syntheticgerbil

Haha, I'll get on that this instant! I was actually considering entering dialogue into Google Translate while playing until I realized no subtitles exist in this demo.I probably would have given that up after a few minutes though, as I'm sure it would have ended up as a bunch of nonsense in English as is usual when I use Google Translate.

Ah, I see well that's help enough though, thanks. So if I e-mail Marco Hullen and he says no, I'll know I've lost all chance of recovering the old demo for myself. I should probably finish the main game first though before I start bugging him. On the bright side, I did find the first 2005 demo which is in German only with German voices right here: http://www.demonews.de/Spiele/The-Whispered-World/Demos/ So maybe if anyone's interested in Sadwick's original look as well as some side characters and background differences, it's neat to see the evolution. Doesn't help me much because I'm looking for the English one which I think is like this except no voices as well as it might have a few other screens... I am not absolutely clear on what it contained. I don't know why I didn't just download the demo in 2005 since I remember being interested in this game back then when it was called Whispered Word or "Wor[l]d," so I suppose it's my own fault.

My favorite is rereading a page ten times over and realizing you still weren't paying attention to a damn thing going on in the story.

Happy Orvidos!

Haha, well a search for the zip file that was hosted on the Bad Brain site doesn't seem to come up anywhere except old links to the same site. Too bad archive.org doesn't actually back up zip files as that would fix everything. Did a lot of people at Bad Brains move to Daedelic or am I mistaken? Because otherwise I have no idea who worked on the original game outside of Marco Hullen who probably won't want to send me a zip file to his older version of the game. I really would just like to have a copy of the demo for comparison sake and to see how much was changed or added on. So far I've just seen screenshots or faint gameplay footage.

Look at all this babbling I did in this thread. Anyway, I have owned Whsipered World for a few months and finally just started playing it this week. I haven't gotten too far as I started trying all objects on everything and really slowed down the pace (I'll get to why). The voice acting for the main character is ridiculously annoying in a way I can't believe the localizers would think such a half assed lisp would fly, but I do see what Fuzzy Lobster pointed out where it starts to become less annoying the more you hear it. Really the worst part about his voice is when the actor is overdoing the sighing dialogue type stuff, it's too over the top for the amount of times Sadwick has to whine. As far as how pathetic and unlikable the main character is, I can see where he is coming from as more of a troubled teen in a weirdly authentic way and not just someone who complains to be funny or witty. I'm seeing signs that his character will have to develop into a different more confident and optimistic person, but I can never tell with adventures games as far as character development. They are all the perfect vehicles to go ahead and do so, but rarely does any do so effectively or try at all. Seeing how this plays out has me very interested. I'm not at all bothered by the low frame rate of some of the animations even though I admit they exist. Really I think it's just a compromise Daedelic had to take to get out a game in a timely manner with such a heavy amount of artwork. A character doing an action in a low amount of drawn frames is okay if it's not wavering too much and so far it has remained pretty constant. What is annoying is when animation for parts that need it are completely absent. One instance is a part where I encountered Sadwick trying to dislodge a bowl from a statue, while all that happens is I hear voices doing a lot of grunting while he's standing completely still. The animation loop for talking sucks as it seems to be the same five mouths repeated over and over while not moving fast enough to say any of what is being said. Had they just extended the loop to use the same mouths in random order it would have even been better than the results now. Other peeves are loading times between screens are annoyingly long while many characters tend to talk too slow for my taste. I have played tons of adventures in the past but I find I grow very impatient when playing one these days, wanting many things to speed up or to be concise. I doubt I would have cared a decade ago. But on to the really annoying gripe where it's going to seem like I shouldn't be griping. So the reason I'm running around using every object on everything is that in the manual it mentioned that trying strange item combinations can usually result in hearing a lot of extra stuff. They weren't kidding as a ton of items right now already equal unique responses that usually end up in a short remark or story about Sadwick's past. It just seems like a bad way to hide extra information about the character but being the weird OCD guy I am, I had to start seeing what kind of extra dialogue I could find to a large extent. In reality this is optional and probably needs to happen all the time since a complaint people often have about adventures is that they all use the same "can't do that" stock phrases in rotation the whole game. So when an adventure actually goes for it, it can turn annoying for me. But I'm hoping this game will end up as great in my head by the time I finish it. There's so much of the obvious to like about Whispered World, but my hope is that the story and design will make themselves distinct somewhat so that the game is just not another pretty face. Also, does anyone know where I can get the original 2005 demo of this thing? I think there was one, but I pulled up the old Bad Brain site on archive.org and saw there were two different demo zips, one for german only and one for international players. I'm guessing they are mostly the same. If anyone at all has any idea how to track down the demo with the old artwork, please let me know. Maybe you can help Rodi?

