Thrik

If you can enjoy MGS3 then it'll be a very rewarding experience, considered by many the pinnacle of the series and still reasonably pretty (for a PS2 game). Peace Walker is quite a grindy game of unremarkable bite-size missions designed for mobile. MGS3 might suffer from age, but Peace Walker suffers from just not being many peoples' cup of tea. It's true that Peace Walker is the direct predecessor to MGS5 and some things won't make much sense without at least a plot summary, but various important returning characters — including who is assumed to be the antagonist — don't feature in Peace Walker at all, and it looks like a lot of MGS5's emotional heft will come from tearing apart the morality of those characters that were so lovingly built up in MGS3.

Oh I know, I just love how the rationale for it is explained in such a silly manner. There are lots of little things like that I love in MGS, like the cold medicine (not) curing your sea sickness in MGS2 and Otacon's desperate explanations for why the Metal Gear Mk 2 is invisible basically all of the time yet can't be when unlocking some door. It's all part of the self-knowing daftness of the series and I love it.

Just got to the caves in MGS3. Spent a few minutes frustratedly running around in virtually pitch blackness trying to find some wooden torches, didn't have any luck. Then I noticed that very gradually the image had gotten just slightly brighter as your eyes do in real life, allowing me to more or less figure out where I'm going — what a great way of handling the player not being able to find a light source while still encouraging them to give it a try. Also, just picked up some glow-in-the-dark mushrooms and Snake convinced himself they can charge his batteries. God I love the cheesiness of the codec conversations in this game at times.

Buy them at once. Do not worry yourself with 'finances' when it concerns Metal Gear Solid.

I was wondering what the heck the spoilers were all about, I thought we had some new rule here.

Hopefully something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=me-WHitlw8A (Yes I tried to find a video of Snake falling off the bridge. Couldn't.)

I reckon it was just put on ice for a while. Maybe it was because of technical hurdles that couldn't be overcome with the PS3, maybe it was because the staff were committed to other projects, maybe they just had creative block and wanted to return to it. But I find it very unlikely that this game has actually been in active development for this long. I just hope that the graphics not looking as slick as its new-generation peers won't put people off of what will surely be a delightful and emotionally stirring experience.

Don't worry, I'll be having Snake run around naked so that things are balanced out.

I am once again gagging for this game. It does all look very serious in the trailer, but the gameplay videos indicate that it'll have just as much silliness as previous games — more so than MGS4, even. So I'm looking forward to seeing how they balance the two, which will be challenging but if anyone can it's Kojima Productions. Hearing Zero's voice was really cool, although I'm not sure if it was the same actor. Good likeness if not. It's weird, I think Zero has this almost mystical thing about him now due to the tremendous impact his actions have had upon the MGS universe, and his being referred to numerous times in Peace Walker and Ground Zeroes but never heard or seen. An unseen antagonist who's been completely messing shit up. Should be a great scene if he makes his return.

I think that feeling compelled to 100% every game is likely to lead to seeing most games as far less enjoyable than you otherwise could have done. I absolutely love Metal Gear Solid 3 for example, but if I felt that I had to non-lethally neutralise every single enemy in the game on European Extreme without ever raising an alert then I'd most likely just ruin the game for myself and get extremely pissed off. Similarly, Yoshi's Island is a masterpiece in my opinion but I'd soon grow to loathe it if I felt that I couldn't put it down before grabbing every collectible. In fact, I think that virtually every game I've ever played would become an inferior experience for me if I tried to 100% them. I don't enjoy that shit; it's purely there for those who do. There is a lot to be said for being able to enjoy a piece of entertainment without needing to explore every last detail of it, slowly but surely eroding away the magic and mystery. And you certainly don't need to 100% a game in order to be able to say that — in your opinion — it's a perfect game. Because fundamentally, your experience with a game and how much you enjoy it is what matters. Just because you endured a super-thorough journey through a game doesn't make you any more qualified to pass judgement on it than somebody who hasn't. It's a bit like saying that nobody is qualified to say the next Star Wars film is great unless they catch every single obscure reference that Abrams will inevitably squeeze into it. How dare there be even one minuscule fragment of the creator's vision you didn't experience? The one concession I will make is that you probably should at least complete a game before being able to give a well-rounded opinion on it. But 100%-ing it, especially considering how arbitrary and pointless a lot of completionist stuff in games is? Why do that to yourself? Life is too short.

Probably be a short but sweet experience like Brothers if it does ever come out.

I can't take this any more. http://www.polygon.com/2015/6/9/8750385/metal-gear-solid-5-the-phantom-pain-preview http://uk.ign.com/articles/2015/05/14/metal-gear-solid-5-preview Just started replaying MGS3 last night, after completing MGS2 and MGS4 in the couple of months prior. It's really great to be back to the sea of unnecessary codec dialogue after its dearth in MGS4.

