Jake

Idle Thumbs 226: "Console Wars and Hedge Dog" or "The New Far Cry 2"

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Thanks for that link Gorm, sounds like that guy at least does feel that polytheism does seem to have some effect on the nature of Japanese culture's approach to philosophy and religion.

Japan has historically approached religion in a rather pragmatic way. Shintoist, Buddhist, and Confucian beliefs exist together in Japan, but only as far as they’re convenient. When Portuguese Jesuits arrived in Japan and sought to convert its people, not only did the Japanese sometimes interpret Jesus as a kind of “Buddha” that conformed to their own polytheistic views, but many of the daimyo who converted did so because the Portuguese also sold firearms. Spirituality exists, but it has existed to to serve the people, rather than having people be absolutely beholden to one or more gods

I think i may actually have polytheism on my mind atm because I'm re listening to The History of Rome and they are right in the middle of the whole Constantine/Theodosius transitional period from paganism to Christianity.

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MGS V looks intriguing to me in a way that no other Metal Gears Solid have ever done. I'm excited kind of in the way Jake was excited upon hearing about it. I was just gifted Ground Zeroes, going to try that out. If I like it... is MGS V for me even though I don't care at all about Metal Gear or Plasma Snake or Gundam Hippo or whatever the hell the characters are named?

 

Following up, I played about an hour of Ground Zeroes. The gameplay seems really good. The cutscene was HOT garbage. Like, incredibly offputting. Wanted to quit the game before I had even a second of control. It also took 10 minutes to gain control, which compounded that feeling.

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did chris play MGS5 on the thumbs twitch? The title says he did, but if so it didn't seem to archive :<

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I kinda feel bad for spending so much time dumping on MGS by the way, because there are things I enjoy about it (that aren't related to the gameplay).

 

That said, I wonder if the plot (uuuuugggggggghhhhh) of MGS5 lives up to the quality of the Mike Oldfield trailer they made last year. Hearing on the podcast that the game takes place during the Soviet / Afghanistan situation really piqued my curiosity. But my imagination runs goddamn wild on this sorta thing and for all I know it could just be a lazily used dressing.

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ROBOT NEWS.

 

I have an idea what the letdown/elaboration on "Samantha West" is

 

it was a soundboard operated by some non native speakers with thick accents.

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Twin Snakes is the better MGS1. It's kind of crazy how many people dislike it.

No it isn't. First person shooting breaks the game and makes it very easy. Its still a good ass PS1 game. They also ruined the cutscenes and made it all Matrix bullshit or whatever and re-recorded the voice acting and it wasn't the same. 

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The game is very easy, anyway, except for the dumb Liquid boss fight sequence at the very end.

 

Also the cutscenes were just brought in line with MGS2, which is the better game, anyway!

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did chris play MGS5 on the thumbs twitch? The title says he did, but if so it didn't seem to archive :<

I was about to do so the night of release, but it ended up taking me so long to get Twitch/Xsplit streaming set up that by the time I was finally ready to go, it was too late for me to want to commit to starting a stream.

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The Lara Croft game, from my experience playing it at least, seems primarily concerned with you exploring the space and feekubg out how the puzzle of the room works and completing it, whereas Hitman Go was maybe more about gaining a holistic understanding of a level and then surgically exploiting it?

Maybe it's something like this, for me? I was put off by Lara Croft Go for a while because I was trying to play it like Hitman Go, but once I started playing it like Monument Valley my enjoyment went way up.

 

I had a similar trajectory with the game. Another factor is the later levels of the game are a lot more interesting compared to the early stages both in terms of puzzle design, and also as environments to admire.

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Following up, I played about an hour of Ground Zeroes. The gameplay seems really good. The cutscene was HOT garbage. Like, incredibly offputting. Wanted to quit the game before I had even a second of control. It also took 10 minutes to gain control, which compounded that feeling.

 

You're in luck then, cut scenes are few and mostly pretty short once you get past the intro. Most of the story is told through (drum roll..........) audio logs.

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The game is very easy, anyway, except for the dumb Liquid boss fight sequence at the very end.

 

Also the cutscenes were just brought in line with MGS2, which is the better game, anyway!

Well. It is when you dissect the game into a memorized set of mechanics and patterns. As soon as you see it from that aspect it's very easy, both in the original and Twin Snakes. But that's a LOT of games and they still make plenty of games that way right now.

 

I'm going with Ponchis on not liking the re-writing of the lines and re-recording. A lot of things lost character in the remake. There was something more cruel and actual villain-like when Liquid Snake says of Gray Fox, "He prayed for death, and it found him." In the remake it's some garbage high-brow quote and SNORRRRE JUST BE A BADASS PLEASE.

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No it isn't. First person shooting breaks the game and makes it very easy.

I'd contest the addition of the tranquilizer gun breaks the game, but considering it adds the extra problem of not letting sleeping guards be discovered as opposed to just killing everyone on the screen and moving on, it evens out. Plus it's thematically more in line with the rest of the series and the narrative itself.

 

Also Twin Snakes is much. much harder if you are trying to get all those damn dog tags, which aren't in the original game.

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While I'm not listing any actual details about MGS5 in this post whatsoever, I'm gonna cover it up in a nice spoiler tag in case anyone is worried anyway. I looked into everything there is to know about the character Quiet, because up 'til now everyone has been wondering what the reason is for such gratuitous T&A to be her design.

