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| Maou 2875th Post
  
PSN: zonepharaoh
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|  "Re(1):Metal Gearrrrrr Solid V and MGS in gene" , posted Thu 3 Sep 05:22  
Micro-transcations Macro-transactions? A pitiful day for the series, now about to be as divorced from its creator as Final Fantasy, and surely similarly compromised by the shambling mess that remains of Konami!
I was as surprised as anyone when I played through MGS1, despite not caring for action games at that time--certainly not before artsy action games in the Wander and the Colossus vein were possible. It was just so cohesive and compactly put together that I couldn't help but enjoy it, despite sucking at the genre.
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Reminisce about the madness of Metal Gear or discuss new things here.
"M, Metal GEEEar?" Obviously, the best way to reminisce is the venerable, raunchy masterpiece, Mad Gear Solid, using 100% in-game audio but spliced together in the most splendid way possible.
Not quite that far, but I remember having Snake crawl back and forth in the air vents in MGS1 until Meryl is no longer wearing any pants, and similarly running like hell to catch her changing when you meet her officially. I remember the blisters on my hand from Ocelot's awful torture sequence.
人間はいつも私を驚かせてくれる。不思議なものだな、人間という存在は．．．
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| Maou 2877th Post
PSN: zonepharaoh
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| "Re(3):Metal Gearrrrrr Solid V and MGS in gene" , posted Sat 5 Sep 16:15
Okay, now to fulfill Spoon's original plan by actually talking about MGS5, after having played it at a friend's. Extremely minor "spoilers" for the start, I guess.
No Longer for People Who Suck at Action Games
It's interesting coming to it after having only played MGS1. The sense of design is so different. Whereas MGS1 was approachable to many non-action gamers like me, MGS5 feels like it's meant for people who play American-style shooters in terms of controls. It's a steep climb up from the isometric view in 1. On the other hand, the enemies are as idiotic and blind as ever, so I guess the more complex movement doesn't put you at much risk.
Relentless Interactive Violence Story, Then Missions Forever
I'm struck most of all by the change in structure, with some related changes in tone. MGS1 played in episodic, comic book-like stages between dialogue/movie events with a quick pace between action and story, the latter of which kept those of us who were bad at the former interested in the game. In 5, I see a peculiar trajectory from the gory, exhausting, supernatural, gratuitous, interactive opening into what seems to be a totally mission-based game structure in an extraordinarily detailed and open world. It's a weird and gigantic break. Like, you still do the sneaking you always did, but it's not punctuated by peppy story events; instead, the story events where they do occur are more "interactive" and thus tiring...I felt as world-weary as Big Boss after slogging through the increasingly over-the-top developments and relentless violence of the opening. But once it was over, that seemed to be the end of it, at least as of mission 6 or so. I can't imagine a traditional MGS structure intervening now.
Big Boss' Monster Hunter 5, in Sim City
As a function of the mission structure and the game's oil rig base development thing, something very strange has happened to the way you look at enemies and the world around you in Metal Gear. Rather than as obstacles on your way to the next discreet stage area, you want to pick up items and capture enemies with skills who can help your R&D so you can build armor for your horse* (*true) and get a sweeter helicopter. That's right, the tactical espionage seems to have been refocused towards...collecting! The game is now called Snake Hunter 5 and is set in your floating Sim City oil rig. Snake will even collect flowers and herbs. This is all perfectly fine, but if you told me at the time of MGS1 that four sequels later, I'd be riding a summonable horse through the desert adding soldiers to my collection, I doubt I'd have believed you.
The Box
Most importantly, the cardboard box is still here, as the Professor's link reminds us. It's possible to break it now, which makes me very sad, but you can also upgrade it in your Sim City and relax knowing that your box is pretty cool.
人間はいつも私を驚かせてくれる。不思議なものだな、人間という存在は．．．
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| karasu 1559th Post
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| "Re(4):Metal Gearrrrrr Solid V and MGS in gene" , posted Sat 5 Sep 23:45
quote:
Okay, now to fulfill Spoon's original plan by actually talking about MGS5, after having played it at a friend's. Extremely minor "spoilers" for the start, I guess.
I received my copy earlier in the week but I just got around to playing last night, and then only the intro, so there will be even more minor spoilers here as well.
