I've been in other worlds, killing all in my way

Okay, okay. I know it has been awhile. But I have a perfectly good excuse. I had to beat Black three times (easy, hard, and easy again for the fun of it). And now I have immersed myself into Metal Gear.

I tried playing the original that comes as an extra. I got about five minutes in and got a headache. I felt as if I was watching blocks shoot blocks at blocks, while running around more blocks.

So I started the new edition, (ahh, lots of round things. And good camera view on top of that). I was in heaven (if heaven was a rainy wet jungle with some cool camouflage and some hush, hush weapons). The one thing that was wrong with the original was the view, it made the game seem flat. So Christopher Columbus came along and showed us that the world is round, and now we have a good 3rd person movable view (alla Grand Theft Auto).

Well, enough of that. Black is a top twenty all time game. When I started playing, I chose the easy difficulty. Which, that was pretty easy once you got the hang of it. The levels get harder and harder as you go along which will hone your skills for the harder difficulties. Then came “Normal”, which was exactly that: Harder, then easy-semi-difficult towards the end. On easy you get small health packs that will increase your health and big health packs will fully recoup your health. The difference is you can hold up to 3 big packs for future use, the little ones are on an as needed basis. Normal limits your big packs, Hard gives you nothing for big packs. And for that reason I haven’t tried Hard yet.

Then after I completed the game on hard I wanted to go back and play it on easy to try a few new ideas to help me complete it on Hard. I read a lot of reviews for this game and they talked about quantity over quality of shots taken. Well I don’t feel that is true. Yes, there are many points that you walk into a confined space and are outnumbered (say twenty to one) and flying bullets are your best friend. But there are plenty of points in the game where you can strategically lob a grenade or fire a good head shot now and again. Lots of times you can’t get a clear head shot, so you keep at a distance and you put a round in his chest, watch him stumble, and as he begins to recover hit 'em again. About five or six shots will drop a guy, the better placed the sooner he will fall. But that instance in itself is one of the beauties of the game. Since he is a long ways away, you hear the delayed “thump” of the bullet lodging itself in the feeble minded terrorist. And as your accuracy gets better you will hear the telltale “pa-tink” of the bullet penetrating the helmet, and he falls lifelessly limp to the ground (ohh, what fun).

Playing the game you get so immersed that you don’t notice how great the graphics are. You take for granted the glare you get from an early morning sun just above the horizon. When I played it on easy the second time, I caught myself giggling as I began to find creative ways to bring these :Greg Rice"s to justice (ahh, uhh, I don’t, I was, uhh). It was nice to see him standing on the street at the base of a building, pull out your RPG and take out the upper half of the tower. That is where the giggling started, just as the debris started to break up a huge chuck of concrete broke free. And almost in slow motion I watched him go from six feet tall to hamburger meat. Ahh, the joys of being part of a black-ops unit.

So yes, there is no shortage of ammunition. But the more difficult levels required a little sniping, but most of all a good sence of what direction your shooting in while you run. When you stand in front of a large group, you want to keep firing but the muzzle flash, the blur from you firing, and the dust and debris that floats around from all of the bullets flying...

You have to play it to fully understand!