Recently completed video games

[Recently completed video games]

For a long time no one really discussed this ending in depth. It's also tricky in that almost no text or dialogue in this game explains it, leaving it up to nearly pure visuals. I will just tell you my thoughts of what I noticed and suspect after playing a few times. It's funny because back in 2004 here on Idlethumbs some people told me I was reading too much into my explanation. But still seriously I don't think so! Here goes:

 

Pey'j's hand that turns into green Giger Domz stuff at the end is the same hand that Jade held when he was presumed dead after being captured. In that scene there is a close up of them holding hands and Pey'j just comes back alive magically. I think on first glance it's just the movie fake out but I'm pretty sure they are conveying Jade healed him either through infecting him or turning him into a Domz.

And the reasoning for that is Jade may either be a Domz or has some kind of Domz blood. Mom or dad was a Domz? Grown in a lab? The green lipstick doesn't seem so important but it seems to have a reflection of this reasoning. If you notice in the intro when Jade goes underground on the first Domz encounter she is caught and not killed but spoken in tongues to by the creature. This part is also subtitled and the alien language is repeated a few times later in the game. Who knows what it says though but it would seem they convey she is special.

Whatever was happening here was supposed to be explored in the originally planned trilogy. Probably never again. Ancel doesn't seem tight lipped about the end because no one ever really asked or discussed this stuff much until the game gathered more popularity through word of mouth. So perhaps if someone just interviewed Ancel about that cliffhanger he would answer.

 Try googling "Jade" and "Domz" or "Shauni" and you'll get more speculation probably more clear than my memory.

 

Also I'm going to guess that none of these questions will be answered in the second one or prequel or whatever.

[RetroThumbs]

I had been sort of messing with this off and on for two months, but I was able to get Policenauts for Saturn up and running on my Saturn. Apparently the patch for this came out end of last year but I didn't know it existed until more recently. The Saturn version of Policenauts adds a bunch of extra features upon beating the game plus some extra scenes and dialogue throughout. Unfortunately it also adds some extra breast grabs so that sucks. One thing it came under criticism for besides that back when the translation was released in 2009 was some of hate speech and dialogue. I can confirm all of the homophobic and transphobic language has been removed as well as any dated internet memes. Apparently those were not Kojima's actual words and the translator embellished that a bit to make the main character seem macho and he has become much more aware of this sort of thing in the last few years.

 

Anyway before I started I ordered the Action Replay cart for Saturn because I was tired of losing all of my saves every few years first of all. The battery backup method Saturn uses is so bad. Also the main reason is now you can soft mod your Saturn to play backups with this cart by installing Pseudo Saturn on it. I'm not sure if this makes your cart lose the save function or not as I've heard conflicting stories. It wouldn't really matter anyway besides that you would have to own two carts because the way my Action Replay works for that is still not great. You can't save directly to the cart from any game and it always involves booting up action replay and copying the saves over every time.

 

However on a whim I thought I would just throw the burned Policenauts CD into the Saturn to see if it booted without me having to do all of that soft mod stuff. Sure enough the intro cutscene played with no issue at all. This was strange as I saw no reports of this being possible with a CD-R. (Also I did buy the Japanese version of this game from Ebay for the included art booklet so I'm not pirating for whatever that's worth with Thumbs' law rules here).

 

Action Replay only allows you to play all region but does not allow CD-R games to be played without a soft mod or mod chip. So this got me wondering if there was something weird going on with my Saturn. The reason I wondered this is because I won this Saturn off of Ebay for $50 way way back in 2003 shortly after I had gotten my first job. When I received it, it would not play North American games and I had my Dad look at it and he saw the jumpers for the region had been soldered from US NTSC to Japanese NTSC. So he put those back to me and it worked fine. The listing did not mention any of this and was just a fairly used, tested, works, AS IS listing. I guess I was too young and dumb to even considering complaining to the seller. If I recall Ebay didn't give much of a shit if you got ripped off back then.

 

So I got curious and took apart my Saturn and sure enough, there sat a mod chip with the wires hooked up. Sort of looks like this:

 

That's how it looks on the right hand side. These things run you about $60 these days, slightly more than I originally paid for this Saturn. So this was a nice and surprising find.

 

But then it also got me wondering about another thing odd about this Saturn. It always had a little removable metal cartridge above the tray for the battery back up in the back. It allows you to view photo and video CDs which I thought all of this time was just a thing Saturns came with and so I left it plugged in. Turns out, nope, this was yet another sort of expensive extra added to my Saturn by whoever owned this before. I'm starting to think whoever listed this originally inherited this thing from a dead friend or something and was auctioning it off.

 

It looks sort of like this:

This Video CD cartridge was apparently only released in European and Japanese territories. Mine has Japanese writing on one side and English on the other. There's no name brand and I haven't matched this to any existing models of this cartridge so that is still somewhat of a mystery to me. Apparently this is also used by a dozen or so Japanese games to playback higher quality video. So I have deduced whoever owned this thing modded it to play Japanese games and also most likely was using it to play burned games from the US region. It's definitely a North American model Saturn.

 

I'm going to see if I can hock this thing on Ebay because I have no use for it. I'm never going to play those Japanese games that run it. No North American or European games actually utilize it. The cheapest available one runs for $80 used but it has a name brand. I have a video CD for the band Garbage I can actually test but I haven't run it yet. What's funny about video CDs is they will still run on a lot of blu-ray and DVD players. Like the firmware is still included just in case. This is apparently because in Asian markets these stayed popular for a long time, much like the Laserdisc.

 

I looked up the Photo CD aspect but back in 1995 Photo CDs were not just jpegs on a disc but the actual Photo CD™ format. I thought maybe I would burn one for kicks but it seems like it's a lot of work to track down burning software that still makes these ancient and useless discs.

 

So I learned a lot of nerdy shit.

[Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain]

Crap I forgot about C4. I think if I were to do it again, there is an opportunity when you listen in on the first conversation to plant it and not get caught.

[Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain]

I would say you should do the Quiet mission just to see some of the best cutscenes in the whole game but it might not be worth it depending on the development of your load out and your amount of patience. I think I read about some safe areas to stay during the mission, but I did not try it myself. It is literally just a fight between 7 tanks, 7 armored cars, and one helicopter all alternating while you sit in that palace SW in Afghanistan. If you are pretty good at handling that sort of thing in the game you will probably be way less frustrated than me.

[Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain]

Apologies for the double post. I figured it would be easier to go through stuff to reply to this way.

On 10/1/2015 at 1:06 AM, Griddlelol said:

I would also like to say, I love the narrative design, I just dislike that it kinda fizzles out. I also dislike how many times Code Talker says

  Reveal hidden contents

"Vocal Chord parasites"

 

I know! God I was so sick of that guy's voice acting by the time it was done. I felt like my throat was sore from hearing it.

On 11/4/2015 at 6:17 AM, manny_c44 said:

Another thing I love about MGS1 and Peacewalker was the incorporation of illustration into the game. That's something else that's been missing in the successive console releases. I mean, in Yoji Shinkawa you basically have one of the best concept artists/illustrators in the world.

I guess this is a bit pedantic, but you can credit Ashley Wood and not Shinkawa for the illustration elements of Portable Ops and Peacewalker. I think though however the illustration stuff in Peacewalker was finished by many other artists following his art direction though as it was a big undertaking. I like him as an artist a lot but in recent years I feel like his art has gotten way worse and the subject matter is still robots and naked girls. Oh well. But he did a great job on the official Metal Gear Solid comics for 1 and 2 and they were also turned into motion comics that are also a fun watch. The first one was a PSP game that you could pause and interact with and then they were rereleased with English voice acting on the Metal Gear Solid HD collection, legacy disc only though.

 

I'm surprised how many people in this thread went straight to this game and skipped Peacewalker. The game would make absolutely no sense storywise. But I see not everyone was here for the story, which is fine. I wish these mechanics existed in a game that wasn't this game.

Also I'm surprised how many people here had issue with Mission 16 and the Skulls in general. Once I started Mission 6 and I easily took them all out with the Killer Bee they give you, I realized they weren't so bad at all. I was already following what I knew from Peacewalker about essential weapons so maybe I benefited from that. But if you just keep your missile launchers and grenade launchers upgraded they shouldn't be too difficult by the time Mission 16 happens. The sniper type, just snipe back, it's just the Quiet mission again with four of them. You can also just walk around them which is a good tactic for the S Rank on that mission as it creates parasite mist and you can run out of there with Code Talker for some reason as the guards are all having seizures.

 

But did no one mess with the parasite suit for extreme stuff? I am pretty sure you unlock the suit after Mission 28 and can start developing stuff if you extract skulls. If you replay that mission it's relatively quick and you can extra the armor types in minutes. It takes longer to extract stealth parasites and mist parasites. But both of those restrict you to an A rank. I haven't used mist to be honest so I'm not sure what it does other than maybe just the same as a sandstorm. There parasite stealth camo lasts longer than the normal Phantom Pain stuff but is not as good as the MGS1 camo device from Huey you get after.

Although I actually did not give the armor a shot until I was seething at the extreme version of the truck mission because finally those Skulls were kicking my ass with one hit kills. I just restarted the mission to give the armor stuff a shot since why not and learned that you are invincible as long as it's going. You literally cannot die until it runs out. You can develop the ability to hold more of these pretty easily. Also it is resupplied when you get ammo drops. I guess it's game breaking or cheating or something but it's there and I earned it so why not? The only other element I had to learn was reading some tips online that heavy machine guns work better on skulls than any rocket or grenade launcher. So the D-Walker gattling gun or one of your fully upgraded lethal machine guns are essential if you want to kill them faster.

Also I see a lot of people here did benefit from being always online despite (from what I remember) a lot of people saying upon release to stay offline so your shit doesn't get stolen or become online only resources. It does seem like every time you connect, 90% of your resources will become part of your online pool but this is how you get more stuff. Building extra FOBs and doing online dispatch missions will net you stuff while not even playing. I am glad I avoided all of the connection issues people had early on though so I had an easier time of it. But as it stands now I can't imagine how this game will be anywhere as much fun once Konami takes the servers down. It will become such a grind to develop new resources and you won't be able to sell anything for extra GMP whenever needed. You can't raid fobs, you can't get special online only weapons, you can't develop better versions of weapons. The whole economy of it will be turned around.

On 2/13/2016 at 8:58 AM, marginalgloss said:

The scripting in the missions where you have to overhear enemy conversations is built like a house of cards. If you get seen by ANYONE — even if you’re only glimpsed, like when the white ring appears without an alert — then sometimes the conversations just won’t occur. And there is no way to trigger them again.

Almost all of those were legit bad. I remember the first tedious one being the one with four prisoners and sometimes the guards would just not go and have the conversation or seemed to just stop. You could often restart the checkpoint and it might work again but sometimes they don't even stay in the same place as the last time you started the checkpoint and so you restart the mission.

The one with the arms dealer was agonizing.It's initially obnoxious because there are no checkpoints and most of the mission involves sitting in the back of the truck doing nothing for six minutes. The first time I did the conversations on the normal version of the mission I did not use stealth camo, but used the sneaking suit so no one could hear my footsteps. However if any guard caught anyone asleep or saw you fultoning it, the ability to hear the rest of their conversations was over as the whole team in the area would go on alert.

The big difference when replaying it on total stealth mode was how I finished it. Since the first time I did it, I waited until all conversations were heard and then blew the shit out of the helicopter and tranqed everyone one by one on alert with Quiet. However you can't do that in the second version because game over and start the whole mission again if you get caught. I made the mistake of using the parasite suit camo first time because it lasted longer but if anyone heard footsteps it would fucking send people on alert. Once I got right to the end when the truck parks right before the two guys get on the helicopter and I accidentally nudged the analog stick even though I was in crawl position in the back. The guys in the truck went on high alert and ran away because that counted as a footstep and I could no longer hear the last conversation and I had to restart. I was so so fucking pissed off.

