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.
>>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
I just got the platinum trophy on maybe the second-worst football game I ever played. It's called Super Arcade Soccer 2021, and I got it for about £2 in a PSN sale. Everything about it is shit, but at least it was entertainingly shit. Here's some funny things I found:
I like to play Jet De Go nowadays. It's fun to have a civilian airplane game that focuses more on the feeling of flying than on making sure you spend 20 minutes going through checklists before you're allowed to move the plane. The physics are so simplified it can actually be disorienting when you're used to flying games (even Ace Combat), and you don't have to remember too many buttons since most functions are just outsourced to hitting triangle, so it's a fairly simple game. The gameplay of Jet De Go 2 is odd, though: it's basically an arcade game, but a large part of your time playing it is spent flying basically straight and level without doing anything for 100 mile segments because you're in control of the whole flight (unlike the first game which fast forwards automatically until you need to make a course adjustment), so you wind up having quite a busy arcade game during takeoff and landing, followed by 30+ minutes of not doing very much. It's like if Ace Combat made you fly the plane across the map to get to the combat zone before you were allowed to battle. That doesn't bother me personally, but it's an odd design decision to put so much waiting in an arcade title. Maybe you're just supposed to enjoy the super low-resolution satellite photo scenery of Japan passing by - though that doesn't help much if you're doing a long overwater flight to Okinawa...
Anyway, as a bonus the games are a neat time capsule of Japan Airlines in the years that they were released (2000, 2002, and 2005) and the soundtrack is good.
So Touhou EsOD runs at like 3000 fps on my machine and I'm trying to my hardest to beat the game without installing the patch for shits and giggles so far I've made it as far 36% through with pretty abysmal high scores.
im so lonely https://www.twitch.tv/yunzhi9
I just bought Viva Football off ebay but accidentally got the unusable PC version instead of the PS1 one >_<
I’ve been trying to relive my teen years by recreating 9/11 in FSX but I always get the flight path wrong and I can’t go on YouTube anymore to see how to do it
>>217 After I 100%'d GTA San Andreas I used to do 9/11s on the skyscrapers in downtown Los Santos. You could also lead police jets to crash into them
Every platformer should have the ability to backflip.
This game looks really fun! I want it! https://youtu.be/fZRDu2noW-U?t=5622
Is there an English patch for the Serial Experiments Lain PS1 game?
I bought 3 games in the PSN sale yesterday for 10 bucks!
Two Point Hospital is quite addictive! The diseases are funny ^_^
I just realized you can go into the hospital in GTA IV and shoot the patients.
I wish there was a brothel management game where you can traffic and manage girls and shotas to high paying clients and dispose of troublemakers in dirty creeks
>>225
I doubt you'll find that last part but check these out
https://vndb.org/g3593
I think the wee battery in my PS2 has died, so it can no longer save the date and time. I've been playing some new games I picked up and the save files say 1999
I'm trying to play REmake and I love it but Jill's jiggly boob physics keep distracting me from the horror
I was just thinking about a little game phenomenon I realised I haven't seen for a long time. In old games that let you adjust the screen position, I would often see a screen that says LOADING... and then the screen would shift a few pixels when it loaded my screen adjustment setting 👆👉
been playing alot of higurashi lately. good story, in the middle of chapter 3 at the moment. cant wait to see how the story unfolds in the Answer arcs
>>231 glad you are enjoying it - it's one of my favs. wish I could read it for the first time again
I bought 6 games for less than £20 yesterday!
I spent $10 yesterday for a used copy of Resident Evil Directors Cut edition for the PS1. I found it in a thrift store. Practically a steal. The disk and box aren’t in great condition but it runs fine so far.
>>235
How did they manage to fuck that up? Also they promised an uncensored intro but didn't deliver because of a production error?! Begs the question, of all versions of Resident Evil, which was the best release? My bet's on the DS version because it made the knife usable and added some extra enemies.
>>236
The soundtrack of the director's cut sucked cause the composer was just bad at his job, he also pretended to be deaf to avoid any criticism.
