What VIDEO GAME(s) have you been playing?

Yeah, that's cool enough as it is but it's even cooler that you can then react to that with countermeasures or strategic attacks. One of my teams just flopped a mission to thwart their "helmet for every man" strategy. I've started doing more day operations too, being more careful with camo selection. It'll be interesting to see what the dog brings to the table.

While we've got Quiet in the conversation...I'm not sure what the big deal is about her being "sexualized" or whatever. So far, I don't think she's any worse than any female in any other game. I haven't seen where her story goes or anything, but at first blush I'm just kind of like "ok, sexy, busty sniper...seen it before. Sniper Wolf?".

There was one REALLY AWESOME even that has happened with her so far. One of those "GOD DAMN!" moments that shows how much of a bad ass she is. Despite how I beat her, which was just completely ludicrous.

Oh, really funny thing. I upgraded the prosthetic arm to have this sonar ping. When you activate it, it makes the Six Million Dollar Man sound. Not "kind of" like it, but literally the exact sound.

You really don't see how Quiet is sexualized and it's a little weird (their dumb explanation for it notwithstanding)? Picture:
kotaku.com/why-quiet-wears-that-skimpy-o...ear-solid-1729329735

Have you been playing any missions as just like "all out war" type approaches? My main fear with getting the game is that I'd lose patience and just come in with all my guns equipped but that that would not be a viable option.

Michael Barnes wrote: While we've got Quiet in the conversation...I'm not sure what the big deal is about her being "sexualized" or whatever. So far, I don't think she's any worse than any female in any other game. I haven't seen where her story goes or anything, but at first blush I'm just kind of like "ok, sexy, busty sniper...seen it before. Sniper Wolf?".

That's the problem, Barnes. MGS is an automatic hit. They don't need tit physics to sell the game, but they still put tit physics in. In a game as forward-thinking and avant-gard as MGS that can still sell a zilion copies, their depiction of this character is retrograde. An opportunity lost, perhaps, but maybe they make it up elsewhere ?

Also, the reason?

No, I get all that but it's just not any different than anything else out there, really...I guess that's the thing is that MG ought to be "higher" than the lowest common denominator. It also doesn't help that Kojima wanted the character to be "more erotic" and they did a figure in Japan that had squishy boobs. Ugh.

All-out war...it is TOTALLY feasible. But it is obviously much more dangerous, at least at the development stage I'm in. Later on, you build weapons that are more powerful and you can make stronger BDUs that can take more punishment. And that likely makes just running in with guns blazing less risky. But yeah, I've had a couple of missions where the softer approach completely flopped and I went all-out war. It was FUN too. If you go this route, you've got to kind of set it up- cut their power, take out their communications hardware, identify any specialists, prepare a distraction in case things get hot, load up on decoys or other tricks, have the right ordnance in your loadout...the game, as always, is telling you "have at it".

But I take personal pride in going on a mission and ballooning EVERY SINGLE enemy I encounter. I seriously ballooned out a whole base last night. Took some time, some trial and error but I did it.

But here's the thing...at least during a first playthrough, you really don't want to kill everybody because you want to RECRUIT them. They're not as valuable dead. But sometimes you have to crack some eggs, so to speak. There are other ways to recruit (Diamond Dogs missions for example, and also by building up Heroism so that people volunteer), but I'm an MGSV klepto and I steal everything in sight including people.

There is a thematic reason for the "recruitment" tied to Big Boss setting up Outer Heaven as a "nation of soldiers" free from National exploitation...which I think (kind of spoilery) is where the game is heading...which would loop it back to the first Metal Gear.

wrote this today over on my blog:

In Praise of Easy Videogames

The other day someone talked about someone else complaining about a videogame being “dumbed down”. I immediately replied that I would love to see some “dumbed down” videogames. In an effort to play something other than Borderlands and Fallout, I will often browse the offerings available and more often than not there are two ideas at work: 1) master over 1000 intricate combat moves and/or 2) this game will slam your hand in a car door!!! (The third idea, which I’ve just come to accept, is “EPIC BOSS BATTLES”, which is actually a combination of the other two.)

