All this wedding planning has taken me away from the mainstream of gaming news, to the point that I honestly couldn’t tell you anything that happened this week. Instead I’m going to share my own gaming news. I just got tickets for my first ever gaming expo, Game Expo Scotland 2014 and I can’t wait to attend. It’s something of a boyhood dream to go to one of these events, the kind of thing I would normally be confined to simply watch on the TV or read about in magazines. I might be a lot bigger and more mature than when that dream first sprung to mind, but that’s not going to stop me enjoying it. So here’s to people dressed as obscure video game characters, getting your butt kicked at Street Fighter and staring as so many screens it makes your head hurt. I’m sure you’ll hear all about it come October!

Kevin

Metal Gear…

…solid games have taken up the majority of my gaming time for the past couple of years now. It all started with an innocent revisit of the original Metal Gear Solid, a game that I loved as a child but hadn’t played again since. I ended up enjoying it so much that it spurred the purchase of the Metal Gear Solid HD trilogy and the completion of Metal Gear Solid 2 (for about the 15th time), Snake Eater and Peace Walker (first time for both of these). This brought me bang up to date with the story for Ground Zeroes and boy, am I glad I made the effort.

Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes only has one main mission and is concentrated on a small, but very open plan island. Despite this I couldn’t recommend it enough to MGS fans. As short as the main story might be (one to two hours), the majority of the enjoyment comes in the form of bonus objectives, hidden content, side missions, easter eggs and beating your previous level scores. I’ve currently racked up around nine hours worth of play and I would still be happy to go back and play some more. Whether this is nostalgia (two of the side missions are a blast from the past) or just pure enjoyment of the most up to date and open Metal Gear Solid yet, one things for certain. The Phantom Pain has been set up to be brilliant!