Smart Jason

To paraphrase Anita Sarkeesian in all of her recent videos, it's a necessity to be critical of the media that we otherwise enjoy. I don't feel like a bad feminist for being a fan of the Metal Gear games, so long as I am aware and conscientious when I play them and respectful of the responses others have to them. Tauriq Moosa wrote his very well known piece on the lack of people of color in The Witcher 3 specifically because he enjoyed the game so much for every other reason. I'd hope that you could explain to your wife that any problematic elements of the Metal Gear games make you uncomfortable as well and be able to point out to her the strengths of the series as well. These are incredibly rich, superbly made, soulful titles, and I hate it when people with good intentions put them in the same irredeemable category of other games which only trade on viscera and sex just because of what they've seen or heard about the portrayal of women.

Thanks for this!

I don't want to encourage you to start answering questions that could lead more and more toward things I don't want to hear, but there was a guy who also got an early copy in the Metal Gear subreddit that piqued my interest about the scoring system and didn't further elaborate. I'm curious, is it clear when you officially begin operations so you know when you're being scored? Like, what if you just drop into the open world and take your time/kill people/get an alert and then later activate a main mission or side op? Does what you did before then count toward your score in the op? Are you always technically in a particular operation when in the open world? Also, the aforementioned guy said there's now a No Kills bonus to replace the score penalty for individual kills; I'm curious - is there still a No Reflex bonus? P.S. I'm sorry that I'm so mad at you right now.

I only recently found this video, which I thought was super interesting and has actually altered the way I play: Before this I'd always assumed that tranquilizers kept guards down longer than CQC, that hold ups weren't indefinite (as they were in Peace Walker), etc. Very informative and presumably quite useful for Phantom Pain as well.

Skullface could unspool all my hard work and drive my psych meter all the way down. Getting to the point where I keep checking the Steam page just to get angry at them for not breaking street date.

So after I wrote that I found this thread and it inspired me to go for it. Since I don't post on the Giant Bomb forum or anything, I hope no one will find it too self-indulgent if I give my playlist here, and I absolutely encourage others to do the same. It definitely helps kill some time while waiting for the game to release. I'm quite happy with my playlist, musically and thematically; all pre-1984. 1. The Rolling Stones - Sympathy for the Devil 2. 3. 4. 5. The Doors - People Are Strange 6. Ike and Tina Turner - Son of a Preacher Man 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. (And yeah, if you recognize my avatar, it was a tight fit, chronologically, to get those Pogues songs in there.)

I found a comprehensive list at some point but unfortunately can't find it again. I'll just write it from it memory, though: Main Op: Chico Paz Escaped Prisoner Prison Camp POWs Eliminate the Renegade Threat: Glaz Palitz Prison Camp POWs Intel Operative Rescue: Intel Agent Classified Intel Acquisition: Agent Bald Agent Prison Camp POWs Destroy the Anti-Air Emplacements: Prisoner 12282 Prison Camp POWs Thankfully, nobody in either Déjà Vu or Jamais Vu. Let me know if you need help with any of these specifically.

Like you said, the video's already been posted and discussed, but yeah, that was one take (he made sure he got it right since he didn't want to eat more Red Vines).

Checking Metacritic, here's the Telegraph's (five star) review quote saying exactly that:

The sense I'm getting from people's reactions to the reviews is that the story is as complex and unfriendly to newcomers as ever, but instead of being told through long, expository cutscenes it's mostly relegated to cassette tapes which you can listen to on your own time (either from a menu or while in the game), same as Peace Walker and Ground Zeroes. So, in that sense, I think that strides have been taken to allow people unfamiliar with the story to still engage with the game and have a satisfying experience without being stopped every few steps for another cinematic which you might find incomprehensible. Having said that, as a huge fan of the series and its storyline, this is bumming me out, since I find listening to cassette tapes to be far more tedious than watching cutscenes. I guess I can only hope that it'll be better than Peace Walker and Ground Zeroes because you're collecting tapes gradually in Phantom Pain so you can keep up with them at a pace instead of being dumped all of them at once, and also you can listen to the cassettes as you slowly explore the open environment. Peace Walker is literally the only game in the series in which I didn't even bother trying to listen to half the content, because I found it so much more psychologically trying to be given a huge checklist of non-interactive story dumps than to have codec calls and cutscenes slowly trickle down (or occasionally be blasted into you like a fire hose) throughout the game. Of course, right now my hype is off the damn charts, so whatever, give me ten hours of cassette tapes and I'll listen to them all while just walking around in a circle in the world if I could.

Because of its music import feature, I'm thinking of making a custom playlist for the game, I'm not sure. On the one hand I feel like - what am I thinking? I'm a huge purist and I only want to hear the game's soundtrack and the specific licensed music that Kojima-san selected throughout the experience. On the other hand there's been something calling to me lately, when I look at this game - look at the sand and Mother Base and the sunsets and Big Boss... I think there's really something to be said for walking around and listening to You Can't Always Get What You Want.

Shout out to Lucas Pope's (Papers, Please) Ludum Dare entry, Unsolicited. On Pope's site you can find all his previous Ludum Dare games, which fit nicely with this thread's theme. I'm a big fan of them - they're all darkly satisfying and well made. Anyone who enjoyed Papers, Please should definitely check them out if they haven't before. I particularly recommend The Republia Times (a pseudo-prequel to Papers).

If your mind isn't already made up about Quantic Dream games (Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls), I'd certainly recommend giving them both a fair try if you're the sort of person who happens to like branching narrative.

