GAMES!

I just came.

 

I just finished playing Metal Gear Solid V, and I'm torn on how to rate it. On the one hand, I really enjoyed it for the most part; on the other hand, there were aspects of it that I just really hated.

The Basics: Set in 1984, the story follows Big Boss (a.k.a. Naked Snake) and partially closes the loop between MGS3 and the original Metal Gear.
I'll start with some of the things the game gets right.

The graphics are great, by and large, and the game is well optimized. Only a couple notable instances of frame-rate drop. Fewer bugs than you might expect from a just-released console port. The audio is polished and mostly believable. The voice-overs are generally workmanlike, with a few notable outliers on both ends of the spectrum. There is no shortage of content; I spent more hours than I care to admit playing this game lately. The quality of some of that content is lacking though; more on that later. The story is about what you'd expect from a MGS game, and is pretty engaging; but more on that later as well. The gameplay is largely very good, and most of the missions grant enough leeway for whatever play style you prefer; if you're going for total stealth, there are plenty of methods for accomplishing that. If you'd rather just blast your way through the game, killing everything in sight, that's an option too. Overall, I'd give the game a solid "recommend".

Now, on to some more spoilery details and some things I didn't care for. Light to moderate spoilers ahead.

Spoiler

As I said above, there is a great deal of content in this game. Unfortunately, a lot of it is just retreading the same ground over and over. There are basically three locations where you'll spend your time: Afghanistan, Central Africa, and Mother Base. The Afghan and African maps are your main playground in this partially open-world adventure. When you're not on a mission, you can free-roam and explore the entire map, collecting various resources along the way, or completing "side ops". The maps are pretty expansive, to the point that traversing from one side-op location to another can be a bit of a slog. Of course, you can call in a helicopter to pick you up at any point, so lengthy overland trips aren't necessarily a requirement. Sadly, apart from a few interesting pockets here and there, the maps are largely homogeneous. Afghanistan is primarily narrow valleys interspersed with Soviet outposts and base camps, and Africa is mostly uninteresting savanna, also dotted with enemy outposts and enemy-occupied villages, and a couple isolated jungle locations that feature in the story missions. Mother Base is a network of offshore platforms; very little of interest here.

About the first 1/3 of the story takes place in Afghanistan, the second 1/3 in Africa, and the final 1/3 goes back and forth between the two. By endgame, you've visited all the key locations in each map multiple times, which is kinda lame and detracts from the challenge factor. The game is broken into two chapters, but don't be deceived: by the end of chapter one, the story is about 75% done. There are like 50 story missions, but about ten of those are rehashes, playing the same mission under more challenging circumstances.

On the subject of gameplay: it is generally not very challenging. I found it rather easy to achieve an "S" rating on most of the missions. Sure, you have to take your time and use your head, but if you pay attention and you're a decent shot with the tranq pistol, even the most ham-fisted approach can usually be made to work just fine. Half the time, it feels like the guards are myopic and half deaf. There's a couple places where the difficulty spikes from zero to a thousand without warning, but it's mostly pretty easy going. Just try not to kill anybody and you'll get a decent mission rating.

Next, some more specific things that bothered me. Moderate to heavy spoilers ahead.

Spoiler

Early on in the game, Mother Base will be established. It starts as a single platform, and expands as you recruit (abduct) more soldiers into your private army and expand your operation. You'll make frequent trips here for story reasons, but there's not actually anything to do other than target practice side ops, or beating the shit out of your hapless guards patrolling the platforms. They will respond with a salute and a "thank you Boss!". The platforms are entirely too far apart, requiring about a three minute drive to traverse from one to another. The other option is to call a helicopter for a ride, but a few notes on helicopters:

Helicopters are one of the most frustrating time-wasters in this game. When you call one in, you have to wait for it to arrive and land. Understandable, no big deal. After embarking, you can man the door gun during takeoff. Cool, except, unless you called the chopper into a hot LZ, there's not gonna be anything to shoot at. Between embark and the point when Snake shuts the door and the screen fades to black usually takes about thirty seconds. Insertions take longer, about fifty seconds from fade-in to egress. In country, you can't just hop from one LZ to another. After takeoff, you will be in your ACC (Aerial Command Center) where you issue production and research orders to Mother Base staff, customize equipment loadouts, and get caught up on listening to info-dump cassette tapes. From here, you can choose an insertion LZ, confirm your loadout, and be on your way. So from pickup at one LZ to drop off at the next, factoring in loading screen times, takes about 3 minutes. No big deal at first, but after about a hundred helicopter rides, it becomes slightly maddening. Air travel from one Mother Base platform to another takes even longer; there's no fade out. You're along for the entire, agonizingly slow flight along the most pointlessly convoluted flight path. You could almost low-crawl there faster. Moving on.

