Invisible Gear Solid

[davidn]

Progress through Metal Gear?! Solid 3 has been pretty slow so far. I had meant to carry on with it while Whitney was away, but somehow never got around to it during the week and then decided to wait for her to return again to continue together. And I'm still not sure where to place it in terms of how good it is versus the previous two games in the series.

I think the only bit that Whitney really hasn't liked is the scene just after you meet up with EVA, where Snake is finally handed a gun that doesn't fall apart within five minutes. He spends an inordinate amount of time absolutely ejaculating* over it, drawing attention to all its modifications such as balancing the grip, relining the barrel, extending the trigger, moving the flint-gaskets and filing down the cockflaps. So he's clearly meant to be a bit of a gun nut, but this is probably an advantage when you're stuck somewhere in Russia and about to spend hours in the jungle fighting a group of leftovers from the X-Men.

Similarly, his way of dealing with bosses so far is mostly by boring them to death. During the first two or three encounters with Not-Revolver-Yet Ocelot, rather than getting to any sort of armed conflict he just goes over exactly what he's doing wrong until he runs away like a big girl's blouse (or is hit in the face with a motorbike). Once you finally get to fight him, he's alternately gushing over how exciting reloading feels and pinging bullets off rocks at you like the Riviera Kid from Red Dwarf. With the addition of snakes biting at your ankles, I'm certain that the fight is much harder than anything I experienced this early on in the first two games.

In fact, the whole game seems a lot harder. Taking away the radar was a brave move, and I'm not sure how I feel about it - the nearest thing you get is a motion sensor and the ability to move the camera around a bit more, but it's hardly a replacement for knowing where each enemy's field of vision is all the time. It seems that you have to rely on luck while poking your nose around a corner or making a run for it into the next area, hoping that a guard you missed won't spot you.

And I miss the presence of guards most of the time, because I'm at a particular disadvantage here. Colourblindness normally only stops me playing very puzzle-oriented games that rely solely on colour such as Puzzle Fighter (I'm very pleased when puzzle game designers are thoughtful enough to give some other distinction to the playing pieces as well). But camouflage is a major theme of this game - in the previous ones I could at least see what I was trying to shoot at, but honestly, this entire game is green and brown, and the guards that are meant to be difficult to see for people with normal vision might as well be totally invisible to me. So Whitney has to be my eyes during the outdoor sections and tells me where to aim.

Despite that fairly major obstacle, at the moment we've just defeated our first unlikely Hideo Kojima villain - this one's The Pain, who is a large man who's covered in bees! and can get them to somehow form various deadly weapons while vomiting explosive hornets at you. He was actually quite a lot easier than most of the game we've gone through so far, because unlike everything else, I could see him.

* NB. This is a perfectly legitimate use of the term

Comments

[rakarr.livejournal.com]

You have made me want to play Metal Gear Solid 3 again. I finished it when hiring it, and when I bought the re-release of it last year (? - might have been 2006) I didn't play it much.
I enjoyed it and liked how it was different from the other MGS games, but I wasn't too big on a lot of the bosses, The Pain in particular.
Still, the game is good and I enjoyed the story and the way it ties in with the overall series.

Not being able to see the guards must kinda suck. At least you get a camoflage index for your own camo, but spotting guards is a pain.
You could always pretend that Snake is colourbind and that it's more immersive that way? =P

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

Colourblind Snake: Christmas Massacre

[davidn]

Merry Gear Solid, even?

[davidn]

I'd forgotten about the Subsistence re-release, actually - had I remembered I would probably have gone for that instead, but getting the original MGS3 for $9.99 isn't anything to complain about.

The story's beginning to pick up now (we've just got past the lab section disguised as a scientist and are about to head back to the locked door in the warehouse). Though I'm still not sure about the lack of radar, even if I had full colour vision - it seems to me that the game would work rather better if you had a more zoomed-out top-down view all the time. The look-around right analog stick and limited-battery motion sensor certainly help, but not having that guide to where the guards are looking is something that's very difficult to get used to.

[rakarr.livejournal.com]

I don't completely recall how the camera worked in the original, but I know in Subsistence they changed it so you can have a sort of over-the-shoulder view of Snake, but they also gave you an option to use the original. Not trying to make you feel bad about not getting it; just factoiding, I suppose.
I also can't really remember how much the camera change helps, but I seem to have a memory of it doing so. I got caught out a lot in the original, but less so now.

I think I know where you're up to but I don't completely recall, so I won't mention any of the spoilers that I was about to. =P

I enjoyed the plot of MGS3 despite the cliches and its ridiculousness in parts (you don't have to hold something in particularly high esteem to enjoy it, after all, but you could say that if you enjoy it it's worthy of praise anyway), but I think what turned me off playing when I bought Subsistence was the sheer amount of dialogue at the start.
I don't like to skip things. Maybe it's just incredibly OCD of me, but I don't like to skip dialogue, and moreover I like to try and get all the conversations I can out of that portable radio, and so the beginning made me quite restless. But I think I'll give it another try soon.

[davidn]

That does sound like it would help a bit, actually - as it is just now, it seems that you can either move or be able to see what's in front of you, and my movement is rather stop-start because of that. I actually really liked the movement and camera in Syphon Filter even though it was so scruffy compared to this series, its most obvious inspiration - and I still think that it's the game that got 3D third-person shooter controls the most right. Of course, the mechanics of the rest of the game also contribute to how suitable its controls are.

And the start of MGS3 really was far too long. I don't know if I'm just getting more impatient as I get older, because I know that the series has been known for long cut-scenes for ages, but putting people through that much codec conversation at the very start was mad. Especially as it's structured as an endless series of "One more thing..." reassurances. But I couldn't bring myself to skip any of it either, even though I was increasingly just wanting to get on with it - I feel they're too much a part of the game to go past them entirely and I was afraid of missing something.

