The Gamer's Quarter

[dessgeega]

"you believe in coincidence?

i believe in conspiracy."

- roy campbell

the gameboy color had an exceptionally neat run. it's closest to the famicom / nes in aesthetics, but its games were developed in the post-16-bit era of design. there are some very intelligent, very interesting games on this platform with the same warm charm that's so attractive in 8-bit titles.

after 1998's metal gear solid brought the series back into public consciousness, development began on the first portable metal gear game. it would be called "metal gear: ghost babel", though it would be released as "metal gear solid" in north america and europe - regions that had largely been deprived of the msx computer and the previous metal gear sequel which had appeared on it.

ghost babel, on the gameboy color, would resemble that 2d msx game in design, though it would be produced in the knowledge of all that metal gear solid had brought to the series in its 1998 update. the results are something like a metal gear solid that plays more like an 8-bit or 16-bit game and less like a self-conscious multimedia extravaganza.

ghost babel is a side-story to the game that, in the west, shares its title. in this world, the events of metal gear 2, and of metal gear solid's shadow moses island, have never happened. seven years ago, solid snake was sent into outer heaven to destroy metal gear and the enemy commander - who turned out to be none other than the leader of his own unit, big boss. this is where the stories diverge - big boss dominates the metal gear solid series; in ghost babel, he is a footnote. this is a new story.

through his victory at outer heaven, solid snake receives fame and celebrity. he is branded "the legend" and trotted out as a national hero. wanting none of this, and disgusted at what he was forced to do in outer heaven, snake flees to alaska, where he lives alone in a house built with his own two hands. the years pass quietly, until, seven years after the metal gear incident, roy campbell appears on his doorstep.

campbell brings news, and a mission that snake is prepared to reject: in a flight to south america for field testing, a new metal gear - developed by american engineers who quietly continued the project following the destruction of the original - has been hijacked by the gindran liberation front, a central african revolutionary group. the group is demanding peacekeeping forces be withdrawn from their native gindra. the metal gear is operational and nuclear armed, secured in a fortress known as galuade.

snake is unmoved. but campbell has one more thing to say: the fortress galuade, in older days, was known as "outer heaven". there is metal gear in outer heaven again.

"you believe in coincidence?" says roy cambell. "i believe in conspiracy."

solid snake accepts the mission: infiltrade galuade, rescue the metal gear developers, who are being held hostage, and destroy metal gear. he will be working alongside the army's delta force, who have already been dispatched to the central african nation. and in doing so, he hopes to confront his past, and to bury the demons that have been chasing him for seven years.

ghost babel is like metal gear solid, and it's not. metal gear solid is like a parade of scenes: now, you are watching a movie, now you are sneaking through a carefully-constructed setpiece, now a codec conversation, now a boss fight. though the game describes itself as "tactical espionage action", the actual stealth scenes are short and subservient to the larger story hideo kojima wants to tell. they are small, infrequent setpieces, rich in detail, but not the heart of the game, which is the cackling boss monologues, the sniper battles, the artfully shot cutscenes, the fistfights with your brother on top of a machine of death in blood-red light.

ghost babel, then, is a game about sneaking. it is not as forward-thinking as metal gear solid, which concerns itself with how to take advantage of the new medium of cd-based console games; it is, rather, backward-thinking, concerning itself with how best the sneaking mechanics around which the metal gear series is based can be developed, implemented, and focused.

it is deliberately videogamey, where metal gear solid tries its best to be not. where solid tries to present the illusion of a continuous world, ghost babel divides itself into stages - which minimalizes back-tracking and keeps the story always moving forward. where solid tries to provide intelligent opponents, who will hear your footsteps or follow your prints in the snow to your location, ghost babel's guards are predictable, following deliberate patterns - making it easy to know where you should be and where you shouldn't, what a window of opportunity is, allows you to trust and abide by your player's instincts.

when i play a metal gear solid game, i can rarely pass a room without being discovered, and so i tend to run right through, guns blazing. the solid games are designed to accomodate this play style - it's kojima's story and ideas that are important, after all, and the game wouldn't dream of depriving the player of seeing them. in ghost babel (which was directed by shinta nojiri), on the other hand, i play deliberately, i watch enemy patterns, i run when i see my opening, and there is a real fear of discovery. being discovered feels like a failure. and you can die because of it.

