Just talk about whatever game you're playin, want to play, want to buy, what you just bought - whatever.
Just a nice, lazy places to spout random crap about games.
MGS 1 feels overrated. Don't get me wrong its a great game but whole sections of it are just rehashed from Metal Gear 2 Solid Snake. The chase sequence at the end, the ninja boss, female love interest etc. Meryl is just a rehash of Holly and Otacon is Dr. Madner. Then you realize Kojima does this with a lot of his games. They all have a situtation where your captured and have to endure a button mashing torture sequence that will give you arthritis. They all have a scenario where you have to save a guy who's captured and knows a bit of the big dark secret but never enough and also happens to be on the other side and in disguise. There's always a diguised female helper (Holly, Gustava, Meryl, Eva) whose cover gets blown and a an ally/friend Snake knows from way back ends up betraying him (Miller/Liquid, Campbell in MGS2, The Boss etc). When will we stop heaping praise on this man for reheating the same damn story multiple times?
>>201 I always took that as a deliberate idea of history repeating itself, the same events playing out in different contexts with different participants, as time spirals out. Each iteration has certain roles taken on by different characters, as you say - I always felt we were supposed to notice that events repeat themselves in each game, and the characters dutifully taking on their roles mostly don't realise their position in the bigger picture. There is an overarching story of the "deep state" Patriots orchestrating the events that unfold, each character playing their part. Snake and Otacon think they're stalking the Patriots, then find out they behaved exactly as the Patriots predicted they would when they lured them in. Raiden takes his mission seriously, but it's made obvious to the player that it is a simulation based on Snake's previous missions, and he is a puppet playing his part.
It makes me think of in the Bible how Judas betrayed Jesus for seemingly selfish reasons, but he was just playing the part he had to play for Jesus to be arrested and executed, in the divine plan to save humanity... or in the Bhagavad Gita when Krishna tells Arjuna that all humans are born to play the part He intended for them in his grand plan.
There was something else in the Japanese version which to me suggested the repitition of ideas and characters was deliberate. Certain characters are voiced by the same voice actress, which isn't the case in the English version, but my memory is a bit fuzzy on which ones...
>>202
Kojima just likes recycling scenes. Now that I think of it a lot of games from that era were the same. The first three Resident Evil games share virtually identical sequences too. Like the way all Star Wars movies have signiature set pieces. The real problem is how messy and convoluted the plot becomes. I took it as the Rashomon effect and postmodern hyperreality. Since the story is always revealed through different characters explanations and monologues, they are all just explaining their own subjective point of view and interpretation of what they think is really happening instead of objective reality. They are all more or less unreliable narrators.
But MGS4 is where things go wrong because it contradicts all the previous games on factual grounds. Solid Snake was killed off at the end of the tanker scenario in MGS2 and all the characters Raiden meets are revealed to be a simulation. But suddenly in MGS4 they're all back again and all of them are real and they're all related to people from MGS3. That one game just screws up the entire lore of the series.
I always thought the Patriots were basically a placeholder for the US shadow empire (the way Godzilla was used to represent nukes) and its schemes to manipulate and control the world rather than a Godlike entity that controls everything. Its more like samurai movies where there's this overarching idea of fate and humans (even powerful groups like the Patriots) are all foolish creatures playing games of power with each other that are doomed to fail while Heaven or Buddha silently watch. The only good guys are noble samurai regardless of whose side they are on.
>Solid Snake was killed off at the end of the tanker scenario in MGS2
I thought he survived, he's Pliskin in the Plant chapter? Which is a simulation, in the sense that a fire drill is a simulation, it's not just virtual reality. The characters he meets are simulations of the real ones we meet in MGS4? I really liked that about the MGS series, it makes you re-evaluate what you thought were “factual grounds”, and story is often told through the characters' own subjective interpretations.
>he couldn't have survived. Huge tankers that displace thousands of tons kill sailors by dragging them down as they sink.
He's Solid Snake! He's built different! I believe he did, and he was Pliskin.
