Be Excellent To Each Other

Bye, bye, Dog.



Bugger trimmed it wrong...

Stealth.

So anyway, I like the stealth video, which is 15 minutes of a 30 minute mission I did, for the following reasons:

Whilst the objective was set out at the beginning of the mission as being blow up the tanks and kill the general (typical game fodder, then) it played out much differently than my good intentions intended at the beginning. Stealth is the best way to play and the game gives you loads of tools to do so and a variety of mechanisms in game to accomplish your stealthy goals. You can take your tranqs, you can hide in the long grass, the shadows, you get a slow mo if someone spots you whilst you're being stealthy giving you a last ditch attempt to continue being stealthy, boxes, dummy solider, ballooning bodies, carrying bodies and so on and so on. So off you go being stealthy and, in fact, 15 minutes of that mission not seen involved me climbing a high shanty town on a rock face silently taking out guards and having a good time.

I fully expected that the tanks would come and visit this craggy rock town and park up allowing me time to snipe the general hence why I was sitting up on the rock face at the start of the video waiting with my sniper rifle.

Then it goes to shit. They drive past me. And it suddenly dawns on me that they are going to drive right by and bugger off ending the mission, so it turns from a stealth mission to a blow the shit up mission. And the game accommodates that too with a further baffling amount of ways to blow shit up. I run past a mortar but spot another quickly giving me chance to try out some devastating fire power and it works and one tank is deadid. Then I make haste using my trusty horse to gain ground. Which fails despite covering a lot of ground but the tanks park up at a base so I have another go at blowing them up. Grenade launchers are the order of the day which doesn't do much damage to the tank and just wakes everyone up.

So more mechanisms come into play as the enemy AI reacts to your presence and starts shooting you. They call out on the radio, they request backup, they shoot at your position. But no sooner are you being shot at, you can out run them and hide in cover. The game has a similar mechanic to Splinter Cell where the AI comes for your last known position but rather than have some massive shadow remain on the map like Splinter Cell, it is just communicated by the enemy going for your last known position! Outstanding work that doesn't require the game tapping you on the shoulder to remind you that you're playing a game. No, instead you just observe what happens. You can see later on in the video that the troops lay down fire on the last known position thinking I'm still there and soldiers start to converge on that position even though I'm currently crawling on my belly right by them. It's all brilliantly done. It looks great. It sounds great. It plays smart.

There's some irritants though, like when I fire a grenade near the end through a camo net which explodes on the net knocking me off the horse because it's treated like a solid object. Bit shit. Or when I drive into the horse by accident and knock over the horse. I felt bad about that.

But these are few and fair between because there's the enemies that are wiped out on the way back to the chopper because it flew overhead, saw me in trouble and someone chain gunned the fuck out of the baddies. I never asked for it - it just happened. There's loads to love about this. Loads.

This guy has a load of tips and secret stuff in this bumper video.

http://youtu.be/8XmZgzRvEiU

Some of these I've stumbled across whereas I had no fucking clue about the symbols alongside the map which indicates whether the AI is getting smart to my headshots, night time infiltrations and sniping. Effing brilliant.

Turns out Kojima is still up to his same shit with dialogue like:

"They're going to wipe every language except English off the face of the earth"

"You can have your speech back but YOU WILL BE INFERTILE."

Yeah, cause Big Boss has always expressed an interest in settling down and raising a family, so who gives a fuck.

Currently playing MGS3. Action is good, but I don't know whether to laugh or cry during the cutscenes. Example: Ocelot gets attacked by a swarm of angry hornets, but he survives by killing hundreds of them by, erm, spinning his revolvers. Erm. OK.

It's meant to be funny. Sometimes it doesn't translate terribly well.

What's going on here then? In the second chapter of the game it starts to add missions to your mission list which are just harder versions of earlier missions. Boo. I wouldn't mind them adding a hard mode or something but this seems like padding the mission list with non-critical missions as it suddenly rushes to some sort of a conclusion. I've got about 5 replay missions that I'm no longer arsed with doing as I'm invested in some sembelence of a story from Kojicunt.

"I am Quiet. I am the absence of words."

Who. Wrote. This.

Oh, Kojima, yeah, great stuff Kojima. You're a real literinary genius aren't cha? Do you not have anyone who reads this stuff before you put it in the game?

He's the George Lucas of gaming in that respect.

I'm so glad that someone had the foresight to convince Kojima to put his hours of garbage read out by cheaper actors into tapes that are entirely optional accessible only to those who give two shits about some ridiculous "story."

Having said that though, I'm, by and large, entirely with the story this time. Big villain wants to do bad stuff, I stop him, then I'm tying up loose ends with subsidiary characters. Really simple-to-follow stuff that requires no knowledge of the previous games (except Ground Zeroes, I suppose. But even then all you need to know is that you got blown up and now you ain't got no arm). I've sort of followed the story in my own way and played every game to completion except for the PSP games, Peace Walker, so there's a little extra for me cause I can recognise some of the characters before they went bad. It's kinda nice seeing them without the ludicrous baggage of the later games.

Hell, the game itself is massively repetitive (Christ almighty how many games set in an open world will have you "capturing outposts" a la Far Cry and Just Cause) but is just an absolute joy to play. Fuck knows how many hours I've spent on it (must be 20-30 odd) but I'm still enjoying sneaking into places and busting heads and sometimes not busting heads. I haven't even tried things like the decoy balloons and stuff and it's still fantastic and fresh each time.

AND, it has its own "No Russian" moment with a remarkable, honest to god, a remarkable level that pulls in everything you've done over 20 hours and says "Now what the fuck you gonna do." And you'll ponder your motives and get on with it, which is bad enough. But then you open "that room." And... well, it's brilliant, and has no reason to exist in this game (because "Kojima", right?) but I'm so super glad that it does.

That and the stellar opening mission will stick with me long after I've finished it. And I've only got a couple of levels to go, I think, but I'll leave that until tomorrow so I can start the next 52.

Holy fuck I've played it for 50 hours and 47 minutes!?

Also finished now and the end is BRILLIANT! I take back everything I've ever said about Kojima. That guy is a genius. Shame he can't write dialogue for shit though. And that crap with the kids and Eli was annoying too. Anyway, BRILLIANT!

MGSV: The Phantom Pain is absolutely marvellous. What a game.

A solid (snake) 9 from me.

A quick look at the stats reveals that I ballooned 479 people.

Completion percentage: 49%

Well. It's hard to say. I can't imagine what he writes translates all that easily.

Have you sat through hours of nonsense cut-scenes and radio calls in MGS1-4 and are attempting to excuse his bollocks because of translation? You, Sir, are the wrongest of the wrong.

I dare say I have a slightly better idea about the difficulties of translating difficult Japanese into English. Particularly when it's meant to be amusing.
So yeah, I think it's a distinct possibility.

Then why try? MGS are AAA titles - they've got enough money to hire writers to actually write dialogue for non-Japanese countries, rather than just do shit translations of concepts that just don't translate.

I didn't realise that Metal Gear was supposed to be a comedy. So now you know, people. Remember that hour long cut-scene at the end of MGS4 where Snake and The Big Boss talk about the Patriots, life, the Cold War, nuclear armament, fox-dye and shit? An amusing scene ruined in translation and not a total bollock spewing bore fest.

I love this a lot.

Corridor Digital do some cool stuff. Look up their Dubstep Guns movie.

Seen it. They are pretty awesome.

Their The Division video (paid by Ubisoft, by the looks of it) was utter shit though. It's about the only bad thing I've seen them do though.