Metal Gear Solid Watch-along
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Re: Metal Gear Solid Watch-along
by bomaye Thu Sep 10, 2020 7:08 pm
Episode 6 (02:02:56-02:26:15, a cut-scene where the last line is "I'm counting on you!")
- Spoiler:
- Parrot
- Rip his lips off why don't you Raiden
- Raiden was sent by La-Li-Lu-Le-Lo too, eh?
- Eyyyyy Ocelot
- God damn, the President has to be of sound mind and calm for the safety system to let him activate a nuke
- Sorry Ames, no one tells anyone anything in this universe
- The Tanker sinking and the Big Shell being built was used as a cover to develop the new Metal Gear
- "Snake" eh?
- If you point the Directional Microphone elsewhere, you'll hear Johnny (the guy who Meryl beat up and the guy you heard having diarrhea in MGS1) having another diarrhea explosion in the bathroom
- Not Snake's voice
- Fatman could've been working for "them"
- "Snake" also says Foxhound was disbanded four years ago, but Raiden is here as Foxhound
- Patriots, eh?
- A few more steps to "Outer Heaven"
- Eyyyyyy Olga
- So the Ninja isn't one of Olga's men even though it definitely had a Russian accent
- "Sergei was my best friend" says Ocelot, the man who killed Sergei
- "I'll put a bullet in your back, instead" God damn, Olga a badass
- I love how "Snake" is basically like "God dammit, is your arm possessing you AGAIN?!"
- "I never trust a Frenchman" as if the French doctors played a silly prank by attaching Liquid's arm just in the right way so that its spirit possesses Ocelot
- Two Solid Snakes, eh?
- The President is a puppet, but it wasn't a smart move to betray "us"
- Ames doesn't know about the hostage situation or the ransom demands either
- They're gonna EMP Manhattan to take it off the grid and then form their own little country inside of it.
- "You'll never escape the La-Li-Lu-Le-Lo"
- Ames just had a random fucking heart attack (or his pacemaker randomly decided to fuck up)
- NINJA
- Ocelot pulled his arm away before it could cut it off this time (I think that was his non-Liquid arm too)
- Campbell doesn't seem all that surprised that Ames had a random heart attack in the middle of a mission
- Eyyy Pliskin, you missed the party
- Pliskin's got a pilot who can fly choppers
- EYYYYY OTACON
- Raiden doesn't believe Snake's a terrorist, and he's starting to talk like Snake, can't get through missions like this without a little something extra
- A messenger from the Patriots
- Eyyyyy Solid... Snake?
- Pliskin's all "SHIT NO, HE AIN'T NO SOLID"
- BROTHER
- Just called Pliskin "Snake"
- "Stop impersonating him!"
- He just pumped his muscles up
- SOLIDUS Snake
- Sorry, Pliskin, Vamp caught him with a jet
- "The world needs only one Big Boss"
- "Hey Raiden, sorry bro, we made the big bad guy mad and now he's trying to kill us with a jet, can you shoot him down for us, thanks you're a pal!"
MAN, lotta shit goin down in this one
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Re: Metal Gear Solid Watch-along
by Enail Sat Sep 12, 2020 4:26 pm
E6
- Spoiler:
-all the enemy soldiers chirping "good morning!"
-whew, didn't rip out anyone's eyeballs for the retinal scan
-Ames is with la-li-lu-le-lo and Raiden apparently is too, and Ames doesn't know about the hostage being killed
-president's normal vital signs unlock the nukes,what if the president develops a heart problem or gets too anxious and it makes it not match anymore?
-actually, I feel stupid for not thinking of this before, but it's gotta be Liquid who got buried in Snake's tomb to fake Snake's death, rather than that there's two resurrected arms running around, and they can't tell it's not Snake's corpse b/c of the supposedly identical (and yet totally different) genes (not like they've ever made sense on genetics before. Also, you'd think Liquid would be much more decayed than expected for when Snake was supposed to have died, but that seems easy to ignore or work around).
-the Big Shell spill was fake and it was always meant for Metal Gear.
-Olga's comeback, if he doesn't want a gun pointed at his face she'll just put a bullet in his back, that was gooood
-Outer Heaven
-president's cooperating with them. But wasn't Ocelot talking like the president was in charge in that conversation at the end of the last game? "Cooperating" seems like a big step down.
-Take over Manhattan as an electronics-free hell-republic
-They let Ocelot come up on them chatting, good job, Raiden
-that was an extremely fucking suspicious-looking "heart attack"
-Ninja comes to the rescue
-Yay, Snake got Otacon!
-Raiden rambling about courage and ideals was kind of out of nowhere, I don't feel like they've really shown him reacting to events or having any conversations in a way that backs up him thinking on those lines YET, given his starting point.
-Plisken loses his cool at King claiming to be Snake
-what the fuck??
-WHAT THE FUCK?!
