Sam's video game collection essentials

Here’s a series of PS2 JRPGs by little-known, long-defunct company Sacnoth, which had been formed from former Square employees. Their first game was a PS1 RPG called Koudelka, one that I used to own, but I didn’t care for it too much. Shadow Hearts was a follow-up to Koudelka, very different and not requiring players to have experienced it beforehand, but with plenty of connections to please fans of it. These games are based in a fictionalized version of the real world from the early 20th century, with supernatural elements like real magic and fantasy creatures.  Shadow Hearts games for the most part play like a normal JRPG, but as you’d probably hope, there are things that help it stand out. The biggest and most obvious is the “Judgement Ring” that you’ll constantly be using to execute actions. When performing an attack in battle, as well as certain actions outside of battle, a disc-like object appears on the screen. A sweeping line appears across half the disc starting in the cen...

Here’s a rather unique game from Sega that’s going to be a challenge to describe, and one you’ll have to try for yourself to really understand. Rez is a game described as a “music rail shooter”.  Rez is light on story, and a lot of it is simply found in the instruction manual. Basically, you’re trying to hack into a malfunctioning AI system called Eden in order to fix it. Gameplay takes place in cyberspace, which has all kinds of trippy visuals, giving this game an element of its distinct style. This is an on-rails shooter comparable to Sega’s own Panzer Dragoon, where you control a crosshair on the screen (rather than the actual present player character) which you move around to try and shoot down enemies and their bullets before they can hit you. Gameplay is fairly straightforward, as you try to survive waves of enemies and then destroy the data node at the end of each one, eventually fighting a boss at the end of each area. In order to post a good high score, a player must shoot...

This game sucks. (But not in the usual way) One of the appeals of playing video games is getting to be and do things you can’t be or do in real life. Have you ever considered what it’d be like to be…a mosquito?!? The developers of this game did, and decided to give it a pinch of Japanese weirdness to create a rather amusing game. This game is about a mosquito who finds himself in the home of the Yamada family. And, as you’d probably expect in a game about being a mosquito, the objective is to suck the blood of the Yamadas. Each level involves the Yamada family going about their business around the house, while you fly around and try to do your thing without being detected. Certain parts of the Yamadas’ bodies will be vulnerable to some blood-sucking at specific times, and sometimes you’ll have to even manipulate the environment somehow to get them in the state that you want them in. Once you’re “locked in” on the skin, you must rotate the right analog stick at a certain speed.  It’...

Metal Gear Solid 2 was a huge game with a heck of a story, but one thing it clearly did not deliver was a finale that left a ton of closure. Anyone who finished the game could tell that there was more Metal Gear to come. But, interestingly, instead of making a sequel, the next Metal Gear Solid would instead be a prequel set decades earlier. This time you play as an agent named Naked Snake, who later in the timeline came to be known as “Big Boss”. The main character of Metal Gear Solid, Solid Snake, was a genetic clone from Big Boss’s DNA, so in this game Naked Snake looks and sounds pretty much identical to the Solid Snake we’re familiar with. The game takes place during a fictional alternate reality during the Cold War, as Naked Snake starts out by undertaking a stealth mission in the U.S.S.R. Right off the bat, many gameplay differences in this game are apparent. The setting of the game is very different, as this game primarily takes place in the great outdoors, with Naked Snake trav...

Metal Gear Solid had made a huge splash on the original PlayStation. Then, Metal Gear Solid 2 was a major early title for the PlayStation 2. And Xbox owners would receive a port of the game a year later. But aside from a spinoff Game Boy Color title, Nintendo was missing out on all this Metal Gear action. They wouldn’t be getting a port of 2 (the GameCube controller arguably doesn’t have enough buttons for it), but instead they wound up getting their own exclusive Metal Gear Solid game for the GameCube. The details don’t seem 100% clear on how this game was conceived and planned, but Nintendo helped make sure that Konami made a Metal Gear game for their GameCube. And since they were already busy working on the third Metal Gear Solid title, developer Silicon Knights would step in and do most of the work on this project. This turned out to be Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, which is basically Metal Gear Solid 1 reimagined with the graphical quality and gameplay elements of Metal Gear ...

And now for what I consider one of the greatest video games ever made. Metal Gear Solid on the original PlayStation had recently set a new bar for cinematic-style storytelling in games, with a gripping plot, interesting characters, and fully-voiced dialogue. But it was still limited in some aspects by the PlayStation’s hardware limitations, which is incredibly evident if you so much as look at the faces of the characters. With the new and much-more-powerful PS2, there was so much more potential. And Konami wasn’t going to waste time making their big new Metal Gear Solid sequel (which everyone knew was coming due to a hint at the very end of the previous game). The game first released on PS2 only in November of 2001 under the title “Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty”. A year later, an updated version called “Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance” came out for the Xbox, which added new content, most notably dozens of “VR missions” for people who enjoy gameplay which contribute many hours of pl...