I guess I was thinking more about story type games where there'll be one or two sticky parts in there that are ridiculously hard or punishing and require too much of the player, not really where you can pick and choose little sections as a challenge. I figured completionist type players will force themselves through the most annoying of challenges just because they can't give up while those that are more into the high score or the bragging rights of it all would probably be thrilled the whole time to have something near impossible thrown at them so that they can hold it above others who haven't done as well as them.

I think accessibility makes sense as long as you just make note that you aren't talking about those that are disabled. Deathsmiles sounds like a good example, but that's a game where I'm guessing the uncomfortable young anime girl art style will put off the more casual gameplayer. Bugs me a little personally, but I was never the audience. I have no idea how the whole "moe" thing gets normally perceived in Japan.

Yeah I definitely don't think I'd be able to sustain anything as rendered to the degree Herzog is for very long. I'd have to figure out how to do something a little bit above plain flat color and try for less varying color. I guess when I think about what I'd want to do, it sounds easy, but I know too well it's not going to end up easy, especially as it'd be a personal project where the perfectionism I have that makes appearances will go out of control. Were you doing Herzog in pencil first and then cleaning the scans before moving on to the microns or the nibs? Honestly, I hate inking and feel I can get similar results or better with just scanning, cleaning, and playing with the levels of my original pencils. Pencils bring about a certain lushness I think. Ideally, I might want to move on drawing directly with the wacom tablet just because it saves so much time (in terms of frame by frame animating at least), but that's very hard for me to handle precision for detailed line art and I feel like it ends up looking too clinical. I like how solid and well rounded everything comes out in Hobo Lobo with just great pencils. Even if you are getting away with fudging things like you say , it's hard to tell and doesn't seem to be detracting at all. I also really like what Sonny Liew used to do with the earlier comics I've seen. He was much more scratchy and rough and a lot of his earlier stories were released in pencil only and revised to have flat color with a small amount of shades or highlights on the top. Nowadays his lines are much more decisive and Photoshop color is more painterly.

It would seem me that outside of good artistic or visual design, which I think attract most of the general public, accessibility should require a lower learning curve so that things like controls and how the game works become obvious quickly instead of assuming you've already played a ton of others in the genre and throws it all at you at once. The downside of this is that most game designers seem to get around this by adding tedious tutorial levels at the beginning or my personal pet peeve where you can't use certain moves or controls simply because you haven't gotten to the part where it's going to give you a tutorial on them. I think some experimentation is always ideal for any player and being held by the hand might hurt raise the learning curve instead. I don't believe accessibility is solely a matter of easiness in a game but instead about a game being easier at the beginning and smoothly making it's way to the peak difficulty. I can imagine a game becoming too difficult for the player in the end will make most quit, but a lot of times I personally experience games where the difficulty is very uneven where one part you are yelling cursewords and then you might hit a section where everything becomes simple and less stressful again. Also just as bad is when a game has a sudden difficulty spike. I agree with Vimes, I'd probably never recommend a shooter without some sort of clean auto-aim system to anyone looking to get into shooters. So many games and years and I still get annoyed and stressed when I have to aim myself quickly and under pressure in first person view. When games require a certain amount of precision or twitch gameplay, I imagine it's still frustrating to those that are "hardcore," but that those people are more willing to stick it out. On the other hand, I don't think general or unskilled players really care about beating the game often and seem to be happier or more prone to playing games without some story and world set up, hence the Tetris effect and all. I don't know how different Street Fighter IV is, but in general fighting games seem to be really accessible because you can get away with just smashing a bunch of buttons in the arcade and still have a good time. I don't play fighting games, but I suppose beating one even on normal difficulty requires you to learn all of the tedious button combinations and yet doesn't make in terms of accesibility.