-NO, IF THERE'S A THIRD BROTHER, HIS NAME MUST BE GASEOUS AND I REFUSE TO CALL HIM ANYTHING ELSE WHAT THE FUCK KIND OF COP-OUT IS "SOLIDUS," LALALA LOOK AT ME I'M JUST A TEMPERATURE RANGE OF A CHANGE OF A STATE OF MATTER BUT I THINK I'M BETTER THAN YOU, AN ACTUAL LEGITIMATE STATE OF MATTER. No, fuck you!
-hulking out
-hulking back in
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Re: Metal Gear Solid Watch-along
by bomaye Thu Sep 17, 2020 5:12 am
Episode 7 (02:26:15-2:52:23, ends on a codec conversation "Cut transmission and get moving")
- Spoiler:
- If you get hit once by a Harrier missile on the harder modes, you're dead
- Eyyyy Metal Gear Ray
- Booped Solidus' eye out
- As we watch Vamp running on water, I recall the complain that "The Twin Snakes was too over the top" but MGS fanboys back in the day
- Pliskin finally admits he's Snake
- Eyyy Grey Fox
- Haha yep, you figured it out just in time, it was Liquid's body that was used to cover up Snake's death. Apparently they just carry the preserved dead bodies of their enemies around with them
- Hrmmmm, Otacon's sister "EE" might be in the Big Shell
- Campbell doesn't trust "Snake" and never even brought up the idea he could be Snake, just changed Raiden's codename once and that was it
- "They were never part of the simulation." Sticking to the plan a bit closely, eh?
- In The Darkness of Shadow Moses is actually available as an extra to read in the game menu. It's pretty much about a kooky conspiracy theorist who gets fed the goings-ons of MGS1, investigates it (it's implied Snake rescues him from captivity when he kinda fails to infiltrate Shadow Moses itself), gets a written testimony from Nastasha (who barely showed up in what we watched of MGS1, but she's a Russian nuke expert you can call up at any time to talk about nukes and nuke politics) and the publishes all of the above for the public.
- Jack doesn't really tell Rose much about himself
- Ha, they added the peeing easter egg (You can shimmy by it without being splashed)
- Eyyyy Olga
- Both Olga and Fortune think Snake killed their fathers during the Tanker Incident, but it was Ocelot who shot them both
- President thought that Raiden was there to kill him
- Nut-sack grab.
- (Kojima called Donald Trump's "Grab'em by the etc" 20 years ago)
- Damnnn, The President was in on it
- The Patriots
- Running the country behind the scenes
- "I'm legally sane, you know."
- The President just wanted some power, Solidus wants to take down the whole thing
- Solidus was the previous President.
- Solidus actually younger than Solid and Liquid
- Solidus was the guy who was talking to Ocelot at the end of the previous game, and Ocelot infiltrated Foxhound to get the whole rebellion going
- Whoops, the Patriots let their pet snake go
- The Big Shell IS the new Metal Gear
- Arsenal Gear
- You can control everything from Arsenal Gear
- "The world will drown in the coming flood of information." The Patriots fear the internet
- The Patriots are going to use Arsenal Gear to construct fake news
- GW is the thing that'll activate Arsenal
- Solidus is going to EMP Wall-Street to liberate it from The Patriots
- Emma Emmerich, EE
BTW this game has REALLY aged well in some aspects
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Re: Metal Gear Solid Watch-along
by Enail Sun Sep 20, 2020 5:28 pm
E7
- Spoiler:
-this fight makes me so glad I'm not playing this game
-oh hi, Metal Gear
-"they got my eye!" he says like it's his third-favourite toy rather than a critical and probably incredibly painful and horrifying body part to lose
-Vamp can run on water and straight up the sides of pipes
-Pliskin finally admits he's Snake
-Raiden's comments last time about courage and ideals would have worked better after a few conversations like this one
-Yep, the body is Liquid, I'm so annoyed at myself for not getting that on first thought, it was so obvious. In my defense, I'm not really keeping good track of the provided info on who's doing what why with who in general (...that might be the opposite of in my defense
) (Also obligatory argggh of "they can't be both genetically indistinguishable and have inherited totally opposite genes from their parent")
-A little relieved they stole Liquid's body from someone else only when they needed it, I was picturing them just keeping him preserved for years like Snow White in a glass coffin for...decoration, I guess?
-I'm proud of both Otacon and Snake that they found themselves a cause of their own
-I'm betting Campbell's in on it with Snake in some way.
-Rose sounding like an exasperated parent being like "how was school? Just 'fine?'" while Raiden's blatantly freaking out because nothing is turning out like his training manual. The Rose elements fit pretty clunkily into the rest of it.
-
at the guy peeing over the ledge and Raiden having to go through it
-And fucking Campbell's "sneaking missions are called wetworks, after all"
-I loved the little visual it gave while Campbell was explaining not to hit the president, it somehow made it really hilarious)
-the president's weirdly happy to just admit "yup, I betrayed my country, I wanted power, my bad."
