Much like rock stars hate being famous, video game protaganists hate being bad asses. Yeah, it's cool every once in awhile, but just imagine if you had to be a bad ass every single day. Like if it was your job. The strain would be unbearable.

The new Metal Gear Solid 4 US cover art, which is simply a close up of Snake's face, displays that "why must I be such a bad ass?!" angst-filled pathos better than any ten minute cut scene ever could.

Look at those eyes. If the guy was an emo teenager instead of a grizzled war veteran, he'd probably be bawling. Instead, all he can do is grimace and move on. When you're Solid Snake, you don't have time to wallow in your feelings.

The other great thing about this cover is that unlike the much cooler looking Japanese or Europe one, this clearly shows us that the game is 3D. I'd hate for PS3 owners to pass up Metal Gear Solid 4 because they can't figure out it's a 3D videogame and think maybe Sony of America was taking a nap and somehow let an outdated 2D game get released on their state of the art $500 vidcon player.

Hey Sony, that sounds great!

But tell me... does it include the ability to play all of the other Metal Gear Solid games that I already own using something besides crappy emulation that has, as of this writing, a host of officially published issues with the very last Metal Gear game?

Thanks, but never mind. I guess I'll have to eventually spend even more money to buy a used, and increasingly rare version of the PS3 that can actually play PS2 games for a ridiculously high price on e-bay, meaning both of us will get screwed. You idiots.

If you read the commentary on JoyStiq.com, you'll see people saying wonderfully stupid things in anticipation of this deal, such as "100 percent PS1 backwards compatibility, 85 percent PS2 backwards compatibility, DualShock 3 - the best controller this gen(motion sensing plus more advanced rumble than 360 controller)."

The last comment is too easy to pick on so I'll ignore it. What really gets me though is this idea that "85 percent compatability" is somehow good or even acceptable. Its as though people have bought that the software emulation used with the newer PS3's isn't that bad, or that the 15% of broken compatibility won't affect the parts of the game they like. This ignores three things -

1. 85% compatibility is the kind of quality you expect from PC emulators you get for free, not from a year and a half old game system that still costs half a grand.
2. 85% is a figure Sony's concocted using some system they made up from scratch and isn't really good at rating something this subjective - there may even be little issues with MGS2 or other games that Sony decided (without any bias or agenda, of course) wouldn't be worth mentioning.
3. 85% compatibility in an emulator still means its imperfect, which can ruin the experience more than one might initially expect. Imagine if you were watching Silence of the Lambs on a DVD player that would play it "85% perfect," which meant that in some scenes Jody Foster's head vanished for several seconds at a time and in others Hannibal Lecter was brighlty lit instead of being occluded in shadow. It just wouldn't feel the same. It probably wouldn't even be worth watching.

As it is, I want to buy this, but just can't get over this stupid issue Sony introduced in order to save maybe ten dollars or so by omitting the Emotion Engine CPU (legal notice: that figure is unsubstantiated). Sometimes, a man just has to live by his principles.

UPDATE FROM 2008-07-12 - So yeah, I picked this up today. Its pretty good, and I don't need to play Metal Gear Solid 3 on it anyway - that's what my PS2 is for! Plus the Dual Shock 3 has all the functionality of the Wii and its like a Dual Shock, its really the best controller ever invented by man. Also, Blu-Ray, and the online is free which makes it better than X-Box Live. Clearly this is the best system ever created, and I recommend all of you buy one so you can play Metal Gear Online with me. ONE OF US. ONE OF US.

In case anyone hasn't heard, three of the greatest games in the history of the Universe have just been released for $30.

Of course, I'm talking about the Metal Gear Solid Essentials Collection.

I know I talk about Metal Gear a lot on this site. But I think if you are missing even just one of these games, failing to get this package would be a sign of your incompetence.

In case you need convincing, this package includes the hard to find Metal Gear Solid 2 Substance, as well as Metal Gear Solid 3 Subsistence. They didn't include the second (or third, heh heh) discs of the later, which sucks for you if you neglected to get it back then, but this is probably so they can continue to justify keeping Metal Gear Online off-line.

