Square Enix Wants a New Final Fantasy Every Year

If Call of Duty and Assassin's Creed can make big money with yearly installments, so can Final Fantasy, says Square Enix.

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The DTOID Show: EA Lawsuits, NFL Blitz, & New
Releases

Hey gang! It's Monday again, so here's The Destructoid Show. (Seriously, I have completely run out of ways to introduce episodes.)

Today, we talk about the week's releases, EA getting sued for being jerks again (seriously, I hate to keep harping on it, but they keep doing bad stuff!) Saints Row The Third has a bonus offer for PS3 users, and Square Enix is opening a new studio in Montreal. Finally, we're having a sick contest for some Astro Gaming A40 Saints Row The Third headphones. Watch the show for details!

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More Lady Gaga coming to Dance Central 2 tomorrow

More Dance Central 2 DLC is on the horizon and tomorrow's bounty brings more Lady Gaga tunes to shake your groove thing to. "Edge of Glory" and "Marry the Night" from her recent album Born this Way will be available for 240 MS points each.

I really should grab Dance Central 2. I mean, if I'm going to listen to dance music and get funky in my living room, it would be wise to make it look as though I had a reason to do it when I get caught.

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Counter-Strike: GO closed beta going live on
November 30

Did you get your hands on a beta key for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive? Go you! You'll be able to play soon enough. Next Wednesday, November 30 is when Valve plans to initiate the closed beta.

The company has been quick to say it's looking for specific feedback from the CS community, so this should be a good opportunity for long-time players to give feedback that could ultimately shape this game. The beta's map rotation is going to consist of Dust and Dust2. Right.

Counter-Strike Global Offensive closed beta set to GO on November 30 [PC Gamer]

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Info on GameStop game streaming service surfaces

GameStop is in the works to jump into the game streaming business. As reported back in August, the service is currently in beta and scheduled for a 2012 launch. GameStop VP Mike Mauler has detailed today what they plan to do with the service:

In terms of a service, the consumer has to have bought the game, so we're not looking at a service where you can just play games in the cloud, you would buy the game through our loyalty program and through a partnership with the publishers we would give them an opportunity to possibly - this is still something we're working out - to be able to play their game when they're not at home with their Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3.

The way this would work starting off is GameStop would put accompanying supplements inside of the case that the consumer could then use to play the game when they're away from their PS3 or Xbox 360. Maybe this is why GameStop was quick to pull the OnLive codes from Deus Ex: Human Revolution copies when Square Enix tried the same thing earlier this year. Perhaps GameStop didn't want this to catch on until they themselves had their streaming service up and running?

GameStop streaming service detailed [Shacknews]

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Flyrule is a trippy, beatastic album of Zelda
remixes

I thought I was done sharing Zelda music for the rest of the year. Then someone on NeoGAF posts this thing called Flyrule, and I'm pulled back into the cycle.

Beatsmith Shag took a few tracks from Ocarina of Time, switched up the tempo and rhythm, added a drum beat, and sampled some choice in-game sound effects, and the result is a very mellow, trip hop interpretation of the N64 classic. The remixes are technically basic, but Shag hit the sweet spot -- not too simple, not overproduced. It's the kind of music you play in the background when you just want to chill with the boys on a Sunday afternoon, and I totally dig it.

I've embedded "Twinrova Theme," my favorite song from the album, after the jump. Check it out, then give the rest of the album a listen. Just don't play the bonus track if you have any sharp implements in your immediate vicinity. You'll see what I mean.

Flyrule [Bandcamp]

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Jak and Daxter in HD

Naughty Dog's Jak and Daxter series is coming to PS3 with the usual HD bells and whistles.

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Metal Gear Solid And The Uncommon In The Common

I'm going to send you a love letter, my dear. Do you know what that is? It's a bullet straight from my gun to your heart." -- Sniper Wolf

