Played this month – July 2024

Metal Gears and a PSP

4th August 2024

update

Here we are, August. As each month goes by, I have less ideas on what to write in this introduction paragraph. Let’s focus on what really matters here, the games:


Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

Action-adventure / PS3

As I predicted on my last Played this month, I got fully invested on Metal Gear Solid 2 and its completely bonkers plot. If the first MGS played a bit with fourth wall breaks and meta concepts, this one was all about them. This is the kind of game that let you thinking for hours about what you just witnessed after the credits roll. I’ll leave it like this for now, as I will save the details for the upcoming review.


Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope

Turn-based strategy / Nintendo Switch

I also finished this month the second and possibly last game in the Mario + Rabbids series, as Davide Soliani, the director of both games, announced his departure from Ubisoft. It was kind of poetic to finish the game just a couple days before this announcement, as it was also my end of cycle with this series. As for Sparks of Hope itself, I’ll save my opinions for an eventual review.


Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater

Action-adventure / PS3

Yup, more Metal Gear. For this one my expectations are unreasonably high, as it’s generally considered the peak of the series. For now, it’s still to early for me to have any sort of opinion, but next month I’ll probably have something to say about it.


Ridge Racer 2

Racing / PSP

My side project of this month was the restoration of a PSP. I had Ridge Racer 2 as the default game to test the system as I was fixing it. Without even noticing, I ended up playing (and winning) a couple of Grand Prix in it. It’s such a shame this series is pretty much dead nowadays, because there is no recent racing game that comes even close to capture its iconic style.


Persona

RPG / PSP

One of the reasons why I went to such lengths to restore a PSP was precisely to continue my Persona journey. Sony’s first portable gaming system was blessed with not one but four Persona games during its time! I decided to start by the beginning, with the very first game (whose PSP version is a port of the PS1 original). Despite my short experience with it, I can already tell that this one is a very different beast from the others that I already played. One thing it has in common with those is its absolute banger of soundtrack. Seriously, it’s hard to think of another series that is consistently spectacular on this aspect.




That’s all for July! For next month, I’ll be at Gamescom (and Germany by extension) for the first time! I’ll do an article about my experience for sure. See ya!


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