But seriously, the new third person camera in Metal Gear Solid 3 is really wonderful. For whatever reason, I started up a new game last week and was surprised how engrossing it still is - I've already logged in 20 hours. The third-person camera added to Subsistence really adds a lot to it, and it would be a tragic mistake to save a few bucks and get the older version which doesn't have it.

This package looks so stellar I'm considering buying it in spite of all logic to the contrary. I think the only thing keeping me from it, aside from my depressing poverty, is I'm afraid of the kind of person such an action would make me.

I have somewhat of a thing for eccentric games on old hardware. As a result, this made me quite attracted to Adventure II, the home-brewed sequel to the original Atari 26000 game Adventure developed for the Atari 5200. For a long time, the only thing that had kept me from buying an Atari 5200 on e-bay was the fact that the system itself was larger than a tank, and the controllers were legendary pieces of crap.

Well, today I discovered the Redemption 5200, an adapter for the 5200 that lets you use old Genesis controllers instead. This sort of fed the embers of my old desire to get an Atari 5200, and I started thinking about what other games I could get for the system aside from Adventure II if I ever got one.

You see, while other much more powerful and recent homebrew-capable systems such as the Sega Dreamcast get maybe a handful of new commercially released games a year, the old Atari systems somehow get heaping handfuls of original stuff all the time. I think most credit for this should go to the AtariAge store, which in addition to offering publishing for homebrew games has a truly fun site to browse and acts as a central command for all homebrew efforts for the classic Atari systems. I wasn't even a fan of Atari growing up - I viewed my Dad's Atari 2600 as a curiosity, a unfun relic from a bygone era. Yet AtariAge.com sexes up their products so well that I've always been curious enough to want to try some of them out.

The first game I remembered was the Koffi: Yellow Kopter!, which had charmed me years before I'd even seen Adventure II. It stars a yellow helicopter that has to fight storm clouds or something. I'm not really sure how it works, I just know the use of gradients on the box somehow end up looking appealing and the graphics seem lively and colorful.

While looking at Koffi though, I saw an ad for a new Atari 2600 game called Melbourne Tatty. See, the thing is there's a huge number of newly created Atari 2600 games, I mean a truly enormous number, and they all have neat looking cover art and seem pretty original. The only problem is that they're Atari 2600 games, which are usually fun for all of the two minutes I spend playing them before succumbing to an intense and rapid ennui. It's hard to be excited about gaming on a system when all the titles seem to be focused on the inevitability of death.

This game had a more attractive cover than most. More over, it also included an illustrated manual along with sticker cut-outs! Even if this was a crappy game, there was clearly a bit of passion put into it. It was about this time I really began to question all of these new Atari games. How could this many people be pushing out finished Atari 2600 games while newer, more capable homebrew-able systems saw no action?

While Googling for info on Melbourne Tatty I discovered that it was programmed in something called batari Basic. Bitari Basic is a variant of the Basic programming language that compiles to the Atari!

Now batari Basic just came out in Febuary of last year so it offers no explanation as to why the 2600 was already such a popular homebrew console. But the program's webpage offers the following rationale for its existence:

One goal is to attract more developers to the Atari 2600 homebrew scene. The relative ease of programming with batari Basic should have this effect. Before batari Basic, the only way to program the Atari 2600 was via assembly language. Also, the Atari 2600 has such minimal graphics hardware that a software "display kernel" had to be written before anything worthwhile could display on the screen. This made Atari 2600 programming arguably more difficult than any other classic console. With batari Basic, the hard stuff is done for you, and so programming should be more palatable to newcomers. Even those with limited programming experience can write games that will run on an Atari 2600 emulator or a real Atari 2600.

The charming idealism of the batari Basic project comes as close to inspiring me to waste time on my own Atari 2600 game as anything ever could. I have to admit I admire its creators for inventing something that succeeds so well in its goals.