I just published this Edge column about how I think it's important for designers and writers to remember to consider audiences who don't think the way they do. A lot of times people tell me they don't get why the MGS series is my favorite, so I'm finally going to try to tell you.
It's so important to my work in games writing to stay relevant and current. Oh well! Today, I want to talk about the original Metal Gear Solid.
I find it unfortunately impossible to replay these days, as it falls into the weird, choppy adolescence of the PlayStation era. I can't reconcile the precision of the gameplay with the rough look, and certain methods of moving and aiming that became more streamlined in later iterations are no longer intuitive to me. I love old games -- in fact, I often prefer them -- and I am obsessed with the tech driving new ones, but things that fall in between tend to displace me, no matter how much I liked them when they were current.
(Sidenote: I had a similar experience when I got Resident Evil: Code Veronica from Xbox Live Arcade -- as it's far and away my favorite Resident Evil, I was psyched to revisit it, only to wonder how the hell I ever managed to navigate that game with a character that controls like a tank).
Unfortunately, the excellent Twin Snakes remake is only on GameCube and I don't have oneanymore. But between Twin Snakes and original MGS1, I've played the game enough times to have indelible memories, which are only reinforced by the fact the characters, scenes and themes of MGS1 scaffold the rest of the series to come, and reflect themselves in every installment.
Actually, to a certain extent it was 1987's original Metal Gear that established certain key conventions: The unarmed infiltration mission where equipment needs to be procured on site; the necessity of rescuing a scientist; warring factions, and war weaponry so powerful it could destabilize the world.
By the time the series reaches its fourth game, it becomes so strange, a lattice of decades (Snake's first outing was actually in 1987, in the original Metal Gear). By MGS4, it's as much a game about video games as it is about Snake, his clone brothers and the morality of war. Hopefully in the coming days I'll get to explain what I mean by that bit in a way that finally satisfies me.
But the original Metal Gear Solid doesn't really indicate that degree of ambition. It seems, on its face, to be a sort of dewy-eyed homage to the sort of action and espionage films Kojima is known to admire, and owes a lot of its tone and style to them. Solid Snake's character design appears to owe more than a small debt to such stuff; he has the look of Kurt Russell's Snake Plissken from Escape from New York (the eyepatch comes later).
Recall that MGS1 released into a time when cutscenes, particularly FMV, were very much in vogue. This was when people my age used to bring friends home from school just to show them opening cinematics. It was exciting -- "it's just like a movie," was a common refrain, and at the time that wasn't a negative. We felt awed.
The idea at the time was that if only technology caught up a little bit, games could become great works of spectacle, capable of the same kind of emotional impact and thrill that our favorite films could provide. So a game that aimed more toward filmic narrative, with lots of dialogue and character, plentiful cinematics and scenes of dramatic, playable showdowns was very much in keeping with the appetites of the time.
Except even then, MGS was ambitious. To some extent, the series always reached beyond what players expected -- even beyond what they necessarily wanted. The most important convention established by the original Metal Gear is the idea that those who employ you, those who you trust for leadership, may turn out to be your greatest enemy.
Pulling that off relied on a pretty basic video game concept: All gamers know that a "boss" is "that guy you fight at the end". But it'd been a long time since we asked, boss of whom?
In Metal Gear, you learn that your boss --who gives you orders in the game -- is your final enemy, your Big Boss. Big Boss is his name and none will ever know otherwise for years to come.
Not an especially creative naming convention. In fact, it's straight up weird and it stays that way: The bad guys of Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake include Big Boss, Running Man, Black Color, Red Blaster and Ultra Box. That's only marginally less blunt than a Mega Man. And, I mean, I haven't even made fun of the name "Solid Snake" yet.
What's weird is that those naming conventions, relics of the late 80s, persisted with the launch of MGS1 nearly ten years later. As credits roll over MGS1s' cinematic intro and Colonel Campbell describes Snake's elaborate counter-terrorism mission, it's a funny note: FOXHOUND's demands include the remains of someone whose name is apparently still Big Boss.
It's as if despite Kojima's excitement about taking advantage of new technology to bring his strange film-hybrid gaming vision one step closer to life, there were some old school concepts he clung to -- and one would be hard-pressed to blame a lack of creativity, as we'll see later. Was it that he couldn't be bothered to reinvent those concepts, or that he had a use for them?