-a sinister cabal running the country instituted income tax cuts, sounds about right
-"Don't look at me like that, I'm legally sane, you know"
-ohhh, Gaseous was the previous President. That explains the bit about the President at the end of last game, that was confusing me.
-I guess at least they had a reason for the name Solidus. Though, I don't see what about him is a balance between Solid and Liquid, Snake isn't particularly extreme in any way opposite to Liquid. I still don't accept it.
-Out of all of that, the thing Raiden seems most shocked by is that the presidential race was fake?
-they made a giant robot armed with nuclear missiles to...digitally manage information?? I get wanting to be topical (and they've sure hit on a lot of current shit, even Russian involvement, which wasn't much on people's radars back then, not to mention grabby presidents, doing good there, Metal Gear franchise), but giant fighting robots are a bit of a weird engineering choice for a war of internet-era information
-programming runs in Otacon's (step)family
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Re: Metal Gear Solid Watch-along
by bomaye Thu Sep 24, 2020 10:13 am
Episode 8 (02:52:23-03:20:46, a codec convo where the last word in the sentence is "social structure." It's an awkward spot to leave off but it was getting a bit long <_<)
- Spoiler:
- A computer virus modeled after FOXDIE
- Of course Ocelot shows up to shoot the President
- And he leaves Raiden alone
- Snake knows about Arsenal Gear, and "You never asked" when confronted about it
- Ohooo, they figured it out around the time when Fat Man was threatening to blow the place up
- Raiden played the Tanker Mission/MGS2 demo too
- Snake and Otacon know about The Patriots
- The US Marines were building Metal Gear Ray and the Patriots, who try to control everything, weren't fans of it
- All the good guys commiserating because the plot of this game isn't making sense
- Pool mishaps
- I think the video skipped over it, but there's a part while swimming where you open a door and the dead body of Stillman the bomb guy pops out
- Eyyyyy Vamp
- "Unfortunately Hell had no vacancies"
- Vamp thinks Raiden killed the President
- Why does Vamp know about a Hydrogen Bomb but not his boss, Solidus?
- There's actually an easy way to cheese the fight with Vamp and never get hit
- You have a very nostalgic heartbeat, Raiden
- Raiden never had a family, and Otacon and Emma might've had a creepy one
- "We've managed to avoid DROWNING!" Like it's been the most significantly dangerous moment Raiden's experienced yet but with a little pep he got through it
- Snake shutting down awkward family spats
- She created GW
- Arsenal Gear is fucking Google
- Solid Snake is an information leak that The Patriots didn't want out there
- We're meme'ing the Patriots into domination
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Re: Metal Gear Solid Watch-along
by Enail Mon Sep 28, 2020 1:58 pm
E8
- Spoiler:
-Ocelot's up for killing the president even if Raiden's not. So now they don't want to launch the nukes? These guys need to pick a plan and stick to it
-the good news is that Arsenal Gear hasn't been doing squat for the environment
-the big secret of how Snake survived that's been a mystery hanging over our heads this whole game so far was... a boat
-the mission was a setup to get photos of Snake to make him look like the terrorist, that's a lot of work to get a few photos when they could have just photoshopped something, these people can implant a person's mind into someone else through an arm transplant, surely they could have managed that
-And the point was to make an example of Snake so "everybody would think twice about opposing them?" That's a really weaksauce reason, if this is such a massive global secret, what "everybody?" If it's other people like Snake who go in not knowing who they're opposing, an example of how dangerous it is to oppose them is useless, b/c they won't know it's them! And if it's people on the inside who presumably already know how powerful they are, it's kind of a wussy threat, and one that they'd have a hard time following through on regularly if they had to go to all that work just to get the photo for it.
-this whole backstory with Otacon failing to save EE/his dad from drowning feels kind of fake and thrown in. Maybe because he's giving us so much more of the story than needed here that comes off as clumsily shoehorning in a setup for an emotional arc. Or because 'can't swim' seems like a convenient excuse for a gameplay challenge. In general, the pacing on character arc stuff has not been good.
-nice light effects from the water
-"Unfortunately, hell had no vacancies"
-Vamp likes Raiden's muscles and makes sure to demonstrate he's got an extremely long tongue and likes it kinky. Also, the shirtless-and-suspenders look is pretty stripperiffic for all this.
-I'd have liked to know why he could stand on the water before and why he stopped being able to. Cool-looking death, though.
-I guess weak bladders run in the (step)-family
-oh hi, Shepard
-again, they need to not do face close-ups while trying to show emotion
-why should she wear contacts? You're not supposed to swim with them!
-aww, she wears glasses to emulate Otacon. But their relationship would have worked a lot better if they'd known each other for more than two years, or if they'd established they got so close or even just an off-hand remark that he was the only person to be nice to her or something before giving us this stuff. This is an almost weirdly consistent problem of not knowing how to lay the groundwork for their character arcs in advance.