And then the other aspect to that mission task being bullshit with total stealth is when you gotta take out that helicopter in the end. I had to look up how to take them out stealthily because a missile will get you caught even with stealth camo on and it's game over. I had the Serval developed but never used it. So I had to exit and attach the silencer and used that to take out the helicopter without getting caught. Is there any other weapon you can even do this with? I have no idea how you would finish this conversation mission task without taking out the helicopter at the end because they get on the helicopter after the final conversation within 20-30 seconds and that's a very short window of time to get out of that truck and try to aim at them correctly from the ground, especially because it would be too hard to follow them as there's no way to take out many guards ahead of time in that area because the second anyone notices anything remotely suspicious the conversations stop and everyone hides behind something.

 

On 6/18/2017 at 10:54 PM, Bjorn said:

 

  Hide contents

Snake and Ocelot letting Kaz torture Quiet for funsies.  Despite her being an integral part of their ability to defeat Skull Face and cure the parasite in the rest of Mother Base, sure, just torture the shit out of her.  I'd have given anything to put a bullet in Kaz at that point (and quite frankly, after that, she could have been a hundred percent justified in murdering every last one of them). 

 

 

What's really strange about that scene is that Big Boss fails to actually vouch for her despite going on a ton of missions with her beforehand. There's more disconnect with this later as Quiet has proven herself to be trusted as there's a billion times she could have just killed you out in the field yet Kaz narratively seems to ignore this. Also that scene is a perfect display of how wrong the characters are for Kaz and Ocelot. It starts with Ocelot giving the go ahead to a soldier to keep torturing Quiet and he is acting like he'll get something out of her. This makes sense for once as this is more true to the Ocelot in the other MGS games. However once Kaz walks in he gets all pissed and defies all logic of the situation and asks for her to be tortured with the salt water because he's gotta upstate Ocelot. Then Ocelot suddenly gets all morally high and mighty and yells at Kaz that she'll never talk because she's mute and this is all pointless and she should be trusted because she's had so many opportunities to kill Big Boss until now. So like... huh? What the fuck were you just doing before Kaz entered the room, Ocelot? I think that's when former Ocelot exited and Troy Baker good guy Ocelot walked in while the camera was on Kaz. What a clumsy ass scene.

[Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain]

Okay, Jesus fucking Christ. This is going to be long. I finished this last weekend, have the 100% and all. I did all the side ops and tasks and S ranks as I went along. The extreme and total stealth levels included. I know Quiet eventually would leave the game so I wanted to make sure I had her for every mission possible just in case because she made a lot of areas easier assuming not everyone was wearing a helmet or full body armor in the area. Had I not done it that way, that true ending would have taken the wind out of my sails so bad.

 

I don't know what to feel about this game. It's fun, I liked playing it. But as a Metal Gear Solid game, I don't think it has any reason to exist in this series. I would recommend anyone playing the series to just stop at Peacewalker and don't worry about what MGSV is and how it fits in the storyline because ultimately this is a terrible send off for the series. It's incredibly gross, awkward, repetitive, grindy, and whatever we were hoping for the third time now about what truly marks the moment when Big Boss becomes the guy in Metal Gear 1 is still not answered.

 

But I did get stuck in the grind. I had no problem completing guardpost raids over and over without feeling exhausted and led me to purchasing all weapons without any major issue. Technically I still have all those online weapons to unlock but they mostly just seem to be minor improvements on existing weapons and not worth the time grinding FOBs for the resources and money needed. I'm going to keep playing all the events every two weeks until I have everything from those but I'm not sure I'm going to expand all my FOBs either. When i'm done maybe I'll leave my stuff unguarded to help other players.

The motherbase stuff was a missed opportunity. The dispatch missions are an even more simplified version outer ops from Peacewalker where you just click okay instead of getting some high stats dudes. But the stats are mostly erased from this boiled down to a few things each soldier. I'm not actually sure I care though because it's not like I played anyone except Big Boss in either game. In Portable Ops having a lot of high ranking playable soldiers was important but that game was overly complicated and played like dog shit. I guess I mean to say that nothing having to do with motherbase or these soldiers feels alive outside of the cutscenes. Visiting motherbase is a chore. You have to wait for the chopper animation and take a shower and punch some dudes in the face for some hidden morale stats. You can't converse with anyone. There's not much to see beyond a few key points which you should look up online anyway because motherbase becomes a massive empty space of copy and paste assets that only serve the purpose of being reused for FOB stuff. There's no way to visit anyone who is taken to motherbase. You can't see these barracks that these children are taken to. You can't talk to Huey only see him in a room when he waves. Kaz and Ocelot are nowhere to be found. Quiet is only there to play out the same sexy animation on loop over and over. You can't see a mess hall, sleeping quarters, bathrooms, or brig. Even though the environment is now possible to visit, it actually feels less tangible than it did in Peacewalker. In Peacewalker you could only imagine these places from the descriptions in the tapes from various characters about life on motherbase. Now that you can visit it, there's no suspension of disbelief and just feels like someone's incomplete environment.

 

But I'm having a harder and harder time explaining why it would be worth playing the same gameplay loop as much as this game wanted, especially completing the side ops. Things never really change. Once you get past the first half of the game no new area is ever revealed. No new enemies come out. There's really just one boss in this whole game. Maybe you can count the skulls but they get reused so much I'm not sure if they would be considered more than just a souped up strong enemy.

 

Really I can't blame anyone for skipping those hard mode missions later in the game as they were such a cop out. The last thing I wanted to do was go through the tedious tasks of two of those missions and listen to conversations again. Thank goodness I had worthwhile stealth camo developed by then. Total stealth is really just a copy paste with a game over on getting caught as you should probably already be playing like that in the first place. Subsistence was neat but there's only two and the latter one can literally be beaten within two minutes with the same method as used in the first go around. The extreme ones had the potential to be major bullshit because of the overpowered skulls but thank fucking god I figured out you could use the armor with the parasite suit and not lose out on the S Rank. I am not even sure if they are remotely possible without having D-walker upgraded and that armor. Otherwise so many parts are just one hit kills even with Battle Dress.