My takeaway from the prologue, after all the crazy overblown stuff that went on and after feeling from minute to minute that I might not make it through all the violence and Bad Craziness was an image of Kojima, months ago watch the intro being played and saying "No, we're not making it clear enough that your accomplice at the beginning is nude beneath his hospital gown. Widen the gap in the back just a bit more and have the player crawl around on the ground behind him even more."
So yeah, a good time, although to Maou's point, since I suck at this kind of action game and even more at shooters, how the hell am I going to get anywhere in this game?
You have to carefully reproduce the world of "Castlevania" in the solemn atmosphere.
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| Spoon 3032th Post
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| "Re(5):Metal Gearrrrrr Solid V and MGS in gene" , posted Sun 6 Sep 07:46
Now that I have a PS4 and have played through the intro:
That was really cool/crazy/overblown/etc.
I also came into it having just given the principal story mission of Ground Zeroes a run through. Aspects of the intro are really powerful, though some of it will be totally lost on people. Snake going from the time period of Ground Zeroes and waking up to The Man Who Sold The World only seems jarring if you're aware of the time periods.
I wonder what came first: PT, or the horror kick he was going on into making the start of TPP. I somewhat imagine that being fed up with Konami has pushed Kojima's interest into realizing a horror vision more, haha. The sheer number of horror tropes on display in the Prologue seems almost more like something you'd find in a Tarantino movie.
I also think that going into TPP just out of GZ, which is the most powerful incarnation of Big Boss up until TPP, makes the experience quite something. Getting to see somebody ahead of you doing all the things like the crouch walking and crawling that you are used to doing effortlessly while you struggle to keep up really sells the feeling of helplessness and frustration. "THAT SHOULD BE ME! THAT'S EXACTLY ME, WHAT HE'S DOING!" I'm a little upset that Big Boss returns to form so suddenly and so completely during the Prologue, because the frustration was sold so well!
Being on the opposite end of a stealth killer was also good. You're so used to killing people under the noses of others that when it's being done to you and you can't stop it, that's a solid "oh, wow, that's harsh" feeling. There's a cute call-out to old MGS games in the Prologue where the "low health" sound starts ticking.
Maou: the "controls for people who play action games" thing is somewhat more of a thing since MGS4 in particular. While your curmudgeonliness with respect to the genre is remarkable (not hating, just remarking on it :p), the general change is demarcated like this:
MGS1: rigid cones of vision in the normal game, cannot aim and fire guns except for a few special weapons in a first-person view, camera angle much more restricted. No tranquilizer.
MGS2: camera is very much set up like a direct sequel to MGS1. Enemies have larger cones of view, and have a bunch of new AI behaviours that more strongly encourage you to enter an area, observe it carefully, and then sneak through it. Among these new behaviours are enemies that radio in periodically so that no matter how quietly/non-lethally you take them out, after a period of time a mild alert gets raised. The alert follows you from area to area. etc.
MGS3: begins moving to a more open area. Moving while shooting is still kind of eh. First person shooting is something you do all the time. The radar map no longer shows enemy sight cones, in part for lore reasons (Soliton Radar hasn't been invented by Mei Ling yet!) and in part to allow for enemies to have bigger/more malleable sight.
MGS4: "next generation". Solidly (ha!) brings in TPS movement/shooting into MGS. Enemies have very malleable detection. This is certainly the most "AAA TPS game" feeling MGS game, with tons of features that are way ahead of its time, but also with a number of features and a straight-forward campaign that are typical of AAA TPS games of the current age.
The experience in Ground Zeroes is still one of "either do something really crazy like hijack a truck and smash everything in the base with it before igniting all the C4 you set on it" or
Kojima is absolutely a man of the times (though sometimes the past and the future are included in "time"), and I don't think that making the game control more like how other games control is necessarily bad. It certainly still has a lot of Metal Gear in how Snake moves about! It isn't quite as automatic as in MGS1 (where tapping Square would make Snake automatically point at the target in his current cone of vision), but it's certainly the case that that automaticness was a combination of the limitations of the controls (Dualshock wasn't yet the standard controller!) as well as the nature of the presentation. MGS4 was certainly the tipping point in the series, but the push towards increasingly intelligent enemies who are less rigidly restricted by a single size of sight vision wedge certainly has to be part of it as well.
I like to think that the Reflex Action is the concession to it all: you get a LOT of time (several seconds!) to line up a shot against someone who has just spotted you. It's still not as good as the 100% automatic aim of old MGS, but it gives the more sneaky and less twitchy players a chance.
