Welcome back to Hit or Miss, Bitmob’s look at the best and worst in the week in news.
This week: Sony shows off their slim and sultry new console; Sony confirms their slim and sultry new console won’t play your old games just like their fat and clunky old console; Hideo Kojima admits even he gets confused by Hideo Kojima games; and Activision drops a few Modern Warfare Wii bombs.
And by bombs, I mean both the one figurative sense of the first screenshots causing a lot of discussion, and the other figurative sense in that they were almost unanimously regarded as failures. But don’t worry, Activision — I’ve got your back! (Kind of.)
Sony Confirms PS3 Slim, Price Drop
The biggest and best news to come out of GamesCom this week was not news at all: Sony finally stopped awkwardly trying to hide the PS3 Slim behind their back, and revealed it to the world during their press conference in Germany. In addition to being 36% slimmer than a normal PS3, Sony also confirmed that it’ll come standard with an eating disorder, and will look an extra 11% slimmer on the boxart after airbrushing.
The PS3, meanwhile, will reportedly continue to hang out with the PS3 Slim, despite how bad the Slim makes the PS3 feel about its perfectly natural and healthy weight.
Of course, the other big non-news news was that all PS3 models across the board will be getting a $100 price drop. This is good timing, because I was starting to worry that Activision CEO Bobby Kotick’s next strategy to persuade Sony to drop the price would be either a hostage negotiation, or threatening to kill himself.
PS3 Slim Won’t Have Backward Compatibility
You know, this wouldn’t bother me as much if my PlayStation 2 wasn’t by now about as useful as a doorstop, paperweight, bludgeoning weapon, or lion tamer chair replacement. Say what you want about Xbox 360 failure rates, but I don’t know a single person who hasn’t had to buy a second PlayStation 2, or been forced to watch their original suffer a painful, possibly prolonged, but ultimately inevitable death.
Sony, I say to you that it should be a moral imperative to assure that all PlayStation 3 owners have at least one PlayStation console that will actually play their PS2 games. And if it really was that costly to add in real emulation, you could at least have done the next best thing: Announce the PS3 Slim would have backward compatibility, program it so that trying to play any PS2 game always produces a disc-read error instead, and then shrug with a mischievous smile when enraged gamers threaten to bludgeon you with broken PS2s.
Even Kojima Gets Confused by Metal Gear Solid
“I personally get confused too about the whole timeline and saga of Metal Gear Solid,” said Hideo Kojima during an interview with Eurogamer.
This is a statement that makes me want to hug the man. I want to get this printed on a card and laminate it, for cripes sake. Then, for the rest of my life, whenever I meet any smug, hardcore MGS fans who insist on arguing the series actually does make perfect sense, I can produce my Kojima Card and watch a single tear stream down their cheek. In this fantasy, I would then proceed to make my escape on a gallant white stallion (I call him Sir Clops a Lot), but that’s neither here nor there.
Evidently one technique Kojima employs to wade through the Byzantine insanity he’s wrought is to keep a series of detailed character timelines handy. It’s a good idea, but I like my technique better: Whenever I’m presented with a storyline that has certain blind spots I don’t quite understand, I make up my own content to fill in the gaps.
And since at this point I don’t understand about 90% of the MGS saga, I believe it’s the story of Solid Snake, a genetically engineered super-soldier who was bitten by a radioactive cobra that turned him into a handsome young vampire who sparkles in the sunlight, often has immaculate bed-hair, and battles transforming racist robots from the future while riding his gallant white stallion.
Activision Releases First Screens of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare on Wii
There was no way Activision could have released these first few screenshots and made it out in one piece. Gaming news comment trolls live their entire lives for a story like this — the built-in console rivalry, the dramatic visual examples of a console’s weakness compared to others, hilariously bad smoke effects… this story has it all!
But in fairness, let’s put aside Internet trolls, and address the shots themselves: they’re not that bad, are they? Sure, the smoke in that screen way up top makes it look like it belongs on PhotoShop Disasters, but wait! Did you know it’s really an accurate portrayal of the Iraqi Republican Guard’s famous Desert Storm technique of using gigantic cardboard images of smoke to make American fighter pilots think they already bombed their location? It’s true!
And yes, that man’s gun barrel may look to the unlearned eye like the butt-end of a hockey stick. But that’s what he wants his enemy to think. First they’re like, “What the fuck? Why is that dude holding a hockey stick?” Then he’s all, “Yeah, that’s right. Think it’s a hockey stick. Little did you know it’s actually… oh shit, I did grab a hockey stick.”
And then Solid Snake appears out of nowhere to whisk him away from danger. This is all militarily accurate, people.