Apologies 2: This Time it’s Personal

It appears that the season of going on holidays is well and truly underway with me leaving for a couple of weeks in France tomorrow, leaving the Clockwork Manual to sit alone in a darkened room until someone returns to feed it and give it some warm clothes.

Needless to say i have a very good excuse for not posting in a while, after completing MGS4 again I felt the need for some sneaking action of my own and as such have played through the game a whole bunch of times, managing to one up Sparki J on the emblem front by netting myself the “FOX” emblem (note that it’s exactly what he’s achieved, albeit on a higher difficulty). Unfortunately rather than leading to something of a burn out on the game, unlocking the stealth camo has lead me instead into an untold frenzy of item hunting, where I’ve been trying to get everything this game can possibly offer.

As you will no doubt remember, in a previous post I noted how you could take photos in MGS1 and reveal the “ghosts” of the development staff. It seems Kojima isn’t done with this little tradition, and so yesterday I played through act 4 of the game, happily snapping away whilst awaiting our undead brethren to appear. Needless to say they did. I would post some of the fruits of my hard work but on exporting the photos to my hard drive I discovered that this removes the apparitions. Ruined my day that did.

At any rate this endeavour opened up the possibilities of the camera and photo album to me, and as such I’ve spent a rather large amount of time “sightseeing” in the MGS world, and using the limited photo editing tools to the best of my ability. What follows is the result of my experimentation, with explanation if I feel it’s necessary.

This is by far my favorite out of the photos I took. It still amazes me how you can edit an in-game photo so little, and make the graphics change so drastically.

It’s a fact, wearing the Assassin’s Creed costume whilst posing as a statue makes it more awesome in nearly every way.

As much as I can appreciate what they were going for, I really hate the look of Act 3. It was far too blurry and yellow for my liking, and just didn’t look like MGS. With every picture I took in Venice I tried to remove the sickly haze that hung over it, and I think it turned out quite well. Titled “Yellow Fountain.”

My least favourite out of all of the photos I took, it was more a trial to see if the whole mood of an act’s design could be changed just with some simple sliders. It might just be me, but I think this picture looks a lot colder, with its lack of colour and almost blue tint. Also sorry about the underlining, not quite sure how it’s happened but I can seem to fix it…

I maintain that if you look at this picture without the watermark, you could be forgiven for thinking it wasn’t MGS4 at all.

So there we have it, a long weekends work condensed into one bite sized post. I hope you appreciate these photos as much as I do. Rest assured I’ll try and post more regularly when I get back, but until then…

Peace out