Ultimately, I think it comes down to this:
To what extent do you like the controls in RE4 over previous RE, and to what extent do you wish that you could move while aiming in RE4?
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| Maou 2881th Post
PSN: zonepharaoh
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| ""It's no good, I can't do it!"" , posted Sun 6 Sep 10:28:
Like a once-great hero in a Metal Gear story, I can say that I was the King of Iron Fist 2D platformers as a kid, but the skill and interest never translated into 3D, even with Mario 64 or something. For the scale of game they're going for in Metal Gear nowadays, it makes perfect sense to have the first-person shooter style of controls. I think I just find MGS1 remarkable from a cinematic and game design aspect. Short, stage-like designs and action that's "easy" to get through. MGS1 was for the non-action gamer what FFVII apparently was for Americans: an approachable, appealingly cinematic, compact, and quite easy entry into a previously unknown style of game. MGS5 feels like...FFV.
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The sheer number of horror tropes on display in the Prologue seems almost more like something you'd find in a Tarantino movie.
"THAT SHOULD BE ME! THAT'S EXACTLY ME, WHAT HE'S DOING!"
It's an ambitious failure of an opening. Even going just on the legends of Big Boss from MGS1, I could feel the incredible effort it was for this previously invincible guy, laboriously dragging himself around, setting injured bones, etc. Unfortunately, it goes on about five times too long and is full, as you say, of hideous horror/suspense movie tropes that are over-familiar even to someone like me who hates horror movies and doesn't watch them. It's a major distraction from Big Boss' rehabiliation-by-fire to see yet another person in the hospital slaughtered, with their demise chronicled with pornographic focus...why did I need to see that particular cast extra brutalized for that long? Then again, I suppose this is in line with the brutal and unnecessary sexual violence I heard about in Ground Zeroes. Not only is this kind of thing gratutitous, it's also an amateurish crutch: maiming the vulnerable is an ugly, easy emotion/mood-summoner without any of the effort of actually developing the character.
All of this contrasts even more harshly with the nonexistent story in most missions...MGS1's melodrama (and occasional humor) tied tightly into its compact stages. Here, the story is oppressive and overwraught where it's present, and divorced structurally and atmospherically from the quirky-as-ever gameplay featured in the missions.
More importantly, it just occurred to me today after realizing that since "MGS5" was split into an incomplete Ground Zeroes before Phantom Pain: Konami just got away with pulling a god-damned Sonic & Knuckles...in 2015!!!
人間はいつも私を驚かせてくれる。不思議なものだな、人間という存在は．．．
[this message was edited by Maou on Sun 6 Sep 12:03] |
| Spoon 3034th Post
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| "the 3D is yours, the agony is your triumph" , posted Sun 6 Sep 14:01
quote:
Like a once-great hero in a Metal Gear story, I can say that I was the King of Iron Fist 2D platformers as a kid, but the skill and interest never translated into 3D, even with Mario 64 or something.
I never "got" Mario 64, literally or figuratively, back when it was new. Everything about it felt weird to me, from controlling the camera, to the inertia Mario had, to trying to run in a straight line in a direction of my choosing, to landing on something I want to when I jump.
I don't think that 3D action gaming with dynamic camera (so that discounts isometric view 2D games like Super Mario RPG) was something that ever clicked with me until.... hmmm.... certainly some time closer to the year 2000. It definitely didn't work for me in 1996. I really think it had a lot more to do with me playing more 3D FPS games on the PC than anything else, though: by the time I had come to grips with mouselook+WASD (or more arcane schemes, like the one used in System Shock), I think I was pretty much set for life in 3D action games, and could actually appreciate them. It's very much a thing that takes time to be able to do intuitively, since it does require you to be able to split your mind/hands into doing two things that may have entirely different rhythms and intuitions to them. A few of my friends simply cannot deal with it.
I guess the thing which strikes me on this topic is that pretty much everybody here has played RE4, and whether or not it was as well-loved to that particular person as RE1/2, I didn't expect that anybody would have trouble with 3D coming from having already had those two experiences. I don't mean that as a denigrating remark; it was really a connection I hadn't made. And that actually makes me kind of sad, because it means that there's a pretty hard cap on the extent to which certain 3D games can be enjoyed, because the fluency of action and movement just won't be there. Crippled Big Boss, indeed!