Somewhere along the way it was decided that videogames need to not just be hard, they need to be punishingly so. If you aren’t dying every four seconds, something has gone horribly wrong. It shouldn’t be surprising, as they’re built to appeal to the same crowd that defines “flavor” as “add hot sauce until only a homeopathic amount of the original food remains”.

It’s actually worse with indie games than it is with big-company releases. An indie company can’t just make a simple platform game or shoot-em-up. They have to both add layers of complexity to the controls and make it near-impossible to survive. Everything has to attempt to re-define the genre instead of just providing a fun experience in the genre.

I tried Transistor, which started out okay, but soon I had to program moves and harvest abilities which combine with other abilities and all this other stuff that was just getting in the way of what I wanted to do: kill stuff. Super Time Force Ultra is free this month and I’m just not interested because it’s a side-scrolling platform game in which you have to send dudes through time and piggyback on what they do to accomplish other things and no. Not for me.

I’m old and I play videogames because I want to relax. I don’t want to memorize arcane statistics and slightly tweak builds and discover intricate combinations or whatever. I want to run around, shoot stuff, and jump. I love jumping. I’m not going to attempt hundreds of times to defeat the same boss. I will just quit instead, because I don’t care. I don’t want to beat a game, I want to play a game. It doesn’t have to make me re-evaluate everything I thought I knew about up, down, left, right, fire, it just has to be fun. It doesn’t need to be wrapped in elaborate gimmickry. Just be fun to play.

Two games I’ve enjoyed lately, which satisfied this criteria for me, are incredibly different from one another.

Submerged is an exploration game. You are a woman looking for items to help her injured little brother. You are in a submerged city, and looking for items you can find atop the buildings that rise out of the water. You climb these structures, look around for items or “treasures” that give you backstory, and discover landmarks and creatures along the way. There’s no combat. There’s no death. Although you are scaling the exteriors of skyscrapers, you can’t fall. The challenge isn’t “oh, can I make that jump?” it’s “can I find my way around this building to the treasure on the west side of it?” It’s a lovely game, it’s not hard (though I never found all the damn boat parts!) and I didn’t want to throw my controller across the room. It’s not perfect, but it was a pleasant time.

Limbo is almost the exact opposite. There is death in this game, early and often. You will die many, many times. This dark and shadowy world hates you and wants you to suffer. But the death isn’t there to make you feel like you’re getting your money’s worth, it’s there to guide you to the correct way to get past each obstacle. When you die, the go right back to where you were a moment ago and are free to just plain try again. The game isn’t trying to punish you or break you, it’s trying to guide you. Limbo in fact seems like it’s going to be very perfect-timing-twtichy, and there are a few moments like that, but usually it’s just a matter at looking at the environment and figuring out how to use it. One puzzle at a time.

I realize that by complaining about things like Dark Souls, which prides itself on how challenging it is and how you’ll have to really work to defeat it, I set myself up for “just play Candy Crush Saga, lol”. I don’t think I’m a dreaded “casual” who can’t handle “real games”, just a guy who wants more out there that isn’t aimed at 14 year olds who have all weekend to master the Typhoon Kick.

I need to play Limbo again , that game was so beautiful and I felt at total peace playing it

Legomancer wrote: I realize that by complaining about things like Dark Souls, which prides itself on how challenging it is and how you’ll have to really work to defeat it, I set myself up for “just play Candy Crush Saga, lol”. I don’t think I’m a dreaded “casual” who can’t handle “real games”, just a guy who wants more out there that isn’t aimed at 14 year olds who have all weekend to master the Typhoon Kick.