One would have to guess the latter. MGS1 became better known for its bosses than for the particulars of its plot; probably that game's slate of unusual major confrontations remains its defining trait. The succession of Decoy Octopus, Vulcan Raven, Sniper Wolf and Psycho Mantis demonstrates precious little more innovation on the naming side; just like most MGS characters, they get a basic title (the adjective-animal conjunction is particular to members of the FOXHOUND unit). They don't sound very interesting, and yet they are.
When Kirk Hamilton and I did The FFVII Letters, we discussed how simple abstractions can become extremely affecting in context, because they leave us room to fill in our imaginations. Generally we do learn about the personal histories of Snake's enemies and their motivations as we guide him to engage with each -- but one of the singularly interesting things about the MGS games is that the gameplay itself is always an abstraction of the story.
The battle with Sniper Wolf, for example, thematically reflects who the woman is. We learn she became a sniper so that she could exact her revenge for the traumas she suffered in the center of a warzone. The battle of marksmen against her is staged in an open snowfield, where distance and precision are paramount and cover is scarce. The player feels vulnerable, and and the tenuous balance between stalking Wolf to becoming her one-bullet prey is anxious. Most people who play that scene fall silent, breath held.
It's not just cerebral, unusual boss design for its time. The quiet tension of the fight, the footfalls crunched into the snow, the distance from rarely-glimpsed Sniper Wolf herself, and the eerie, lonesome howls of the wolves with which she keeps company are an excellent reflection of her spirit. She is being characterized by the player's gun combat against her, quite rare in games about war. It doesn't really matter what her name is. She's illustrated through the player's experience.
But of course, even people I've met who dislike Metal Gear games remember Psycho Mantis. The most sinister of the FOXHOUNDs, the spectre of his influence haunts the player throughout the game -- a black-clad telekinetic who wears a mask to keep out the thoughts of others, and to veil his face from the burns he sustained after his fear of his father woke his aggression and he incinerated his hometown.
The character is creepy enough, but in another breach with what's perceived to be his obsession with imitating movies, Kojima used Psycho Mantis to famously break the fourth wall between the game and the player. The fight with Mantis is designed so that the player genuinely feels like his game hardware is on the fritz; Mantis can even "read" data from games on other memory cards and report back to the player on what he or she appears to like. Ultimately Mantis can "cause" Snake to defy the player's controller inputs -- to beat him, you have to become "invisible" to him by plugging your controller into the second port.
It's a fun trick now, good for old-school anecdotes; many would consider having experienced it once to be crucial to a well-curated gaming background. But back then, it was revelatory. As with the rest of MGS's boss design, Psycho Mantis' ability to pass through Snake and "invade" the player's space used design to illustrate the character.
In that respect MGS could be said to hold onto some of the primitive traditions of earlier games just so that it could subvert them. Since when did the sprite with a life bar and the word BOSS and little else to recommend him get to express himself through game design in the way that Wolf, Raven and Mantis get to do?
That approach to designing all of the interactions in Metal Gear Solid games -- making them innovative from the design side in a way that gave those moments expressivity from the character side -- is one of the things that especially sets the series apart, and it was MGS1 that defined it.
Best of all, those boss fights characterize Snake, too -- or, they let the player characterize Snake. Who is this ultimate soldier? His world is full of people who think they know, allies and enemies alike, and no one ever seems to be right. Or they all are, to some degree, with the deciding vote cast by the player's concept and play style. Vulcan Raven predicts that Snake will never get respite from war, always haunted by the spirits of his enemies. He'll be shown right a decade later.
That common complaint about the cutscenes, like the director is divorced from the value of interactivity? I advise anyone who thinks that to consider MGS1 more closely.
Throughout MGS, every character and boss reveals to you the ways their childhood and their relationships with family or lack thereof shaped their lens on war and informed their actions. At the end of the game, Snake learns where he himself comes from: He, like his rival, Liquid, are "sons" -- direct copies, more like -- of Big Boss. Isn't it interesting to think of your ultimate rival as your original progenitor, an ending that's a beginning?
Hang onto that idea of begin and end. The series comes right back round to it. Meta. I love meta.
More soon.