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| Maou 2881th Post
PSN: zonepharaoh
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| ""Hurt me more!"" , posted Tue 8 Sep 15:18
quote:
I guess the thing which strikes me on this topic is that pretty much everybody here has played RE4
Hell no! Too scary.  But I get what you mean here. quote:
there's a pretty hard cap on the extent to which certain 3D games can be enjoyed, because the fluency of action and movement just won't be there.
It's true! And it's not that it can't be done, but more that it's not in line with what people who may have enjoyed other series entries may have enjoyed, or, more likely, have the patience to deal with now. Putting aside the grotesque and amateurish direction the cinemas have taken in both MGS5's, the control scheme for MGS5 reminds me of what would happen if Smash Brothers suddenly required Street Fighter inputs. It could be done, but there is zero doubt that it lessens the appeal. MGS1 was likely intriguing to a lot of people, as I mentioned above, because it was friendly and approachable, and while in an ideal scenario the continued interest in the story/world would be enough to make people try new things, I can't see horror movie amateur hour doing the trick.
Today's question: is MGS5 the one true sequel to Metal Gear "2": Snake's Revenge?!?! I can't see anyone but Americans being able to play this. Then again, they may be the only ones with PS4's anyway, so this could work.
人間はいつも私を驚かせてくれる。不思議なものだな、人間という存在は．．．
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| karasu 1561th Post
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| "Re(1):" , posted Wed 9 Sep 00:53
quote:
Putting aside the grotesque and amateurish direction the cinemas have taken in both MGS5's, the control scheme for MGS5 reminds me of what would happen if Smash Brothers suddenly required Street Fighter inputs. It could be done, but there is zero doubt that it lessens the appeal. MGS1 was likely intriguing to a lot of people, as I mentioned above, because it was friendly and approachable, and while in an ideal scenario the continued interest in the story/world would be enough to make people try new things, I can't see horror movie amateur hour doing the trick.
I'm not completely put off by MGSV's controls, but then I only ever played the first game once or twice, and it was years ago now, so I only have the scarcest of memories to compare it to. Plus I hesitate to suggest that a control scheme is overly baroque or complex at any point since I can vividly recall my sister, who was quite the videogame player circa 1980 (I can simultaneously praise and curse her for introducing me to the medium oh so long ago), gnashing her teeth and proclaiming that controls in games "had gotten too complicated" when playing-- you guessed it-- Metal Gear Solid.
My biggest problem with the intro, now that I've had a few days to digest it, is that it has one very specific route and 'solution' to it, in complete opposition to the rest of the game. That made it play out like an extended QTE for me, with the sole redeeming feature being that it sort of taught me the control scheme. Except when it didn't (i.e. giving me the gun and just telling me to 'shoot that guy').
As for all the horror movie 'flourishes', I have no difficulty seeing Kojima channeling the Tarantino-esque 'LOL BAD MOVIEZ' attitude. I should note that I don't care for it when Tarantino does it, either.
You have to carefully reproduce the world of "Castlevania" in the solemn atmosphere.
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| Spoon 3043th Post
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| "Re(4):The real important question of TPP" , posted Tue 15 Sep 02:42
quote:
all over the place, and longwindedness
I remember the first time I played through MGS, one of the most prominent thoughts to myself was "this game is a triumph of staging/production/voice acting (over writing)" because goddamn some of the parts were drawn out and/or clumsy but I just went along with it because of the above.
MGS2 to me feels like the most longwinded of the MGS games, even if it doesn't actually have the largest quantity of speech to go through. The audio tape approach to delivering story content is the kind of thing I have previously bagged on Bioshock Infinity about, but the general integration of it in MGSV is better both contextually and in terms of usage... but I'm still not sure how much I like it. Here it provides a way to even dish out tons of conversations in a way that is easy for you to skip if you don't want to partake, or will automatically queue and play if you want them to run while you are playing, but I don't know if that correlates with a reduction in in-game story moments (I haven't played through the game yet).
The subtitles are unfortunately problematic.
If you have a tape running and then somebody nearby starts a conversation, the subtitles that you do get shown wind up being a weird alternation of the two, with no font differences. There's no button to instantly pause the currently playing audio, so while I fumble into the iDroid to do so, I'm getting hit a double-whammy of audio speech my ears have to parse and alternating subtitles which my eyes have to try to not get confused by. These occurrences result in me tending to choose to consume the audio tapes in isolation from the rest of the gameplay, which does indeed make them feel like a separate part of the game, and one in which I sink time into separately from the rest of the game.