Credit rolls. So many credit rolls. I counted no less than three COMPLETE credit rolls. There are also credit overlays at the start of each mission, kinda like a TV show, and credits at the end of each mission. We get it. Hideo Kojima made the game. Other people helped. DO NOT CARE. One credit roll is more than I'm ever going to pay attention to.

Audio: well made, but some of it is seriously annoying. Those cassette tapes I mentioned? Takes way too long to listen to all of 'em. I'd rather just read a transcript and be done with it. There are four different "buddies" you can bring along to help you out, and a couple of them have some super annoying sound clips that play constantly. For instance: the dog. He is usually extremely useful when you're stealthing around, but I had to quit using him because I couldn't stand one more minute of listening to his incessant panting. And it's not just on the ground. If he was with you when you got picked up, he'll be in the helicopter (where you spend a ton of time muddling through menus designed for consoles [no mouse support]), panting. Constantly, with the panting.

One of the other buddies is a certain female sniper (the only notable female character in the game). I can certainly see why so many people made a stink about her before the game was released. Reinforcing stereotypes, and not in a good way. She starts off as an enemy and, for reasons that are still unclear to me, has a change of heart and apparently falls for Big Boss. And while I'm not one to get bent outta shape over some shameless eye candy, even I will say her depiction is rather degrading, and the story's justification for her depiction is thin at best, and I'll leave it at that.

What I found more disconcerting than the misogyny was the number of cutscenes that involved some form of torture. Big Boss has two lieutenants, Miller and Ocelot, and while Miller seems awfully quick to call for immediate execution of anyone he sees as a threat, Ocelot prefers "enhanced interrogation". And Big Boss, bafflingly, never calls either of them out on their behavior. This apparent lack of moral compass makes it hard to understand or relate with Big Boss (more to follow on this), as one minute he's rescuing children from the battlefield, and the next he's standing by silently while Ocelot tortures people. Electrocution, joint manipulation, beating, drowning, and probably a couple others I'm not recalling at the moment, all got way too much play time in the cutscenes. Game would have been better without them IMO.

Concerning the story. Major spoilers.

Spoiler

I will give Kojima and company props for sticking to established canon from previous games, as absurd and convoluted as it may be. But what that gives us in MGSV is a rather absurd and convoluted, albeit rather engaging, story. In a nutshell: in MGSV: Ground Zeroes (a prologue to The Phantom Pain), the original Mother Base gets attacked and destroyed by the forces of mysterious villain Skullface. Big Boss is gravely wounded, and is in a coma for nine years. His awakening is the starting point for TPP. From there, the story revolves around reestablishing Snake's private army and the new Mother Base, while discerning and thwarting the diabolical plans of Skullface. The climax occurs at the end of Chapter 1, complete with epic boss battle. Chapter 2 attempts to tie up some lose ends, while introducing still more plot elements. It is fairly obvious that the epic conclusion of Chapter 2 got left on the cutting room floor, whether due to time or budget constraints. What we're left with is a pretty disappointing ending, which I will discuss below.

Concerning the ending. HUGE SPOILER, DO NOT READ.

Spoiler

There's the ending, and then there's the "secret ending." Apparently I met whatever arcane requirements on my initial playthrough, because I got the secret ending. And man was it disappointing. The game starts off with Snake, just after awakening from a 9 year coma, escaping from a hospital with the help of another patient (whose face is wrapped in bandages), as the bad guys attack and try to finish him off. Mysterious patient disappears at some point, Snake is rounded up by Ocelot, and things proceed from there. Final mission is the first mission all over again, only with some minor differences that reveal the truth. The mysterious patient is, in fact, Big Boss. The guy you are playing is somebody else, made to look like Snake, and believe that he is Snake. So the real Big Boss goes off to establish the true Outer Heaven, while the fake takes the heat from his enemies and builds his rep. It felt like a plot twist just for the sake of a plot twist, and left me disliking both Big Bosses. Super lame.