This is kind of why I feel obligated to read Discworld in chronological order and have so far ignored the way most read them (I think) by starring characters. I've only read the first 10 but plan to get to the rest one day. I think besides the Rincewind books, all of them are very self contained stories that tend to reexplain a lot but in different ways that are equally amusing. Granny Weatherwax is sort of rebooted in Wyrd Sisters with no reference at all to Equal Rites, which I hear Pratchett really doesn't like (it is bad). I imagine they just keep getting better, although the last one I read, Moving Pictures, was stand alone and somewhat mediocre and unmemorable. Out of the 10 I've read, I absolutely love Pyramids, Mort, and Guards! Guards! Mort is my absolute favorite as I find it to be a very clever story that is paced incredibly well and comes off very sincere with the comedy mixed into all the right places. Guards! Guards! seems to be great to me for similar reasons but has the added dimension of crime and intrigue like I imagine all following City Watch novels have. On the 100 books to read list, I also rank similar to most of you at 16, with only tfour read for myself and not as a school assignment. There are definitely at least 15 more books on there I would be interested in reading but I have a hard time getting around to consuming media that lacks visuals. If I do get past the initial phase of opening the book and reading the first fifty pages, I'm usually set to finish. I didn't count Moby Dick in there, even though I've read it halfway through twice so that I could read a good seafaring tale and understand all the references, but both times I gave up at the part where the narrative just completely halts and pages and pages of information become devoted to the anatomy of a ship and the biology and habits different types of whales. It just came off as a spectacularly bad idea for Melville to structure his novel like that. Maybe I'll try again someday, as I'm almost sure it gets really good once it gets past that. It's probably doubtful the narrative breaks again like that in the book as well. I know I'm going to seem like a major dick for criticizing 1984, but I had a similar problem with reading "a book within a book" for that one as well. I guess it's all fair game for anyone to write however they want, but that's one of those things that works better in video games as branching research or information instead of dropped in the middle.

I tend to have idiotic dreams all involving normal situations with everything in different configurations for the past few years now. Before that I used to have much more fantastical dreams I try to remember the atmosphere of for inspiration. Then there are some nightmares that usually end up needlessly nasty for many reasons and it's not really worth talking about since I have no idea why my mind sometimes needs to think of such horrible situations. Besides that though, almost every time I go to sleep after playing a video game and remember my dream, it'll involve situations from normal life with like a maze dropped in or retrying tasks over and over to get a better rank or score. A couple of months ago my girlfriend woke me up and I started complaining to her about not being able to save my game until I visited all five nacho stands. This one came from Costume Quest and I was in that mall with some kids, even though I believe the nacho stands were actually popcorn stands in the game and there were no save restrictions to speak of.

Holy shit, the whole Oswald mystery as in, "Why did Disney suddenly feel the need to acquire the rights to a character everyone except animation historians had long since forgotten about and then subsequently put out some merchandising and a game starring starring the character?" is fully explained here as true insider information in an exact place I would never expect it. It was pretty confusing to see why Disney latched onto Oswald so late, but considering the idea that the Epic Mickey concept came first makes way sense in that order. This is kind of major information as Sean Vanaman is now part of a thread leading back to the origins of Disney, the company, itself. How crazy for this to suddenly come up in an Idlethumbs podcast. You truly are famous, Vanaman.

The basket and boxes of for sale vegetables in the foreground on the next section is very well rendered. I'm very focused on it. Also Dresden Codak has got me intensely jealous while at the same time I feel annoyed that he has some needlessly long "how to draw characters" posted and sprinkled with art from others. In my opinion, at this point in his career, his anatomy wavers way too much for him to act like he's an authority on character structure and the naked test is complete BS. I would venture to guess he never does the naked test with his male character's cock and balls flying around. Also he tends to do that super obnoxious thing where everyone's default expression involves a cocked eyebrow. I don't know the origins of this as it precedes the whole "Dreamworks does it only" claim in scale, but I suspect it's from people who were greatly influenced by Don Bluth studio tripe and 80s and 90s Disney. But aside from bagging on a guy who is obviously superior to me, I'm curious how long it takes someone like Dresden Codak guy to color each page though. His rate seems to average about a page a month but I have no clue how much time spent that actually equals. I would really like to start my own webcomic as just a place to dump regular comic pages just for fun sometime as I have this set of characters and story floating around, but I feel really stressed imagining it as something I will start and then do a few pages until shying away from doing the rest of the work because I will feel like everything needs to be top quality lest I be ridiculed. Any kind of coloring takes me a long time, but the particular comic I would like to do would need to color to come out of my head the way I see it. I routinely have drawn everything with a pencil to convey mood for the past 10 or so years just because I hate being bothered having a bunch of art supplies sitting around. The computer makes it all easier but how to digitally paint efficiently and quickly is a conundrum to me. At the same time, pencil drawings make me feel happy. On that note the pencils in your comic, Stevan, are a marvel.

