[Adilegian]

Paz also carries forward a series-honored tradition of bomb-rigged torture escapees.

MG1: Snake is captured, stripped of equipment. Get equipment back with a tracer that the player must manually remove from bag.
MG2: Similar scenario, except I think it's a bomb? I forget on this one.

MGS1: Snake is captured, stripped. If you endure torture for the Meryl ending, you find a bomb that Ocelot stuck in your bag that the player has to manually toss.
MGS2: Blanking on an example of this one.
MGS3: Snake is captured, tortured, and Ocelot plants a tracking device on him. If you don't remove this in Survival Viewer, there are Ocelot Unit soldiers after The Sorrow fight.
,
So Paz reorients these elements. She's captured, tortured, and rescued. She has a bomb that must be tossed, but all of these elements are out of the player's hands, and the outcome is finally reversed -- the bomb ruse works (however tastelessly and offensively so).

So there's some stuff.
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[Adilegian]

[Adilegian]

[Adilegian]

[Adilegian]

[Adilegian]

I'm not comparing Kojima to Kubrick. I'm indicating an abstraction that includes but is independent of both.
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[Adilegian]

I'm with Kilroy on not entirely understanding how the stealth works in traditional MGS terms. I think I'm going to treat each screw up like I would a screw up in an Assassin's Creed game. The game seems to give you just enough control to move over obstacles to let you approach... But also trying to make it fluid enough so you can dash.

Let's see how that works, because even Normal on one of these side missions has the same Get Caught :: Punishment Severity Ratio on MGS1 Extreme.
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[Adilegian]

Man, they *really* brought back the sense of guards being EVERYWHERE like I felt in the first MSX Metal Gear, where you duck into a room and just keep shooting (with silencer) guards as they enter the room until the alert level drops.

The prison camp and the low cliffs are nearly the only areas that I can reliably hide once caught. I like the 2D white curves to indicate enemy perception. It makes the situation much more tense, even if you have the Ground Zeroes app pulled up in an iDevice.

Speaking of which, I need to get a little more familiar with the independent Mother Base manager that you apparently can populate by performing certain achievement/trophy like actions. So far, the only residents in my Mother Base are Big Boss, Kaz, and... The Pain? Like I wrote, this merits further investigation.
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[Adilegian]

Note, however, that the AI of the soldiers feels FAR less abusable than in the previous games. I think that that's what the three (I think three) square tented/celled areas come in handy to break line of sight. Despite this, I've found the soldiers search in groups, which are murderous if not fled from well.

I've also enjoyed the sabotage aspect of prepping your helicopter for a safe travel, particularly sending an APC along a road of C4s spaced far enough apart that they don't blow each other up, and that the APC rolls over on its regular patrol. It's like Pacman if the dots exploded whenever you rolled over them.
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[Adilegian]

And am I the only one finding Sutherland Snake largely forgettable, a cipher in his own right?
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[Adilegian]

[Adilegian]

[Adilegian]

Also, along with the weirdness of Sutherland Snake sounding like a phoned in performance, half his recurring lines ("Spit it out!") sound like they're delivered through one end of a cardboard tube. Part of me keeps asking how they could have fucked up on Snake's voice this noticeably, idiosyncratic and subjective as that response might be. I mean jeez they've got Richard Doyle's number if they really want to develop Big Boss away from Solid Snake, right?

I would like there to be a Doyle/Sutherland language option in TPP.
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[Adilegian]

For those curious, this is what gets transmitted onto an iDevice when you get the (free) app to interface with the game.



And here's for good times. It is strange that the resolution of the screencaps that the game sends to my iPad is so low. I wonder if this is any different if interfaced with a PS4.

No spoilers in these. Just showing what it looks like.







And, of course, a surveillance camera!?


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[Adilegian]

To maybe illustrate this more specifically, this on the screen...



Corresponds to this on the iDevice.



I smell Assassin's Creed all over this.
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[Adilegian]

I had no idea that the iPad screencaps would destroy this page's formatting. My bad, one sec.
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[Adilegian]

Wait now it looks normal!? Someone tell me if the image sizes screwed up the page and I'll fix.
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[Adilegian]

[Adilegian]

The Mother Base VR Simulator is something like the resource management aspects of Peace Walker mixed with the referential qualities of the AC!D games. Right now, I've got The Pain fighting abroad to help acquire materials to build a Gekko.



As noted previously, I'm not sure how this relates to the main gain, but among its prizes are archival MGS artworks.



I was playing this just now and got the message "Insufficient storage on device," which seemed highly implausible unless the recruitment of one Ocelot soldier took up 2.1GB on my iPad. A little bit of kicking around Google brought up this information from a Reddit thread.

[Adilegian]

[Adilegian]

[Adilegian]

[Adilegian]

I'm coming to appreciate the game's austerity and oppressive environment that, as I wrote earlier, reminds me more of the first Metal Gear on MSX than anything else. I don't think that it's far enough away from the general MGS aesthetic to be considered a total departure, even while it IS emphasizing different aspects of the series that have been underplayed or underemphasized for a while. Peace Walker started heading in this direction, except the looseness of the Fulton extraction prevented it from being truly difficult, I think. This Is pushing the series more in that same direction. I can dig the minimalism which, combined with the legitimately distressing presence of torture, creates an atmosphere that's 50% new to MGS and that I don't think I've quite encountered in similarly styled games.
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[Adilegian]

[Adilegian]

I think there's also something pertinent in the torture camp for Raiden's situation later on. I mean they carved him up except for his head and spinal column in "Area 51," which is presumably a similar black site with more sophisticated versions of what we're seeing in Ground Zeroes run by the Patriot AIs.