 

Interesting write-up Japes. The last MGS game I played was MGS2. I remember staying up late to finish it, and when the game got super fucking weird and went off the rails right before the end I sorta made the decision to never play another one again after I finished it. It's not that I didn't *get* it or understand what was going on, I just simply thought it was retarded and the gameplay was enjoyable enough to keep me interested.

 

Elite: Dangerous went on sale on Steam the other day, so I seized the opportunity to not pay $60 for it. Been playing pretty heavily for the past few days, and my current impression is that it's pretty darn good. The reviews I read beforehand seemed to go one of two ways. A) Negative: there's nothing to do or B) Positive: you can do whatever you want. I guess I can see where the general lack of guidance and direction in the game can leave a player with the impression that there's nothing to do. It seems that the ultimate goal in the game (beyond simply having fun) is to increase your reputation and credit balance (profitssss! Oops, wrong game). How you go about accomplishing this is totally up to you; you can explore the billions of solar systems in the galaxy and sell cartographic data, fight as a mercenary, buy low and sell high while dodging pirates, buy and sell illicit cargo while dodging the authorities, be a pirate and steal other people's cargo, hunt pirates and collect bounties, or spend your days chipping away at asteroids and selling minerals. Or you can just wander aimlessly through space, lamenting the lack of an on-screen arrow pointing the way to what you're supposed to be doing. You can also crash your ship into a space station while trying to thread the needle through the annoyingly small docking bay entry port. Multiple times.

Whatever you decide to do, you'll need the right ship for the job, and it'll need to be fitted with the right kit. One of the finest points of the game is the lack of depreciation on purchased equipment. So if you, like me, decide to change careers every five minutes, you won't lose money in the process.

If, later on, I decide that I actually hate the game, I'll be sure to put an update on here. But so far, so good. Recommend, especially if you can get it on sale.

 

I'm waiting on the next big update on Wasteland 2 to come out and then I think I will probably attempt a playthrough again. Might even get past the first town this time. If I do I'll be sure to create my team based on the forum and who knows if I could be bothered I may even post some screens and give you all an update of how the game is going. But not a Let's Play.

 

Somehow my beloved managed to con most of her family into to chipping in for a PS4 for my birthday/Christmas, so recently I've been playing Until Dawn. The idea of the game is there's a bunch of teens who have gone to an isolated cabin up on a mountain for an annual get-together, only unfortunately there seems to be a psychopath in combo with a group of monsters that live up there which are determined to pick them off.

The gameplay revolves around quicktime (the standard pressing buttons on queue and aiming shots within a certain time, with the less standard keeping the controller still when things are looking for you making use of the motion controls), which isn't everyone's thing but do allow for a greater focus on plot without having to learn any complex controls. The real draw is the decision making - with every decision requiring one of two responses and resulting future decisions being based on your original choices, creating a repeatedly mentioned butterfly effect (i.e. there's a point in story where a character can keep a flare gun or give it to their partner, which in turn allows them the option to shoot a monster that would bite them otherwise, which means that a debate that normally happens later in the game over whether to kill that character because they might turn into the monster never happens. Obviously giving him the flare gun has it's own consequences too).

There's several situations where you can kill characters by willfully throwing these decisions, which is great as the characters are based off stock teen types from 80s slasher movies and so sometimes it feels a bit deserved; the deaths are also as gruesome as you'd imagine. Beyond that, the decisions involving character on character interaction allow you to become a puppetmaster of sorts, shaping each person's personality and meddling in their personal relationships - which can make characters reluctant to help you in the future, sometimes fatally.

The other plus side is the game looks extremely good, using several real life actors who were extensively mo-capped for everything you see in game - making it probably the most realistic representation of people in a game to date.

I'd say the main downsides are that the characters aren't as intertwined as they could be, with most people only caring about their love interests rather than other relationships with friends, plus if quicktime really isn't your thing then this probably isn't for you.

Overall, I'd definitely recommend it. The choice element makes it feel like an RPG stripped down to the bare essentials of impactful decisions affecting the course of the story, plus it makes it highly replayable. The narrative is reasonable, with at least one decent twist I never really saw coming. If you have a PS4, I'd definitely get it.

Other than that, I found Batman: Arkham City a bit meh.

