Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes PC edition review

(text in this font is my personal experience playing this game for the first time.)
The game enthusiasts among you are probably very aware of this series but for those who aren't here is a little background info. Metal Gear Solid is a stealth espionage action (with heavy dose of third person shooter thrown in) game series created by Hideo Kojima. It follows the"perfect soldier" in some games and his clone (this is not the sci-fi cloning it's more realistically based) in others. Here's a link to the wikipedia if you want to try and understand the series intricate plot

Ground Zeroes is more or less a glorified demo that sets the stage for mgsv: the phantom pain which will release later this year, now this doesn't necessarily mean that it's a bad game. With a far less outrageous price tag than the console version of the game did on release it's far more justifiable buying this game that can easily be finished in around an hour... but shouldn't be played that way. I as many others did learned through trial and error that metal gear solid was a game that got more fun the more time you spent carefully planning out your mission as you pick what entrance you want to take where you go from there and if there are any points of interest you could explore on the way (that building could be useless but it could just as easily contain some much needed firepower or a suppressor to replace the one you just wore out) and ground zeroes does it perfectly.

My mission: to extract two hostages being held in a U.S. marine base. I enter the base scanning the environment, quickly marking the closest enemies before finding a spot to hide in some bushes behind some crates. I then pull up my map look for a vantage point, mark it out and head over to it. once there I do a more comprehensive search of the compound making note of the prison on the other side and the small army of marines patrolling the base between me and it. 

what would ensue for the next few hours was one of my favorite gaming experiences so far. Incredibly well programmed artificial intelligence stopped this mission from being a cakewalk by having marines comprehensibly searching areas where I'd been spotted and by making good use of tactics, cover and weaponry at their disposal up until the literal last moments of gameplay.

I thought it was all over as I loaded the last hostage and myself onto the helicopter I called in. The alarms were blaring but the soldiers were searching for me in area I had left a while ago, as we lifted off I felt a sense of pride in completing the mission... or at least I thought I had. Off in the distance I can see another helicopter approaching, fast, my pilot tells me that the chopper isn't friendly and needs to be taken out, A simple task if I weren't carrying only low caliber weapons. The Helicopter fires a few rounds as it approaches missing us by only a little bit, My mind races as I try to figure out a way take out this threat. As the helicopter closes in a sudden stroke of genius hits me and I ready my rifle to take what has to be some very precise shots. I pull the trigger and send a stream of bullets straight through the enemy copters windshield and right through the skull of the pilot. The doors slowly close as I watch the helicopter spiral towards the ground and then go up in fireball that was once my enemy, bringing my mission full circle.

Another cut-scene later and I found myself back at the main menu with host of new missions  (all on the same military base map) unlocked that range from assassinating high value targets all the way to fighting body snatching aliens. 

Having previously seen the game in action I was pleasantly surprised to find that the game ran at a constant smooth sixty frames per second on mixed medium/high quality settings on my starting to become dated (a.k.a. 3+ year old technology) laptop which shows a lot of effort went in to the optimization and the entire game in general.

Despite only having about a days worth of base content MGSV: Ground Zeroes has impressed and entertained me far more than a lot of games with about five times the content and is another great installment in the series that can be enjoyed by returning fans or potential new ones

Rogue Legacy Review

Rogue Legacy is an indie game developed by Cellar Door Games published June 27th, 2013. The game has "rougue-like" elements in it (a rouge element in video games usually means that when a character dies there's no way to bring them back.)

In Rogue Legacy you get to play as the great knight of the land... until they die, leaving the task to their heir. The Heir is the one of three you select each with positive and negative traits (because nobody is perfect!) such as ADHD (you move faster), Vertigo (the game is upside down), and even Alektrophobia the fear of chickens (sometimes a chicken will appear occasionally instead of a health item). Altogether the game has many more traits than this and randomly combines a few of them for a varied experience in playing every time.

Each time the player dies and choose a new heir they can purchase upgrades and new classes to play as with each purchase adding a new section onto their castle, then they can use whatever money they saved to purchase items like new armor and swords or enchantments that give the player bonuses like a double jump or finding more money from various people outside where you enter the actual game. Unfortunately before you can proceed into the game Charon the gatekeeper (in a nice reference to Greek mythology) demands the rest of whatever money you spent.

The actual game takes place in a randomly generated castle that changes each time the player goes in as a new heir. The game has 4 bosses for the 4 different environments in the castle that can be defeated in any order but due to how the game plays out are usually fought in a specific order.

The enemies in the game are easy to fight alone but grouped together they become quite a challenge. The enemies vary from skeletons and evil spirits to poison spitting plants but the variation unfortunately mostly ends there as many of the enemies have similar attacks and behavior patterns so the combat formula never strays off the beaten path (this could be viewed as a pro rather then a con to some though)

Rogue Legacy is a really fun light-hearted platformer that shows Cellar Door Games really has potential to become a major developer as long as they keep making games like this!

I'll upload my own gameplay at a later date but i'm currently bogged down with a lot of work and don't have the time