Zeusthecat

I recently finished this game and really really enjoyed it. I ended up putting about 90 hours in and managed to complete all 50 missions and around 25% of the side op missions. After I knock out some other games I've been meaning to get to I will probably come back to this to do the rest of the side ops and max out my base. One of the best things about playing this game has been discussing it with other people who have played it and hearing how different their approach to certain situations was from my own. I quickly adopted a pretty basic stealth strategy that carried me through a good number of missions where I would scope out an area first to find weak points in guard placement on the perimeter of an area. Then I would start at the outer perimeter and just systematically sneak up to each guard, grab them, interrogate them, knock them unconscious, and fulton them. Then I would slowly move deeper into enemy territory strangling and fultoning everyone as I went until the entire base was empty. I preferred not to use my tranquilizer pistol because the silencer didn't have much durability and it was usually more likely to alert other guards. So I would more or less just watch and wait for the perfect moment to go strangle someone and if I was spotted by someone nearby, I would tranquilize them with my pistol as a last resort. As I got deeper into the missions though, I was forced to branch out and improvise a bit more and that is when the genius of this game really started to shine. Whenever I hit a spot where my strategy just wasn't working, the game always seemed to support exactly what I thought I would need to do to get through. For example, as the missions got tougher it got harder and harder to get through without being spotted and I knew that I had to do something different. So naturally, I figured I would need to start putting more effort into luring enemies away so I could isolate them and take them out easier. It turns out that this game supports several ways to do that so I settled on throwing ammo clips as my go-to way to lure enemies. However, it wasn't quite enough and I was still having trouble in some cases with finding the right position to take them down once they were close enough to me without them seeing me first and alerting the others. So I quickly found that if I just hid in a cardboard box behind a rock and threw ammo clips, they would walk right past me without seeing me and I could jump out of my cardboard box and strangle them once they had walked past. Discovering the cardboard box was a game changer for me and I was shocked to hear from other people that had beat the game that they never even touched it. Once I realized how useful it was, it became one of my main infiltration tools. It was endlessly fun to cause just enough chaos to freak everyone out and make them go into an alert state and then watch 4 guys walk right past me and my cardboard box without a second glance. And my absolute favorite was doing the Wandering Mother Base Soldiers side ops, running up to the delirious dudes in my cardboard box and having them realize it was me and just let me fulton them. As far as buddies go, once I got Quiet and started using her I figured I would probably just use her for the rest of the game as it seemed hard to justify gimping myself by using another buddy. But as I continued going through the game and getting frustrated with certain missions, I was forced to adjust my strategy again and started appreciating the glory of DD. While Quiet was great at scoping out bases and providing cover fire, I was finding that some missions were just getting way too chaotic and I couldn't keep things under control well enough. So I started using DD more and came to really appreciate how well his mechanics complemented my basic stealth approach. With him at my side, I was able to start luring 2 guards at a time while hiding in my cardboard box and once they walked past I would order DD to distract one while I tranqued the other and then interrogated and choked out the one DD was distracting. Combining his distraction capabilities with my existing strategy and the fact that enemies didn't go into an alert state when he fucked with them opened things up considerably. That dog is so fucking rad and I just love pressing triangle repeatedly to tell him how great he is. I think the ultimate culmination of all of these stealth strategies building on each other came out in the Code Talker extraction mission when I started using decoys with voice recordings. I was having kind of a tough time getting through the mansion without being spotted since there were a bunch of guys patrolling both inside and out. I hadn't tried using the decoy yet and figured I would give it a shot to see if I could combine it with my other strategies to get through. So I went through the library area and found a little walkway at the top of some stairs that was adjacent to a hallway with two doors. Once I got up to the walkway I threw a decoy down at the top of the stairs, hid in a box at the end of the walkway, and deployed the decoy. As soon as it deployed I saw a couple guards in a nearby room get alerted and come down to investigate. As soon as the first one walked through the door and walked up to the decoy to see what it was, I burst out of my box, tranquilized him, and popped back inside. The other nearby guard was initially alerted to my attack but was then immediately distracted again by the voice recording so then he came through the door and walked up to the decoy to investigate and I burst out of my box, put him down, and popped back inside. Meanwhile, other guards in nearby rooms started getting alerted by the decoy as they got close enough and they just filed in one by one as I popped out of my box and put each and every one of them to sleep. Then with the last guy I sent DD to distract him which gave me all the time I needed to waltz over to him, interrogate him, and choke him out. When it was all over there were about 7 or 8 guards all sleeping in a massive pile in front of a decoy. Everything was silent except for the occasional cheesy line coming out of the decoy voice recording. As I was about to leave I saw one of them start to wake up and went to try to grab him before he had fully come to. Instead, I accidentally kicked the pile of sleeping bodies and fucking tore out of there like a bat out of hell when I saw all of the blue triangles turn to a red circle and everyone start to stir and get up. Another fun one was one of the missions where I had to rescue the kids that had run off and I went super decoy heavy on the outskirts of the palace to lure enemies away and choke them out. By the time I had finished the mission the entire palace was empty and as I was walking out I got a good chuckle when I realized that the aftermath of my infiltration just left a bunch of my decoys facing in one direction while there were a bunch of enemy decoys facing in the other direction. Parts of this game did kind of suck though. The whole Quiet thing was problematic in a lot of ways but ultimately I think she was the most interesting character in the game. The story wasn't all that great and I really didn't care for how everything concluded. There were certain moments regarding Huey where I really wanted the game to let me make a moral choice and instead it just all played out in a pre-canned cutscene. Eli and the stuff with the kids was also mostly garbage and bothered me more than it probably should have. And seriously, fuck Huey. There were some fantastic moments but I just don't know that Hideo Kojima's convoluted storytelling ultimately works for me aside from some of the cool, flashy, action stuff. It didn't help that this game was nearly devoid of the silly poop humor that I was hoping to see. Not that there was a whole lot of that in 4 but there were enough poop jokes to keep me interested. On the gameplay side, the only thing I didn't like were the action heavy missions. The Sahelanthropus boss fight was the worst (especially the extreme version of that missions, ugh) and the skull boss fights were also incredibly frustrating. It just feels so jarring to have all this realistic stealth stuff and then suddenly have a mission where you are fighting a guy that can absorb 20 rockets without flinching. Given that I am basically commanding an army I feel like those missions would have worked better if there was some way you could actually call in the troops to help. All in all though, this game was great and its easy to look past the less than stellar parts. It's strange, I thought I was ready to put this game down for good but as more time passes, I find myself wanting to jump back in more and more.

