Today was the 16th anniversary of MGS4’s release, and I finished it for the first time in a few years. (I never did finish it last year.)
Stray observations:
-
In Act 3 (Prague), moving near to certain buildings allows you to hear muffled speaking from inside, like patrons of a bar. It’s small but gives the level more of a feeling like it’s an actual place instead of just a video game level. It’s the little things
-
very Cinema Sins observation here but also in Act 3, Snake uses FaceCamo to make himself look younger, and in the act’s opening cutscene is seen smoking. When the FaceCamo mask isn’t activated, it’s like a piece of rubber covering Snake’s face. How, I ask, can he open his mouth to stick a cigarette inside??? Checkmate
-
crawling around in Act 3 with the iPod playing “Old LA 2040” from Policenauts is great
-
never occurred to me that part of the difficulty in porting the game to newer consoles is in the MGS1 section: the PS3 seems to boot that little slice of MGS1 as an entirely separate program/image/whatever the term is and run it via the system’s PS1 emulator. Curious to see how they’ll handle this for the inevitable Master Collection vol. 2
-
there are a number of real guns in this game, and I hope Konami isn’t obligated to pay licensing fees to the manufacturers of those weapons when rereleasing it
-
getting Crying Wolf to run over a claymore triggers a special animation, not an especially interesting one but she’ll rear up and the game will effect slow motion for a few seconds
-
in mission briefing scenes, the surround sound is a little funny in that sound is tied to where the camera is situated in the scene—if one character is speaking throughout a scene, their voice jumps around whenever the camera cuts to a new angle. During parts of these briefings the player can take control of the Mk. III and move around as the scene is playing out. I’m not a sound engineer and don’t know the term for this but maybe the camera (whether the cutscene camera or the Mk. III’s perspective camera) behaves like a directional microphone only in these scenes because they couldn’t “switch it on and off” whenver the player changes between cutscene and Mk. III perspectives
-
Cavia is credited with character modeling support. “These are my favorite character models in any video game” —my back of the box blurb