@Syzygy#27685
I will be watching/listening to this playthrough now. This is quite good.
Gall darn it, Survive is on the shopping list now. Thanks @billy @Syzygy @robinhoodie for the insight.
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@CidNight#27699 Revengeance (lol I love/hated this game)
Don't let me go and turn this into a hater thread but I'd like to hear more about this. I'm a fan of Bayonetta and DMC and such (and obviously Metal Gear) so I felt like Revengeance should've appealed more to me but the language of play just never made sense to me. Always felt like bashing my head against the wall. (and that it became popular with a more mainstream audience was/is confusing to me only because of how much trouble I had playing it)
@captain#27731 I mostly love it. I played it a long time ago, but I remember also being quite frustrated by some of the sections, like in a bad way. The infamous final boss more so than any. I think what I loved was the injection of the Platinum-craziness, a la Bayonetta, sort of allowed MGS to be its peak, unambiguously dorky self. The game was so over the top, so ridiculous, that it makes accepting some of the insane stuff in the mainline games seem pedestrian. I have a warm place in my heart for that sort of nonsense.
@captain#27732 There's a certain meow that cats make to remind those around them that the Colt Single Action Army is the greatest handgun ever made
@CidNight#27736 Think my fondness for that same nonsense might have made me feel more frustrated at the gameāitās really something I want to like, I just havenāt been able to wrap my head around proper parry timing, weapon usefulness, the dodge mechanic, etc.
Too many details!
This is how to make an intro to a video game
Iāve seen (extremely dubious) rumors flying around for years about Bluepoint remastering Metal Gear Solid, and recently theyāve really got me thinking about what I would even want from a project like that. So many aspects of the original's gameplay are so hilariously antiquated that a direct remake would probably feel kinda strange, but once you start changing things the entire design concept collapses (see the twin snakes).
You can't quite go the FFVII-Remake approach of wild expansion because you lose the tightness of the scope of the original, and you can't quite go the FFVIII-Remaster approach because the game is antiquated beyond words. So like, what do you do? Go for Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin and rebalance the entire game with a texture bump? I honestly have no idea
@Official_Danimalz#27971 ive been thinking a little about these Blue Point remakes and their place in games. I recently played a bit of the Shadow of the Colossus remake which looks great but definitely still feels like a game of its age. I remember thinking time and again āwhy canāt I just climb like in Uncharted 4 - for a game about climbing it feels like ass.ā But I also sort of love that Blue Point leaves the game mostly intact while just tweaking it a bit to make it bearable. This formula works pretty great for 10 year old games like Shadow and Demonās - but I donāt know if it would hold up for a game thatās 25 years old.
@CidNight#27975 Very well put at the end there, I think Bluepoint remakes have worked for me because of contextual factors: Demon's Souls has an entire franchise scaffolding the gameplay and Shadow of the Colossus is as streamlined as it could ever be. With something more uneven and dated I have no idea how that approach works.
One of the things I love about the Metal Gear series is how later games will often flash back to past games and just show you 8-bit or low poly footage, like thatās just how everything looked back then. I love replaying the series in order and seeing that progression. I like that the series values whatās unique about each gameās aesthetic, even when they become outdated. MGS1 has those great chunky textures and that cool winter color palette, MGS2 has that smooth plastic, sterile sheen that just happens to gel so well with the gameās themes of artifice and the encroaching power of misinformation in the digital age. So I dunno, thereās a lot about the specific feeling of playing the original games that Iād miss in any remake. But I guess it could be cool
@Official_Danimalz#27980 I donāt think itās meaningless that successful remakes from that era (FF7, RE1-3 come to mind) are true remakes, reimaginations from the ground up. They look and play like your memory remembers them. For this reason I suspect a similar approach would be best for MGS1. The through line for all these games though, including Blue Point, is an obvious respect and love for the original material on the part of the new artists.
I really want to play MGS3 on my 3DS but you can't lift yourself on your elbows in it and this somehow ruins the game for me.
@compositehiggs#28007 literally unplayable
@CidNight#27995 I will say, an important aspect of my memories of these games (VII and MGS in particular) is that they always looked a little bit shitty but cool, if that makes sense? Even in 1999 when I thought MGS1 was the coolest thing I had ever seen, a big thing about the PS1 aesthetic for me was the combination of loads of ideas and cheap hardware. Being lectured on the ills of nuclear weapons on a 12 inch television is, as they say, a vibe. I think that's very hard to recreate now for all sorts of reasons, so the remake from the ground up is probably the way to go, but yeah, the FFVII Remake is very far from how I remember FFVII.
@Syzygy#28011
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Skull Face was a strange oneāit seemed like his goals and motivations were clear enough but there always seemed to be something missing. Also surprised to hear he's based on a 21st century Japanese creation instead of a character from a 1984 American movie.
