I recently resumed playing through Metal Gear Solid HD Collection and had just started Metal Gear Solid 3 when I noticed something was missing. MGS3 is an incredibly deep game, but after you've beaten it there isn't much to do… unless you thoroughly explore each area Snake walks through, at which point you realize the game is teaming with details. Much of it is the animals you can capture or eat along with the special items you may not have found the first time through the game.

Metal Gear Solid 2 allowed you to capture the dog tags off enemy soldiers in order to earn special items, such as the stealth camouflage or infinite ammo, and had a viewer built into the game so you could track your progress. It was a nice way to see how much extra stuff you could find and pick up as you replayed the game.

MGS3 has nothing like that, so its a surprise to discover there is far more secret stuff to find. In MGS3 eating every animal you find, as well as shooting every single hidden frog coin bank in the game, will unlock special items. There's also additional secrets such as weapons or camouflage sprinkled throughout the game.

Now unfortunately, because MGS3 is linear this means you can't simply play to the last boss and then backtrack through the entire game to pick up stuff you missed; you really have to remember it as you play through. Unless you're sitting down with an FAQ or other guide in front of you as you play, this isn't really possible. As much as I love MGS3 it takes about 18 hours to play through, and most people won't feel like replaying the entire game because they missed some item ten hours in.

Years ago as I sought to alleviate this issue and to learn Adobe In Design I created a fairly short PDF which had a check list for all special items and things in the game, as well as a listing of every location in the order you visit it in the game with a summary of the unique stuff to do in that area. This included unique animals to kill and eat and the location of the frog. To get that information I copied the works of two guides on GameFAQs that told you the locations of all frogs and animals. The frog guide (whose sentences I copied verbatim) was MangaMan505's Find the Stupid Frog Guide and the animal one was Vesperas' Markhor Rank Help FAQ. I contacted the authors to get their permission to release the guide but only one ever responded before the trial to In Design expired (making me unable to ever update the PDF), so I never released it (I also pilfered dozens of official Konami images but that's par for course on the internet).

However the guide is so useful that in retrospect it seems like a mistake to not share it, so I'm doing that now. If either one of the GameFAQ authors contacts me with a complaint I'll take it down, but for now I'm going to offer it up in hopes others might also rekindle their love for MGS3.

Download the normal version of the PDF here, and the even more condensed version which contains some embarrassing spelling errors and other nonsense here.

… so why is it every time I start up the system I have to wait for the menu selections to load? Having to load some menu text and icons, isn't that the kind of thing a next-generation, super fast multiprocessor could have helped with?

What I really don't get is the time to load each column of items takes the same regardless of how much time I've spent waiting before that. So for example, I see the super-tiny, no-way anyone without a huge TV can read it text that warning me of the world of hurt I'm about to get myself into, and leave it sitting there for a minute. When I finally hit start, all the menus will still have to load. Isn't that a classical problem that can be solved by running parallel threads of execution? Shouldn't it have already been loading all the menus for everyone (or at least the most frequently accessed account) while I was staring at the warning screen?

I recently got a new, fairly top of the line desktop machine, and was surprised at how pleasant it is to play games on it compared to the newer game systems. I'm a console gamer myself, and one of the biggest reasons to play games on that format historically has been the limited boot up time made it easier to play games on impulse. No logging into accounts, no waiting for Windows, you just put the game in the box, hit the power button and go. However, the new systems - even the Wii - are just so frickin' slow, to the point where a fast computer seems much nicer.

I also got an iPhone recently. My favorite part of it is how buttery smooth the experience is, and also that I can play an intense game like Don Don Pachi, hit the home button, and be looking at emails in roughly a second. That kind of ease of use, and speed to switch between tasks, should be something the newer game consoles strive for, but if I switch between Batman and Pacman Championship Edition DX on the PS3 the process takes several minutes (nearly a minute to start up Pacman and longer to wait for it to load). This has been my biggest pet peeve about the PS3 for awhile, so imagine my surprise to find the PS Vita takes nearly as long to load games as the PS3! Just trying the Vita in a retail store is something you have to commit to since you'll spend a good thirty seconds opening up a game. The fact my iPhone can open up a game faster than either of the two current Sony game systems is shameful. I might get the new bigger 3DS soon; hopefully this problem will not exist on that system.

