Gēmu Otaku San

Gunpei Yokoi (横井 軍平) is said to have hit upon the idea of the Game & Watch when, while traveling on a train, he saw a bored businessman pressing the buttons of a calculator to kill time. The Game & Watch triggered the evolution of mobile gaming and it wasn't just to "kill time" anymore, it had become a lifestyle. The Game & Watch also led to the mass production of Chinese bootlegged game consoles and culminated, in the 1980s, with the Brick Game craze when just about everybody lugged a Chinese bootlegged version of the game console; and for a time offered Filipinos a virtual respite from their miserable lives.

Mobile gaming was so-so and mainly served as virtual baby-sitters for dorky kids until the Portable Sony PlayStation (PSP) came around. Maybe more as a marketing strategy rather than anything else, game developers began to target serious gamers by porting the most popular PC and PS games into the PSP. This allowed hard core gamers (-- as against those who are casual gamers who only played simple arcade style games to "kill time") to be Solid Snake (-- and Gabe Logan in the Syphon Filter series; and Kratos in God of War; and Sam Fisher in the Splinter Cell series) even when they're on the road. I'm a Metal Gear Solid (MGS) fan and I've beaten every MGS reiteration on the Sony PlayStation (PS1/2) and now the PSP had snipped the umbilical cord that attached me to the PS. Although I was a bit disappointed with the first MGS on the PSP: Metal Gear ACID (Active Command Intelligence Duel), because the action-based game I enjoyed so much in the PS had morphed into a card trading/collectible turn-based system where you either draw a card or play your hand to control the character’s movements and actions, I still played it because I haven't played MGS for maybe three years and I missed it. Although Metal Gear ACID is not canonical, it retained the original MGS look. In the game, Solid Snake must retrieve the "Pythagoras" from the Lobito Physics & Research Laboratory. In the end, he will face the latest model of Metal Gear-- the Metal Gear KODOQUE.

The sequel, Metal Gear Acid 2, the protagonist is a clone created from tissue samples of Solid Snake. The game had become totally unrecognizable, gone are the gray and green theme of the original MGS series, instead the in-game models are rendered in stylized anime graphical style that looked more like colorful, clearly-inked concept art. It was disappointing.

Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops is the first canonical outing of the MGS series for the PSP. It again featured Naked Snake (introduced in MGS1 as "Big Boss", Solid Snake's C.O. in FOXHOUND and who is later revealed as the source of Solid Snake's cloned genes and that of Liquid Snake as well; and who was also Solid Snake's main antagonist in Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake). It also went back to the series' action-based game play from previous PS1/2 console iterations, but instead of Naked Snake doing solo missions, the game has a squad-based approach, with Naked Snake having to recruit allies and form a team. It is set in 1970 in South America, six years after the events of MGS3:Snake Eater. It is nowhere near previous PS reiterations, but it was way closer than the ACID series.

Snake has yet again returned in Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker. The first MGS title for the PSP directed by the series' creator Hideo Kojima. I look forward to beating it; as eagerly as I look forward to finally getting a PS3 so I could beat “Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots”--which features an aged Snake clone (The only other MGS game I haven't yet beaten).

In the meantime, I alternate between "New Super Mario Brothers" on my Nintendo DSi and "Splinter Cell: Essentials" on my PSP2000 (and my trusty Sony Reader PRS300:-- repository of my "walk-throughs" and e-books).

A well meaning friend once told me to get a life.

"Hey, I don’t need a life....

... I’m a gamer. I have lots of lives!"