Yeah, I agree with the sentiment Toblix, but I'm guilty myself I think. I prefer in any case for the long posts to make it on the threads for the games that already exist, just because I read forum posts for games I finally get around to playing and it's nice if it's all centered in one thread. So I typed way too much crap about Brutal Legend but reserved it for the Brutal Legend thread while mentioning it within the Recently Played thread. On the other hand I just wrote a ton of text recently about Metal Gear Solid 2 in the Recently Played thread, hoping it wouldn't be too annoying but feeling I had to get all my thoughts out somewhere. I did look before hand but there are only threads for Metal Gear Solid 3 and 4 which venture largely into general territory. I shied away from starting a new thread because I figured I didn't have much worth replying to. My fault. But I think I'll just start a new thread from now on anyway if there's too much text, since I did create one last year yelling about Wave Race for game boy which I didn't expect anyone to have played.

I was thinking the other day that a robot dog might possibly make me just as happy as a regular dog. I mean, this is assuming of course they are the crazy advanced types from the robot thread lying around here somewhere...

I thought IMG Burn was the only thing you could use for making Playstation CD-Rs. Are you trying to run these CD-Rs in a PSX or PS2, Kroms? I can get PSX games foreign or burned to work on my PS2, but I have to use this stupid key that must have cost about $30 with some boot discs a few years back. I used IMG Burn to successfully get the English patched Policenauts up and running on the actual system, but I have yet to play through it. It has a setting in there for PSX discs that is super simple.

Apparently I live under a rock because I haven't come into contact with anyone saying these awful things, but seriously, I just want to be shocked but instead give a groan because they probably picked that up from some right wing talk show host. Seriously, to still be mad at someone after you've decimated their country in this day and age, decades after, AND to be two generations away from anything having to do with World War II is all madness. Ugh. I have an old issue of Raw Magazine that has pages and pages of U.S. commercialist rationalization ads and comics from the 40s and 50s for dropping the Atomic Bomb that is fascinating. Seems like it worked to some degree. If the register article says that no radiation disaster will take place, I'm very relieved, just because that seems an awful way to die or suffer. This still seems like a huge fucking mess though.

Haha, yeah, that's a great way to sum it up. Sucks hearing it from Moriarty, since besides Loom being one of my favorite LucasArts adventures (which I don't consider kitsch), I felt his Dig probably would have been amazing had he been left to his own devices. Ebert is just a critic, which I guess many hold high, but I myself don't really think of them as terribly important as individuals defining art and entertainment beyond finding one you can relate to specifically, especially since so many just repeat eachother after the head honcho critic in whatever medium has his say. It's weird to me that Moriarty would just write such a long article on a rigid way of thinking eventually leading up to two subjective categories that almost no one is probably going to find any common ground on. Instead of separating the word art from bad (or unimportant) art, as discussed much earlier in this thread, which not just put the adjective in front? Art is such a tiny word anyway.

Come on Ubisoft, fight the power!