Read The Full Article:
http://sexyvideogameland.blogspot.com/2011/11/metal-gear-solid-and-uncommon-in-co
mmon.html

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Zelda Week: Fear Itself

_{[Destructoid recently held Zelda Week to help count down to the release of Skyward Sword. The game is now out, and while you're enjoying it, take a look at all these blogs our community members wrote about the Zelda franchise. Our first promoted blog on this topic is from Noir, whose discusses his first experience to the Zelda universe through Majora's Mask. -- JRo]}

Many people's first Legend of Zelda game was Ocarina of Time or A Link to the Past, but me? Majora's Mask stole my Zelda virginity. I remember seeing a trailer with this kid putting on masks that made caused him to go through a painful looking transformation into something else. I remember a boss that commanded a swarm of moths, an insane looking man with masks, an even more insane looking moon, and of course the enigmatic Majora's Mask itself. I don't know where I saw this trailer, I still can't find it to this day. I know I had to have the game after seeing it though, even if those eyes filled me with terror.

As a child I was frightened of Majora's Mask. I didn't want to look at it, doing so filled me with anxiety. I thought I would die just from looking at those massive eyes that stare endlessly into the depths of my soul. I was also fascinated by them though, so I asked my parents to rent it for me. I even got an Expansion Pak just for it, which became another useless peripheral a week later. The point is that I needed this game, the odd nature of it just drawn me to it. It wasn't like my other games. It wasn't bright and light hearted like Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards or Banjo-Tooie, no. This game was different and I could feel it in my bones. Mind you, I was only about 8 years old at this time. I only had a few N64 games and they were mostly happy, child friendly games rated E for Everyone by the young ESRB system.

So I eventually acquired this accursed game and my standards were met. The game starts up again and there it is, the epitome of my nightmares - Majora's Mask. This was before I played any actual horror games, so I was easily scared by something as simple as a mask. Resident Evil 3's Nemesis and the psychological horror of Silent Hill wasn't something I was aware of at this point. Majora's Mask was my definition of fear, but that didn't stop me from playing the game. This "thing" was all over the game, seeing it was practically unavoidable if you wanted to play the game so I pressed on.

The beginning of Majora's Mask is better than any Zelda game when it comes to hooking the player and forcing them to explore. Your horse is stolen by a masked kid who curses you, turning you into a Deku scrub. After that you encounter the disturbing Happy Mask Salesman who may seem a bit too happy despite his predicament. No. He's not happy, not happy at all. He's downright pissed, pissed off to the point where he snatches up Link and shakes him repeatedly. Then your quest to defeat Majora's Mask begins in Termina. It's like an acid trip that ends with "Where am I? Why do I look like this?" and you're forced to find out who's fault it is.

In every other Zelda game the first ten minutes of the game is fairly peaceful and light hearted, awful things just don't happen one after another. Majora's Mask isn't like that though, it beginning pushes the situation from bad to worse and doesn't care how you feel. Then you're finally faced with the fact that the moon is going to crash down on Termina and annihilate everything in sight, including you. This moon...it has the same beating eyes that filled me with the same dread that Majora's Mask did. It was an unstoppable force that continually looked down on you during the entire game with those eyes because it knew you couldn't stop it.

You're able to reverse time fairly early in the game, but I was not a smart child so I never got that far when I had this game. Thus I was faced with this feeling of dread that everything was going to be destroyed, everything I was doing felt purposeless. I made my way around Clock Town, but was never able to stop the destruction. This was before I had access to the vast internet, so I grew mad at the game for forcing an impossible task on me. It was at least six years before I played the game again, but in that time I still thought about it from time to time. It was merely a rental (that I for some reason never bought), but I'd say it affected me more than any of the other games on the N64.

Eventually I did beat Majora's Mask, with a little help from the internet, and all was right with the world. As a teenager I had journeyed through Majora's Mask and discovered that it was a dark game in ways I didn't know. The citizens of Clock Town all had their own stories, along with everyone else in the vast land of Termina. The apocalyptic situation I had on my hands seemed even worse after learning of the problems around Termina, many of which were caused by the mask wearing Skull Kid. Skull Kid's story is one of the grimmest out there despite seeming to be the mastermind behind everything. Skull Kid was originally a child who wanted to have fun, but that desire was twisted into a form of destructive behavior after being controlled by Majora's Mask. At that point Skull Kid becomes a puppet, though he retains his mischievous personality.

Skull Kid himself represents what the Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask truly is. It is a twisted reincarnation of a children's game that presents itself as a dark and nightmarish experience. Behind the mask Majora's Mask is not as bad as an M-rated horror game, but the mask it dons still manages to make itself appear menacing. As a child this mask is all that appears and that's what I saw. While I wouldn't say that Majora's Mask as a game and an object has scarred me, but it's done something definitely. It thrust me into the Zelda series, imbued in me a love for the strange, and made me wish I had a replica of Majora's Mask itself in my home. As long as it remains out of sight most of the time!

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Modded Skylanders toys are even MORE awesome

I haven't gotten around to playing Skylanders yet, but I dig the concept. You collect little figurines then zap them into the game? Brilliant! And when you aren't playing the game, you can play around with the figures by themselves? Wonderful! It's a shame the toys aren't poseable, though...

DAH DAH DAH DAAAAAAAH! Here comes the enterprising toy modder to the rescue!

Jin Saotome, whose mods we've showcased in the past, has snatched up a few Skylanders figures and set about adding points of articulation to them. The results are marvelous, making you wonder why Toys For Bob didn't do this in the first place. As with his other mods, he'll be putting some of his creations up on eBay -- Chop Chop is already on the auction block.

So Jim, how much money would you spend on fully articulated Skylanders toys?

Articulated Skylanders, Spyro's Adventure figures [Jin Saotome's Dangerous Toys!] (Nice find, Nick!)

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