If you take my support of an MTV intern named Billie to post about her plans for a “Halo” Halloween costume…

…stir that up with my year-long coverage of the Steve Wiebe - Billy Mitchell “Donkey Kong” documentary “King of Kong” and associated shenanigans…

…put it on a stove-top for 10 minutes at medium heat…

…you will find, ready for serving, this post: Billy Mitchell Halloween Costumes.

The only thing that would have made this better is if Eli Roth came through with a photo. Why him? Because he told MTV Movies reporter Larry Carroll back in May that he was planning to dress as Billy for Halloween. Well, Eli?

Read on to see the costumes.
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by Billie Edington

So a month has passed since I decided to build a Master Chief costume for Halloween and it’s finally over. If I knew how to communicate an audible sigh of relief via internet, I would do it now. Stephen told me I didn’t know what I was getting myself into when I signed up for this project—and he was right. I’ve spent time, money, and a little dignity since this saga began. But I’ve got to say, it was worth it.

Now, I know what the “gamers” are going to say when they see my costume: It doesn’t really look like Master Chief. And it’s true.

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This week, in an all-new edition of “What We’re NOT Playing,” regulars Stephen Totilo and Jason Cipriano bow out due to excessive “work,” but Jason M., Gerald and I take time to talk about some of the games we’re avoiding.

There were plenty of great releases this week, so it was a tough one. But what we decided on boiled down to personal preferences. No one around here likes MMOs except for me. Why? Here’s Gerald’s reason:

GeraldFlannory: with no end, it feels like im running an endless marathon
GeraldFlannory: i’d like to have some closure to a long quest because, i just won’t have the time to play something forever
GeraldFlannory: thats why I pretty much won’t be playing mmo’s
GeraldFlannory: until they have an ultimate goal that everyone has to reach to bring some closure or something
TraceyJohn: An MMO that ends?
GeraldFlannory: yeah
GeraldFlannory: i think it can be done

Photo Credit: Scott Olson/ Getty Images
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If you’re played the “Phoenix Wright” Nintendo DS games you may have noticed that they’re a little different.

Part throw-back to text-adventure games, part shining beacon of how funny games can still intentionally be.

Part rare video game coutroom drama, part case study in just how non-interactive a game can be.

Last week I e-mailed Capcom a bunch of questions about the series:

How do these games get made? How do they get so funny? Would they designers ever make a law game in which you only defend guilty people? What have lawyers said to you about these games? And so on…

I wrote up some of the answers in my MTV News GameFile column yesterday, but I found the interview so interesting that I’m posting the whole thing here. Some of the answers were quite brainy, much to my delight.

Two things jumped out at me in the interview. The first is series producer Minae Matsukawa’s description of the relationship between the player and Phoenix Wright, the character they control.

We also wanted to betray the player’s feelings. The player may want Phoenix to do one thing, but he’ll do another, even after the player knows what’s really going on. Playing through an Ace Attorney game, you can see that Phoenix is one part the player, and one part his own character, Phoenix Wright. And when the player walks around, they solve the case both with and as Phoenix at the same time. In a way, this case set out to betray not only the player, but also the character Phoenix himself.

The other ties into a comment made by gamer Calvin Smith on a “Zelda” post I published yesterday. He lamented that “a lot of developers and gamers claim open-endedness as a virtue.” When I asked Matsukawa about the common critique that the gameplay in “Phoenix Wright” is too linear, she said:

If we were to give players any more leeway … the structure of the game would fundamentally change. We wouldn’t be able to tell a single story anymore if there were too many paths. Also, what we want the players to enjoy is not so much the solving of each riddle they come across them one at a time, but rather, the ability to use their logic to put together what happened as they collect the pieces of the larger puzzle, as it were, and that’s something that we feel is an important aspect of the game.

Food for thought. The full interview is below.

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Here we go, folks… this is the post I’ve been reluctant to publish.

It is Round 3 of this week’s “Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass” Vs. Mode, a series that has filled my inbox with letters from people who say I’m rejecting a beauty of a game.

In Round 1 Newsweek’s N’Gai Croal praised the game’s controls and described his experience as a “Zelda” neophytye. I then explained why “Phantom Hourglass,” my 12th “Zelda,” wasn’t doing it for me.