I would think it would be very difficult for any of us to agree full heartedly with Moriarty, or really any of the professionals he knows for that matter, being a very obviously contrarian position to take. This is my guess, but I would think the guy hasn't felt the energy of creativity in video games since he last worked on Loom. I can kind of see where the guy is coming from, all it takes is just a look at his Linkedin profile. He's done major work with Imaginenginehttp://www.imagengine.com the past few years on amazing titles as the creative director such as Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel and titles based on American Girl (the expensive doll company). I e-mailed Moriarty once to see what his actual credits were on stuff at Imaginengine, as the credits for licensed garbage made on the cheap rarely make their way to Mobygames, but he was not having that. I'm not really trying to be an asshole about Moriarty, since he's done some great games in the past and a few of the lectures I've heard are very interesting. I am just really not surprised of his viewpoint when he's been knee deep in fluff work for the past decade or so. When he hasn't worked on a game of much artistic value or merit for so long, I'm almost getting the feeling that he is leveling the playing field to act like games based on the Fairly Odd-Parents are just as important as Braid. This isn't being said of course, but this is what I'm personally hearing. Since Braid has also been held up as the poster child for this Ebert discussion, I'm wondering if Jonathan Blow will have any comments towards Moriarty, as he's idolized the man for years it seems. On the article itself, I think it's weird that he keeps bringing up chess and checkers, since those really don't have any attributed artist behind them. Chess personally seems like a lot of creative or artistic thought was put into it. The weird throwout notion that math doesn't get mixed up with art was somewhat odd as it seems he wouldn't be one to ignore the whole music being math thing. I also don't understand why a video game is the same as a novelty item, as he uses driftwood and the famous urinal, pieces which he qualifies took no time, as similar. Surely making a video game takes way more involvement by anyone than those pieces he's equating them with? I also find it strange he says, "nobody needs art" and that it serves no purpose. I am really sick of this sort of viewpoint, as history would obviously show that humans expressing themselves through art has always been a part of humankind. For no one to need it or it to be counted as a sort of extra even though it's been ingrained in us from day one seems foolish. Sure, as Moriarty says, most great pieces of art from ancient times has merely been practical, but there is also tons of other stuff where we just done know as well as stuff that appears to be art for art's sake and all. Who knows? When these sort of semantics come into play, I just lose interest. It especially sucks when you are getting kind of frustrated with someone like Brian Moriarty who is smarter than myself over many times over. I feel like he's just going to be right by default for that very reason. I should shut my mouth though, as this was all discussed again and again last year pages ago in this thread as well as everyone basically in agreement that interactivity does not make something cease being art, etc... I do fully support this notion though: I figure if people stop arguing and moaning on both sides, a generation's worth of time will decide much of the factors of the argument on whether it can be considered art or not, even though to me the former has already been obviously established. I think the idea that game makers should worry much less about their status or merit in the world (since there's always going to be some jerk to put you down for what you do) and just getting back to trying to churn out the best games they can possible. This is happening anyway though...

That's not nice, haven't you seen iRobot starring Will Smith?

Oh yeah, the report button!

I would guess the main game has remained unchanged, but I did read a few extra dog tags were added in the marine holds. It seems on the Metal Gears that the chaff was not working to me in on the hardest difficulty, so I just skipped that and kept moving in order to win. It may have worked by whatever variable, but at that point I wasn't sure if the effect of the chaff grenade had been taken away or what as it didn't seem to trip up anyone's homing missle ability. Yeah I really don't think anything would be missed by anyone aside from a few really clever or really jokey VR Missions. The Snake Tales become even more nonessential, because I forgot to mention they are all non-canon. They aren't non-canon in a way where you can think, "hmm... this could have possibly happened," leading fan boys to argue and such. Instead they are clearly taking place in weird alternate universes where things are rewritten to make certain boss or side characters alive or related that weren't before in the main storyline just so they can reuse skins or boss fights already on the disc. Then there's this one where Funny enough, I've already finished the MSX games on Subsistence far ahead of time, so I think I've already done a major chunk of what's extra on that one.