It started getting to me in MGS2 as well, but only because the game got into the habit of putting you into codec conversations between people who were right in front of you, giving some excuse about talking that way being "more secure" and getting you to sit watching the rather blank codec screen rather than a full cutscene, which would have felt rather more rewarding.

[rakarr.livejournal.com]

I don't mind long cutscenes (well, I suppose it depend on what sort of game I'm playing, how good the cutscene is, and how badly I just want to get to the action), but for all that the Metal Gear Solid series does well, it has horrendous pacing. The codec stuff doesn't bother me too much (although you're right that it's less engaging than a fully-fledged cutscene), but the timing is frequently abysmal. Out of the main series (Solid 1, 2, and 3 - I haven't played much of the original Metal Gears or any of the spin offs), only the original could be said to have anything near good pacing, and even that was a bit shaky at times.

Metal Gear Solid 2? MASSIVE EXPOSITION OF DEATH, especially towards the end of the game. Seriously, to throw all that at you at once is absolutely stupid, especially considering it's complex stuff that you need to wrap your head around, but you can't pause the codec conversation (without permanently losing the voices) to take it in before they press onto some other revelation or subject. Maybe I'm just slow, but to me the last part of the game was like pushing through molasses (I really don't have any idea of the actual consistency of molasses, but that's not the point) and I didn't appreciate that much.

Metal Gear Solid 3... it wasn't too bad on the exposition (and I in fact found the story to be a bit "lite" for my liking, despite being strong in the themes department), but all the talking at the start was a bad move. You're just at the point where you're gearing up to play the darn game, and they just won't shut up. "One more thing" indeed.

I think what Metal Gear Solid really needs is the ability to move around during codec sequences - have the pictures display on-screen, and maybe the text, and let you at least walk slowly and have to work to remain hidden or something. It would remove that comfort factor of knowing you can't be spotted while codecing, but it would make sense and would add to the immersion. I often find that starting codec conversations in the middle of a guard's patrol route makes me nervous, and having something come of that wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.
But a lot of games have commentary while you wade in, guns blazing, and it rather ruins the effect of the conversation. However, I'm sure the designers could come up with a way to encourage players to sit relatively still and remain stealthy during said conversations, and they could still effectively freeze the character for really important scenes, or perhaps revert to the codec interface.

I suppose it would get either frustrating to have conversations cut off due to fighting (Dead Rising, anyone?) or unrealistic to have them keep going as if nothing had happened... but I think it would be a step in the right direction.

[davidn]

MGS1 really does have something special about it that I didn't feel in the second game... I don't know if it was just because I hadn't seen anything like it before (the stealth style of play, as well as the strange admission that yes, it was just a game, in the way that the controller and even the game box were things referenced by in-game characters).

MGS2's ending was absolutely mental - the really annoying thing about it, though, was that thanks to Osama Bin Laden and all his little wizards, they had to cut out a significant scene involving Arsenal Gear crashing into the Manhattan and therefore the whole thing made even less sense than it would have already. I really had no idea what was going on during the final boss fight, and thought that Federal Hall was just another strange illusion seeing as I'd suddenly just appeared on top of it - the whole Arsenal Gear section felt like a disjointed bad dream.

Some sort of movement would probably help the long codec calls - they did seem to hit on the idea of at least giving you something to do while listening to giant exposition (the R1 for first person view in the second and third games), and while you can flip between different character portraits in the third game, it might be nice if it was taken further.

Finally, I have found a way I can actually play the game - the thermal goggles. I don't know why I didn't think of it before. Of course, the battery life is a concern, and I'm not much of a fan of weapon/item deterioration in the first place.

[rakarr.livejournal.com]

Yeah, not to look a gift horse in the mouth or anything, but a little more interactivity than flipping pictures or making the camera dance around Raiden's head and then zoom in on his feminine lips would be nice. When you have conversations that pause the action, they need to be paced a bit better. And for that matter, if you have voice overs of the quality of those found in Metal Gear Solid and onwards in the series, you really don't need to pause the action for it. But at least in Metal Gear Solid 2 you got some (mostly fairly static) facial expressions.

And agree on Metal Gear Solid 2 not having that same feel as 1, although I did still enjoy it muchly when I played it through. I didn't mind Raiden even though nearly everyone else did. On my more recent attempts at playing, however, he continually annoyed me. He really is very, very dense. "Huh? What?" and repeating what everyone says in a tone of gormless wonder. I mean, I know he's supposed to be green, but to that extent?

But yeah, I still think the MGS games are brilliant in a lot of ways, but that's what makes their downfalls all the more glaring.
I thought I would be a lot more excited about Metal Gear Solid 4, but it's probably a good thing that I'm not, if it's only coming out on the PS3. Of course, it'll have some rerelease titled "Subsidy" or something, just to annoy the people that bought it early. =P

Also, congratulations on being able to effectively play now. It can't be majorly fun to go through the game wearing the thermal goggles, but I suppose it would be fairly immersive. Item detioration doesn't bother me too much if it recharges (Crysis is an exception because you get barely any suit power), but irreperable item deterioration or destruction does. There are many reasons to dislike Silent Hill Origins, and the melee weapons that would break after about three hits is a fairly large one. Their extremely common to pick up, but that isn't exactly a boon, and further erodes suspension of disbelief. Who on earth goes around carrying five TVs and an assortment of bats and knives and intravenous stands in their vest pockets? Except for possibly Guybrush Threepwood.