 

But really even those I didn't mind since I already knew I had the abilities to do them, I am just sour grapes. The main reason I have left this game with an awful taste in my mouth is this:

 

The final mission with Quiet. For whatever reason when you start this mission there is no going back. If the gear you came in with starting the side op is too underpowered it's too bad because you are stuck. You can't go back to helicopter even though you could do so in every other mission in the game. You quit to the main menu, when you start your game you are brought back to the latest checkpoint in the mission. There is only one way to leave and that's if you ride the shipping container out of the mission. If you leave the mission area it just restarts you. This leads me to believe that if this trick works then it just a programmer oversight that you are not allowed to leave this mission. With that and the insane difficulty spike the whole mission is really unfair and seems very poorly designed. Nothing in this game is harder than this mission. No extreme level even comes close.

And if you leave the crate like I did after looking it up, you only get one chance to do so as the crate will no longer be there upon restarting. I put on the battle dress and did not abuse the parasite armor because I did not want to S rank it or anything the first time, I just wanted to see the cutscenes where Big Boss' face was visible. If you wear the parasite suit then you watch the final cutscenes with that stupid mask in the way.

However even that didn't matter because I had to wear the chicken hat I was so fed up from dying so often. I had equipped the upgraded Killer Bee but the game forces you to lose that weapon to a really shitty underpowered rocket launcher after the cutscene. This rocket launcher takes like 8 hits to blow up a tank. Each one uses up all the ammo and you have to wait for a drop. In the mean time I die. The easier and faster way to take out the vehicles was fulton and having Quiet shoot them because for some reason her sniper can blow up a tank in a couple of hits while this rocket launcher can't do shit. However sneaking around tanks usually means I die half the time. I had to basically learn the position and timing of all the tanks and dudes for the whole level to finally beat it. And even then I would often die from the helicopter at the end because at some point in there I have to call in a weapon drop for the same Killer Bee I took into the mission since it homes in on the helicopter. I did attempt a few rounds to destroy the helicopter with the shitty launcher but it would not fire fast enough and the damn thing always moved out of the way too quickly.

 But hey even if I have time to call in the Killer Bee it doesn't always guarantee I'll get one. Sometimes Quiet is already calling in a supply drop so I can't do it until she's done. However she does it so frequently. And sometimes the damn thing gets blown up if I'm being fired at before getting the crate. And sometimes i can't even find enough cover while calling in the drop even when I'm hiding in the back of the palace because the copter will find me. It's just so obnoxious.

So yeah I ended up taking the LITTLE CHICKEN HAT which I didn't even know was a thing until then because I just wanted the shit to be over. I think it made it so almost no one could see anymore or whatever. And so with probably the best ending, cutscenes, and story moment in this entire game, I was stuck with Big Boss wearing a stupid fucking chicken hat the whole time, completely undermining whatever power the fucking thing might have had. I mean that and the camera stopping at Quiet's crotch and boob jiggle on the earlier awesome fight scene.

So great fucking job Kojima or whoever dropped the ball on the design there. Considering the final mission before replaying the hospital prologue was just a bunch of tanks we had seen before, I get the feeling this was the result of running out of money and quickly completing whatever was there.

 

 

And this game started so strong with the hospital part. That was great. What a let down.

 

But really even that would have been forgivable if the story weren't the worst I had ever seen in the whole series. Besides the Quiet ending there was one moment that actually worked for me

 

was when you had to kill all your troops on the zombie part. That was actually a highlight to find out that no one was saveable despite Kaz leading on that you could save some. The guys asking you to kill you while saluting was a nice touch. Of course then the resulting cutscenes are ruined with Keifer voice. Does Keifer sound like a cartoon to pig to you the way he does to me? Such nonsense.

But I don't even know what to think about it at this point. The parasite concept was a cool idea and all but poorly executed. Most of the game's story is only told in the cassette tapes. You even get prompts from characters between missions to say HAY BOSS LISTEN TO THAT TAPE WE HAVE BECAUSE WE DIDN'T MAKE A CUTSCENE FOR THAT IMPORTANT INFO. Then there's just a ton of tapes where every character has a bunch of talking besides Boss. Whatever. I guess it's good Hayter isn't in this bad game, easier to write off now.

 The final Paz cutscene is stupid and gross. All of that was pointless. I guess it's to drive home that this medic is somehow important to the story but really it's just a poor insertion of a character that was never there to begin with. Totally awkward. Skullface is the same. He is mad at Big Boss because he had to "clean up his mess" in all the previous games. There's nothing specific he would have had to do or get mad about leading this supposed XOF force. Plus that completely undermines the cool feeling of the one man mission in the jungle in MGS3. He's mad at Zero because he couldn't use his parasite plan? In what way should any of this require a gang rape or raping an underage boy or all whatever gross shit was in those tapes in Ground Zeroes. Nonsense. The guy wore a stupid mask and was not fun like previous MGS bosses. He just flatly dies under some metal halfway through the game. There was that stupid weak ass car ride I talked about earlier. It was all so pointless. This added nothing to the saga nor did it really resolve much besides saying possibly Zero wasn't THAT bad since it was Skullface doing the really nasty stuff.