-Raiden sounded like he was imitating Snake when he said "you did good," that's sort of endearing
-Their age difference is wayyyy too big to make the (step) brother-husband sister-wife thing sound cute and innocent, even though I think they intended "playing house" to be a literal "kids playing they're adults", not euphemistic, it still reads badly enough that I was like "nooo, don't make Otacon a teenage child-molester"
-setting up a nuclear weapon robot because she was mad at Otacon, but is also so attached to him that she still wears glasses because of him and tells soft-focused happy memories about him at the drop of a hat
-Patriots vs. Google
-suppressed the knowledge of more than half of human genes
-they sort of got it right on info in the internet age, but completely suppressing information from everywhere is so much neater and less ridiculous-sounding than the idea you could just flood people with so much conflicting information and reasons to mistrust everything they lose all ability to tell what's real even though the real info's readily available to everyone. OTOH, I wouldn't have found the latter at all convincing at the turn of the millennium, so maybe they had it all figured out and just went with something that sounded less fucked up
bomaye wrote:
- Spoiler:
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Re: Metal Gear Solid Watch-along
by bomaye Thu Oct 01, 2020 5:50 pm
Episode 9 (03:20:46-03:41:20, the last line of the scene is "ready for some shut-eye?" and then a bit of action happens and then the scene fades out)
- Spoiler:
- Y2K
- The Patriots infected Windows with their program
- Complex data for the program to study, and then suddenly everything goes haywire on the Big Shell
- This segment of the game where you're dragging Emma around and protecting her is generally not fun <_<
- The Sniping in the game is also not fun because your aim wobbles unless you take a pill to lower your heartbeat. Also not fun if you're trying to do no-kill runs or harder difficulty runs
- Though if you don't care about that, it's fun to shoot'em up and on easier difficulties, Snake will show up much earlier and shoot everything for you
- Eyyyy Johnny from MGS1 is also here (the guy Meryl beat up/the hapless guy who guards Snake's cell)
- AGHHHH VAMP
- Whoops, Vamp got Emma
- "Got the disc?" That's cold, Snake
- Big Shell's got the good antivirus program
- EE wanted Hal's DD but Hal wasn't into the whole "going to jail" thing
- ... He wasn't into the whole "going to jail" thing because Emma's mom was (this is still one of the weirder "wtf why?" plot twists in MGS)
- "He took his own life" so he tried to kill Emma too as revenge? Wtf, man
- Leaving Emma's body to go down with the Big Shell because there's no room in the chopper with the hostages, brutal
- Action movie dramatic walking away from Emma's body, god dammit
- Did they just crush the bird with their hug?
- You're sad for your man Otacon but then he keeps collapsing in crying agony like 8 times before the scene ends and it actually starts getting funny, like this goddamn bird won't leave him alone
- Snake with the betrayal ;_;
- Eyyyy Cyborg Ninja-kun
- Eyyyyy Olga is Cyborg Ninja-kun
- RIP Raiden
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Re: Metal Gear Solid Watch-along
by Enail Sun Oct 04, 2020 5:51 pm
E9
- Spoiler:
-uh huh, the US solved the Y2K bug for every country in the world
A lot of programmers who worked a lot of overtime worldwide are probably pissed at this game 
-that was just an explanation of how the program got on every computer, that in no way explains wtf she means by "the system exists in our social structure" or how, what a cop-out!
-they're totally going to use the parrot to get some key info it overheard or was taught, aren't they
-"otherwise you'll get hit with diarrhea, one of the few things I learned from Shadow Moses"
-Vamp's back again, this is getting a little ridiculous, even for a character as ridiculous as this
-stabby stabby
-Otacon calling her Emma like she asked, too late
-Otacon blaming himself for his father's suicide and possible attempted revenge-murder of Emma b/c his stepmother molested him, this is both and wtf
-yup, there's the parrot
-they still kind of make his crying sound comedic, even in a tragic scene.
-Snake pep-talking Otacon to hold it together
-they have a secret handshake/hug, that's adorable!
-pep-talk didn't hold. The parrot might just be a massive jerk
-Aww, he learned that you can make your happy family, I guess that means Snake's his family now
-Well, that was an exciting twist, Snake and Ninja-who-is-Olga betraying Raiden!
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Re: Metal Gear Solid Watch-along
by bomaye Wed Oct 07, 2020 11:48 pm
I'm hoping but also decently certain that we'll be finished watching this by the time Attack on Titan starts back up again, that way you won't have a few too many simul-watches going at once 
Episode 10: (03:41:21-04:03:40, a codec conversation where the last line is "What's going on?")
Episode 10: (03:41:21-04:03:40, a codec conversation where the last line is "What's going on?")
