Metal Gear Solid 2

IIRC you get it by repeatedly messaging Snake on the Codec

MGS 2 is so batshit

this might be the funniest game i've ever played

I am pretty confident that people who say the 3rd is the best in the series have NO SENSE OF HUMOUR

also czn's post at the top is very otm, i don't remember that

that tracer post upthread also otm, especially

i'm almost finished with this. are the main characters possibly the STUPIDEST main characters ever to feature in a video game? every other line out of jack's mouth is "?" or "WHAT IS GOING ON??!"

also sometimes (twice per conversation) he repeats what the other person just said as a question

i like all the parts where he brings up the supposed ransom of "30 billion dollars in cash" (could've sworn it was 40 the first time it was mentioned) and the other person says WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT

cut the crap! if you're immortal, why would you take away individual freedoms and censor the net?

i am your foster father, and your worst enemy!

also sometimes (twice per conversation) he repeats what the other person just said as a question

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've only played MGS1 and that was 10+ years ago, this thread is making me want to try MGS2 - are those HD collections the way to go?

i'm playing on the ps2 and it's sons of liberty, it's not even the substance edition, so idk. this was the only one i'd ever played; i bought it forever ago because i thought i'd heard that 2's the best and then i went online and read lots of people being ehhh about 2 and then i played the game and went into cutscene shock and couldn't figure the controls and didn't play it for a couple years. then i just devoured it all this week. long dumb metal gear solid 2 post:

i loved it. it has the most infuriatingly awkward controls i've ever mastered: how about the fuckin way that, when you flatten yourself against the wall, the camera angle changes but the angle of control does not, so that sometimes if the camera turns a full 180 degrees, as often happens, moving the stick left will make your dude sidle right and vice versa? eventually i understood/dug this as part of the 3D-pacman ethos, because the stick will always be mapped properly relative to the little dot-radar. so then i learned to play looking at the radar all the time, but since you have to creep around an area first before you can use the radar there's always an initial terrified creep where the camera and the controls are working malevolently against you. but once i actually got fluid with, like, rolling into a crouch behind some low cover then switching to first-person to take my gun out and peek over the top, a pose that actually requires you to be holding down five different buttons (and not letting your grip slip on any of them because they're all pressure-sensitive), i started to see the controls as really elegant (stockholm) and the interface even minimalist in a game where you can do so many complicated things. (also: beautiful pause screens.) once i learned the controls the famous Visual Detail opened up and started to warm up the generic video-game facility setting, which (stockholm again) i thought was totally gorgeous by the end, when the sun started to set. it helped that i actually had a physical sense of the facility, knew where things were when they were named, really started to know the limited space the game covered even as new places opened often enough to keep it from feeling cramped. and once you know what you're doing the environments are so fun just to move through, so it survives an amount of backtracking that'd probably cripple an fps.

SPOILERS: i was 100% on board with the aggressive dada absurdity of the "plot" (until the last ten minutes with all of the sentimental speeches about art being the genes of culture, or maybe that was the last 40 minutes) and with how meta it is from the beginning, with the fan-hostile girly-man unmentioned on the box subbed in for the beloved bondy icon and the constant+gradually more central references to his only having had VR training. some genuinely nifty identity games in the shaggydog mess which i will steer clear of the charybdis of talking about. mostly i just laughed all the time: raiden's constant shrill bewilderment. the straightfaced absurdities everyone gushes at him. the hard right into epic sentimentality at the three-quarters mark where the game introduces you to a ludicrously helpless girl to boy-protect (she's had toxins injected in her legs so she can't walk unless you hold down the button to hold her hand), kills her off immediately, then spends seriously ten tinkling-piano minutes on her brother shuddering in grief. the disassociative camp was so high i didn't mind the bonkers-long cutscenes, and i am pretty firmly anti-cutscene. embrace it if you're gonna do it, i guess. this ended up being some of the most invested i've ever been in a game story.

also the villains in this game are evil AI historians

i think

I am pretty confident that people who say the 3rd is the best in the series have NO SENSE OF HUMOUR

― I've Seen rRootage (Will M.), Monday, August 12, 2013 11:29 PM (5 days ago) Bookmark

well it's a better game. so there's that. but yes it's not as funny

kojima's basically the only guy on the planet i trust to do non-boring cut scenes... and even with him its a crap shoot

this might be the funniest game i've ever played

― one yankee sympathizer masquerading as a historian (difficult listening hour), Monday, August 12, 2013 10:39 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I am pretty confident that people who say the 3rd is the best in the series have NO SENSE OF HUMOUR

― I've Seen rRootage (Will M.), Monday, August 12, 2013 11:29 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Playing through this after finally having played through the other ones (except 4, which I watched LP's for) and yes it is hilarious. I forgot how funny! Been pushing L and R during codec calls and it is so fun I tend to miss the dialog entirely so I can hear Snake go "Oh yeaaaah!" or "Yyeeeeuch!" Then the Raiden section happens and things get weird immediately. I forgot how strange this game is right from the start, what a total subversion of Tough Guy Game Hero it is. Then you finally get control of the new character, you are on top of Big Shell, and..... you slip in bird shit!