 

We should totally be PS4 buddies.

 

My PSN trial just ran out, if I get a multiplayer game where I'll need it again I'll let you know.

 

I spent 60 bucks on Elite: Dangerous back in May and it's the worst 60 bucks I've spent in gaming in memory. The game has an excellent shell, but I agree with Japes in his assessment of there's nothing to do. Well, there are things to do, but they seem boring and better done by other games elsewhere (Eve, mostly).

The only thing I enjoyed was the actual handling of the ship with a joystick, but that wasn't enough to keep me. All of that crap combined with their frankly insulting "expansion" cost system pissed me off enough to never want to come back.

 

I think I've reached a point in the game where any significant further advancement would require a LOT of grinding.

Ahhh, grinding. I have mixed feelings about it. If a game makes the ultimate achievements too easily attainable, then they feel cheap. If they're too outrageously difficult, or if they require too vast an amount of time, then they feel like a cheap gimmick. I guess the sweet spot is somewhere in the middle with adequately varied grinding activities, so it doesn't feel like such a grind.

I think that where ED fails is in consistency. If you're grinding, but you feel like you're making steady progress, it's all good. You're going places, moving up in the world. But in ED, the amount of credits required to move on up to the next best thing seems to increase almost exponentially at each step, while your rate of income does not. I think having a greater variety of ships available would alleviate this problem somewhat, but as it stands, your choices are few, and mostly expensive.

And yeah, I don't expect I'll be dropping any more money on expansions unless they're just seriously revolutionary. Or on sale.

 

Been playing the Star Wars Battlefront beta today. Being a free beta, the play options are pretty limited, but the Battle for Hoth is a lot of fun. Graphics are top notch, sound effects are great. Although, I feel like the term "Rebel scum" gets thrown around a little too often by the Imperials. Grabbing a Hero powerup and wrecking people as Darth Vader is quite satisfying.

 

But do you think it will have replay-ability past the honeymoon period?

 

It's hard to say for sure, since the beta is limited to just two multiplayer maps and rank progression and item unlocks are capped at level 5. But it feels like a game you could keep coming back to for a long time, especially if you've got a group of friends to party with. I'd definitely recommend downloading it while it's in beta, and free, to see what you think.

 

If I had a group of friends to party with I wouldn't be playing computer games in the first place.

 

Yeah, I guess all our moms are past their partying days.

 

Tried out the Star Wars Beta. Not a fan. Visually it is impressive and that is pretty much all that it has going for it.

 

So I caved and bought Fallout 4, mainly because i managed to get it for about $20 less than normal.

So far I have enjoyed it. People complain about bugs and such things however I haven't encountered any yet and most complaints seem to be from the PS4 version.

 

So, Fallout 4. After a few days with it, I'm very impressed and am enjoying it immensely. It's far from perfect, of course; plenty of wooden dialogue and physics problems, and certain aspects of the workshop system are a hot mess (hopefully workshop issues will be ironed out in the patching process). But nothing so game-breaking that it's not still a lot of fun to play.

I was somewhat surprised to see that the devs took quite a bit of artistic liberty in updating the appearance of many iconic wasteland creatures and items. That's a good thing, a lot of them needed an overhaul.

Anyone else have any thoughts to share?

 

I'll probably be getting it at Christmas, so I'll hold off my personal thoughts about it until then. However, I'd be interested in hearing more about it - I'm pretty interested on whether Bethesda are up to the same standards of writing and quest design that Obsidian had for New Vegas (I feel like the Fallout 3 and Skyrim writing and quests, whilst fine, weren't really standout)? From what I've read, it seems that a lot of people think the writing's not as good, though the factions are supposed to be well represented and compelling and the combat is meant to be decent also so it seems it'd be enjoyable.

As an aside, it seems PoE White March part 2 now has a more of a provisional release date. The "faster paced Story Mode" sounds pretty weird, I'm not quite sure why a game would want to make chunks of it skippable which seems to be the gist.

 

It sound like you'll be able to do quests in this manor:

1. Quest Started
2. Complete step 1
3. Complete step 2
4. Complete step 3
5. Quest Completed (here's your reward)

and skip all the flavor stuff that allows for role-play feels.
Mainly, I'm assuming for the folks that readily skip through all the FMVs and backgounding dialogs.