- Spoiler:
- Raiden doesn't legally exist
- "Nonexistent organization."
- Solidus with the eye patch, looking like Big Boss, and with Dr Octopus arms
- Jack The Ripper
- Son, eh?
- Jack was a child soldier in an African civil war
- Jack was recruited by the Patriots without knowing it, says Solidus
- Snake must be near, Ocelot's hand's getting a bit twitchy
- Olga was supposed to be Raiden's support
- Had her baby stolen
- Good guy, Snake. Went back and rescued Olga while the Tanker was going down (because she was mega-tranq'ed by him in the first place)
- The S3 Plan
- I like that Raiden's life bar drops a bit when Olga punches him in the cinematic
- Raiden didn't want to tell Rose anything about being a child soldier
- Showed them Hollywood Action movies to "image train" them into being soldiers, mixed gunpowder with their food
- Jack was kept alive specifically to take down Solidus
- Naked sneaking mission time!
- Campbell's transmission tweakin
- Raiden demanding to know if Campbell's in bed with the patriots
- "This is a type of role-playing game."
- Never met Campbell in person
- "We have Rosemary" Oh shit
- The soldiers in this part, the Arsenal Tengus, are the most annoying enemies in the game.
- "Turn the game console off right now" Campbell's lost it
- "Something happened to me last Thursday while I was driving home" is how the book In The Darkness of Shadow Moses actually starts
- "Outer Heaven" with an image of Metal Gear from old computers
- Rose is a Patriot spy
- So it's not really shown here in the movie version, but when you contact Rose to save, more than a few times she starts needling Raiden about if she'd changed her hair colour or if she didn't look like she did if he'd still love her, and you find out here that it's because they used his psych profile to alter her appearance to be the most appealing to him, and she was feeling guilty because she actually does like him but he might only like her because of the act she put on
- "I'm pregnant" but in a robot voice fading out
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Re: Metal Gear Solid Watch-along
by Enail Tue Oct 13, 2020 1:51 pm
Yeah, if we're not done by then, I'll probably have to pause this one.
E10
E10
- Spoiler:
-traditionally, godparents are supposed to, like, give you presents and make sure you're being raised right and shit; child soldiering not so much
-if Raiden's real name is Gaseous, all will be forgiven
-"We'll use him like you suggested" sounds awfully suggestive when he's spread-eagled naked with careful camera angles to hide the naughty bits
-Olga's baby taken hostage at birth by the Patriots, I was wondering when the pregnancy would come in
-Snake saved his enemies from drowning, what a mensch
-mysterious S3 Plan that involves potentially unhandlable truths
-they're pushing the whole Raiden angst thing too hard so it comes off feeling Angst!Mary Sue fanficcy
-they needed some hints of Raiden remembering this stuff gradually, or else made it a sudden realization/flashback when he sees Gaseous; it doesn't fit at all with the whole "I learned everything from computer sims" naive confidence he started with to nonchalantly be able to tell a coherent backstory of having been a child soldier, chock-full of details and the context of them, all of a sudden now without any transition or moments of trying to figure out patchy memories that didn't seem to fit. Zero ability to set up character changes
-they could have at least had Raiden showing some recognition of Gasous! Now we're supposed to buy that hatred, when he had zero reaction to Gasous standing in front of him?! Gah!
-...he knows you don't have to be married to "risk starting a family," right?
-"Snake wasn't part of the simulation" so ignore him, you're in an rpg so play your part, plus Raiden's never met Campbell in person... he's gonna be just a simulation created by Arsenal Gear, isn't he? Though, I kind of feel like if you're an AI smart enough to convincingly pull this off, you wouldn't get stuck on that rigid "stick to the simulation" stuff that's going to ping as a cartoon AI flaw. Maybe Snake's smashing some servers right now so it's going all "Daisy, daisy...," I guess?
-they've got Rose? She didn't act like she was being held hostage all along, so either they kidnapped her just now, or the people who have her are actual people she trusts enough to work with and she's still totally in the dark, or she's in on it all and is on their side.
-turn the game off to shut down the mission, that 'using the real-life existence of the player playing the game' thing they works really well when the story's all about computer-y shit
-naked acrobatics
-the old game visuals while Campbell starts breaking down and going robot, "I'll do the fighting, you can just go home," this is so cool & creepy
-Rose was working for the Patriots the whole time
-"GOD, I should have known, how could they possibly want a data analyst otherwise, they're totally useless"
-Rose reinvented herself based on Raiden's taste, his taste is generic and boring as hell
-"falling in love with you wasn't an act," as if that'd actually matter when the entire rest of the person is an act, like "oh goody, someone who all I actually know about their personality is that they deceived me for years, loves me." I guess it's less of a hit to the self-esteem than otherwise.