But then also pointless was this Big Boss double. Why reveal this? What does it actually add to the saga? I thought maybe at first it was a shitty cop out to explain why Big Boss becomes such a villain because this medic dude is mad and punches a mirror and walks away in demon mode. So we could say, "Hey that wasn't Big Boss being bad, he was never bad! What a nice guy in MGS4!" However the text after the credits betrays this. It says the Big Boss killed in Metal Gear 1 is a doppelganger while meanwhile the real Big Boss was developing Zanzibarland in Metal Gear 2. Zanzibarland is where the child soliders being employed by Big Boss first comes up. He's portrayed as a pretty bad dude there. So still no gap is bridged between the Big Boss series and Metal Gear 1. We get the info that instead of thinking Big Boss never dies as villains never do in Metal Gear 1 it was instead this medic who died. But it doesn't really impact the story in any meaningful way. Besides you find out he escapes death again at the end of Metal Gear 2 after his reveal in MGS4. So we now learn that Big Boss only escaped death at the hands of Solid Snake once instead of twice. Bravo Kojima? Amazing twist!

 

 

And I'm not gonna lie, this story would be mostly redeemed for me as just mediocre and fine enough had it just treated women with respect. Had Paz not had all of these nasty things happen to her and Quiet actually had sensible clothes, it would have been okay. Quiet's story is good, she could have just worn shorts and a less ridiculous bikini top if we really did need that reasoning for her skin. Yet Code Talker is still wearing a fucking suit. I guess that bald head really does wonders for photosynthesis. And Kojima drove it home into disgusting territory by taking ever opportunity to jam that camera into Quiet's breasts or up her ass. When she is tortured let's fucking stop and leer at those boobs for a second. Ugh.

 

Isn't this guy almost 60 now? He's had so many years to evolve past the nasty parts of Policenauts yet here we are. So then when I'm playing this game I start having to field questions from my wife about stereotypes about Japanese men. "Why are Japanese men so gross?" "Why are they so sexist?" "Why do they need to jerk it to everything?" And with how extreme anime is these days with fan service and these camera angles creeping into almost all Japanese media that gets imported here, I don't know how to really say that apparently not all Japanese men are like this. I mean I hear this is just an otaku subculture of catering to a subset of men who carry around body pillows,  but I can't speak first hand. "Vistors of Akihabara." This is mostly what my exposure also reflects so how can I really say different?

 

And I also caught this article:

Quote

Kojima also talked about some of the other big issues in gaming.

He defended the way women have been represented in previous titles, with some gamers critical of "overly sexualised" characters.
"I'm going to have a different approach for the next game," he says.

"What I really want to avoid is, like you see in some games, characters with big breasts with no back story.
"If I make characters that at first glance might look like this then they'll have a deep background story to give a specific reason why."

 

This is a poorly written fluff piece for the BBC so I have no idea what they were getting at there. It could be poor or awkward translation. Is Kojima saying he's going to grow up a little here? Is he saying he has portrayed a lot of female characters wrongly? Or is he justifying that Quiet was a super good story where she wasn't just big boobs? Was he the one ashamed of his words and deeds? I can only hope Death Stranding can be a little bit more respectable.

 

And all these Gamergate types will still defend this behavior from Japanese games all over the place. Reviewers and critics are somehow insensitive and racist towards Japanese culture because we don't respect how they see women in their society. That we are trying to assimilate them into our western norms. Fuck it though, not all culture is created equal. Their media gets sold on a global scale. Japanese have a responsibility to pay attention to the rest of the world if they are to release their games there. Some of these projects are multi million dollar releases so why undermine it with sleaze? I feel like so many Japanese games and cartoons with fanservice are catering to some weird world where porn isn't available at your fingertips and this is all to titillate 12 year old boys who need to be able to get boners without getting in trouble with their parents. Like how when I was in middle school and most of our internet was dial up and our computers were shared family computers where you would get caught so instead you are playing Dead or Alive. Like Jesus fucking Christ can we move on now Japan? This is how the world perceives you. Saying Japan has issues with perversion has been the butt of every joke for decades now.

Anyway, I started Policenauts on my Saturn. I'll complain about that later. I should probably go through this thread now and click all the spoilers too.

 

[Fargo (TV series)]

On 7/11/2017 at 4:50 AM, Ben X said:

 

You should do it!

Hah, I'm not enough of a fan to do a comprehensive list. Half of what I know of in the Fargo TV series was from people listing stuff on IMDB but those forums are nuked now.

Maybe Noah Hawley should just release a list.

 

On 7/11/2017 at 5:44 AM, BigJKO said:

Here's a long list of "easter eggs" http://www.ranker.com/list/fargo-easter-eggs/lisa-waugh and some more http://www.rollingstone.com/tv/news/fargo-a-guide-to-the-shows-coen-brothers-references-w477546

Woo thanks those had some good ones I missed also including season 3 now!

[Fargo (TV series)]

I wish someone would just make a thorough listing of all of the references to Coen brothers movies throughout this show. Like some kind of Coen Bros. megafan who can list names, shared music, similar shots, similar settings, pieces of dialogue, scene recreations, and shared actors. It's probably a very difficult task at this point but I wish I could go through it without scrolling through a bunch of lumped messages on Reddit.

[Fargo (TV series)]

15 hours ago, Gormongous said:

Now that the third season of Fargo is done airing, I've been making my way through it and I've been enjoying myself a lot. What the TV iterations of Fargo have argued, with increasing success, is that we live in a universe that appears chaotic to us, with our limited perspective, because of all the moving parts interacting in hundreds of thousands of different ways. Each character creates their own partial narrative, to try to make sense of the seeming noise, but the truth (if you can call it the truth) is always bigger.

 

Season 3 is no season 2, which managed to be a dizzying mess of which no one was in control, but it's still very entertaining as a wheels-within-wheels crime drama. Carrie Coon continues to be a revelation, after being the best part of The Leftovers by far, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead is pulling her weight, too. Ewan McGregor has the toughest row to hoe, playing two identical brothers, and he seems to be in over his head a little? Each of the characters is fine on his own as the "dupe" laid out by William H. Macy's Jerry Lundegaard in the original movie, but together they lack texture. David Thewlis is much better, probably his best stab at milquetoast sinister yet, but he's also responsible for what is probably the least good part of this season? Fargo characters usually get a chance, once or twice in the show, to explain their understanding of the every-growing and changing catastrophe that is the season's plot, usually as a proxy for explaining their worldview, but this latest season has a lot more of this than either of the two previous ones. I've watched five episodes, half the show, and Thewlis has had at least three protracted soliloquies about the power of money in a cold, chaotic, and uncaring universe. It's wearing out his character with too much talk. Hope it improves! Although it's already really good, so who can say.

