Let's Take Little Trip with Metal Gear Acid [SSLP]

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bman in 2288: Apr 21, 2010

Ace of Aces posted:

I thought he was pretending all along. loving MGS4.

MGS4 had a lot of things it did wrong, but I don't think that Ocelot trying to get rid of Liquid's ghost was one of them.

Now, taking everything from MGS2 and saying it was "Nanomachines", that was stupid as hell.

# ? Nov 23, 2017 04:33

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# ? Apr 28, 2024 10:09

Babysitter Super Sleuth: Apr 26, 2012; my posts are as bad the Current Releases review of Gone Girl

bman in 2288 posted:

MGS4 had a lot of things it did wrong, but I don't think that Ocelot trying to get rid of Liquid's ghost was one of them.

Now, taking everything from MGS2 and saying it was "Nanomachines", that was stupid as hell.

it didn't, though. Vamp? only nanomachines part of it was being able to keep resurrecting himself. Everything else, all him.

# ? Nov 23, 2017 04:38

Cool Ghost: Apr 13, 2012; MORE YOU SWEAT、
LESS YOU BLEED。
MORE YOU WEEP、
LESS GAME OVERS。
...OVER

DeathChicken posted:

I think the weirdest thing in the original game was those robot twins who were implied to be Snatchers

The robots in the first game were Terminators. It was Big Boss in MG2 who was part of the "Snatcher plan."

# ? Nov 23, 2017 05:39

bman in 2288: Apr 21, 2010

Babysitter Super Sleuth posted:

it didn't, though. Vamp? only nanomachines part of it was being able to keep resurrecting himself. Everything else, all him.

I liked him being able to run up walls because "gently caress you". I get the regenerative nanomachine powers, I'll accept it, but they kept taking away a lot of the fun, crazy things until it was all just boring explanations.

# ? Nov 23, 2017 07:13

Kase moch: Jun 5, 2012; Gentlemen prefer blondes

Saying it was all nanomachines is basically the same thing as saying it was magic anyways, just more boring, yeah. Every sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, etc.

# ? Nov 23, 2017 21:16

Kibayasu: Mar 28, 2010

Vamp did everything through the power of dance.

# ? Nov 25, 2017 06:00

chiasaur11: Oct 22, 2012

Kase moch posted:

Saying it was all nanomachines is basically the same thing as saying it was magic anyways, just more boring, yeah. Every sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, etc.

Magic doesn't harden in response to physical trauma.

# ? Nov 25, 2017 06:16

HitTheTargets: Mar 3, 2006; I came here to laugh at you.

Honestly, my hunch about those dolls is that they're remotely controlled by psychic power or Nanomachines.

# ? Nov 25, 2017 16:04

Cool Ghost: Apr 13, 2012; MORE YOU SWEAT、
LESS YOU BLEED。
MORE YOU WEEP、
LESS GAME OVERS。
...OVER

Part Three: A Snake at the Gate

Now that the tutorial "mission" has ended, the game dumps us out here, on the intermission screen. This is where you do all the fun stuff, like mess with the settings or save your game. Later on, this will actually be a useful screen, but right now all it's really offering is map selection.

The map select screen is how you select, naturally, maps. Most of the time, a new mission means a new map, but that's not a perfect one-to-one relationship.

There's only one map to select at this point. The forest is visually on the map, but you can't actually go back there.

After choosing a map, there's a high-angle shot that shows off the basic lay of the land. This map is pretty simple - there's a road towards the gate, with three little buildings off to the side.

To indicate the goal, there's a tighter shot of the gate, with this guard standing in front of it.

Then it pans back across the map to show Snake entering the scene.

And immediately making a phone call.

Why just show or just tell when you could do both?

It's kind of a lovely fence. Nothing to write home about.

Snake: I see some soldiers standing guard in front of the gate.
Roger: That gate is your only ticket into the lab.

I'm including this shot because you can mostly see what the guard is doing, which is standing around holding a rifle. Essentially, an activity you could describe as "standing guard."

Snake: Doesn't look like he has any intention of moving.
Roger: You've got to get him to move out of the way somehow.

This mission is a bit of a tutorial on making people move when they're not inclined. If you know about Metal Gear, you know where this is going.

Roger: Snake, I hate to sound like a parrot, but this is a top secret mission. It's very important that you move forward without being detected by anyone.

No special penalty is levied for being detected in this mission.

Roger: I'm sure the soldiers inside are armed to the teeth and patrolling the area with a steady eye. If that guard catches sight of you and calls for backup, you'll be seriously outnumbered in a matter of seconds. Survival is very unlikely under such circumstances.
Snake: Right. I've gotta stay alert.
Roger: Yes. I'm repeating myself again, but I can't stress enough the importance of staying out of enemy sight.

If enemies see you, they call in more enemies, and then all the enemies shoot Snake many times with their rifles.

You can set up for combat later on, but this is good to keep in mind early in the game.

Snake: I get it. Enough with the lectures, already!
Roger: Fine. You have to get through the gate. Figure out some way to distract that guard.
Snake: Right. Time to get down to business.