it is a good game, with smart level design, in which the mechanics the game introduces are actually developed throughout the course of the levels - whereas in metal gear solid they feel as though they're only trotted out to draw attention to how clever they are.

it also has a fine plot with some compelling villians. i recommend reading every line aloud as if you were david hayter. there are also some clever moments, which i am unable to spoil. but here's a neat detail for those who have played metal gear solid 2: the protagonist of the v.r. training missions is named "jack".

there's also a multiplayer mode, which i have played. it takes advantage of the dual-screen nature of handheld multiplayer - each player can only see her opponent if she is within her field of vision. multiplayer requires the gameboy color's infrared sensor to play, so it's not a game that gets a lot of play anymore.

you can get this game for less than usd20 on the internets, probably for even lower if you look harder, and, in conclusion, everyone should buy this game and post in this thread as they play through it. also use this thread to post about tactical espionage games in general.
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[Lestrade]

[Lestrade]

I'm at work now, and I keep talking to myself as David Hayter. I have to give a client presentation in half an hour; maybe I should do that as such too?

"This website has... Metal Gear!?"

[table_and_chair]

I must confess. My only real problem with Ghost Babel, and actually probably a large reason I stopped picking it up recently, was that after a time when you enter the codec to save the game instead of getting a little story she just kept repeating the same line about einstein or something, over and over. The game ran out of text?

I understand that is a bit solipsistic but I guess those little stories were a large part of why I felt confident with the game as a whole. Until then though, the play mechanics were rad and some locations were nigh on beautiful.

[dessgeega]

you save too often, i guess? really, there's no reason to call mei-ling more than once per stage, unless you're playing on a train.

i got the impression mei-ling gives you one quote per stage, and if you call after that she just tells you "good luck!" or something.

the real story is finding out what happened to weasel's brother.
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[table_and_chair]

I will take your advice and try again.

[Shapermc]

My problem with this game is more rooted in the fact that you can just keep running through the first level and never have to interact with, or do anything. I mean, it doesn't feel like a MG game in the slightest because of this. So I admit to never getting much past the first level because nothing seemed good/interesting to me. You put up a compelling argument Dess, but I just don't buy it.
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[table_and_chair]

Well, I can't speak for dessgeega, but for myself Ghost Babel actually reminded me of Boktai or a rough draft version of it and I accepted it as that instead, amused. The music is pretty similar too.

[Dracko]

[Harveyjames]

I like the Game Boy Color remake of Super Mario Bros. It's got a really neat mode where you can go back over the levels you've already played and hunt down 5 red coins, ala Mario 64. It's a welcome addition, but the game is sadly crippled by the reduced screen size. It's got all sorts of Gameboy Printer functionality, too.

It's a funny piece of hardware, the Game Boy Color. My ex-girlfriend had a Pokemon Pikachu Pedometer which would reward you with delicious berries for the on-screen Pikachu every 10,000 steps you took in real life. But you could even store up the berries and send them to your Gameboy color copy of Pokemon via a little-used infra-red sensor under the screen. It was some crazy shit to be walking around town with my girlfriend and then being told she'd just earned a Pokemon berry.

[Crazy Bacon Lips]

[dessgeega]

[Isfet]

i bought this game a few years ago off of eBay, but it ended up being Nintondo. when i figured that out, i sort of lost all desire to keep playing the game. i don't know why, because that's a dumb reason to stop playing it. but...it happened.

[Harveyjames]

We need to do a profile feature on Nintondo and their CEO, Satoro Iwota. He would be a gap-toothed smelly oik wearing an Iwata wig and glasses.

[Lestrade]

Episode 53 of the Konami Production Report features Ghost Babel director Shinta Nojiri!

[not a zombie]

Playing Ghost Babel behind a book in detention was meta as hell.

[GSL]

[JamesE]

There's an alternate Donkey Kong mission once you beat the game, greatest times. I recall the introduction dragging out forever, though.
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[dessgeega]

the introduction is super duper long. however, it doesn't play in-game. it appears in the attract mode, and you can skip it with the touch of a button if you just want to play, and come back to it at your leisure.
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[dongle]

Shinta Nojiri talks about Metal Gear for GBC and his work on the AC!D games.