Best Metal Gear poll

I made it past the first boss fight and had a long rumination on the dangerous post-war proliferation of nuclear weapons with the president before he had a 'heart attack'. Before he died he told me to check the back of the CD case LOL.

I wrote down these names because they are amazing:

Psycho Mantis
Sniper Wolf
Decoy Octopus
Vulcan Raven
Revolver Ocelot
Liquid Snake

http://img2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20091226190134/metalgear/images/d/d9/Mantis_Castlevania.jpg

Snake: "You're a ninja!"

I just met up w the otaku dude. LOL this game is amazing. And of course Snake is this total super-serious badass who doesn't mind just waiting for this guy to say whatever he wants to about Japanese anime or cute butts or whatever. I love that shimmering camouflage effect, it sort of looks like someone made a programming mistake one day and Kojima saw it and was like "Oh, I'm going to write that in as a plot device!"

There is some history of metal gear thing on youtube where they have all the characters on playing cards or something and go through the entire series chronologically and it is one of the nerdiest things I have ever watched.

I just beat Psycho Mantis and it was AMAZING. The whole black screen of death and switching controllers (didn't find anything on my memory card tho) really amped up the tension in the fight. The gameplay in MGS is tight and the cut-scenes (which are a big issue for Kojima's critics) are so well-written and pretty much perfectly integrated into the game. I'm not a fan of the modern trend towards cut-scenes, but in this game they are MASTERFULLY woven into the gameplay. It is quite the seamless experience!

Predator, Star Wars, and The Terminator are all big influences on the writing. Got to give a hand to Jeremy Blaustein for the English translation!

The whole sequence where you are running up this giant Communications Tower up like a dozen flight of stairs and bad guys are shooting at you from behind, so you're chucking flash grenades at them, then you get to the door and it's frozen shut, so you end up on the roof in a standoff against a helicopter, who ends up blowing up the roof while you leap from explosion Die Hard style is AWESOME. I am finally comfortable with these controls :)

Hal and Dave, that's a good one! Maybe we should take a trip to Jupiter!

i just bought the new one

basically because i have about 50000000 things to do in the next 6 days and this seems like a good way of not doing them

i died about 100000000 times

So I just started playing MGS2, and I've made it past the first part of the game and onto the second protagonist. The "Did you say 'nerd'?" "Not nerd, node." exchange felt VERY David Lynch. In fact, the whole story is feeling more and more David Lynch. What's the deal w that skull mask? How come there is an all-new, far less cool, scene showing whenever you die? I know, I know, the game gets meta, nobody spoil anything but answering my questions please.

But sweet Jesus the cutscenes in this game are overkill. There are some in the first one, but here they really do seem to last a long time. Again, this is both ok because the writing in this series is pretty special, and not ok because the gameplay/controls/graphics are so far improved over the first MGS that whenever it's taken away from you, it sort of sucks. This is the big auteur game? Has anyone played Policenauts?

The cutscenes do not get any shorter

Hahaha, wait until you get to the end of the game

as this poll reflects mgs1 is mad superior to mgs2 (which I actually just didn't like much: terrible dialogue, uninteresting plot (also nonsensical, but that's ok), silly villains, not much new gameplay) and also to mgs3 which has great gameplay but really lacks a good storyline and omg enough with the "what is a warrior"-philosophizing omg infinite codecs.

just completed mgs2 yesterday and almost fell asleep during final codec-conversation (but thematically mgs2 is pretty good, just doesn't translate into as fun an experience as 1 or 3)

but still they are all pretty good games compared...

but now i'm gonna play mgs1 :D

btw really nice to read your "live-posting" on mgs1 :)

raiden's nonstop bewilderment in 2 is hilarious. "!?". he is a man who has only played video games and does not expect them to be like this one. said it in the other thread but iirc he's told at the very beginning that there's "30 billion dollars in cash" involved in the affair, and then every time he asks about it after that nobody knows what he's talking about. it just blows away in the wind of the "plot".

(that was technically a spoiler, but don't worry; this game is in the volume business.)

we need to link this thread in: Metal Gear Solid 2

Yeah Raiden is hilarious, when he takes over. I finished Revengeance last week and he's basically and unstoppable killing machine in that, so it's funny to see where he came from. Nontop bewilderment otm.

The more I read about Kojima the more it seems like a George Lucas case, of an artist who accidentally made a huge genre-defining work and is now forever beholden to that work if only out of monetary necessity. Every successive game he says is the last one, and yet they won't let him go. The list of all the Metal Gears he has written/directed/produced comes to nearly 30 games in the past 15 years:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hideo_Kojima#Metal_Gear_series

Btw the PC port of MGS2 is amazing, one of the best ports ever. It even recognized my Rock Candy wireless PS2 controller at the key config. (And of course the controller always turns itself off during the cutscenes. Then someone in a cutscene goes "Snake! Snaaaake!" and I turn it on again, ready to play. Then the cutscene continues for another 5 minutes and the controller turns itself off again LOL)

lol volume business

this talk is almost inspiring me to finally pick up Snake Eater. almost. i'm almost there.