This next exchange is added if you gently caress up the tutorial.

Snake: What is it?
Roger: You don't seem to be paying attention to my instructions. So I've been thinking...
Snake: Is this about our last conversation?
Roger: Yes. I lose my temper sometimes. ...So don't be surprised if your equipment starts acting up on you...

If Snake screws around during his jog, Roger threatens to have Alice psychically make Snake's pants fall down or something.

Like I said, this is an optional scene if you screw around during the tutorial, so it actually has no bearing on the story at all. :toot:

Now the mission starts. It's pretty simple, just gotta bomb up that road and past the gate.

Every mission begins with Snake's turn, and with a full hand. This is the first time in the game that the hand isn't pre-determined, and I'll tell you right now: the starting deck loving blows. It tries to showcase a little bit of everything, which is a no-no when you're building a deck for a card game like this and makes it harder to do any single thing.

Before I actually do anything, though, I want to show off this menu here, which has a few supplemental actions. The first is to end your turn, which is useful more often than you might expect. Punch makes Snake punch a guard that's directly in front of him, which is very useful and means the player always has a way to attack. Discard throws two cards away to grab two new ones out of the deck, which of course you have to do a lot when you have all the good cards in your hand but need some dumb bullshit to finish the mission.

There's also a very important feature that the game doesn't tell you about right here, but you can hit triangle to switch to this overhead view and scroll around the map.

Doing this is especially useful because it lets you see where the guards are and what they can see. Any tile with a square on it is in the guard's vision cone, so you shouldn't go there. These two guards, who are currently staring at fences, are generally irrelevant to this mission. If you don't get too close to them or make trouble, they won't hassle you.

Over here between these two buildings is a much more important guard, who is looking out at that main stretch of road by the truck. If you're the kind of player who just tries to make the sprint towards the gate, this is the first guy who'll see you.

And, finally, the man of the hour, this guy who just stands around looking down the road. This is the guard Snake needs to move to finish the mission. While he's highlighted, I want to point something out: when you highlight a guard, their HP is displayed in the upper-left. The other three guys have 40 HP each, but this guy has 25. At the same time, though, the guard's current equipment is shown in the two boxes right above the HP number. Every other guard has two rifles equipped, but this guy has a rifle and a vest. The vest is actually body armour, which absorbs 80 damage if you attack the guard, which makes his effective HP total 105. This is a trap for players who think they're going to just shoot the guy and run through.

There's one more mechanic to talk about here, which is Cost. If you look at the little data window next to Snake here, the number next to the stopwatch icon is his Cost. Every action has an associated Cost, which determines turn order: lowest Cost goes first, and then however much Cost that person's turn is deducted from everyone else's totals, and the next turn starts.

You can tell what the Cost of a card is by looking at that big number in the upper-right corner of the card. Something else to know about Cost is that, when you play a card, the next card's Cost is reduced by 1. You can see here that Spin Kick has a cost of 6, with that 1 down icon next to it. Spin Kick has a base cost of 7, but because I moved up the road, it's now at 6. This mainly serves as a complication of the system that has basically no actual effect on anything else.

The point of all this is that you need to watch what you do and try not to spend too much Cost if you want to take your next turn quickly. This is another reason why this starting deck sucks, but let's look at some pictures to break up this text.

Everything guards do also has a Cost associated with it, but I don't think they're limited by what's in their hands, they seem to just be able to do what they want on a turn.

Now, back to Snake and why this deck sucks: there's a lot of high-Cost, situational cards in here. The Spin Kick from earlier is one of them, but there's also a lot of stuff like Grenade in there. When you use Grenade, Snake throws it on the ground, and after 8 Cost "passes" the grenade blows up and does damage in a 3x3 square, but it also causes a loud explosion, and if any guards are alive, that triggers an instant alert. So, most of the time, you don't want to be chucking grenades around, but you don't even want to use it to move, since it's got a Cost of 7. Since Discard costs 6, it's actually cheaper to throw Grenade (and something else) away than it is to use it.

Mechanics aside, I'm gonna hang out over behind this building for a minute.

And Snake's gonna just hop on the radio real quick.

This call exists in case you forgot what you were doing.

Snake cannot see the guard or the gate from here.

By flattening against a wall, you can knock on it to make a noise and distract guards. This is the other purpose of the call, to introduce the knocking tutorial.

Roger: Think you can get through now? Basically...
Snake: ...Make a sound to lure the guard away from his post.
Roger: Just do it without getting caught.
Snake: Got it.

So, with that little hint out of the way, we can move on with the mission. This guard between the buildings just moves from one end of the alley to the other, pausing for a turn after each trip.

Since the guard at the gate is watching the road, the best way to reach the north end of the map is by sneaking back behind the buildings.

Flattening up against this back wall here is a great opportunity to shoot the alley guard, if you can draw a SOCOM. The SOCOM is silenced, so you don't alert the guards if you fire it, and killing this guard can speed up your run, especially if you want to visit the little buildings around the place. See, each building contains a booster pack of cards that you can use to customise your deck. The problem is, the cards you can get from this mission aren't very good and it's a hassle to open doors in this game. My decision, in the end, was to skip the cards and just finish the mission.