Nah, man. No one here would say that. I like complicated games and you don't. No big deal. I like casual laidback stuff too. I like everything as long as it's a good time. Makes sense that you wouldn't like SUPER TIME FORCE ULTRA if you don't care for TRANSISTOR--they are both about assessing a situation in "bullet-time" basically and manipulating the game state to get the optimal outcome.

Started my 17.5 GB mandatory download for DESTINY. Yay?

Really, this whole "hardcore games must be hard" thing is fairly recent...the Souls games sort of brought that into the spotlight, along with a couple of old school platformers like Super Meat Boy...and the unexpected emergence of rouguelikes on IOS/Android/Steam.

The thing is- and this is probably hard for a lot of old school gamers to admit- a lot of these older games were hard because a) they were coming from an era where coin-op games were still an influence and those are DESIGNED to make you lose and b) some of the kludgy, fudgy controls and bad level design are what was making the games challenging- not the actual quality of the design. Super Ghouls and Ghosts is a good example. It's hard because the controls are horrible and the level design is patently unfair. It's fun for some people (like me) to try to overcome that, but at this point I would not play that game without save states. I am not playing the same 30 second segment of a level 100 times to get it right.

Now, back to MGSV.

My helicopter now plays "Love Will Tear Us Apart", which is awesome.

Now, all-out war. Here's how it works. The mission is to take out as many fighting vehicles as you can in 15 minutes. Once again, how you do it is up to you. C4 and directional mines? Airstrikes? Crashing a transport truck into them? I went with "Horse and grenade launcher" but I expected to take some damage so I put on the heavy sneaking suit, which has armor plates on it. I take an assault rifle and a rubber bullet-firing SMG. The plan is to ride up alongside them on the road and blast them. It works, and I even wipe out an outpost of dudes in the middle of it all. So much fun. Then I get a radio message from Miller- "Boss, there's a transport truck with something in it headed your way...maybe check it out?" I run up in front of the truck and blast it. The driver gets out and I spray him with the rubber bullet SMG. Kidnap the dude. In the bed is a laser-guided anti-tank missile launcher. Take it. Steal the truck with a balloon. Suddenly, the plan changes. Now I'm just lying in wait for the tanks, blasting the living shit out of them when I get a lock on them. "Boss, maybe you'll break a sweat next time?" S rating.

In the back of my mind I hear Otacon- "But Snake, this is a SNEAKING mission!"

Funniest MGSV moment so far happened on that mission too. I was on the horse and one of the APVs shot it and it fell over. I took cover, crouching behind its "body". The horse can't die, but it can get KOd for a minute. So I pop up to shoot a rocket at it RIGHT AS the horse stands up. Woops. "Snake...quit kiddin' around...Snake? SNAAAAAAAAAKE????"

Michael Barnes wrote: The thing is- and this is probably hard for a lot of old school gamers to admit- a lot of these older games were hard because a) they were coming from an era where coin-op games were still an influence and those are DESIGNED to make you lose and b) some of the kludgy, fudgy controls and bad level design are what was making the games challenging- not the actual quality of the design.

For me, it's not a matter of accepting the truth, I just don't think it's historically or artistically accurate. Most notable games from that era are not harder because they have bad controls or because they were designed to kill you, it's just not true of say, Gradius II, Final Fight or Contra and it doesn't even apply to Wizardry or text adventures which were also much harder than they are now. It's true of Konami's beat'em ups and other mid 90s games, but they are not the games people have in mind when they say that.

Ghouls and Ghosts also seems a pretty bad example to me, because it's a whole different breed of game than practically all other games of its era. It doesn't have pure patterns, it's semi-random and it has a very intentional design philosophy that brutally punishes the player for not respecting the game enough. Everytime I play it and die I can't help but imagine the designer gloating "Hahaha, you thought I was going to fall for that, you little shit?", it's that hardcore.

Personally, I think games got easier as they got cheaper and people got less involved into each game their bought.