MGS3 is the better game, and tbh I like the look/direction of the cutscenes in 3 more than the (ahead of it's time!) teal & orange of 2, but 2 is definitely a unique piece of work. I'm trying to think of some cinematic equivalents, where an auteur made a super-successful movie then made a sequel that starts off in that same style before taking a 180 and driving into meta madness of surreal comedy.

Gremlins 2?

This codec with Peter Stillman is pretty awesome. It is revealed he was faking an injury to due PTSD. I haven't seen other games (or movies for that matter) address the consequences of war as multi-dimensionally as these.

http://youtu.be/2nBvTpUFub0?t=3m2s

http://youtu.be/pElRk7iF0oA?t=1m58s

Having met the enigmatic E.E., she proceeds to basically predicts PRISM and the various NSA shenanigans we have been dealing with in the past decade. Kojima was so ahead of his time. Emma is an ex-NSA information agent turned hacker a la Snowden. She's dropping info bombs left and right here. Also pretty spooky is that the AI system running the data collection is called GW, like George W Bush. She is way ahead of her time as a Truther/conspiracy nut.

Emma is sort of the key contact that unlocks the weird meta ending of this game. It is pretty amazing just how much of an anti-hero Raiden is. Not in the cool Rebel wo a Cause or Man With No Name way, but as a bumbling idiot who is cowardly and confused and is just bad at being a hero. There was a segment where you have to shoot a rocket and guide it through some airducts and into a room where the President is being held, and guide it around him to blow up some kind of power panel on the wall. Unless you get lucky the first couple of times the President is just running around trying to avoid your missile and you end up blowing him up, over and over again, in an almost comedically inept attempt at saving the day.

Love the grey game over screen, it's so unnerving. So fake. A game over screen needs to have a nice big splashy image or be black with solitary "Continue...?" text.

Finished it again last night. Woah. In a way it almost feels like going back in time. After the NSA hacker helps you escape, you end up in a battered and war-torn NYC and a climactic fight above Wall Street. When the story ends, and it gets optimistic and metaphorical, they start showing video of happy New Yorkers all working together and showing the optimism of daily life and working through the worst world-threatening odds. It felt like that "We are all New Yorkers" feeling you had in the US shortly after 9/11. I wonder what it would have been like to play this when it came out (November 2001)?

As a game, it's still pretty awesome. The controls are LOLold but the art design is really well done, love the shadows and late-afternoon sun beaming down on the orange oil tanker. Love how the character is often really large in the screen.

Love all the little easter eggs and hidden touches that are a sort of hallmark of MG games. At one point I was sneaking up stairs into a room w some guards, and the nearest one had a walkman loudly playing some dance beat, which was convenient for figuring out when he was closer/farther away. At another point I came upon a room with two guards, both of their back turned to me. Tranq'd the furthest one in the head, then waited for the other to walk over and see what was up, conveniently putting him in sights for another tranqing.

The tranq is OP but this game isn't exactly easy so you don't mind using it. It's also why having the older controls is fine, if you want to tranq through a room you need to switch to first person mode and aim, putting a layer of inputs between you sneaking and simply shooting your way through the game.

Some amazing acting and drama in this. Otacon's death scene w his sister was so sad, and the following scene with him being tormented by her parrot "Hal, I miss you..." was a Twin Peaks-ish decent into character psychosis. Love the complete and total ego-death of Raiden's character and then Snakes comes out of nowhere and hands you a ninja sword and suddenly you are in Strider 3D. Love when Snake says "Don't worry about me, infinite ammo." it is PERFECT.

http://33.media.tumblr.com/135c1d0af0f48516bdf02b4cc6531ead/tumblr_mszx0g8GsQ1r1oesuo1_500.gif

Also re: Raiden's anti-hero-ness it is interesting that everyone he tries to save dies, usually in a cutscene where it at first looks like HE killed them. Both the President and E.E. appear to have been shot by Raiden at first, only to reveal Vamp was behind it.

I can't remember if I talked about this on another thread, but I started playing through each game again with someone who had never played any of them this winter (sadly, we only got partway into 2 before he had to move to another city). I played on the PS3, using the PSN emulated version for 1 and the HD collection for 2 (3, 4, Peacewalker will all be PS3 eventually too). Holy shit do these games hold up. Even 1, which I was very concerned I was going to be disappointed by (old controls, rose-colored lenses, etc.), was great. Still the best even. Don't get the "LOLold" stuff about the controls, the controls for these games made so much internal sense. These games are timeless and probably the best of all time. (We'll see how I feel on the replay of 4, though.)