Having my chopper play Take On Me got old surprisingly fast, but I'll never forget how good it felt the first few times.
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| chazumaru 1552th Post
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| "Re(5):The real important question of TPP" , posted Fri 25 Sep 20:50
I loved TPP. The story was clonky as always, but I have zero expectations for coherence following the Happening of MGS4 and, as usual, I at least liked the intentions behind the story. The bad guy was cool, although you only see him for roughly seven minutes in the game, and I genuinely enjoyed his plan which sounded as stupid, egocentric and grandiose (spoiled: let's erase the English language from Planet Earth) as a what a vintage James Bond villain would cook up.
The overall message was the typical "cool topic that rarely goes discussed in video games so I'll forgive that it was addressed awkwardly" that Kojima has provided for 30 years now, and that I am going to miss when his inevitable Kickstarter only provides him with 1/10th of the budget and staff he usually gets to do his schtick. In the end, the game does indeed a piss poor job of connecting the Big Boss era with the Solid Snake era, despite the "vengeance" theme providing Kojipro with a great opportunity, so I get why some fans who somehow had not given up on the story yet (which is baffling to me) got disappointed with the outcome. And you do feel that at least one fight is missing (the famous Mission 51 you can easily find about with Google or Bing), so like everyone else I start to wonder what else could not make it in the game.
But hey! It's the most fun MGS to play, ever. And I already had fun playing MGS before, when the controls were clunky and visiting the different areas was cumbersome, so I am over the moon now. And I have a horse following me! And a doggy following me! And a half-naked girl following me until she vanished for a contrived reason! It feels like a typical Friday Night in London. I can't believe I am writing this but I am almost forcing myself to stay on Super Mario Maker rather than going back to MGS5 (which I only dropped because I had a plane to catch for TGS and the Wii U was easier to bring with me to Japan). I would really like to visit some bases again with all my recent gear; HikariMGS and his wonderfully stupid stupidly wonderful videos are even starting to convince me about the potential of D-Walker.
Même Narumi est épatée !
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| Spoon 3063th Post
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| "Re(7):The real important question of chaz" , posted Sat 26 Sep 03:15:
I had dreams about escaping from zombies and equestrian sports in Uzbekistan (of all places! not even Afghanistan!) last night, a night in which I did not play MGSV.
The sneaking and playing of MGSV is extremely excellent to me. The AI is wonderful in how it can be deceived believably. My biggest complaint about the just playing of the game is that you are constantly reminded about the importance of troop quality and GMP and you get lots of both by capturing things... which means you can't use lethal weapons on things. Except that lethal weapons form like 95% of the researchable weapons. So in order to make use of a lot of your toys, you have to deliberately choose to make yourself less profitable. In side missions, many of which cannot be repeated, this seems yet worse: missions of less "consequence" sound like they should be the ones you can goof around in, but instead I wind up feeling that the imperative to tranquilize/strangle and Fulton everything is even stronger. Since non-tranq stun guns make guards panic when they are hit, using those also feels discouraged. I wind up using this minimum level sniper rifle that has tranq rounds and a silencer since it can instant sleep somebody on a headshot and is suppressed and doesn't cost so much to use basically ALL THE TIME. Together with the fact that you get (admittedly very small) GMP bonuses for not killing anybody and not getting spotted, which noisy lethal weapons certainly won't help, and it feels like the game is actively discouraging me from a ton of itself... which it wants me to participate in, like the researching of weapons! And while this could be a Kojima joke, it's one that has already been played in Peace Walker (if it was meant to be one there, too), and it's not like Kojima to make such a sweepingly huge systemic meta joke two games in a row.
It does kind of push towards a more "humane" way of playing the game, but again, we've already experienced that in Peace Walker.
But, just like in every MGS since 2, dragging a ton of unconscious guys into a pile, sticking a C4 on one of them, and detonating them all is still fun.
But my real biggest complain is that I can't just go on to youtube anymore. My front page is plastered with MGSV spoiler videos that I've had to look away from and scrub even the titles and thumbnails of from my memory.
[this message was edited by Spoon on Sat 26 Sep 03:21] |
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