Add gender selection and turn this into an immediate dating site phenomenon.

My game development community has just announced an event we've been planning for a while in coordination with reddit's /r/GlobalOffensive. If anyone here is still into a bit of Source engine level design, we're now running a Counter-Strike: Global Offensive mapping contest. We've decided to put quite a bit of dosh into it (for a completely self-funded site) so hopefully it'll get sufficient interest! There's respectively $500, $150, and $50 for the first three places. Additionally, Valve (unexpectedly) offered to donate a bunch of Counter-Strike merchandise such as signed posters, lanyards, stickers, and a SteelSeries gaming mouse. If anyone's interested, more here: https://www.mapcore.org/articles/special-events/reddit-mapcore-csgo-mapping-contest-r61/

Plugged in?! Bloody hell, what do you think this is — the early 2000s?

The Python one is a falsy check I imagine, which is like doing this in JavaScript (best): if ( !fizzbuzz ) someFunction(); It uses coercion to determine values as true or false. An empty string would be falsy, as would a 0, as would a boolean false. Conversely, any string, any number, or a boolean true would be truthy.

Thought I'd better post a less horrendous picture: I don't think that there's a thread on here about this kind of thing, but I've been making an effort to finally get myself into shape this past year or so. I've lost about 46 pounds so far and have another 24 or so to reach my target. I've got to say, life is better in almost every way now that I'm no longer lugging so much fat around, as seen in this picture from early last year (I don't have many photos of me at my largest because, well, I didn't like seeing myself): It's very motivating being able to 'upgrade' my photos online, including on dating sites and generally getting higher levels of interest.

It was excellent value for money even when I picked it up for like £6 over Easter, so getting it free should be wonderful. Of course, now that I've long since finished it I'm absolutely salivating for The Phantom Pain. I'm having to replay the older games just to quench my ravenous hunger for sweet, sweet Snake.

Oh man, I actually replayed MGS2 the other week and the amount of codec conversation really is off the charts. I'd forgotten but now that you point out they were supposed to be cutscenes, it very much makes sense. Weirdly, MGS4 — which I'm replaying now — swings the other way. It features very little codec conversation, you only get two ongoing contacts throughout the whole game, and one of those is pretty much just a tutorial. Even with Otacon, he has very little to say about the environment and nothing to say about your equipment and weapons. I really liked the stacks of optional codec conversation in the previous games, so it does feel like something is missing. I guess that MGS5 will take the lack of codec randomness even further, but going off of Ground Zeroes will probably have more contextual stuff than MGS4. Also, I expect that there will be lots of tapes that I can listen to in-game so that'll be nice. They worked really well in Peace Walker, even though you had to sit in a menu to listen to them.

Not me until the last year or so, until then I'd never spotted the wordplay. Most excellent.

I thought it was 'expresso' for years because of this ****:

Scandal. Nice TV show if you can get past the first season. Due to sub-par music and a slight lack of focus, the eight or whatever episodes that comprise season one provide vital narrative but seem very unremarkable. I did not at all understand its popularity. Get to season two and you'll very quickly realise why it's now on season five, because it busts out into 22-episode seasons of political drama and action that I can only compare to something like 24 in terms of speed and twists, with doses of House of Cards thrown in for good measure. I've never seen any other show transcend so quickly, although unlike 24 which is pretty much constant hell, it does have an element of silliness. This element is mostly lost after the first season, but does pop up from time to time — which you might really like or not.

In some ways, you can think of Banjo-Kazooie as the precursor to Ass Creed and its more or less pointless collection. I never found the collection in BK unsavoury because it was always so exciting and awesome uncovering a whole new section of Grunty's Lair and the world that laid within. There's nothing wrong with collection being the primary mechanic rather than survival, so long as plenty of other stuff fun exists to keep it interesting. BK basically combined the two to great effect. Excellent shout about Banjo-Tooie and Donkey Kong 64 not really getting the formula right, though.

I really like how the characters look, and also think it's cool that they've tried to give a cutesy look to kinds of animals that aren't particularly... cute. It's so easy with a bear and bird. The DKC games remain my favourite of all of Rare's output, but Banjo had a much different art direction and this is more in keeping with that. If it's just the vibrancy of the colours that turns you off, maybe you could lower the saturation on your screen — although from what I've seen of the very early in-game shots the vibrancy isn't so pronounced. Purple and Green are pretty much universally considered good complementary colours and are used together all the time, so I don't believe there to be anything wrong with the choice of colours. I won't disagree with you guys pointing out BK's collection-heavy play bogging it down at times, but I think you're overlooking that a big part of the game's appeal came from its humour and exploration, not just the the core gameplay. Quirky humour is something that Rare has always excelled at, and I think that we're all hoping for a bit of that here. Heck, Rare themselves have poked fun at BK's huge amount of collecting on numerous occasions, including in the tragic misfire that was BK: Nuts and Bolts.