I'm in complete agreement here. I really didn't like most of what was going on in Season 2 in terms of characters and this amount of gang nonsense. I guess to me a bunch of mixups and some humble characters along with a few pleasant but incredibly sinsiter ones is what Fargo is to me if I were to take an essence. David Thewlis did wear thin for me, but he grossed me out if he was on screen too long. Those lips argh. Otherwise I loved it, great improvement on what I thought was going to be another iffy followup. Also I generally love Ewan McGregor in anything so that helps.

 

Also after being kind of annoyed and confused at this show for just being a bunch of strange and vague reference humor(?), now that they have just started adding long animated sequences I have embraced this thing as sort of a fun shitshow of discombobulated writing.

[Beyond Good and Evil 2]

This could be a great game but I think aside from that ultimately nearly all fans wanted a Zelda-like sequel starring more adventures with Jade and Pey'j and explaining what the hell was going on with some of that plot, even besides the last tiny scene after the credits. Seems weird to not bother with that, especially since a decade or more ago it was said that Beyond Good and Evil was originally planned as a trilogy.

 

But hey, on the topic of Oddworld that was described in the original manual as a quintology series with side games (wherein apparently two of their games don't even count towards this). The strange thing is that new team continues to remake and port the old games even though with the New and Tasty they have shown they have the chops could totally make a new Oddworld game instead of remaking them all.

 

I guess Beyond Good and Evil may be in some kind of story limbo like that. Also Rayman Origins was actually supposed to be some kind of origin story for the series, no joke. Rayman games aren't big on story whatsoever but Rayman 2 had a lot going for it in that department and I kind of wish for another one similar to that. Origins has all this extra dialogue in the game files explaining the past that was ultimately just cut out. Legends and Adventures (as well as previous Rayman games) might as well just be in another dimension, as much as I love Legends. So I'm not even sure Ancel can be relied on to tell some coherent story in one universe as much as I want him to. He just hasn't led by example with his Rayman series.

 

I'm probably thinking way too hard about this.

[Beyond Good and Evil 2]

Looks good but I'm still not excited that the cliffhanger of the first one won't be touched upon (most likely), and that the game might be some kind of MMO streaming with possibly microtransactions. But this video makes me feel better and I will be happy to be back in that world anyway, except this time with awesome graphics.

I guess now I'm just worried WiLD won't happen, haha. I played Far Cry Primal early this year and I am wanting more of that but more fantastical.

[Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain]

Oh shit, I forgot about those photo modes. They seem so tame by today's standards. Now I'm remembering how MGS4 also upped the ante on that too. Sheesh. VR Missions was great though, I enjoyed it more than the stuff in MGS2 Substance.

[Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain]

2 hours ago, Twig said:

I so desperately wish Kojima had someone who wasn't gross telling him no when it came to how he portrays women visually. I'll pretty much defend most of the MGS stories, but cannot even remotely defend Quiet, or the Beauties in MGS4, or (to a lesser extent, because she is a "femme fatale" trope, although it's definitely been done better...) Eva. Snake staring at Meryl's ass in MGS1. Sniper Wolf's attire when sniping in the biting, snowy cold of Alaska?? The Boss unzipping her top from neck to navel because?????????????

I think the Beauties is when I really noticed the change. I think the camera in MGS4 went fucking crazy on leering at women and never stopped. Like no scene could exist with a female character without it being about the male gaze. The outfits got skimpier too. Metal Gear Acid 2 before that was pretty raunchy with live action videos of Japanese models in bathing suits posing jammed in the extras of an otherwise good game, but I am guessing that wasn't a Kojima decision.

 

Snake checking out Meryl seemed to be pretty standard to me and the rest I just chalk it up to some women just show off a lot of cleavage. With Sniper Wolf it just seemed like the characters were designed without any thought of them being in Alaska considering Liquid and Vulcan Raven never put shirts on. It's when the cleavage became Naomi almost having her boobs fall out every second in MGS4 when it got bad. There was a handful of FPV stuff with Eva though in MGS3.

[Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain]

4 hours ago, Bjorn said:

On the Skull Face car ride, it struck me as an attempt to recapture the Snake Eater ladder climb from 3, but was just kind of dumb, because instead of just being this thing that happens, it follows the massive exposition dump from Skeletor.  Which feels like that dump only needed to happen because most of the plot is hidden away in cassette tapes, which are very easy to skip.  idk, I laughed at the car ride because it was ridiculous, but not because it was ridiculous in a good way.

 

Haha that would make sense if Kojima was trying to channel that. I thought maybe I had hit a bug actually and dialogue stopped or somehow I turned on the cassette player. Then I couldn't understand if the song was coming from the jeep radio or not.

It is weird, they could have just introduced a new character with Troy Baker and not had it be Ocelot and it would have made more sense. Maybe I'm not to any plot twists yet, but so far he's not even in his classic triple agent role. He didn't appear in Peacewalker and was only in a "meanwhile" cutscene at the end of Portable Ops to set up flashback stuff in MGS4 but perhaps they wanted to show that he was always working for Big Boss as said in MGS4. Part of my problem is I sort of don't like to think of the portrayal of Ocelot in MGS4 as him.

 

Even though at the end he says the Liquid thing was all an act.

That and I'll always miss that Liquid was never to return as a villain... or ally.

 

 

Someone did spoil it for me in a (fucking!!!) guide for the key items that Eli was Liquid. They wrote "Eli/Liquid" which was so unnecessary. So I know it's him already, but I'm guess he doesn't shout "brother" a bunch and get theatrical with his world domination and want everyone to join him.

 

I guess I'll find out what you all mean by Huey, because I enjoyed him in Peacewalker.

[Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain]

Oh hey I also found this embarrassingly awkward and atrocious thing:

 

I think this is worse than the Paul McCartney Destiny video by far.

[Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain]

The humming originally was driving me crazy but there's ways to make it stop. She hums whenever she is "active" and is aiming at nearby enemies. So if there aren't any enemies she won't hum. Once you increase here bond to like 2, which is easy to do after one mission, you can send her to other places across the map and scout them out to mark enemies ahead of time so you won't hear her when she does that. I usually do that when I'm done needing her. If you do get attacked no matter where she is she will soon appear with cover fire.

 

I do enjoy using her a lot on some missions, especially when trying to S rank. She is also a pretty cool character in a game with none except that we are instead to leer at her the whole time. I'm really sick of her bending over in the chopper for the hundredth time. I don't even know when I earn a way to put some fucking clothes on her but it's probably going to be too late. Then again if I do that I may betray my words and deeds.

 

I'm probably going to get to mission 31 tonight but I think I have to play until mission 51 until I can go back in this thread and click all the spoilers? Needless to say I feel the same Bjorn, this story is shit, it's wrapped in bad characters and bad plotlines. I know MGS is known for being ridiculous, melancholic, and nonsensical but I do truly enjoy the plotlines and characters except for maybe all that happened in MGS4 was atrocious. Revengeance was such a bad game too for so many reasons I won't get into here but I know that doesn't really count. I lost some faith in the series with 4 but Peacewalker turned all of that around. The Ashley Wood/Yoji Shinkawa art was great, the gameplay was great and somehow turned around the clunky nearly unplayable Portable Ops into solid mechanics that MGSV would be widely based on. I liked Miller, Amanda, Paz, Strangelove, and Chico. I was so happy when Otacon was cheesily reintroduced as Huey to keep that dynamic going. The way that game ended was a nice bittersweet ending. It really could have just stopped there.

 

So starting with Ground Zeroes just everything was turned on it's head tonally even though they doubled down on the fanservice stuff that I contest was majorly introduced in 4 and was not all over the games before like some consumer first/anti-SJW types would have you believe. Skullface is a joke, him using rape as a tactic doesn't make him more evil. I just watched a scene

 

where he and Big Boss sat through a whole car ride. They were too big and bulky in the back of the jeep looking like toddlers while staring at eachother awkwardly while Skullface has 10 minutes of exposition. Boss says not one word. Then they go silent so that a loud song can play while they just sit there still awkwardly. I'm just bored and spinning the camera the whole time. There are no cinematic camera angles or any kind of visual effect to go along with all of this plot dump. It makes Skullface look infantile and portrays him as harmless. So all that rape tape stuff in Ground Zeroes has gone to waste anyhow even if it was supposed to have some intended grave impact and not shock for shock's sake.

 

The game just got too serious. I can't find any confirmation of this theory but it seems some think the reason Big Boss just kind of ran out of lines in Phantom Pain outside of some earlier cassette tapes was because Kiefer Sutherland was too expensive? Is there any evidence to it? It would make sense. A big part of enjoying the plot to Metal Gear for me is besides the incredulous interjections David Hayter delivered to all of the characters, Big Boss/Solid Snake was always one to respond or even give values and advice. Even if a character were rambling off a bunch of unrelated info dumps like with Paramedic and movie trivia, there was a banter there that kept things interesting. He showed he cared what they were talking about. Now Big Boss just sits there and looks at people like an idiot. Or if not that, looks dramatically away into a blank area off screen, facing away from the characcter who is speaking. There's even times when someone expels something important and I'm just angry yelling at the screen, "Fucking say something! Doesn't this plot matter to you?!"

 

If Kiefer Sutherland was that expensive, then removing Hayter for the sake of a C-list celebrity was a big mistake for the last game in such a prominent series. If he needed some celebrity voice, would Bryan Cranston have been too expensive? Kojima said the reason for him going so X-TREEEEME was because of Breaking Bad and Cranston did used to do anime dubs. He would have done a good Snake.

 

Also Ocelot isn't the same character. First, his accent is some kind of shitty Texas thing Troy Baker cooked up trying to be a less gruff Joel. I'm kind of sick of Baker now anyway. Then, we don't have this kind of nemesis feel to him any longer. The deviant weirdo thing he had going on in MGS3 made sense with his appearance in MGS1. I particularly loved him in 3. Now he's just back for some inexplicable reason, with a very awkward and ugly 3D model I might add, playing the role that Miller should be playing. He's incredibly positive about everything and he seems like a generally low stress and supportive guy. In other words, he's completely bland now. So far he's been absolutely useless to the plot and doesn't even need to be in this game.

 

And Miller as a fleshed out character was a good addition to the series with Peacewalker, not counting his brief MGS1 and Metal Gear 2 stuff. He provided backup and banter with Big Boss and was playful and good humored. It's also canon that he and Big Boss might have a thing for eachother. Now he seems to have become an angry misogynist with no sense of loyalty and nothing fun to say anymore. He's not really into interacting with other characters anymore either. It's like the soul has been sucked out of him and everyone else.

[E3 2017]

Maybe it's just time for Mario to pull a Sonic?

[E3 2017]

The original trailer for Rayman Legends had amiibo support to unlock Rabbids in game but I guess that never worked out. Maybe again?

[Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain]

On 6/13/2017 at 1:49 AM, Bjorn said:

 

One thing on animals, particularly the cage ones, is just to deploy all 8 (at max rank) every single time you're going to load up on a chopper or finish an mission.  It doesn't seem to work by jumping straight to the chopper from the pause menu, but the other two ways it does.  I think I'm at 80 percent on the animals list now, and I haven't farmed or tried at all to get anything.  Just doing that every mission, sometimes all 8 dumped right under the chopper, has got me that far.