-Whoops, she's pregnant (guess he didn't know you don't have to be married), and this conversation is powering down too. Robot baby? But I'm gonna be annoyed if they do a babies-ever-after happy ending with this, a pregnancy does not make this a viable relationship
I feel like they could have done a bit more lead-up or hinting about the computer-Campbell-y stuff (the save screen stuff with Rose would help, though), but overall, this element works really well and is way better-developed than the child soldiering or most of the other big character stuff. And the way they use the fact that it's a game is so unsettling, it really works to shake the ground under the player's feet, not just the character's.)
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Re: Metal Gear Solid Watch-along
by bomaye Tue Oct 13, 2020 7:20 pm
A few things
- Spoiler:
On: "Snake Smashing Servers"
Don't forget that when they inserted Emma's disk to take down the Patriot AI, it stopped at 90%. The virus mostly got in but didn't completely
Raiden and child soldiering: I don't think it's ever explicitly stated but since they mentioned that a) Raiden's got some kind of robot implants in his head that scrambled his memories and b) he said that he's pieced together enough of it via his nightmares and the things Solidus said to know what's up, I think c) that Raiden doesn't actually hate Solidus, he's just playing the part of hating Solidus because he figures that's how he's supposed to act with all of this knowledge, especially since everyone else around him seems to be playing a part as well.
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Re: Metal Gear Solid Watch-along
by Enail Tue Oct 13, 2020 8:56 pm
bomaye wrote:
- Spoiler:
Raiden and child soldiering: I don't think it's ever explicitly stated but since they mentioned that a) Raiden's got some kind of robot implants in his head that scrambled his memories and b) he said that he's pieced together enough of it via his nightmares
- Spoiler:
We knew he had some kind of weird memory shit going on, so it would have been okay as preparation for the sudden appearance of stuff he didn't have any memory of (it could have mostly worked if they'd made it a sudden jolt of remembering when he saw Gaseous again), but isn't an adequate prep for something that's apparently been an ongoing figuring-out process, and would have been very easy to drop in here and there; it's not enough info or integrated enoough into the story to make the big reveal feel believable. To be fair, I'm probably leaning overly hard on this b/c I'd already been finding that a big weakness in the writing up till now, so there's some built up storytelling frustration that this one alone may not have earned, and also b/c it being so close in time to the better-done whatever-is-going-on-at-the-end-of-this-section stuff, but I just don't think it was competently done and it would have taken very little to make it better.
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Re: Metal Gear Solid Watch-along
by bomaye Thu Oct 15, 2020 10:22 am
Episode 11 (04:03:40-04:22:26, the last word spoken is "ugh" and then someone gets knocked out, the screen fades to white and then it cuts to black)
- Spoiler:
- EYYYYYYYYYYYY Snake geared up
- 25 Metal Gears ahead
- Eyyy Olga gave him a Ninja Sword
- Snake makes the "Infinite Ammo" joke because he's wearing his bandanna. The Infinite Ammo bandana was an unlockable item in this game and the previous game
- "Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between reality and a game"
- Yep, Campbell was an AI
- Constructed by the Arsenal AI fiddling with his nanomachines so it created the Colonel Campbell that Raiden expected in his head
- This part where you're fighting the Arsenal Tengu/Arsenal Ninjas is one of the hardest parts of the harder difficulty levels. If Snake dies, you lose, and you can damage Snake yourself
- Fission Mailed, a fake game over screen
- Eyyyy Fortune
- Not seeing how the Fortune vs Snake fight actually played out is one of the mega disappointing parts of the game tbh
- The S3 Plan
- Solid Snake Simulation
- Raiden is a simulated Solid Snake, trained in VR
- Solidus realizes there's a Patriot agent among his ranks
- The Metal Gear Ray fight varies on difficulty level. The easiest difficulties, you only get a few of them before the fight ends. The hardest difficulties, you barely have any healing items and you have to kill 20 someodd Rays. You can survive one, maybe two hits from their small arms fire but their missile fire will one-hit kill you. This shit was hard as fuck
- Also I like how they dinosaur roar
- Eyyyyy Olga
- Brutal, Solidus shot her in the head
- Arsenal AI's losing it
- Solidus a badass
- Fortune captured Snake instead of killing him
- And Solidus wants to bring Snake in instead of killing him, always a mistake
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Re: Metal Gear Solid Watch-along
by Enail Mon Oct 19, 2020 5:27 pm
E11
- Spoiler:
-the dramatic music when Snake reveals himself, headband and all
-I love Snake's casual "sorry about earlier, just needed to use you as a passkey"
-Raiden gets the ninja sword
(what is wrong with Snake that he doesn't want a cool sword?!)
-Snake's brain is infinite ammo?
-Snake taking his own advice of passing it on when you find something to believe in
-Campbell's not just the AI itself, but it cobbling together things it finds in Raiden's brain to make who he thinks Campbell should be, that's pretty cool
-Does that mean Rose is too? She went kind of funny for a moment after Campbell was breaking down, though it could have just been the connection breaking up. Him having basically made her up inside his head wouldn't be that novel, but it would be way more interesting than them just happily-ever-aftering at the end or her dying for him.