So every day I'm falling further and further back down the Minecraft rabbit hole. My friend and I started up a new world about a month ago since our old world that we inhabited for a couple years was generated on a much earlier version of Minecraft and was missing a lot of stuff that's been added over the years (we didn't want to have to travel super far to find new chunks that hadn't been previously loaded). We had both burnt out on Destiny a couple months back and figured it would be fun to hop back into this game and see if we could re-kindle the old Minecraft obsession. At first we just played a couple hours on the weekend, then started finding time to play a few nights during the week, and now we are on pretty much every day and texting each other throughout the day as we re-read the entire Wiki to get up to speed on all the changes and new items that were introduced since we stopped playing. To my surprise, this game is just as engaging and exciting as it ever was, probably even more so now that we have started fresh with hundreds upon hundreds of hours of prior experience. This is still my number one game of all time by a very large margin. It is pretty much fucking perfect in every conceivable way. I'll probably post some more thoughts at some point but there is one new-ish mechanic that has resulted in a pretty hilarious situation. In the past, villager breeding was just based on the number of valid doors in a village and villagers would breed until the number of adult villagers reached 35% of the number of valid doors. In a subsequent patch, however, they added a layer on top of that to change the mechanic so that they would only breed if they were willing. To raise a villagers willingness to breed you can either trade with them (villager trading was another great addition to this game by the way and adds a surprising amount of depth) or give them certain food items to fill up their inventory (also, villagers now throw food to each other if they detect that another villager doesn't have enough food which is fucking rad). Since we never ended up finding a village, we eventually ended up curing a couple of zombie villagers and shuttled them over to a basic village we had built. It took a bit to get up to speed on the new breeding mechanics but we were able to finally get them to reproduce after doing some trading and setting up the village with enough doors to fulfill the 35% requirement. From there things took a slightly more disturbing turn. Once we had a handful of villagers, we forced pairs of them into houses and fenced everything off so they would be forced to reside in the specific houses we chose (there is still a bug where big villages tend to have all villagers congregating in a corner of the village and leaving the rest of the houses empty). Then, we got about a dozen stacks of 64 raw potatoes and put them in a central village chest. With that setup, we then started making regular visits to the village to make sure our villagers were continuing to breed. This basically involves us running over to the village, grabbing a stack of potatoes out of the chest, and throwing a bunch of potatoes to each of our villagers. They then take the potatoes and a few minutes later they emit hearts above their heads and a baby villager pops out. I didn't think much of this at first but then I did start thinking. And I realized we have enslaved a bunch of people in tiny houses and are forcing them to breed by feeding them a diet of nothing but raw potatoes. I love Minecraft.

