Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

Metal Gear Solid the Digital Graphic Novel for PSP is a little bit unusual. It’s basically a digital comic book without voice work but packed with 2d animations and classic Metal Gear Solid sound effects with a couple of nifty features added on. It also has a typo, shown above. The black-on-white background didn’t play all that well with my digital camera, so when Revolver Ocelot says “That weasel Baker said there’s some king of trick to using the key” (my emphasis) he means there’s “some kind of trick to using the key” (again, my emphasis). It’s not a big deal, seems to be the only one throughout all of the dialogue in the title, and doesn’t take away from the title’s overall excellence.

The story is still very strong and holds up well, it even throws in a few small details from the comic book adaptation that I’m pretty sure weren’t in the original MGS game on the PS1. I could be mistaken about that, since it has been quite a while since I’ve died repeatedly and had the Colonel shout “Snake? Snake?! Snaaaake!” in the first MGS, but after seeing the newest trailers for MGS4 I’m excited to see the same themes carried forward powerfully through the series. It all still holds together very well, and I’m thinking the extra tidbits added to the digital graphic novel only serve to tighten up the links between the titles.

I’m sure the upcoming digital graphic novel adaptation of Metal Gear Solid 2 will likewise grow the story a little bit to tie things even more closely together. I’m definitely looking forward to that rendition after viewing this one.

I highly recommend the comic, but I have to say a word about the controls. It turns out that there’s a secondary “game” element to the comic. You can hit the square button and then use triangle and circle to zoom in and out with a camera, and if you put the viewfinder on an important person or thing it will highlight it and you can snap a picture to be saved. There are lots and lots of pictures hidden throughout the comic, and you can even zoom in and out of scenes, moving behind the characters in the scene to discover things like hidden Kojima Productions icons on the walls behind them. Snapping those pictures is easy, and it’s pretty addictive and fun to scan through scenes for something as simple as ghostly memories of the Gray Fox ninja or as straightforward as snapping a pic of Otacon after snapping a picture of him earlier as Hal Emmerich. Once you snap a picture, you don’t need to snap it again and it won’t highlight again in later scenes.

Once you have those photos, which the game calls Memories, you can link them together in an interesting 3D matrix-like arrangement and reveal new memories. The problem is that it’s really not clear how to save your snapped pictures. One of the L or R buttons opened the save menu, I hit the button to write to the card, but apparently I didn’t do something else that actually wrote the data, because when I started the comic back up later all of my discovered photos were gone and there wasn’t any save data on the memory stick. I don’t know what I did wrong, but if I can’t figure out how to do it easily through the user interface even after reading the controls online at GameFly, I’m sure I won’t be the only one who loses his progress.

Aside from that it’s a great story that no MGS fan should miss on their PSP.

See also:
That Editing Has Got Be Pretty Tough, a typo in MGS Portable Ops.