![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The Unbelievable MGS5
Oct. 16th, 2015 02:15 pmI've been playing loads of Metal Gear Solid 5 recently - the new entry to the series is a weird combination of stealth gameplay and X-Com: Terror from the Deep, making you responsible for a lot of base management and resource gathering while being free to roam on a horse around a war-torn environment taking missions and side quests. Listening to loads of The Unbelievable Truth on the car radio around the same time as playing it has made me realize that I could make up practically anything about the game and people wouldn't be sure if Hideo Kojima had actually put it into the latest installment of his increasingly mad series. Therefore, here is a short summary of the game. Six things are true. Good luck.
You start the game in an underground government bunker, where Big Boss has been kept in an experimental suspended animation process following the events of Peace Walker. In the first interactive sections, you can walk around listening to conversations through an analogue stick-controlled cybernetic ear implant which was given to him somewhere along the years, learning through overhearing dialogue that the location is part of a group that's implied to be the Patriots, and that many of your former base-mates from Peace Walker have been subjected to experiments in mind control - the head of the experimentation group heavily hinted as being Psycho Mantis.
Before you can act, the complex is suddenly shaken by the footsteps of a bipedal robot stalking nearby, and you have to make your escape during the confusion while following a fellow yet-to-be-operated-on captive who is wearing a hospital gown with his bum hanging out the back. During your escape, you are constantly harrassed by a large singing mechanical wasp and some vaguely humanlike creature with the limb-stretching powers of Mr Fantastic, creeping out of the building as the crisis unfolds and eventually reaching outside just in time to see a helicopter being swallowed by a space whale that's on fire. This omen seems to scare the Metal Gears leading the assault and they begin to turn on each other, screaming with dinosaur-like sound systems.
Amid this confusion you're suddenly rescued by the familiar face of Master Miller, who is in bad shape, missing an arm and most of one leg. It has to be said that Snake himself isn't looking too good either, with one entire arm being artificial and his eye having been replaced - however, it's an upgrade on his previous one, allowing night vision, thermal vision and X-ray to see through soldiers' clothing. In fact, if you put all the starting characters together you would only just be able to complete one human body before running out of parts.
The horse controls integrate with the controller as you would expect from a Hideo Kojima game - the analogue sticks are used to pull and twitch the reins to alter your heading, kicking it with your Attack button repeatedly will speed it up, and there's a "defecate" command that you have to use periodically to prevent your horse exploding.
Your base can be expanded by attaching small rockets to items and soldiers on the field, provided you've gathered enough fuel for them to make the trip home - this has to be kept topped up by finding wells or stashes of it around the map. Later on, you can actually forget about the fuel requirements as you develop a Star Trek-like system of beaming things through a wormhole directly to your base instead. Your prosthetic arm has a high-fidelity iPhone-like interface for reasons that aren't really explained - during gameplay, this offers the real-time overhead map that hasn't been seen since MGS2. Maps are up to ten kilometres wide and you can speed up your transport by using an extraction device yourself, clinging to the underside of an enemy helicopter, or simply by getting in a box and posting yourself to the right address providing you've collected the right stamps.
You start the game in an underground government bunker, where Big Boss has been kept in an experimental suspended animation process following the events of Peace Walker. In the first interactive sections, you can walk around listening to conversations through an analogue stick-controlled cybernetic ear implant which was given to him somewhere along the years, learning through overhearing dialogue that the location is part of a group that's implied to be the Patriots, and that many of your former base-mates from Peace Walker have been subjected to experiments in mind control - the head of the experimentation group heavily hinted as being Psycho Mantis.
Before you can act, the complex is suddenly shaken by the footsteps of a bipedal robot stalking nearby, and you have to make your escape during the confusion while following a fellow yet-to-be-operated-on captive who is wearing a hospital gown with his bum hanging out the back. During your escape, you are constantly harrassed by a large singing mechanical wasp and some vaguely humanlike creature with the limb-stretching powers of Mr Fantastic, creeping out of the building as the crisis unfolds and eventually reaching outside just in time to see a helicopter being swallowed by a space whale that's on fire. This omen seems to scare the Metal Gears leading the assault and they begin to turn on each other, screaming with dinosaur-like sound systems.
Amid this confusion you're suddenly rescued by the familiar face of Master Miller, who is in bad shape, missing an arm and most of one leg. It has to be said that Snake himself isn't looking too good either, with one entire arm being artificial and his eye having been replaced - however, it's an upgrade on his previous one, allowing night vision, thermal vision and X-ray to see through soldiers' clothing. In fact, if you put all the starting characters together you would only just be able to complete one human body before running out of parts.
The horse controls integrate with the controller as you would expect from a Hideo Kojima game - the analogue sticks are used to pull and twitch the reins to alter your heading, kicking it with your Attack button repeatedly will speed it up, and there's a "defecate" command that you have to use periodically to prevent your horse exploding.
Your base can be expanded by attaching small rockets to items and soldiers on the field, provided you've gathered enough fuel for them to make the trip home - this has to be kept topped up by finding wells or stashes of it around the map. Later on, you can actually forget about the fuel requirements as you develop a Star Trek-like system of beaming things through a wormhole directly to your base instead. Your prosthetic arm has a high-fidelity iPhone-like interface for reasons that aren't really explained - during gameplay, this offers the real-time overhead map that hasn't been seen since MGS2. Maps are up to ten kilometres wide and you can speed up your transport by using an extraction device yourself, clinging to the underside of an enemy helicopter, or simply by getting in a box and posting yourself to the right address providing you've collected the right stamps.