The bottom line is that it is arbitrary as fuck no matter how much "ohhh isn't that mysterious" they throw at her background. The info to explain why she wears no clothes literally has no bearing on anything else going on with her. As in, it's a stand-alone information point. It's an ironically flaccid writing job to justify having a chick prance around almost naked. Nice try Kojima, except not.

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Well. It is when you dissect the game into a memorized set of mechanics and patterns. As soon as you see it from that aspect it's very easy, both in the original and Twin Snakes. But that's a LOT of games and they still make plenty of games that way right now.

Well, I mean, yeah, that was kind of my point. Any game is easy once you figure out how to break it. (Well, any game like this.)

 

I'll also say that I replayed MGS1 recently after years of having not played it or Twin Snakes, and it was still easy, and I promise you I remembered very little about guard placement, etc.

 

The only hurdle was re-acclimating to the strange controls.

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I think the only parts that have bothered me on replay is the fist fight near the end and the jeep four wheel drive part (especially if you don't get the extra ration). On my first playthrough at a friend's place so many years ago, each encounter was so unique that we struggled through a lot of it.

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I understand that "it's anime" might have felt like a slight overgeneralization. But I also think some of you are over-representing the genre with a few cherry picked titles. A huge percentage of it is, in fact, precisely the medium of "spectacle" for it's own sake that they were talking about. For every Haibane Renmei or Mushishi, there are legions more anime (that aren't limited to the shonen sector of titans or giant mechs), including "slice of life" which very often carry similar habits of breaking the fourth wall and interjecting off-color humor and fan service during odd moments.

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I understand that "it's anime" might have felt like a slight overgeneralization. But I also think some of you are over-representing the genre with a few cherry picked titles. A huge percentage of it is, in fact, precisely the medium of "spectacle" for it's own sake that they were talking about. For every Haibane Renmei or Mushishi, there are legions more anime (that aren't limited to the shonen sector of titans or giant mechs), including "slice of life" which very often carry similar habits of breaking the fourth wall and interjecting off-color humor and fan service during odd moments.

 

Oh no, there's certainly recurring features in anime as a genre, which is why I tried to couch my objections somewhat lightly, but I still think that describing Phantom Pain as "anime," in anything more than an offhand comment, is not particularly descriptive or evocative, in light of more specific cultural touchstones available to us. It's the difference between making a reference to comic books and specifying that you actually mean Silver Age superheroes; the two might be synonymous to most people, but they're not really equivalent, so just using them as if they were isn't as insightful as it could be.

 

Anyway, many directors of anime do relish breaking the fourth wall and muddying the tone of their work, probably in part because anime as a genre is generally more permissive of such structural oddities, but they're overwhelmingly not the norm, certainly not to the point that breaking the fourth wall and keeping the tone inconsistent could be seen as genre traits. In my opinion, that's a wholly mistaken impression, mostly owing to the runaway success of a smaller subset of shows and movies in the English-speaking world that are all "different" enough from Western media to find their own niche, and I sometimes wonder if it's self-reinforcing, given how Japanese animated works without those characteristics are frequently reevaluated, at least in the American cultural space, as anime that's "not really anime," e.g. Miyazaki's oeuvre, Ghost in the ShellAkira, etc.

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From the perspective of someone who does not know the cultural ins and outs of all the different branches of anime, if you said "Badfinger, what are the genre characteristics of anime?" my answer would be "Needlessly gratuitous." That also happens to dovetail directly into how I feel about everything Metal Gear. It is the Most Anime to me. There's nothing about Metal Gear that isn't either self-serving, self-righteous, wildly outrageous for the sake of outrage, or a combo. It's not those characteristics that make it So Anime, it's that they're needlessly gratuitous at all moments along the time cube.

 

I am fully cognizant that I am limited and this is only based on what I've observed, but I can only form opinions based on what I've observed. The later installments of Red Alert and Command and Conquer are really Anime to me, as well.

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From the perspective of someone who does not know the cultural ins and outs of all the different branches of anime, if you said "Badfinger, what are the genre characteristics of anime?" my answer would be "Needlessly gratuitous." That also happens to dovetail directly into how I feel about everything Metal Gear. It is the Most Anime to me. There's nothing about Metal Gear that isn't either self-serving, self-righteous, wildly outrageous for the sake of outrage, or a combo. It's not those characteristics that make it So Anime, it's that they're needlessly gratuitous at all moments along the time cube.

 

I am fully cognizant that I am limited and this is only based on what I've observed, but I can only form opinions based on what I've observed. The later installments of Red Alert and Command and Conquer are really Anime to me, as well.

 

Yeah, but that's why I tried to point out the limits of that observation, while still acknowledging its core of truth. Honestly, I feel like the pushback I'm getting on it is a little strange. If you say a media work is just like American movies, the conversation shouldn't have to be continually reframed on that broader assessment once it becomes clear from the contributions of others that what you actually mean are hyper-militaristic Michael Bay-style movies. For me, as someone who's watched a lot of anime, most of what I think to be the defining characteristics of anime, especially the twenty-first century epidemic of moe, are absent from Metal Gear as a series. Instead, the "needless gratuity" of Kojima's work puts me in mind of a larger group of Japanese authors, directors, developers, and artists who were born after the occupation had ended, grew up during the postwar "economic miracle," and came into their respective industries in the mid-eighties, during the peak of the sci-fi boom in Japan. You can call that sensibility "anime" if you want, I'm just saying it lacks the specificity you might think it to have.

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I'm saying it does not have specificity. I'm saying the opposite. So many of those works I've been exposed to contain the same sensibilities that it is way, way too easy to assign that generality and not be terribly off the mark.

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