Instead of shooting that man or running around the map collecting trash, I ran over here and flattened up against the wall.

And promptly ended my turn. When you knock, if a guard hears it, they will immediately come to investigate. So, if you do it as the last action on your turn, Snake's stuck in the exact place the guard's going to go towards.

So I knocked on my next turn.

The green exclamation mark over the guard's head here indicates that he's alerted to something, but he doesn't know what it is, so he'll go investigate.

Before the guard can move, though, Snake's back up against this wall, safe and sound.

I also timed it out so that the alley guard would be facing away.

This time, I am going to shoot him.

I am, not, though, going for a kill. See, the SOCOM has a fun side-effect. When you hit an enemy with it, it causes them to fall down.

Falling down knocks a card out of a character's hand. Since this guard only had one card in his hand, the fall causes him to faint.

And that lets Snake zip right up the alley and stand on top of him. If I remember right, this actually stops the guard from ever waking up (because someone else is on his panel), but I'm not 100% sure, I just did it here because it let me do this on Snake's next turn:

And that''s that!

The game even recognises my skills, and that's an S rank right there. The rank is based on how much Cost you spend on the mission, how many times you're found, how many people you kill, and how much damage you take. Lower numbers in each category means a higher total rank. You're also awarded points at the end of the mission - higher rank, more points. Later on, those points will be useful, but right now they're just there.

At the end of a mission, you can also see which cards you gathered. However, I skipped them in this mission, so it's just nothing here.

Additionally, there are also three bonus cards you can collect at the end of a mission. There are bonuses for completing the mission without being seen, without killing anyone, and for keeping your Cost under some threshold. I did all three this time, so it's three bonus cards.

Now that the mission is finished, Snake runs off to the next adventure!

Cool Ghost fucked around with this message at 04:45 on Nov 27, 2017

# ? Nov 27, 2017 01:15

HitTheTargets: Mar 3, 2006; I came here to laugh at you.

drat, they make you collect booster packs? That's harsh. Imagine if they turned this into a mobile game.

# ? Nov 27, 2017 02:04

Cool Ghost: Apr 13, 2012; MORE YOU SWEAT、
LESS YOU BLEED。
MORE YOU WEEP、
LESS GAME OVERS。
...OVER

You can buy packs after the second mission, thankfully.

# ? Nov 27, 2017 03:28

Blaze Dragon: Aug 28, 2013; LOWTAX'S SPINE FUND

HitTheTargets posted:

drat, they make you collect booster packs? That's harsh. Imagine if they turned this into a mobile game.

Don't give Konami ideas, please.

# ? Nov 27, 2017 03:31

Sordas Volantyr: Jan 11, 2015; Now, everybody, walk like a Jekhar.

(God, these running animations are terrible.)

HitTheTargets posted:

drat, they make you collect booster packs? That's harsh. Imagine if they turned this into a mobile game.

Don't give Konami ideas.

# ? Nov 27, 2017 03:35

Angry_Ed: Mar 30, 2010; Grimey Drawer

HitTheTargets posted:

drat, they make you collect booster packs? That's harsh. Imagine if they turned this into a mobile game.

Given this is Konami we're talking about they'd turn it into a combination Carddass and Patchislot game.

# ? Nov 27, 2017 03:48

Blaze Dragon: Aug 28, 2013; LOWTAX'S SPINE FUND

Cool Ghost posted:

Why just show or just tell when you could do both?

It's kind of a lovely fence. Nothing to write home about.

Or when you can show twice :v:

Did you mean to put that image twice?

# ? Nov 27, 2017 03:59

Cool Ghost: Apr 13, 2012; MORE YOU SWEAT、
LESS YOU BLEED。
MORE YOU WEEP、
LESS GAME OVERS。
...OVER

I did not, and have now fixed it. Thanks.

# ? Nov 27, 2017 04:45

MysticalMachineGun: Apr 5, 2005

I'm enjoying the snark levels in this LP

MGS deserves it sometimes for just. Being. So. Obvious.

# ? Nov 28, 2017 11:44

Blueberry Pancakes: Aug 18, 2012; Jack in!! MegaMan, Execute!

Babysitter Super Sleuth posted:

No, no, no. He actually was possessed by the ghost haunting his transplanted arm, which was mainly haunting him to gently caress with Snake, but then he cut off the transplant, replaced it with a cyber-limb, and used the self-hypnosis to replicate the effects of being possessed, to fool the AIs in space that control 21st century earth from behind the scenes (and also to gently caress with snake.) Easy mistake.

What the gently caress?

quote:

what the gently caress :stonk:

Metal Gear is weird.

# ? Nov 29, 2017 18:45

Kase moch: Jun 5, 2012; Gentlemen prefer blondes

Hobgoblin2099 posted:

What the gently caress?

what the gently caress

Metal Gear is weird.

What's fun about Metal Gear is it looks like a fairly serious, realistic, military-based combat game, and then you play it and realize it's deep into absurdist fantasy soap opera territory.

# ? Nov 29, 2017 19:12

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003