-Fission Mailed
-Fortune going omnicidal b/c she can't die
-the computer-y set stuff has a bit of a Star Trek user interface vibe
-designed to recreate Snake, feels like a bit too much of the aggrandizing 'everything revolves around Snake b/c he's so awesome' stuff they like to do
-telling him child soldiering was real, everything else that's led him here is fake
-Olga comes to save the day
-the Patriots are gonna kill her kid if Raiden dies specifically
-she didn't put up much of a fight after all her cool ninja stuff
-(tbh, I was still kinda expecting her armpit hair to be relevant somewhere somehow, they made such a point of showing it at the beginning )
-and Raiden just flops to the ground like somehow that was the last straw and he's just done
-mechas going into unhappy dinosaur mode as the AI starts failing
-Gaseous takes them down pretty efficiently. Sure would be a shame if his Doc Oc arms caught the virus
-I find Gaseous' relationship with Raiden really flat, you really don't feel any actual emotion between them, it's just Gaseous kind of going through the motions of whatever disdain and hatred the story wants him to have and Raiden not really having any feelings either way.
-Fortune got Snake, but he's probably got a plan. Or he'll have one soon. Stupid as fuck to bring him in alive.
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Re: Metal Gear Solid Watch-along
by bomaye Wed Oct 21, 2020 12:28 am
Episode 12 (04:22:26-04:43:55, the last spoken word in a cutscene is "Liberty" and then the codec rings)
Should be only two episodes left
- Spoiler:
- Solidus doing everything just to get the names of the Patriots, Arsenal was just going to be a decoy
- Fucking Ocelot's betraying everyone again, guys
- The S3 project to recreate badass Solid Snakes in VR isn't the whole deal
- An orchestrated recreation of Shadow Moses
- The computer virus was supposed to delete all the Patriots information
- The real Solid Snake, not part of the simulation
- Ocelot actually shot her
- The Patriots developed the bullet shield that protected Fortune
- "You couldn't get enough of the drama"
- Her heart's on the other side of her body apparently
- Ocelot using the same bullet shield
- Solidus firing missiles out of his Doc Ock arms
- Wuh-oh, he got in Metal Gear Ray
- Solidus deflecting bullets like a maniac with his two swords, I fucking love him
- Fortune deflecting all the missiles despite Ocelot having shut off her powers
- BROTHERS I literally cried laughing when I saw this for the first time in the game
- "I've been inside this arm the entire time waiting for the right time to awaken!" God dammit Liquid
- He lured Snake in to free him so he could go fuck up the Patriots, god-speed Liquid('s arm)
- Fucking Snake dives after Liquid in Ocelot in Metal Gear Ray
- If the jump between the Arsenal under the Brooklyn Bridge and then them falling out of the sky feels weird, it's because 9/11 happened like 2 months before the game came out so they had to remove a cut-scene that showed Arsenal Gear crashing through buildings
- "Do you know what day it is today?" The same question Rose has been asking Raiden the entire time
- Solidus wanted to back freedom and civil rights and all that jazz
- Les Enfants Terribles, they can't have babies, Solidus can have no heir and can't pass on his genes or anything
- This man was the President of the United States and it still wasn't enough to be remembered for
- SONS OF LIBERTY
Should be only two episodes left
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Re: Metal Gear Solid Watch-along
by Enail Thu Oct 29, 2020 1:35 pm
Sorry, falling a little behind, I'll probably get to it today or tomorrow.
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Re: Metal Gear Solid Watch-along
by Enail Thu Oct 29, 2020 4:16 pm
E12
- Spoiler:
-I think we're up to like a quintuple-cross from Ocelot, at this point I think he might just be doing it for the fun of it
-Arsenal's useless without tons of support, Gaseous just wants the names of the Patriots, I've a million percent lost track of who has been wanting what why such that each new reveal of someone's true goals is just like "okay, I'll take your word for it that I thought your goal was something else and this is a surprise."
-"Good luck." "Thanks, but I have quite enough of that."
-And now Ocelot was just setting up Gaseous to fulfill his plan, too, I love this guy
-This whole thing has just been a way to get Raiden to be more like Snake and that's why there've been all those Shadow Moses deja vu elements? This is wacko in a different way from the whole genetics fuckery in the last game but equally nonsensical, billions of people go through the same experiences and come out still different from each other all the time! Not to mention that most of the Shadow Moses-like elements are pretty different from the original, there've been tons of elements in this mission that are totally different from Shadow Moses, and all the elements of Raiden's life that haven't been the same up to this point.