I haven't gotten to the end of 2 again as mentioned above, only maybe halfway, but the thing I am looking forward to (as a continuation from 1, actually) is that you have these super diabolical enemies who, upon their defeat, immediately transform into babyface sadsacks begging for the player's empathy, to the point where you begin to predict it and feel awful while you're fighting the boss (partic. some of the less heinous ones in the series -- Raven, Fortune, The End, etc.).

Also to AB's comment "...Twin Peaks-ish decent into character psychosis..." that raises a really interesting thought, which is that I feel that maybe the only way for a game's story to be truly successful is to wholly embrace the uncannyness of everything and tilt it at a weird axis? Like these games, Deadly Premonition, etc. feel like the pinnacle of what "games" as "stories" can do, so long as they involve people not really looking like people and enemies not really behaving like enemies and controls not really emulating personal locomotion, etc. -- of course you can go all the way abstract and make Tempest or whatever, but this area here -- this Deadly P, MGS2 degree of realness/not-realness -- it's perfect when it's done right.

Yeah i think acknowledging the fakeness and gameness really adds a lot, not only in mind-bending meta flourishes but also in the way you interact w the content. In MGS2's terms, it creates context. Putting the player in purposefully uncomfortable roles to act out experiences that could never happen outside of a videogame. I think GTAV does this really well with the torture/profiling/assassination mission.

The game has a really weird sense of reality, you can't even say "First half is real, second half is a simulation". This dialog:

Revolver Ocelot: You know why no bullet could hit you? It wasn't magic, or some New Age mumbo-jumbo. Certainly wasn't your psychic talents. It was all staged by the Patriots.
Fortune: Staged?
Revolver Ocelot: You were being shielded by the electromagnetic weapons technology that the Patriots developed. Your Dead Cell comrades loved your father and husband - we needed a pathetic wretch like you to keep them focused.

Is quickly followed by her getting shot with a million rockets and all of them missing. Even when you think Raiden is breaking through to the 'real world', it is just another layer of illusion.

It's all about subverting player gratification. That may be the biggest tool game designers could use to turn a game from a game into art. Art being object you take in and think about and interact with and that tells you something about the world and maybe how you interact with that as well. The big problem is the control for these things is a sort of barrier to entry, but that will definitely go away in time, as more generations get more and more comfortable interacting w virtual spaces.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaLiLRVeaZA

Metal gear storyline explained

i really want to get into this game but i just can't get into the controls (and the weird camera angles). it feels so unnatural. i've tried a few times but i bounce back hard each time. any suggestions?

i loved it. it has the most infuriatingly awkward controls i've ever mastered: how about the fuckin way that, when you flatten yourself against the wall, the camera angle changes but the angle of control does not, so that sometimes if the camera turns a full 180 degrees, as often happens, moving the stick left will make your dude sidle right and vice versa? eventually i understood/dug this as part of the 3D-pacman ethos, because the stick will always be mapped properly relative to the little dot-radar. so then i learned to play looking at the radar all the time, but since you have to creep around an area first before you can use the radar there's always an initial terrified creep where the camera and the controls are working malevolently against you. but once i actually got fluid with, like, rolling into a crouch behind some low cover then switching to first-person to take my gun out and peek over the top, a pose that actually requires you to be holding down five different buttons (and not letting your grip slip on any of them because they're all pressure-sensitive), i started to see the controls as really elegant (stockholm) and the interface even minimalist in a game where you can do so many complicated things. (also: beautiful pause screens.) once i learned the controls the famous Visual Detail opened up and started to warm up the generic video-game facility setting, which (stockholm again) i thought was totally gorgeous by the end, when the sun started to set. it helped that i actually had a physical sense of the facility, knew where things were when they were named, really started to know the limited space the game covered even as new places opened often enough to keep it from feeling cramped. and once you know what you're doing the environments are so fun just to move through, so it survives an amount of backtracking that'd probably cripple an fps.

great post. gonna try the radar thing

So I found an old PS2, which I totally forgot I owned, in a cupboard the other day. Bought a dongle so it works on my nice new telly, and found MGS2 and 3 on eBay. I take it it's best to play 2 first? Or skip straigh to 3.

I'm a huge huge Death Stranding fan, but my only experience of Metal Gear is watching a housemate play it way back in my uni days. I tried to get into MGSV but I couldn't get past the first level.

3 can stand on its own, I guess really any of them can, but Imo it's really worth playing 1-2-3-pw-4-5 in order because they're all really something special. Or idk maybe in in-universe chronological order? Maybe there's something to that? That'd be like... 3-pw-5-1-2-4 I guess? Nah I'd play in release order. I might be in the minority but 3 is my least fave of the bunch. (not by much I love them all)

I'd even out an hour in with vr missions between 1 and 2 because I think it pays off to at least be aware of vrm for 2

this game is insane lol