The tanker really sank, and Big Shell was really built around it. The events and participants there were planned by the Patriots to recreate Shadow Moses, not so much as a training exercise for Raiden but to test the S3 plan, and how an individual can be manipulated with misinformation. This is done to Raiden and the player (even before the game was released, like how all the previews hyped up the return of Solid Snake, then it turns out he's a side character you only play as for a couple of hours). I think there's ambiguity around the word “simulation”, it's a simulation in the sense that it's staged, like how police might train in a simulated terror attack - not a computer simulation.
>>The characters he meets are simulations of the real ones we meet in MGS4?
My bad I was referring to the Colonel and Rose... they are AI chatbot versions of the versions we meet in MGS1 and 4. But Solidus, Vamp, Emma etc. are real and playing their part in the simulation. Remember Solidus raised Raiden as a child soldier and later orchestrated the events of MGS1 (getting Ocelot to convince Liquid to highjack REX). Raiden and Vamp are the same as the ones in MGS4, and Solidus's real body was recovered to rebuild Big Boss.
These Rose and Colonel chatbots predicted what we see today with AI chatbot versions of famous figures from through the ages. If the S3 plan (as Ocelot understood it) was to refine the perfect soldier like Solid Snake, you can see how each soldier having a personalised AI version of the Colonel and a save game lady that Snake had could be incredibly useful on the battlefield.
Do you think in the near future, real soldiers will be using AI to help them in battle the way the Colonel AI does for Raiden?
>MGS4 kinda does away with that. It gives you answers.
I agree, I think the misinformation was deliberate and interesting in MGS2, and then I remember how exciting it was the first time I played MGS4 getting those cold hard truths! And I think those rehashed situations and characters were a deliberate part of the master narrative of the series.
This morning I was playing Super Airwolf for the Mega Drive. In maybe 1997 I bought a copy from a pawn shop, but the cartridge was a weird shape, with ribbed ridges down the sides, and it didn't fit in my Sega. I never learned why, was it for a different model or something? Well I finally played it for the first time today, it's a pretty fun top-down scrolling shooter. The music's pretty good as well
>>206
Kojima got his idea of simulation from Baudrillard who was popular in Japan at the time. The idea is that simulation isn't a fake version of something real or a lie that hides the truth. Its a representation of an object that claims to be faithful but has no real connection to it. A simulation replaces the thing its supposed to represent. Porn is supposed to be raw uncensored real sex but nobody used to have sex like that irl. People end up modelling their meatspace sex lives on internet porn so it ends up becoming real or more accurately replacing what was real. Our ability to distinguish between real and artifical has broken down. The Big Shell incident is a staged event based on myths about Shadow Moses. Its designed to take rookies like Raiden and turn them into replacements for Solid Snake. All of the bosses, the bad guys, the mission profile are rough copies of MGS1. Its a meta commentary on gaming i.e. Konami will just pump out soulless Metal Gear clones that rehash the first game and the military will turn warfare into a game and use gaming to recruit mindless soldiers. The breakdown of our ability to distinguish truth and falsehood will make us easy to control through manipulating content.
This also means we don't know where the line between real and staged is in the game. For all we know, Snake/Pliskin, Otacon, EE etc are all actors and the big reveal at the end is part of the exercise. Its one of the what ifs of the game. Do Snake and Otacon actually interfere in the Patriots' simulation or are they just actors too?
>Do you think in the near future, real soldiers will be using AI to help them in battle the way the Colonel AI does for Raiden?
They already do that. Usually it means taking metadata and demographic information to generate kill lists for drones, death squads, or the air force.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/the-nsas-skynet-program-may-be-killing-thousands-of-innocent-people/
This is more recent
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/01/the-gospel-how-israel-uses-ai-to-select-bombing-targets
>They already do that
Yeah I knew about that, I was meaning specifically like how in MGS1, Snake has direct one-to-one communication with the Colonel, then in MGS2 this role is replaced by an AI version of the Colonel. In real life, a human commanding officer can command his troop as a whole, but can't give every soldier his full attention at all times; if all of that officer's expertise and experience could be stored as an AI entity and each soldier had their own personal Colonel guiding them in real-time in battle, military operations would be more efficient...
We already have this happening with AI chatbots of famous figures, I wonder how long before individual real-life soldiers will be making decisions in the field based on AI guidance...
I'm stoned and I'm rambling hehe :P