I'd like to see a videogame where a level boss just says "I'm thinking of a number between 1 and 1000. Guess it and you can pass." Guess wrong and he kills you and you have to try again, with a new random number. Guess right and he steps aside. You want "hard"? It's a 1-in-1000 chance, gamerbro. Have a lot of funs.

Legomancer wrote: Submerged is an exploration game.

This sounds great and I will look into it. I love exploration games. I loved ICO because it was basically an "explore the architecture" game with occasional easy to defeat enemies.

You might want to check out an old PC game called Knytt and its followup Knytt Stories. Avoid at all costs its console followup Knytt Underground which was sadly terrible. The original Knytt was very exploration-y and pleasant to play.

Hohokum is another one I keep meaning to look into as it sounds similarly exploration focused.

that does sound great, but what's an exploration game exactly? I honestly don't know.

My favourite part of GTA IV and GTA V was the exploration aspect but those are obviously not exploration games. Wind Waker had a bunch of exploration in it but again, that's an adventure game. If there was a game just dedicated to exploration, I'd be all over that I think. No Man's Sky is going to be an exploration game right?

But Erik, what actually MADE those games harder? I think in some instances, it was a matter that the game was designed to encourage you develop skills or gain knowledge to overcome the difficulty. Nethack and Demon's Souls would also be examples of this, and this is the "good" kind of extreme difficulty. But thinking about games like Contra III or Battletoads where the difficulty is just punitive, I'm not really sure that it was "good" difficulty. I do think you are right that most NOTABLE games from the past weren't like that...I'm not saying that Contra III and Battletoads are bad games (I love Contra III), but I'm not convinced that the challenge is going in the right direction.

I think you're definitely right that cheaper/more plentiful games have lowered difficulty...it's just like with board games, really.

Exploration games are getting to be a big deal, I think it's to 2015-2016 what crafting games were to 2013-2014. It's a big trend and we're going to see more of them. I think that barring Myst and point and click adventure games, the roots are in Journey...that kind of more introspective, solitary game where there isn't really any conflict and you just spend your time uncovering a story, a meaning or a mystery. I think you could likely point to the Metroid Prime games as being influential to some degree even though they aren't anything like this particular breed. Gone Home was probably the game that really galvanized this kind of thing, and now titles like Submerged and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture are starting to turn up out of those influences. P.T. was really an exploration game.

Michael Barnes wrote: But Erik, what actually MADE those games harder? I think in some instances, it was a matter that the game was designed to encourage you develop skills or gain knowledge to overcome the difficulty.

I think that's exactly it. I feel many of these games are learning experiences, the actual fun is in learning how to fight enemies, how to use your character or how to tackle a dungeon. In general, older videogames tend to be far more focused on skill-testing that newer games so I kind of feel it's not really a matter of games beind easier or harder but about the question of difficulty no longer being as relevant as it once was.

But thinking about games like Contra III or Battletoads where the difficulty is just punitive, I'm not really sure that it was "good" difficulty. I do think you are right that most NOTABLE games from the past weren't like that...I'm not saying that Contra III and Battletoads are bad games (I love Contra III), but I'm not convinced that the challenge is going in the right direction.

Yeah, I haven't played Contra III in years but man...I agree it's totally true of Battletoads. I know some people love it, I know it's not really what one would call "badly designed" per se but...yeah, it's not a good challenge. There's a lot of stuff in the game that kills you in one hit, or that requires lots of foreknowledge or simply punishes you to brutal degree for getting small things wrong.

Erik Twice wrote: Yeah, I haven't played Contra III in years but man...I agree it's totally true of Battletoads. I know some people love it, I know it's not really what one would call "badly designed" per se but...yeah, it's not a good challenge. There's a lot of stuff in the game that kills you in one hit, or that requires lots of foreknowledge or simply punishes you to brutal degree for getting small things wrong.

Well this is where I get confused. I haven't played Dark Souls or Bloodthorne (not in my wheelhouse due partly to difficulty) but aren't they famous for one-hit killing or death trapping you if you get a small thing wrong?