was Kojima's trump card. It would have been horrible. It would have been terrible. It would have been brilliant. It would have been something else.
To a person who plays videogames more than semi-regularly, it very likely would have been the biggest feat of mischief ever pulled in game design.
It would have gone like this: you can save the game if you want to. After you save, the girl, Para-Medic, talks about a random old movie. When she's finished talking about the old movie, you're told it's okay to turn the game off. You do so. You turn the game on the next day, play a little bit, get careless, get shot, and you die. That's it. You can't continue your saved game; saves are immediately deleted upon being resumed. Play carefully, now.
Imagine would coulda been, eh? Gaming needs more journalists like him.
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