I've bought a good number of my consoles based on a game or games I really wanted to play N64 - Super Mario 64, Wayne Gretzky's 3D Hockey, Star Wars Shadows of the Empire, and Pilotwings 64 Dreamcast - Worms World Party, Shenmue and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 Virtual Boy - Wario Land and Mario Tennis Gamecube - Star Wars Rogue Leader PS2 - GTA III Game Boy - Tamagotchi, Pokemon Blue, and Harvest Moon Xbox - Halo 2 and Conker Live and Reloaded Xbox 360 - Gears of War and Halo 3 (and really just online multiplayer gaming in general) Wii - Wii Sports and Twilight Princess WiiU - Super Mario 3D World 3DS - Animal Crossing New Leaf I've bought plenty of other consoles but never really for a specific game or games.

Seems fair. I like my references too. But references or not, A Bug's Life is Pixar's worst film (sorry Twig). Which I guess still makes it an above average kids movie.

So I was discussing A Bug's Life with one of my co-workers and he completely disagreed with my assessment and loves the movie because it is apparently a big homage to Seven Samurai. I hadn't heard anyone bring that up here but if that's true, does that somehow make this a better movie than it otherwise comes across? I've noticed this thing with film criticism where a lot of movies and shows that seem kind of generic and uninteresting to me tend to be lauded by huge swaths of people simply because they reference other classic movies or have some apparent awareness of film culture. Like that weird lizard man X-Files episode the other week that my wife and I absolutely despised and had to turn off but is apparently everyone else's favorite episode because references to classic X-Files. Or that movie Rango that was just drab and boring to me but highly regarded by others because references to western movies. Maybe if I watched a ton more stuff I would be able to frame these types of movies/shows differently and appreciate the artsiness of it but I'm not so sure that if I went into A Bug's Life with prior knowledge of Seven Samurai that that somehow would have made it a better movie.

Yeah, I just really hate the way drug use is discussed in an almost universal negative light in modern society. Describing it as an "epidemic" just further poisons the conversation and demonizes people. Drugs can definitely be pretty terrible. But in my experience, they can also be totally awesome.

Sorry if I came across as insensitive. I'm just being pedantic about the way the word 'epidemic' is so casually thrown around with this kind of stuff.

So I guess we are apparently in the middle of a "heroin abuse epidemic". It's scary to think that it is spreading so fast and infecting so many people. I wonder what precautions I can take to avoid catching it.

