It's September 11 today , and it has been already 2 years since the 9/11 incident . Coincidentally , It's mooncake festival today . To remember the September 11 incident, I played Metal Gear Solid 2 : Sons of Liberty with Simon today , and I'm very very satisfied . Set in New York , the game is mostly about disarming the terrorists' plan of world domination . Hideo Kojima was such a geek !!! Because the main theme of this game is more to privacy issue on the I.T. age and Genetic issue , the intro movie has a bunch of C source codes flying around the screen as well as the double-helixes , which we normally known as the DNA molecule structure .

Here's the scoop of what we have progressed in the game . The game started somewhere near the New York harbor , and Snake was walking around a bridge ( I forgot the name ) . It was raining that time and there were cars crawling around as if nothing was happening . All of a sudden, Snake picked up his pace and started to run faster . He turned invisible suddenly , with the stealth gear he is wearing . He bungee-jumped to a ship below the bridge which is suspected to have the new Metal Gear prototype in there . Due to impact , the stealth gear was broken and he lost his invisibility .

Then goes the dialogue talking about how Snake got involved again .. yada yada yada .. It took us about 10 minutes before the game started , but the movie is so eye catching . Adam Sessler calls it , "The Metal Gear Syndrome" . Ahh ... the game's finally started . It's scary at first because it's been a long time I didn't perform these stealth stuffs ... . I just walk around , and was hoping to find the entrance to the bridge . Bumped the enemy for a few times , but I managed to get over it. My first lesson : When you killed an enamy , hide it . It won't disappear like its predecessors . It will remain as a corpse . If another guy found it , you're doomed . They will call for backup and hunt you down . My Second Lesson : When my life gauge turned yellow , I must rest to get it to green again . Otherwise , I'll bleed and if I'm unlucky , the enemy will find the traces of my blood and hopefully , they could find me .

Inside the tanker , I practised two types of technique . One is to point the dart gun at the back of the enemy , hoping them to freeze . They are so afraid of death so easily . What can I say , they're mercenaries !! When the froze , I can then choke them to death . The second technique is to simply shoot some tranquilizers to them and they will have a nice sleep ... Oh .. wasn't that sweet ? I don't need to take their life away !!! . The tranquilizers will take effect at a certain period of time , depending on which part you shot on . They will fell asleep instantaniously if you gave them a headshot . It was kind of frustrating when we reached a door where there are some tripwires in which it can blow up the whole ship if you're not careful enough . After some time , we found that we need a USP gun to deactivate the security system . It is frustrating at first when we need to find one . We go round the tanker , and Simon finally found the place where the main control was located . We found Olga , a Russian soldier , and she was a bit mad when she was informed by her father that she has to leave the mission . Then the duel between me and Olga began . It's just first-person shooter thing , and she is clever . She used to searchlight to conceal her position . I got some eye strain because of the searchlight . When she was dead , I'm glad that she dropped a USP for us ...

We stopped the game for a while and had lunch before continuing at 1:40pm . Without any hessitation, we moved to the tripwire place , and there was a bit obstruction when the enemy are storming at our way . We continued the game many times before we are able to get to the place . There goes our frustration again . We managed to shoot two laser devices , but we can't find one . Simon was a good shooter . He shot most of the lasers , and we still can't find the last one . We tried to zoom in with the digital camera , but we failed . After some time , Simon commented , why not standing up a box so you can get a cleared image on what's happening up there. I tried , and he's right , we found the green blinking light above the locker . I shot at it and it is finally deactivated . Then , I'm on my own . Simon's busy calling our classmates about Andrew's party tomorrow . he tried calling Daniel at that time , but he was not there . Back to the game . It's kind of easy navigating through the corridor until I reached the main hall . It looks like the US Marines were listening to the briefing on Metal Gear . I sneaked through them and managed to proceed to the second hall . There goes our problem at the second hall . First , I was trying the right corridor because it was less guarded . At last , I didn't find the entrance because it was blocked ( maybe not ) . Then I tried the left one but it was heavily guarded . Then I tried the right one again, but this time , I searched a bit more , and at last , I found that the entrance to the hall where Metal Gear was kept was concealed by some blocks .

Without any hessitation, I took some photos here , photos there , well , about Metal Gear . It went quite well . After that , I went to a workstation to upload the photos . Here's the cool stuff . When it shows the terminal of the workstation , it actually shows the actual boot process of a typical UNIX system . Those dev/lib/... stuffs are actually shown . Even the login screen mimics the exact UNIX login screen . It was funny, Snake was trying to login using the root user ID . Hahahah . And you know what ? It boost my interest towards using Linux even more . After uploading , there goes the cut scenes . To summarize it , It's about Olga's father being betrayed by Revolver Ocelot , and Ocelot was a selfish man . He took away Metal Gear Ray with him and destroys the whole tanker , and gets everyone sleeping with the fishes , including Snake . That concludes the tanker incident , and after that , the "Big Shell" story begins , in which I will continue it tomorrow .

Okay , on the technology news , the RIAA case is on . Once you're fined , you have to pay RM 54,000 PER SONG . I repeat , PER SONG . TechTV has a scoop on this case this Friday on the Screen Savers, so don't miss it . Next , Adrian Lamo , the grey hat hacker , was released today with a bail . He was prohibited to use computers , according to an article I read on In.Tech , The Star , today . In the meantime , the Japanese are taking a step further and made a plan to develop an Open Source operating system which will give a tight competition with Microsoft . the Japanese government are very supportive and we'll see what's gonna happen next . This will gonna be a hot topic

Solid Snake - Got fired up
5:56pm GMT+8