The build up and ending of MGS2 is the most nonsensical thing I've ever encountered in video game form! It's kind of amazing that it exists.

this is a common Japanese conversational device, drives me nuts when i hear it - "this cake is good" "... so, you think this cake is good?" "yes ... yes" "... i see" - well thank fuck they established the cake is good

I thought I heard that there is no cake, though.

this talk is almost inspiring me to finally pick up Snake Eater. almost. i'm almost there.

setting/plotwise i prefer time-crisis-on-acid to coldwar fantasia because while both are "dumb" the first one is video games devouring themselves and leaving nothing behind and the second is them wading kinda ineptly into a different pool, but 3 really does have terrific gameplay setpieces. the muddy greens/browns of the "soviet jungle" were kind of a problem for me on the ps2 (compared to the clean, anonymous "facility level" lines of the big shell, or even shadow moses) but i expect that's a lot better in the hd remaster. anyway the sniper duel alone is worth whatever you get it for.

Japanese conversational device!?

haven't played any metal gear since the first MGS, but i'm playing Revengeance now and it's just damn fun, plain and simple. it's like everything i could want out of an action game. platinum games is definitely becoming one of my favorite developers.

Interested because I see it as one of the options on this poll -- did anyone ever play Ghost Babel? iirc it was a color remake of MGS, but with different characters... I had a friend who played it (a guy who didn't own a tv console after the SNES, but was pretty faithful to portable gaming) and he said it was fantastic, one of the best portable games he'd ever played. I am fascinated, but probably not enough to go back to a 2000 game boy game.

I did! can't say I remember much but I was super impressed at the time. I'd bet that it holds up.

It has a good reputation, though I've never played it either.

Holy shit MGS2 is starting to go crazy on me! I love this:

Colonel: I hear it's amazing when the Purple-stuffed worm in Flap-jaw space, with the tuning fork, does a raw-blink on Hari-kiri Rock! I need scissors! 61!

Colonel: I was a North American Fall Webworm in my past life. Those were the good old days... What were you in your former life?

Sorry, if these are spoilers, this is amazing, like walking into a David Lynch movie.

At that point, I was just like, oh good... they're finally going with full gibberish instead of pretending the game makes sense

Haha, by the time the game gets to this point nothing really makes sense anymore

This stuff about the rise of junk data is so OTMFM it's like Kojima predicted the future.

Yeah this is incredible. It's also a little sad cos so many games rip off stuff that this game did first, only they do it with really lame storytelling. This and the first MGS are basically every mainstream AAA video game from 1998 onward, including current gen. I have to say I have heard a lot of hype about this game over the years, and this ending completely rids me of any doubts as to it's greatness.

OK I just finished it completely, back at the title screen now. I haven't felt like this since the first time I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey. I think I prefer the first MGS as a game but good gracious the end of this game is amazing! Best ending ever!

Also, I like how the last words spoken in the game are "What the hell?"

Pretty insane that this came out in Novemeber 2001. Especially with the heavily anti-authoritarian stuff, one of the heroes being called a terrorist, the villains being called The Patriots, etc. This was at a time when "Leaving on a Jet Plane" was banned from US radio. I suppose Japan is just years in the future, and Hideo was seeing things 5 years in the future (who was talking about internet leaks in 2001?).

The meta stuff really works because the AI is very convincingly self-aware.

RAIDEN!! TURN THE GAME CONSOLE OFF NOW!

Gonna play some VR missions. But reading for later:

http://junkerhq.net/MGS2/

This could be a BS rumor, but I remember hearing somewhere that the original setup was even more NYC-based, with a WTC setup for the part of the setting, that for obvious reasons had to be changed quickly

i like that all its deepthoughts are couched in a mean joke about how the player is an underqualified girlyman manipulated by uncomprehended forces who doesn't even deserve to "play" as "snake"

don't they reveal the "patriots" or w/e have all been dead 100 years?

lol

the new Captain America movie felt very very Metal Gear at certain points

Captain America: Winter Solidus

It's really insane the amount of stuff they put in these games (at least MGS2). There are hours of unrepeated dialog that is hidden Easter egg type stuff you may never hear playing the game normally. Tonight I was hiding in a locker and some guard found me so I punched my way out. The door to the locker ended up getting torn off and falling to the ground. I couldn't put the guard in the locker because the door had fallen off! I know that's a very small thing, but it's also something deliberately programmed in, another variable that can be triggered for further immersion. They don't make games like this anymore.