Sorry, I'm a little behind but we finally grabbed A Bug's Life and I watched it twice. It sucked. It reminds me of those second rate CGI movies on Netflix like Thunder and the House of Magic or Turtle Tale. Every character is a lazy stereotype and nobody is likeable. I was expecting to see at least some Pixar magic but it was all just really generic and all of the bugs were completely interchangeable. There was nothing about how the ants or grasshoppers (or any of the other bugs really) acted that really came across as ant-like or grasshopper-like and instead they seemed to just rely on lame visual gags to define the bugs. The caterpillar is a ravenous fat guy, the praying mantis is a magician, the two rolling bug guys are foreigners that don't understand what anyone is saying, and of course the flea runs a fucking flea circus. Even if they did do a good job with the bugs though and actually made characters you didn't want to see immediately squashed by a giant foot, this movie still just has the worst and most pointless story. The grasshoppers have more or less enslaved the ants and are forcing them to gather up food as an offering. Why? So the ants don't realize that they outnumber the grasshoppers and step out of line. I really can't figure out what the issue is here though because the grasshoppers have all the food they want in other lands and the only reason the ants would rise up would be to fight their oppressors. So the grasshoppers' logic basically boils down to them just wanting some lower beings around that they can be assholes to without repercussions. Never mind the fact that there is no analog to this in the real world and grasshoppers and ants probably couldn't give two shits about each other (not sure why they couldn't conjure up some actual insect conflict that might resemble something in the real world). Then there is the mechanical bird. Flick convinces the whole ant colony to go along with his stupid plan to build a mechanical bird out of leaves and twigs. It was maybe kind of cool when the little woodland critters did something similar in Once Upon a Forest but it was fucking stupid here. Suspension of disbelief has its limits and I begrudgingly gave the movie the benefit of the doubt that yeah, if there was somehow a genius ant that built a mechanical bird and knew enough about aerodynamics, and knowing ants can lift multiple times their own body weight, that maybe they could get the wings to flap by rowing the little oars inside the body of the bird. But then my brain exploded when I saw the flea light a match and use his flea body weight to shoot a jet stream of lighter fluid at the bird and light it on fire. Nope, that's not how that works. The worst part of all of this is how utterly pointless it all was. Flick is the worst main character I've seen in a long time. He makes mistake after mistake and does far more damage than he does good and yet one stupid speech at the end wins him the princess and convinces all of the rest of the ant colony to industrialize so they can partake in all the leisurely activities they always wanted to do. I always hated ants before but after seeing this movie I hate them even more.

Mmm. Sexy. This is the sexy thread right?

Damn, that's quite different from my experience and sounds super shitty! I still find it hard to fault the customer though and think it is really on restaurant owners to set their prices in a way that they can pay their staff a fair wage without relying on donations from customers. I've seen so many people from so many walks of life that are bad tippers for one reason or another. But at the end of the day, it is their money and tipping isn't mandatory. For some, eating out is a rare treat and they just can't afford dropping a good tip, some people are bad at math, and some people can afford it but just don't feel like being charitable. Unfortunately, it is all too easy to just assume they are all just assholes. I'm guilty of that too unfortunately as it can be quite a vicious environment. And I totally agree on a forced 3 months work in the service industry. To this day, I attribute my years at Applebee's as the most valuable life experience I've had. You learn so goddamn much about people and conversation and body language.

If my several years at Applebee's is any indication, yes, wait staff workers are very often entitled and shitty. I started out working back of the house making $8 an hour. The shifts were longer, working conditions sucked, and we made about 1/3 to 1/2 of what front of the house people made. Then I eventually made my way to front of the house and saw a drastic increase in income and shitty co-workers. Yeah, you get some bad tips and that can suck but there was this weird mentality with almost everyone where if they weren't getting 20% tips they would take it personally and get all bent out of shape. And the discrimination it fostered just made it even more toxic. Any time a group of black people, military people, young people, old people, hispanic people, European people or religious people came in, there was this automatic assumption that you were going to get a bad tip if they sat at your table. And that just set the whole stage for a bad experience on both ends. Tipping is bullshit and tip jars that pop up at every random place are the absolute worst. People that make tips generally have no idea how good they have it compared to all the people working twice as hard for half as much money.

Dude, that is awesome!

To be honest, at first they kind of felt like bullshit but they really are the best versions of those missions. Especially the Subsistence missions. I finished mission 46 last night which I guess means I've finally seen the true ending and the big twist. I still need to finish the last few remix missions and I think I'll be done.