PROTIP: Don't let them take your blood.

PROTIP 2: If you are battlebros with Snake and he beats you with his fists in a minefield, crawl over and die because you don't want them getting hold of what's left.
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[Adilegian]

Looked for the XOF patches with an FAQ. Looking for small, indiscriminate patches in an environment where the surfaces are constantly moving on the same scale due to rain visual effects? And making them impossible to positively locate outside of three guards who point them out on your map -- or your standing directly on top of the Maguffin?

Sounds like a great time! It actually isn't!

Empty activity to unlock actual content blows. I really wish they were being more careful with what they're borrowstealing from Assassin's Creed. We've now got the digital voice telling us that we're about to leave to pseudo-historical recreation area, which would have been neat if it weren't now beaten into the ground by another series.

Hell, if they were going to go this collectathon route, they might as well have made it more easily tracked like MGS2's dog tag acquisition which required negotiating different strategies for level layouts in order to get the Maguffins, and which documented whose tags you were missing and where they were.

And that last one on Snake that you find only by doing the one move in the game that you least often need to do? That's actual bullshit, and I'm glad it exists as a reference for future inquiries into what is and is not bullshit.
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[Adilegian]

[Adilegian]

[Adilegian]

[Adilegian]

Also, where the hell is the trademark MGS homoeroticism that MGS4 practically bathed in?
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[Adilegian]

[Adilegian]

But on the other hand, in the Middle East, they don't hunt foxes, they hunt jackals. And they don't use hounds, they use royal harriers!

All these goddamn mammals, no wonder they decided to make as many snakes as possible.
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[Adilegian]

Cross-posting from FB:

[Adilegian]

[Adilegian]

This was intended partly as a collective answer to people who DM me on my YouTube channel asking if I have quit making videos, if I were dead, or both.

It also features a serendipitous intersection of a mistake and event-triggered character speech.


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[Adilegian]

I wrote out a thoughtful response twice and then accidentally deleted it twice, so I'm going give Cliff's Notes:

(1) An argument about a game's value that has to ignore content in the game (other ways of reaching fixed goal, Side Ops, etc) is a bad argument.

(2) Ground Zeroes reminds me pleasantly of the MGS1 VR Missions and the MGS2 Substance release, particularly the latter since GZ's design is very much about stretching the possible ways to use a fixed level as much as possible. Pricing out GZ at $30 seems like a different way of using that same model.

With that said, the FOX Engine broke and here's what that looks like.


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[Adilegian]

But then who would represent the anti-cabbage contingency?

Also Toptube, I appreciate your response and do see that you're working out an objective measurement of the GZ's value by correlating its content to prior experiences with content in other MGS. As alluded to in my prior post, I think of GZ in the context of the "enhanced" versions of MGS1 (well, VR Mission disc here, Integral package in Japan) and MGS2, though not so much MGS3 since Snake VS Monkey isn't quite the same and the best bonus content was the MSX games and the first MGO.

The Side Ops bear similarity to the Snake Tales and VR Mission content that takes place in actual areas in Substance. GZ calls them "pseudo-historical" enactments, and part of what's good about them, I think, is the same as with those retreading levels in Substance. You're given new objectives to accomplish in the same space used for the canonical prelude, and that requires you to think about the same space in different ways.

Hauling Paz while avoiding new patrols and that AV requires a different touch than, say, going for a KO extraction of the two war criminals who wander around the base flanked by other guards. It's the same space and same skillset with a different set of demands, and even there the game responds to which approach you choose, as you get to know more about the war criminals if you extract rather than assassinate them.

I didn't think about it before I got the game, but knowing that the Side Ops would use the same level design created expectations that I'd see the designers similarly stretch the possible uses of the areas on the map. I like how seamlessly, for example, the anti-air installation sabotage mission can briefly become a rescue op not too unlike the main mission's, with the additional perk that you can potentially learn much more about the base's in-fiction political significance and operation ONLY by handling it as a rescue mission for a brief spell.

I would like to have seen more use made of the gridlike tented areas outside of making them tenuous hiding places that Snake gets funnelled into while running away after detection. I also would like to have seen the positions of escaped prisoners randomized within those camps, kind of like how Ames's location was randomized in MGS2.
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[Adilegian]

Just wanted to comment on this:

[Adilegian]

[Adilegian]

Yeah, if I were developing a game and had a free choice between an initial console release VS a PC release, I'd likely go with console so that I could report to the board of directors that the game they/I sank money into developing turned a profit that made the entire venture worthwhile, fiscally speaking. No one cares how popular your game is if the popularity comes from piracy rather than that thing we do called buying + word of mouth that makes it possible for people to make more games.

EDIT: And Kappuru's right, though I suspect Rei's using hyperbolic language to express distaste with the game's tonal problems plus the fact that she doesn't like Kojima specifically. Ground Zeroes isn't a kusoge, and it's a sharply designed game with plenty of earned victories and defeat.
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[Adilegian]