Totally fair.

I hear you about Snake's deterioration not necessarily being reflected in the gameplay. To be honest, I've played so many "disempowering" smaller indie games over the last couple of years which really just come off frustrating and too difficult that I'm kind of over that sensibility. I think there's something to be said for the fact that we're still talking about the series which originated stealth gameplay - which is inherently disempowering on an intellectual level. Even if you play loudly and violently relative to the overall bell curve of the Metal Gear Solid experience, Snake will most likely die if you don't take the time to strategize, hide, or run. All of these are antithetical to the legend of Solid Snake as a mercenary bad ass, which is a theme (the realities of legends) the games have been presenting since day one, put into its most literal form now that Snake is so old. As esoteric as it is, I do want to mention the psyche gauge, which is a gameplay mechanic that is specifically there to support all of this. The weaker you play, the more violent and seen you are, and the more condescended towards Snake is, the worse Snake's mental well-being becomes and that has actual effects such as, notably, reducing your aiming accuracy, how quickly you heal - it can even cause you to vomit. Admittedly, more could have been done to force the player to engage with it, but it exists for this exact reason, and I'm going to swear by it as I continue to revere Guns of the Patriots as a masterpiece.

I guess from my perspective, review scores are a very inflated metric - particularly when dealing with a blockbuster series. It's really disenfranchising to see something like Grand Theft Auto V be one of the highest rated games of the decade on Metacritic and subsequently capture nobody's passion when it comes time to talk about what was actually the best game of its year. I'm not trying to be overly cynical about the industry itself, but in too many cases, good reviews just seem like a requisite stage of high profile releases. That said, I admit wholeheartedly that this is completely anecdotal and subjective on my part. I'm more concerned with the previous page in this thread in which people were comparing the Metal Gear games and I saw 4 ranked as last or second to last. While I think all four mainline Metal Gear Solid games are excellent, that's what prompted me to mention it being underrated (as well the complaints I saw being reiterated about its ending). I want to disagree with you about there being a shitload of time devoted to Guns of the Patriots' gross pandering moments or digressions which fell flat. I'd offer that maybe those stick out more in retrospect because they didn't work for you, but I definitely don't think it's at all fair to say that the story of Snake's expiration took a back seat. That is the story of the game; in many ways the story of the series. But hey, opinions, opinions, opinions! I don't want to sour this thread. It should be a celebration! Laugh, and grow fat!

So, more broadly, I think Guns of the Patriots is an exhaustively underrated game. There's a misery and pallor hanging over the entire experience (particularly, of course, Act IV) that I don't think anything else in this field has achieved. Even indie games which specifically deal with aging and mortality (Passage comes to mind, and other notable titles like Cart Life or Kentucky Route Zero tackle similar themes), they don't have the same legacy as Metal Gear. I find there to be something so overwhelming about watching the evolution of the characters from cavalier young men Metal Gear Solid to profoundly sad and resigned adults in Guns of the Patriots that frequently seem afraid and uncomfortable to speak to one another - which is a tremendous accomplishment of writing, performance, and animation. I vividly remember how weakened and hopeless it felt to play that game.

I wish they went into more detail about how FOB alliances work. We need an Idle Thumbs mutual defense pact.

Not sure about actual Fulton inventory (as Thrik stated, that was the case with Peace Walker), but in all the gameplay demos you can see that there's a GMP cost of Fultoning things out. GMP (likely being a play on GDP) is your resource for all Mother Base initiatives - expansions, R&D, supply drops, etc. That's your bottleneck; and every Fulton recovery has a cost as well. So, apparently Ken Imaizumi - or somebody else on the development team, I can't find the tweet myself - dropped the detail that rescued POWs in Ground Zeroes will stack when imported to Phantom Pain. This has been a bit of a frustration for me lately. Everyone's working off the very old promise that unique recoveries from Ground Zeroes will transfer to Phantom Pain (i.e., Hideo Kojima, Glaz and Palitz, the escaped prisoner, the informant, the POWs from each mission) and there's been no further information about that. I wish I had something more solid because it's really making my completionist sense itch to ensure I have the maximum starting staff possible.

https://twitter.com/HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN/status/632351237225082880 https://twitter.com/HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN/status/632351286701129728 Tactical espionage action.

Does anyone know how this happened? Did the channel change some parameters and start over? Or did the troll contingent that was trying to quit the game get its way and, subsequently, a new game was selected from the main menu? Edit: I'm inferring from the chat that it was a quit, and the real beauty now is that they're actually stuck in character creation because they're in an advanced customization menu and need a back button to get out. However, it looks like the back button was unbound in order to facilitate rolling. There's literally no escape. 5:02 fwjwt: Twitch Plays Dark Souls is the Dark Souls of Twitch Plays Heh.

I'd assume we'd want to tread lightly on getting into, just, random recommendations in this thread, but Always Sometimes Monsters is also marked down to a super low $2.50 in that Devolver sale, and now would be a great time to play that if you haven't since they just announced an early 2016 sequel which will import save files from the first game. One of my favorite games of last year!

When does this actually happen, though? More often this type of rhetoric is just used to silence social justice movements by casting them as all bourgeois white people. That was the ostensible thesis of #NotYourShield. I know the most conservative member of my circle of friends frequently talks about how he never hears black people talk about privilege and other hot button terms, only SJWs, as though that told any story other than his own field of view.

Is this a good time to ask about Apple Cider's podcast? I'd also subscribe to your newsletter, if you have one.