In Round 2 N’Gai took me up on an offer to get a crash course in the two wonderful Nintendo 64 “Zelda” games, “The Ocarina of Time” and “Majora’s Mask.” I explained why “Phantom Hourglass,” my 12th “Zelda,” wasn’t doing it for me.

Today, Round 3 continues the previous round’s experimental approach (a transcript of a chat N’Gai and I had after the N64) crash course. I explain why “Phantom Hourglass,” my 12th “Zelda,” wasn’t doing it for me.

I’m being hard on myself. I’m not that much of a broken record, but I really felt stuck in this Vs. Mode. As I say in this round:

It’s kind of weird for me to proselytizing about “Zelda” for so long and then when we finally have a “Zelda” conversation to be the big “Zelda” doubter. Maybe it’s because I’m always going to be contrary about everything, but I think it really is that I got surprised by this crossroads that I found myself walking into.

The more I read what we talked about, the more conscious I am of just how anguished I sound in all of this. I’ve been a big “Zelda” fan for years, and the prospect that the series is either going south or that I have played too many “Zelda”s to appreciate them has unsettled me. I don’t want to be over “Zelda.”

Well, read on and see what you think. N’Gai talks about his issues with the “Zelda” gameplay formula, and how they relate to his feelings on “The Sims,” “GTA,” “Little Big Planet,” “Metal Gear” and “Halo 3“’s Forge.

I play my same sad tune. Here’s one comment from me — slightly rambling — that I wanted to highlight, because it speaks to my developing thoughts about the value of video game remakes as well as my long-time concerns about how hard it is for great game experiences I had in the past to be appreciated by gamers that come after me:

Totilo: … with “Madden” what I view EA as having done and the other football game developers, is they’ve essentially been able to work off of an ideal, which is real football and year after year after year try to come close to that. And really once they’ve reached that ideal and they’ve got football as realistically rendered or as successfully rendered as it needs to be for a video game that at that point there’s no need to make, to remake the engine, remake the graphics or remake anything other than to keep the rosters up to date, keep the uniforms up to date and so on. And you can see a lot of people saying that that’s all they’re seeing from some of the football company game developers anyway.

“Zelda” — it peaked. It’s been great already. It’s like the ideal “Zelda”s exist. They’re already out there. And in other forms of entertainment, once the ideal exists and companies have found a way to make money off of just re-releasing that ideal, finding a way to make that ideal relevant even if it means transferring it from VHS to DVD to downloadable or whatnot. And so, you know, clearly where I’m at is at a spot where I’m just saying, “Look, I’ve played the ideal ‘Zelda.’” I was able to play it in 1998 when, at the time, it was running on technology that blew my mind so my memory of that “Zelda” will always be a bit as an ultimate experience. Your memory of “Ocarina” will probably always be that, “hey this was a really good game.” That was an interesting artifact of history that you played in the year 2007 right after seeing “Ratchet and Clank [Future],” you know, HD quality graphics on my standard definition set. And so you probably actually haven’t experienced the ideal “Zelda” experience.

Read on. And check in later this week for Round 4, which will return to the original format and in which I will finally say some nice things about “Phantom Hourglass.” Hopefully I’ll have beaten the game by then. I’m at the final dungeon.

(These exchanges are mirrored on N’Gai’s “Level Up” bog.)

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With such a daunting task hanging over my head, sacrifices must be made.

The major sacrifice I’m making on this run to 20,000 achievement points is quality. The quality of games, the amount of quality time I get to spend with my girlfriend, quality sleep, and overall, my quality of life. The games of this past week hold true to each and every one of those examples. Yes, I have lowered my standards in the name of meaningless achievement points.

Take a look at the games I played this week: “College Hoops 2K6,” “CSI: Hard Evidence,” “The Orange Box,” “Every Extend Extra Extreme,” and “Virtua Fighter 5.” While I was able to score a resounding 1,890 points, but at what cost did it come? Besides putting me at an overall score of 7,775 points towards my 20,000 by February 10th, my brain is starting to become mush.