I wrote my first webpage during the reign of Windows 98, back when the time period and my own inexperience made such a sin excusable. Sure, Front Page would generate a bunch of surplus HTML (newer, hipper tools such as GWT do the same thing) and junk that didn't work on all browsers, but in retrospect it wasn't that bad and the ability to instantly see what the page would look like as I wrote it imbued a level of creativity in my first site which all later iterations have lacked.

One feature I really missed as time went on was being able to quickly preview different fonts to find the one that fit. “Google Font Previewer for Chrome” is a plugin for the Chrome web browser that brings back this ability; it allows you to quickly preview how certain fonts would look on a web page so you can find one you like. It also provides CSS snippets so you can copy and paste the result into your own stylesheet.

This tool is so nice its making me reevaluate every font I've been using on this website. I'd say something like “I don't know how I ever got by without it!” but one look at this page would reveal that for the lie it is since I clearly didn't get by without it. With this tool however there is now hope.

Download the plugin here.

I got this game in seventh grade and quickly beat it. I love it, but found like most JRPGs it was impossible for me to replay since I hate grinding.

A few years ago I moved to a large apartment that had two walk in closets (about four by four feet). The one downstairs was surplus, so I came up with the idea of hooking an outlet into the lightbulb on top, buying a bean bag chair along with a small table on which to put my ancient 20" TV and SNES and turning it into a classic game room. I'm not sure what gave me the inclination (maybe the hype for Mother 3, which had already been out in Japan for a few years) but somehow I started playing Earthbound one day and found myself completely enthralled by it.

I had recreated the perfect environment for replaying SNES games, but the tiny covey seemed made for Earthbound in particular. I remarked to a friend that the graphics honestly looked really nice an old TV, and he responded to me the way I might respond to someone claiming vinyl sounded better. I get that, I really do, but so much of the SNES's appeal just gets lost when you look at the images digitally, with their unnatural rectangular pixels squished into squares.

The best part though was the sound. I piped the SNES into two old computer speakers which for an SNES is impressive. The music in Earthbound is maybe its best feature, which makes sense when you find out the authors sampled and highjacked sources from everywhere - the game is the medium's best case for relaxed copyright restrictions.

As a kid I hated having to level up. I waited forever to buy items and always seemed to have inventory problems. I noticed as an adult these problems were gone- I discovered it was easier to get XP from chasing down fleeing enemies and instantly winning battles than I remembered, and the “for sale” sign (one of the most brilliant features in any RPG ever made) alleviated most inventory problems (maybe as an adult I just found it easier to let go of stuff).

With the incredible amount of attention Earthbound still gets I can see how a lot of people could be turned off to it by now. Honestly I had begun to think it was overrated myself, but after replaying it I honestly appreciate it more now than I did as a kid. Its hard to really articulate what the appeal is, except that Earthbound has a definite sense of place, like its a real world you're inhabiting. Videogames are naturally violent, since there has to be something to fight, and RPGs with their roaming monsters are no exception. However Earthbound still manages to exude warmth, like the Andy Griffith show. Most characters you meet are rooting for you, and even when characters are portrayed as weak, stupid or wicked the game still has empathy for them.

Unfortunately the primary feature of Earthbound which overshadows everything else to people who haven't played today it is how unavailable it is. I'm afraid this, combined with the unrelenting praise of its acolytes, may make the game seem phony and overrated. As someone who vehemently hates piracy, I think this is a game that should be pirated recklessly. Nintendo has pretty much closed the door on ever releasing it in the US again thanks to various infringement issues, so its hard to think who it would harm (there is an argument that by stealing a game you'd be less inclined to pay for a modern RPG, but I'm not sure I've played an RPG in the past ten years that's been worth the hours of my life I put into it, so maybe that's for the best). I also suggest playing it someplace cozy and quite, though if you can't spring for your own game room and real hardware at least use an emulator with a good full-screen NTSC filter and appropriate volume.