Pretty much.

To be honest, at first I figured people were just being hyperbolic about how terrible this online stuff is integrated into the game. But Jesus, that is just about the worst implementation of an online component I've ever seen in a major AAA release. It makes no goddamn sense. I would estimate that of the last 10 nights that I've played this game, 7 or 8 of those nights had this connection issue where the servers went down for maintenance. At least I have an excuse to use this gif again to express how I feel about the jackasses that thought this was a good idea:

So I've been playing the crap out of this and really enjoying most of it. I hope to post some more thoughts at some point because there is just so much good video game stuff here. But my issue right now is that the Metal Gear Solid V servers go down for maintenance just about every single day. Maybe there are a few days here and there that it doesn't happen but almost every time I sit down to play in the evening, I eventually get a message saying I lost connection to their servers and when I try to reconnect it tells me they are down for maintenance. Normally I wouldn't mind since I'm not paying attention to the online stuff but I'm pretty sure when it happens I'm instantly losing like 90% of my GMP. At first I thought I was mistaken but I swear last night I had well over 1,000,000 GMP and then got that disconnect message and saw my GMP plummet to about 100,000. Is this normal? Please tell me this isn't how this is supposed to work...

Dude, I'm totally not outraged and I never said he hates the puzzles for being clever. I just said the review was kind of irritating for the reason I outlined. He spent several paragraphs going on about how concerned he is about people using guides and I felt that it colored the review in a negative way that seemed a bit off the mark to me. It's such a weird line of criticism for a puzzle game too. He talks about how the game rewards your puzzle solving by building your knowledge so that you can solve more puzzles, but then later says the game doesn't give you enough reward. It's not clear to me what other rewards he would need to for his criticism to be rendered invalid. A cutscene maybe? A gun? Sometimes puzzles in a puzzle game can be hard. And I think it's totally fair to knock a game for having puzzles that are too difficult or obtuse. But to knock it because the puzzles didn't provide good enough rewards and didn't give you some big fanfare when you solved them is missing the point of the game. Yes!

Taking the paragraphs he wrote leading up to that statement, I stand by my claim.

That Polygon review is kind of irritating. It seems kind of like he knocked the game because the puzzles are so clever that nobody would be able to resist using a walkthrough, which would defeat the entire purpose of playing and experiencing the game. Also, hearing such a bold claim regarding the puzzle difficulty only makes me want to play this more.

Well shit, I just Googled it and apparently the director gave an explanation for why Riley's emotions are of mixed gender: http://www.cinemablend.com/new/Why-Inside-Out-Main-Character-Has-Male-Female-Emotions-72176.html Kind of a bummer that there was no real significance behind the decision and it was just done to more or less make the dinner scene more understandable. Boo.

My first thought was that it was a smoking apparatus. The color of the water was a tad yellower than it should have been but I swear I made something that looked just like that once. Then I realized it was just a pee bottle and got sad and a little grossed out.

http://www.giantbomb.com/podcasts/giant-bombcast-e3-2013-day-two/1600-513/ Around the 16 minute mark is where he claims that preparing the trailer for E3 2013 was the only time their team had had to crunch at all. I guess things got a little more crunchy since then. Edit: Sorry, had to fix link. It was acting squirrelly.

If I remember correctly, I believe Blow was interviewed on the Bombcast a while back and made a comment that they refused to "crunch" with this game and with the exception of a demo they had to throw together in a short amount of time, they've pretty much worked standard weeks while making this game. I'm paraphrasing a bit here and things may have changed in the years since that interview but if that is true then I would imagine that partially explains why development has taken so long. Which is totally fine in my book. I hate the crunch mentality in software development.

I feel like between this thread and the busted thread thread (i.e. the "Making Nick Breckon Uncomfortable" thread) both near the top of Idle Banter, we have taken a dark and uncomfortable turn into the creepier side of weirdness. I don't know how I feel about it but I shudder to think of Nick and Chris reading through these threads. At least Jake is safe... for now.