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Did you know that this week is Multiplayer’s N’Gai Croal theme week? Well neither did I, but somehow he keeps showing up. Hey, N’Gai, try to stay out of our Twitter feed, okay?

Here, the great games journalist explains how to say his name. Somehow he does it without betting anyone. Amazing.

Sadly, residents of the U.K. and Canada — which includes the Croal family — will not be able to see this video. Sorry!

In yesterday’s Round 1 of this week’s “Zelda: Phantom Hourglass” Vs. Mode, Newsweek’s N’Gai Croal admitted that he’s a “Zelda” newcomer and I grumpily huffed and puffed about how the series was showing its age.

In today’s Round 2, we do what Nintendo has been largely unwilling to do with “Zelda.” We alter our tried-and-true formula. Instead of the standard exchange of e-mails, this round and the next are a full transcript of a conversation between the two of us about the “Zelda.” See, what happened is that I ended the last round inviting N’Gai to get a crash course on the two N64 “Zelda” games, “Ocarina of Time” and “Majora’s Mask.”

On Saturday, October 20, he agreed and stopped by my Brooklyn apartment for several hours of N64 gaming goodness. I walked him through some of “Majora’s” and then had him play “Ocarina.” How did the Ivan Drago of video games journalism manage the experience?

In the exchange I ask him the following about “Ocarina“:

You spent one hour going from the opening of the game to the beginning of the first dungeon–which basically required you to get the sword and the shield. And then you spent I think two hours in the first dungeon, Deku Tree Dungeon, which I said at the end of the first round of our exchange was what I felt epitomized all that’s great about Zelda and Dungeons and in fact I think is the best Zelda Dungeon.

So I gave it a lot of build up, did I oversell it? What did you think?

The full exchange, which, admittedly has some crazy-long sentences — such is the nature of a transcribed, informal dialogue — now follows. It will wrap up in tomorrow’s Round 3 and then this session was close with a more customary Round 4.

(These exchanges are mirrored on N’Gai’s “Level Up” bog.)

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We here at the MTV Multiplayer blog appreciate all the attention paid to MTV News intern Billie Edington’s valiant quest to make a Master Chief costume for Halloween.

Really, we do.

But when you go and steal our ideas and make us feel bad, we can only do one thing.

Steal ‘em right back.

So, Kotaku, you had your fun with your little “Halo” helmet post. Now we’ll show the people how it’s done. Because unlike you, we remember what our math teachers taught us in middle school. We show our work.

To see how Billie made mincemeat out of the “Halo” helmet and then turned said mincemeat — plus an MTV baseball hat — into a Halloween “Halo” helmet, watch the oh-so-simple 27-step process.

Word is, folks, that the costume is complete. Will we see it on Halloween? Stay tuned. It could be like waiting for the Great Pumpkin. Or not.

This week sees the release of “Manhunt 2” for the Wii, PS2, and PSP. Rockstar sent me the games on Friday and put me on the phone with v.p. of product development, Jeronimo Barrera.

I beat the game on Sunday and will have stuff to say about it later this week.

But for now, let me point you to my interview with Barrera over at MTVNews.com. I can tell you here that Barrera was choosing his words carefully. Clearly the “Manhunt 2″ ratings controversy has made Rockstar extra-careful about how anyone from the company will be (mis)interpreted.

At one point, he struggled to deal with a question about the game’s content, saying to me: “I’m so not used to talking about the game, just the controversy,” he said. “It’s really weird.”

In the story he talks about

• What Rockstar changed in the game and why — including the little discussed removal of a scoring system
• What the ideal player experience of “Manhunt 2″ is
• Whether the “Manhunt” series should go multi-player
• Whether Rockstar will release the “unrated” version of the game on PC

An excerpt from my piece:

The release of “Manhunt 2″ may well be a bigger deal than it would have been without the ratings controversy. But Barrera hopes people will talk about the game’s content too. “There are conversations to be had about this game — intelligent conversations,” he said. “That’s what we want to do: get people interested in those [things], rather than ban this game because of X, Y and Z.”

Read the rest at MTVNews.com. And if you hunger for more, read the rest of my year’s-worth of “Manhunt 2″ coverage, including a Vs. Mode with N’Gai Croal about our play-through of the first six levels of the AO-rated version of the game.