Does anyone want to talk Metal Gear?
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@SuperEffective#27365 Yeh.
Peace Walker and Phantom Pain are easily the two most important games to me (outside of maybe Dark Souls 2) thematically in the last decade. So yeah.
Metalā¦ Gearā¦
Metal Gear Solid for PS1 is cemented in my mind as one of the best entertainment experiences Iāve ever had. Iāll be telling my grandchildren about it someday, the way grandparents today talk about black and white movies, or having to buy physical objects to listen to music.
It was a world unto itself. The characters, the references to real-world events that were barely graspable to my teenage brain. And that soundtrack! People talk a lot about that Kojima feller, but the composers on that game (and in the series in general) are almost just as important to the continued cultural relevance of Metal Gear Solid.
Oh my god, donāt do this to me, itās my bedtime
@captain#27376 Not to Tim Rogers Post but when Tim mentioned in his Death Stranding review that he seemed to always finish Kojima games as the sun came up hit me like a ton of bricks
@Gaagaagiins#27382 I remember that and admit I felt like some kind of KojiPro fraud for never having done the same (just because Frank also said he does that). Ironically this is the only time anything Metal Gear-related has kept me up.
_You're supposed to **save the game,** Tim!! That's what it's there for!_
@SuperEffective what are you thinking about? Are your nanomachines keeping you up?
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@robinhoodie#27372 Peace Walker
I do not like Peace Walker especially much and would love to hear you gush about it (sincerely, this is not a joke).
@captain#27385 Well, I donāt know if itās ever been all the way to sunrise for me, but it most definitely has been very late at night quite often, particularly Metal Gear Solid 4 I remember it being like 3 or 4 am if not just before sunrise, back when I wasnāt staying up that late routinely anyway lol. So I felt the spirit of the statement was deeply relatable even if all of my experiences didnāt match up to it to the letter.
Something about those games just make me feel the need to see them through to the end, after a certain point when the game's climax is being set up. It's kind of like a similar feeling to getting close to the end of a very good book. My excitement at knowing what will happen completely overrides the biological need for sleep or anything else.
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@Gaagaagiins#27390 Itās kind of like a similar feeling to getting close to the end of a very good book.
Very true. I mean I can think in every one of these games where that point isāI guess I've always just started playing early enough in the day. Come to think of it, the first time I played 1-4 I was routinely staying up till 4:00am, so I honestly probably did marathon that multi-hour home stretch for one or two of them obscenely late at night.
Last thought for tonight. Very fried brain here.
In MGS4, Liquid* is constantly on about _**the system**_ and how he needs** Big Boss's Bones*** to get into it.
*not really Liquid, it's Ocelot tricking himself that he's being controlled by his forearm
**_does_ he need them considering it isn't really him in there?
***it turns out to not even really be Big Boss (and not even really the guy the game tells us it is instead!)
And this completely doesn't matter in any real way but something I seem to have mysteriously fixated on is just exactly what _accessing the system_ means in this context. Like this just raises a huge list of trivial questions which if answered would make me think less of the game (not everything needs an answer!). Yet, I am plagued with wondering:
1) How, in literal terms, does Liquid access this system?
2) What, in literal terms, _is_ this system?
3) When Liquid gets Big Boss's remains, what does he do with them?
Again, NONE of these questions matter, I don't really want the game to have answered them, but this is what I _**THINK ABOUT**_ whenever I play this game. I'm frankly due for a replay (been a few years) so maybe I've forgotten some information in the above but I'm sure my fundamental question re: how Ocelot uses the computer is not in any way made clear. He just points his fingers in the air and says "bang."
Syzygy, grant me wisdom
Man did I love choking and ballooning Soviet men in that 5th game. But that story sure was weird.
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@captain#27394 Come to think of it, the first time I played 1-4 I was routinely staying up till 4:00am, so I honestly probably did marathon that multi-hour home stretch for one or two of them obscenely late at night.
Yeah, this week's episode got me thinkin' about em but the feeling I felt Tim was referring to was like some sort of feeling of exiting some sort of liminal space. It doesn't matter what time it is, so much as it feels like you've been transported from the place you turned the game on last, within some suspended environment where only Kojima Game exists, and then back to the real world where the sun may or may not be rising. It's also very similar to the feeling of leaving a movie theatre. For obvious reasons
To be honest, Iāve also had the feeling of finishing most of them late at night, but I attribute this to bad pacing. Not that I didnāt enjoy the endings anyways!
All these games are great, all for different reasons. But I got to gush a little about IV, I just love it. This is a game full of moments, big and small. || I love helping the rebels win in the first two missions, it's so great when you knock out the last bad guy and all of the ai start cheering. Or the night-time stealth mission where you tail a guy while staying out after a curfew, that all feels like the developers flexing about how versatile their stealth mechanics can be. There are other smaller, moments, like dealing with back pain after stalking around too much, or escaping from an ambush while your friend poops his pants.|| These are all simple set pieces, really, but they feel so much more ingrained into the mechanics of the game. ||Even the return to shadow moses, the most encounter-light chapter in the game, benefits from letting the player explore and reminisce. || The gameplay conveys so much of the feeling of the game, in much more concrete way than other titles in the series.
My luke warm take is that the boss battles in this game are generally pretty bad, and IV's are genuinely uncomfortable on top of that. My Hot take is that I'm not the biggest fan of 2, I just don't know how to appreciate it.
I love Peace Walker, played it on my PSP slim in 2016 and 100%'d it just about. I was going through each stage, holding people up with just a banana. The feedback loop was just tuned perfectly to rewarding game design.
Iāll have more to say about the games once I read the thread but for now hereās what my wife got me for my birthday 2 years ago
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ86PMbU8Uc](https://)
I donāt recall what time of day I beat any of the games but I also assumed this sunrise phenomenon is that most of Kojimaās games employ the ābut waitā¦ thereās more!ā narrative device in their endings. The most egregious (excellent?) examples to my mind being MGS4 and DS, each of which have like 3-4 hour ending sequences.
My first playthrough of MGS3 was done in a single sitting, starting after work and finishing around lunchtime the next day. It was GLORIOUS.
The thing I love about that multi-hour final crazy segment of (mostly) any Kojima game is that you absolutely know you're in it, even if it's your first time. MGS V didn't have that kind of ending, so it had been a few years and when I suddenly realised I was in the 'final stretch' of Death Stranding it felt like putting on my favourite pair of shoes.
@rainbowbattlekid#27417 Wow, I have the biggest, stupidest grin on my face after that. I thank you and your wife for this gift