I finished both Prince of Persia and Earthworm Jim for Game Gear recently. The former is a terrible 8-bit port with broken controls and a complete set set of levels, while the latter is a great 8-bit port with broken controls and a cut set of levels. Funny how that works out, but for whatever reason, the fact that someone managed to cram all those animation frames as well as fit the existing art in a tiny resolution that didn't make the game look like a bunch of color vomit is something I really appreciate. It came off as "cute" even though controlling Earthworm Jim with two buttons was annoying. I finished all the Sly Coopers from the HD collection and was thoroughly satisfied. Still feel the same way I said earlier about 1 and 2 as well as still angry at the shoddy and sloppy HD porting (which seems to be a trend with everyone). In the end, the perks outweighed the bad since the original games are still there with the original art intact and all. It's just really not properly HD, missing a couple of extras, and cannot be considered "remastered" in the least. False advertising, I say, but it seems Sucker Punch, Sanzaru games, and Sony don't give a shit, according to their lack of replies to my e-mails. Shocking. Sly 3 was incredibly fun in many ways, but definitely a step down. Since Sly 2 tended to repeat many missions or tasks in different areas, but not really in an annoying way I feel, it seems Sly 3 went all out in having different missions or gameplay styles every time something new was introduced. It's one thing if the set varied gameplay styles work, but if new types keep getting introduced relentlessly and are no fun to play, it becomes tedious (I'm looking at you RC Car garbage crap). The pirate ship section also came out of nowhere and turned out great once you got the hang of it. There was also a lot of adventure-lite™ stuff thrown in. While it was shallow and probably annoyed many, I found it welcome. Maybe dialogue trees make me unnecessarily giddy. --- Also after a year and a few months of picking at it, I finally finished Metal Gear Solid 2 Substance. While completely behind everyone in the series as a whole, it seems like I'm one of the few that actually managed to 100% this behemoth of a game. What a tiring and ridiculous amount of game play time. I'm sure I must have put over 120 hours in the thing and I don't want to find out really. I even finished that idiotic skateboarding minigame. Considering the amount of time I put into it, I actually don't think I like Metal Gear Solid 2 very much outside of just the basic stealth gameplay I'm already familiar with. The dialogue seemed ludicrously long in all plant chapter parts in comparison to the much more interesting tanker chapter (and Metal Gear Solid 1). So much development seems to have been given to cutscenes that most gameplay mechanics and items were not explored at all in the actual game. This is very different in comparison to Metal Gear Solid, which seemed to make you use all items at at least once. While I don't mind the overall story, extended action scenes, and Patriot tirade at all, the incessant whining and drivel coming from Raiden made every conversation tedious. Since Snake traditionally tends to answer everything with a one word question or grunt, I took for granted on how much the writing and conversations could change with a swap of the main character. Also I really could not stomach the desaturated orange setting of the plant chapter, it makes me feel queasy to look at that color scheme and it sucks there was so much of it. The VR missions also have this sickly beige and blue everywhere, which I don't understand since the Playstation VR Mission set for the first game was much more colorful and "digital" looking. The big joke here is how much gameplay exists in the VR Missions compared to the regular game. It must almost be more than 5 times over the amount of gameplay required to finish the basic game, including the part where you play it five times over to obtain the dog tags. Unfortunately no cheat items I earned through dog tags alleviated the bastardness of extreme mode. In Twin Snakes, extreme mode was not annoying outside of one or two parts, but it seemed on Sons of Liberty that everytime I made my way to a boss, defeating them in any traditional manner was out of the question and I had to reseort to looking up clever game breaking ways on Youtube playthroughs. Even worse is that I can't even fathom how expert players would be able to finish certain parts playing it straight. Seems impossible. In one part, the way to do defeat a bunch of guards is to crouch in a certain spot and spray coolant at them while Snake kills everyone, in another I was having to throw all previous gameplay methods out the window and do constant flips back and forth, and destroying 25 Metal Gears in a row seemed based on pure luck that you wouldn't make a mistake and die in the meantime. The 500 VR Missions thing is sort of a sham also. There's really only about 40 unique levels and then 20 in the same areas with different arrangements and taskes. Those 50 are then repeated five times over on harder difficulties. The alternative missions are just parts from the game with guard or bomb tasks tacked on. While this is all sort of a good thing, as I was not looking forward to play 500 unique VR Missions of increasing difficulty, it seems unnecessary to repeat so much in the first place. Either way, I was having a lot of fun solving the puzzles of each new mission as well as breezing through the more strange or hilarious levels, but of course all of that became aggravating as I started the last 50 or so where you have to play as "MGS1 Snake." I just gave up and started using guides to get through these. Apparently these missions are such utter bullshit in difficulty that not one FAQ had solutions to all missions in one. Most forums posts on the topic of VR Missions seem to indicate this is the point where most gave up. I had to mix and match various incomplete guides as well as bite the bullet a few times and struggle through certain ones on my own. The immense frustration on about five of these specifically contain gamer hell moments I'm not wanting to repeat ever again. So once I made my way to the Snake Tales after this, I was super disappointed to find out that they all consisted of me running through all of the same areas as the main game, doing tasks that were similar but dumbed down from the VR Missions I had already finished in between text wraparounds. I guess I was under the impression they would have me doing new things in new locations as Snake instead of a bunch of fluff repeating everything I had done up to that point. The Substance package wasn't anything like what I was expecting If the developers are already adding new content to a rerelease of the game which is substantial as is, why inflate it five times over with filler and fluff? 100-150 good or unique VR Missions along the Snake Tales involving the guy in much more unique locations and situations would have been much more ideal. After all of that, I'm still looking forward to getting to Metal Gear Solid 3 soon. I don't have to beat it five times over for dog tags to fill a completionist urge (meaning I get to skip extreme mode as well), which is nice. It also appears that it does not contain hundreds of extra missions to complete for the Subsistence version. Should be a concise and enjoyable game, I predict. The colors are also much more rich this time according to screenshots, so that's a plus.