Also
The best version of resident evil is the gamecube remake, the steam remaster would have been the best if they didn't lose the original renders of the backgrounds they had to use the compressed gamecube ones.
I fucking love Ultraman Fighting Evolution 3.
been playing atlyss recently
finally able to play as big booty fur creature (chubby)
(・∀・)
Finished the higurashi question arcs!!! Gonna start playing the answer arcs pretty soon.
Also bought valkyria chronicles a few days ago.
5 bucks well spent, that game is incredible, probably in the top 5 of
The strategy rpgs in all time. Plus the girls are cute in it.
Got addicted to Elona again.
Working my way through the main quest in Custom-GX with a Pianist. Just today, I finally grinded out enough small medals to replace my pet little girl with a catsister.
I'd like to try out the Omake Overhaul mod, but it can't upscale the window like Custom-GX which is annoying, and there's also some kind of locale issue on newer versions of Windows that results in JP text randomly not being displayed. You're even more screwed if you don't know any Japanese, because while someone made a translated version of it back in 2017, all the links for it are long dead.
Funny thing, while looking at Japanese wiki comments I saw people bemoaning that Custom is the most popular mod lineage outside Japan (apparently they feel that the mod creator disrespected Noa), unable to comprehend why it wasn't Omake. Maybe translate it for starters?
I got Juiced 2 on PS2 just because you can get my car in it :3 It's kind fun, only cost me £3
Yesterday I was in CEX and got a PS2 game I'd never heard of, called “Whirl Tour”. Looking at the back cover, it looks like a scooter extreme sports game, but with enemies to hit? I finished Razor Freestyle Scooter back in the day so that's why I was interested. It was £2! I'm about to play it now.
A funny thing about Razor Frestyle Scooter was you could unlock UFC fighter Tito Ortiz as a playable character. I didn't know who that was at the time.
I'm tired of people making new games as if Sonic Adventure 2 Battle doesn't already exist.
Some furry on Youtube did a pistol only run of STALKER: CoS where he absolutely refused to get in their faces to make the most out of his low accuracy, so I didn't feel bad for him when it stopped functioning all together. How the fuck do you struggle on Agroprom? There's ample cover all throughout the map, just let the NPCs cover you sprint to the closest cover low-crawl and go for headshots; don't hide like a faggot in the back and fight at the medium range mercs want you to.
I appreciate how tight the movement in CoS feels for lack of a better word. Just that simple difference in the crouches makes you feel like you're hugging cover for dear life, popping out hoping to get a second's opportunity to move. Little things like that.
Me and my friends were talking about a game but couldn't remember what it was. It's a game like GTA or Driver where you drive around a city, but instead of getting out of the car and running around, you change car by sort of possessing them, like a spectral orb flies to the new car. I'm going to play The Getaway on PS2 for the first time today, I can't think of other possibilities. Can you?
>>247
...Are you sure that wasn't Driver?
Specifically, Driver: San Francisco, the one where Tanner goes into a coma after a car crash and becomes able to possess people.
I don't think I'll ever be mature enough not to laugh a little when I see the title "36 Great Holes Starring Fred Couples".
>>248 I only played the first 3 Driver games and it wasn't them, but I never played the San Fransisco one. Looking at it now, it looks like the camera goes up to a bird's-eye view when you leave the car then comes back down to the ground. The one I can picture in my head, when you possess another car it just travels along the road directly to the other car. This Driver one looks fun though, I bid for it on ebay, thanks!
I tried the Getaway but the controls were too bad to really enjoy it. You can't control the camera! So if you run into a building and a guy starts shooting from behind, you have to run in a circle to get the camera to see who's shooting you. It was kinda cool driving around London. The one thing I remembered about this game when it came out was the real-life businesses and vehicles in it, like Royal Mail and Parcel Link vans driving round. I stole a double-decker bus and went on a rampage in first-person view, and felt like I was in the Spice Girls movie.