Metal Gear Solid was a bit of a revelation for me when I played it back in the day. Some time around 1999 (probably) I used essentially all of the pocket money I had been saving up for years to buy a used playstation from someone. This playstation had a modchip and I got a bunch of burned games along with it, although the person in question had printed out covers for the games and put them on the cases. One of those games was Metal Gear Solid. I didnāt have any particular interest in it at this time and I actually tried to play it once, but had no idea what I was doing, got quickly discovered and killed by the enemies and decided that I didnāt really like it. I was 10 at the time (if my memory of 99 is correct). Fast forward two years and I gave it another try. I remember the situation, because it was during my birthday. Back in those days it was common to invite your school-class for some kind of birthday party and in addition I also invited a few friends who were not in my class. One friend, who was my best friend at this time stayed the night (his father was much more protective than my mom, so this was a pretty rare occurrence). That evening we decided to give the game another go. This time it clicked. I think it helped that we were two people as we could discuss with each other, eventually figuring out how one was supposed to play, how one was supposed to hide etc. I remember the excitement of discovering the entrance to the base utilizing the binoculars, getting there unseen and finally getting inside. The gameplay was exhilarating in a way that was very different from any other game I had played until then. It took me a long time to beat it that first time. Over the next week or two, I would invite my friend to come over after school whenever possible so that we could continue the game. I think that I was mostly the active player, but he had plenty of advice. He also nailed the button mashing required for withstanding the torture scene which I could never do.
I really enjoyed the story and was into all the weird conspiracy stuff, whacky characters and zany yet somehow serious plot. I remember understanding it all quite well, so I guess I must have been better at English at the time than I currently remember myself as being. One part of the game that was very frustrating is when you are told that a certain codec number is on the back of the CD case. I thought for sure that it was some in-game item and I spent hours hunting for it in order to find this stupid codec number (remember I also didn't have the original CD case). Of course if I had thought even a little bit about it, I could have just tried every possible frequency in like 10 minutes, so that was pretty stupid. Eventually I looked it up online.
When I bought a PS2 around a year later, I got one which was packaged with Metal gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (it even had a special box), not because I was extremely interested in the game, but it was a good package deal and as I liked the first one I did want to play it. Metal gear Solid 2 ended up being one of my favorite games of all time. To this day, probably due to familiarity it is still the one in the series I enjoy playing the most. The gameplay felt like a refinement of MGS1 in every way, but still fundamentally similar, unlike say MGS4 which felt very different to me and not in a way I found enjoyable. The story took everything I liked about MGS1 and turned it up to 11 and I loved it when I was 13. The Patriots, the crazy ending I liked all of it. I have replayed MGS2 quite a lot of times since then and I still like a lot about it. I think some of the sillier elements that I may have taken more seriously at the time work in a different way for me now. Aside from the ending which is super interesting and which many essays have been written about, another thing I enjoyed about the game was the characters. I remember being very emotionally affected by Hal and Emma's subplot, although looking at it now it does have a whiff of the āIntroduce female character and kill her off in order to make the male main characters feel sadā trope. I still overall enjoy this aspect of the game though and think Emma is a pretty good character in her own right.
I don't like MGS3 as much as many people, but I still bought it as soon as it came out, played through it and enjoyed it. I haven't played it since and I think I might like it more if I were to play it again. But overall I doubt it will ever feel as special to me as MGS2.
I didn't get a PS3 until the first slim was out which is not much a of a loss as many more interesting games were available at that time. I did the same with the PS4 and will probably do the same with the PS5 if I ever get one. MGS4 was one of the two games that made me decide to get a PS3 (the other was Disgaea 3, I guess I also knew that FF XIII was coming at some point). I really enjoyed it as an experience, but as I touched upon earlier, I didn't enjoy the gameplay as much. I guess it felt more like a shooting game to me than the earlier entries. Not sure why, I think maybe because shooting was a more viable strategy against normal enemies? The story is very indulgent and it does feel like it has a bunch of retcons of stuff from MGS2, but to be honest I don't remember it clearly enough to express any strong opinion on this. Another game I should replay at some point.
I have not played MGS5. One of the things that appeals to me about MGS 1-4 (particularly 2 which I know inside out at this point) is that it is a relatively short, focused experience which tells a cool story, with some interesting gameplay. This makes the games quite replayable and makes for a good first-time experience. MGS5 as fas as I can tell is a much longer open-world type of experience, with less story segments. It might very well be good, but it seems like it is lacking some of the core design that appeals to me about the MGS series, even if the stealth gameplay is good (as most people say). However, I am open to be convinced that I should play it or any of the MGS subentries for that matter.
I have played Metal Gear Rising. It is such an over-the-top game which is even siller than the mainline MGS games and I absolutely love it for it. Strangely I generally suck at action games like Bayonetta, DMC etc. but somehow I got on OK with MGR. After dying what felt like 100 times to the first boss (the wolf) I somehow got the hang of it and never had any problems afterwards aside from the final boss, but that was minor compared to the first boss.
Despite many references to the āsillinesā of the games, I love them and I think they also tackle quite serious themes in interesting ways. In fact I love this blend of seriousness and silliness although I understand it is not everyone's cup of tea. I think it is one of the underlying reasons why many accuse Kojima of being a terrible writer recently, the other being backlash to how much praise he got in the early 2000's, some of which was definitely a bit much.
