Merry Gear Solid 2 has now been patched to version 1.2. A small, 3MB patch is also available for download to patch any version to 1.2 (I think!). I'll be attempting another live 0 alerts, minimal items run of the game later tonight, so keep an eye on my Twitter for more information about that!

After 3 long, terrible, head splitting agonizing months, Merry Gear Solid 2 is finally released! I'd like to take a moment to thank everyone involved -- it's been an absolute joy seeing so many talented people come together (out of the kindness of their hearts!) to help me put this together. First off, a thousand thanks to Duncan Roberts... You know... Super Joe. Besides creating more than half the levels in the game, here's a man who recorded a significant chunk of the hour worth of dialogue. Also, thanks to Binbag McGraw, the musician I found for this project, who created the amazing soundtrack to the game (and so quickly too!). I've offered him some interim hosting. You can find his site here. Helping out with the music, was Megan Johns, who recorded the hypnotic vocals to If You're Nice. Former The Underside musician, J. Michael Brown also contributed live bass to the track. A personal friend of mine, Abra West contributed the vocals to Christmas Eve, and I think we can all pretty much agree she's done a phenomenal job! A higher quality version of these tracks will be made available in the coming days in a special downloadable soundtrack. And of course, a very special thanks to all of the new friends I've found on the VAA, Zeix (Chase McCaskill), Kamuro (Darcy Maguire), CidRunsFunny (Ariel Harman), and Calavera (Matt O'Connor), who helped put a voice to all of that terrible, terrible writing I came up with. Anyways, the download link is here. Feel free to leave any comments about the game either on that page, or on this post's comments section. AND HAVE YOURSELF A MERRY CHRISTMAS (yesterday).

I'm currently getting the game tested by 5 people... AT THE SAME TIME. Once the testing is done, I'll have the game available for download! It should be another hour at most!

Sorry about the delays -- I've been working non-stop of the game today (to a ruinous effect on my Christmas Day... fff). All of the game content is now finished -- I just need some time to build the frontend, and to test the game a few times (it's an hour or two long). With that said I will release Merry Gear Solid 2 at 12 pm PST on December 26th. That's this coming noon! Thanks for all the support on the comments threads, and through Twitter -- it's helped encourage me to keep on keeping on!

SO. After countless Red Bulls and a very agonizing Christmas Eve, the first section of Merry Gear Solid is complete. The current playtime (skipping all the codec conversations) is around 1 hour. There is about 1 hour's worth of recorded dialogue, which puts the game well over 2 hours to complete. I feel like I should apologize in advance for all the backtracking that's involved in the game -- what started as an innocent way of letting players try old levels with new items kind of ended up being a tiny bit tedious. Whoops! I'm just putting that out there to cover my own butt when people come storming to my front door, upset that I've ruined their Christmases and their lives forever. With that said, I just wanted to share with you a little bit of the making of one of the game's theme songs, a song entitled If You're Nice. The original idea of the song was to make something that sounded a bit like The Zombie's She's Not There. I started off by making a really basic midi version of the song by putting down the bass line, and then adding the guitar, and what would be the vocal melody. When I was satisfied with the result, I tried recording it live with guitar and vocals. I also ripped off the drums from She's Not There. I learned how to steal them by playing the song in Rockband 2 a thousand times. The problem then was: A) my voice. it suck. it sound bad. i am bad. wa wa we wo. and B) the song was kind of too long considering how short the credits list was. Which is why I decided to A) Find a singer and B) Get rid of the parts of the song that were kind of unnecessary. I also didn't like how artificial the bass sounded, so I got a friend of mine to record the bass. I'M SORRY IF I SOUND CRYPTIC AND MYSTERIOUS but I think the finished track turned out pretty well. I'm not posting it online because I want it to be a surprise, but hopefully you enjoy the finished track as well!

I've been noticing a lot of blogs have been linking to the first Merry Gear Solid game -- which is great, since playing Merry Gear Solid 1 is kind of important if you want to be able to fully enjoy Merry Gear Solid 2. Still, I just wanted to remind people that barring some sort of terrible catastrophe Merry Gear Solid 2 will be released on Christmas Day this year. That's two days from now. I can't make any other promises besides that (about time, whatever) -- since the game is still very much in development. Still, I'll be trying my darndest to get this thing done sometime on that day.

Welp, after weeks and weeks of sleepless nights, the script to Merry Gear Solid 2 is finally complete. Yep. 7 days before the game's release date. It's literally 70 KB worth of some of the most incomprehensible, utterly redundant text I have ever written in my entire life, with plot holes so large and obvious that it's been said that traveling through them could take you back in time. The obvious punchline here would be: Kojima would be proud! I would suggest to anyone who will be playing the new game, to either play the first one, or watch DeceasedCrab's Let's Play video of it, so you can start with a working knowledge of the story so far. I TRIED my best to make the game work by itself, without prior knowledge, but you'll enjoy the game a lot more if you've seen/played through the game at least once. A working knowledge of Metal Gear series will also help a lot. With that said, it's only a few more days until the game's release. Now what I've gotta do is get all these separate parts I've got of the game, and synthesize them into something resembling a continuous story. It's been a MIND NUMBINGLY FRUSTRATING EXPERIENCE getting the game to where it is now, but the worst of it is over. But know this: this game has ruined my entire Winter and I will be quite upset if this game falls short of winning the Lifetime Best Game Based On Both Metal Gear Solid And Santa Claus Award.

As always, a work in progress. Enjoy two weeks of blueballs. Chase "Zeix" McCaskill as Cold Snake Duncan "duncan" Roberts as Otacon Music by Binbag McGraw