 

Haha, I'm so fucking bad at remembering this! Even when I've replayed the missions I keep forgetting to put down the cages. It sucks it doesn't count if you lay them down during a side op. I think I'm at 67% or something so you are way further than me. I have so many god damn gerbils. (naturally)

 

Not to mission 25 yet, I left off on 24 because I kept messing with FOB and had to S-rank some stuff. Since I unlocked FOB I've had a lot of blueprints to gather and side ops to open up. I keep trying to finish the event stuff for the exclusive weapons and such. I think they all rotate so I'll probably be at this game every once and a while event for a year or more just to clean up. Sounds like I'll need to cut out a free weekend then if I start 25 though and get all obsessive about the next part. Then I'll click your spoilers.

[E3 2017]

Also I don't know how to feel about BG&E2. I have played every Ancel directed and designed game to the bone. So much Rayman. But I felt burned by his iOS cash grab Rayman Adventures and the fact that BG&E2 is some online streaming world and Ubisoft has this idea of putting out Games as a Service from now on makes me worried it's just going to be an unfinished thingswith tons of microtransactions and grinding. That's not why I love the first game.

 

Also the tone seems off, not sure why it jumped up a rating but I'm not against any of that I suppose if it's executed well. I'm just guessing the cliffhanger won't be touched upon because now it's a prequel even though it has '2' in the title. It's fucking pretty and well animated though.

 

But since there's no gameplay footage and we've been treated to prerendered trailers before and only last year they said they were in preproduction, this seriously could be another 3-5 years if not cancelled again. I was hoping I'd feel happier about this news but instead my feelings are pretty mixed. I'm now actually worried that WiLD won't happen, which looked pretty neat.

 

That Rabbids + Mario game looks so much better than it has any fucking right to be. I'm kind of excited for it. I love Rabbids Go Home even though I'm not fan of them in general. (I am still bummed that Rayman 4 became a minigame collection).

[E3 2017]

On 6/12/2017 at 7:25 AM, Merus said:

So the publisher, Raw Fury, has responded: 

 

 

Brace for impact.

Holy shit, I don't want to reread what I wrote in that thread because I sort of defended the guy, but he definitely wasn't apologizing in that thread. What was weird was I got a PM after where he told me to stop responding to it but he was upset someone said he was associated with the holocaust denier as he himself did not know this and removed that person from Twitter, as he (Tim) is Jewish. Found it weird he didn't want to publicly say that.

Anyway, I figured he wasn't really like that anymore, as I checked his Twitter last year at some point and he seemed to have had a turning point sometime after the terrorist attack in Paris. At least that was my assumption. But well... looks like there's still some bullshit with him upon reading more of this thread. What else did he say that was transphobic?

[Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain]

Oh okay, I turned reflex off early on for S ranks and never really wanted to bother with toggling on and off. I guess the team production stuff makes sense but I'm not really keeping up with the numbers of materials they make even though I probably should get on that.

 

However I sort of want to see these extra cutscenes for low morale and not showering. Will this kind of screw up my stats if I let it get bad?

 

That sucks they didn't find a more intuitive way for anyone to find animals without a guide. There was some stuff on Peacewalker that I remember where people could only get the exact requirements by translating the Japanese guide, specifically the drops for the Monster Hunter missions.

[Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain]

Despite my best efforts to take a break I messed with it more today.

 

I realized because I have the Definitive Edition it came with 2000 FOB coins yet I also spent some money for coins for more bases so I could do multiple dispatch missions. The prices I originally read online require more MB coins than what the actual in game asks for (on PS4). I guess Konami lowered the prices at some point. So now I have a bunch of left over MB coins I wasted money on. Oh well.

 

I'm so bad at the FOB invasions where the person actually set up their stuff, I keep failing most of them, especially the event one which you have to do over and over to get special things, like a leopard speedo for Snake which I have going right now.  I think I locked myself out of invading really pathetic bases because it only lets me choose hard ones now. So I guess now it's just about filling out FOB platforms to get more dispatches going.

 

There's other stuff on FOB like relationship where I thought you come in and help someone whose base is being attacked but you just press X to "support" and nothing else happens. There's also some kind of virtual league daily and weekly which I also don't understand.

[Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain]

Yeah, FOB is really the best way to make money and get resources it turns out so you are probably better off waiting. I finally messed with it today and while it's somewhat tedious because of all of the loading screens, a lot of people leave bases with low security or just a lot of goods to get with little effort. I keep getting my ass kicked by the Konami event FOB though. If you have enough MB coins to get an extra base or two or three, Bjorn, you can also do more of those dispatch missions at the same time (assuming you have enough soldiers) and then get tons of stuff.

 

I feel a bit overwhelmed with this game now with this on top too so maybe I'm gonna take a break.

[13 Reasons Why]

Yeah that last episode was really tough for me. I struggle with depression my whole life and I get too many of these character.

 

I had a hard time getting into the show at first because of the desperately wanting to be a John Hughes movie, which these days I kind of just find as examples of gross rich extravagance. But it's not really that and it had a good representation of not just only uptight white people. I also don't like when people way older than high school age are playing someone that is supposed to be 7-8 years younger, but I guess I really enjoy 10 Things I Hate About You, which did the same. But I do like the 80s style atmosphere though even though it's modern times. It strangely seemed like it wanted to be Life Is Strange, and if that truly is an influence to the show creators, then that is just fucking awesome.

 

I think it was some top notch television, I couldn't stop watching as it got closer to the end. It's really the essence of what I want out of a teen drama, which is all the uncomfortable stuff plus the feelings of alienation that some characters experience. It was much in the vein of older better Degrassi but I don't think as amazing as Skins (UK) was. That will always be my favorite. I did have some misgivings on Hannah being so pretty because it didn't feel that she realistically would be in that position. Plus her hygiene and ability to take care of herself should have theoretically deteriorated some over time. But I think in the end the actress pulled it all off. Then again I guess a lot of the cast was too "beautiful" except for token nerdy kid. I really wish they had also taken note of Degrassi and Skins in that regard as well with just casting teens because they feel right for the role, warts and all, not because they are nice to look at.