-the computer virus wiped out GW's info on the Patriots, Gaseous never had a chance
-And the mad bomber was just a mid-term exam, this is nuts and I kind of love it
-"Given the right situation, the right story, anyone can be shaped into Snake" THIS IS NOT HOW PEOPLE WORK
-and they're gonna use the data from this set-up to make a million Snakes this way, oh my god
-Poor Gaseous was only even involved b/c he had a similar relationship with Raiden to Snake's with Big Boss, this is why you're only a temperature range of a state of matter and not an actual state of matter, you sucker!
-Holy shit, and Fortune and Vamp's group were only involved because they're the only ones as freaky as the Foxhound villains
-Fortune's getting a devastating revelation of how her loved ones were all taken from her just to trick her into hating the Patriots, and the camera focuses on her crotch's reaction
-fast little gun beats big slow gun
-Ocelot tearing down Fortune as a giant drama queen. (He has a point, if she really wanted to die so much, why didn't she ever try poison or stabbing or anything?)
-Now he's the one who can't get shot, neener neener neener
-Fortune just standing there in total stillness, untouched, in the rain of missiles like she's in Jedi mode even without the "luck" is pretty badass
-Liquid's hand has other plans
-The Snakes are all sterile?
-And all Gaseous' plan was just for the sake of leaving a legacy, did he even consider fertility treatments first? Or, like, writing a novel or something?
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Re: Metal Gear Solid Watch-along
by bomaye Thu Oct 29, 2020 11:39 pm
We're not remotely done with the whackoness yet
Episode 13 (04:43:55-04:56:18, the last phrase is "enjoy yourselves.")
Final "episode" next time after this
Episode 13 (04:43:55-04:56:18, the last phrase is "enjoy yourselves.")
- Spoiler:
- Eyyy "Campbell", now with creepy codec skull effects
- Evil Rose too
- Genes don't contain human history, but it's still something that should be passed on
- "Trivial information is accumulating every second, preserved in all its triteness). Here we go, the big speech that has aged extremely well for being done in 2001
- Junk data will slow down social progress and evolution
- Convenient half-truths aka "Fake news is a thing"
- "Their own gated community" and now we're in echo chambers
- No one is invalidated but nobody is right
- A machine AI saying "you lack the qualifications to exercise free will" is some spooky bullshit
- S3 is not Solid Snake Simulation army training
- "The S3 Plan is a system for controlling human will and consciousness" and then it shows the video game's game over/continue screen
- "You've accepted the fiction we provided, obeyed our orders, and did everything you were told to."
- The final order is to take Solidus down
- Rose and Olga's child are wired to die if Raiden does, but Raiden doesn't even know if Rose actually exists.
- "Our beloved monsters. Enjoy yourselves"
Final "episode" next time after this
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Re: Metal Gear Solid Watch-along
by Enail Sat Nov 07, 2020 5:29 pm
Oh oops, I forgot to finish this like 2 minutes from the end.
E13
E13
- Spoiler:
-inhuman creatures that represent the spirit of American morality evolved in the White House? This is the most ridiculous thing yet
-also, that would kind of explain a lot
-why would them being immortal mean they wouldn't have any motivation to control people?
-so Rose was one of them, yay, that's the way better option
-social darwinism but for information
-pointing out the bullshit messages kids get
-"the world is being engulfed in 'truth'," they may have a worse understanding of genetics or human psychological development than your average tree frog, but they sure got the internet right
-calling him out for the fact that his determination to decide for himself what to believe is from Snake
-Poor Raiden, this is quite the psychological savaging he's getting
-so basically, they want to put us in people zoos
-I'm half relieved and half disappointed that this isn't actually about turning Raiden into another Snake, that was ridiculous as hell
-"Fission mailed" is a pretty good argument against AI Campbell & co's ability to run humanity better than humans can, they can't even proofread their Game Over screen.
-Also, their proof that this thing works is that their model was able to solve the situation their model created, that's basically the same as being able to answer a riddle that you made up yourself.
-they chose Raiden because he's got amazing powers of denial
-fantasy girlfriend calling him out
-fantasy girlfriend and Olga's child both rigged to die (and does he really even know Olga's child exists?)
-Rose saying of course she really exists, but that capitalisation in the subtitles on "you have to beLIEve me"
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Re: Metal Gear Solid Watch-along
by bomaye Sat Nov 07, 2020 7:05 pm
Episode 14 Finale (04:56-18-end, there IS after-credits stuff)
Oh, and we're not done yet.
The VR Theory is a very plausible fan theory. Tl;dr ahead
- Spoiler:
- "Fufufu, I killed your parents"
- The endless loop, the double-helix of being trapped by Big Boss. The Snakes are really fucky that way, they can't let it go
- Oh hell yes, Ninja Sword fight to end it
- The Patriots are inside Jack
- The doves flying away as the two pose before fighting is always so fucking cool
- Campbell codec'ing in and telling Raiden that he has to win
- Raiden's replacement codename is from Japanese warplanes, the same as Metal Gear Rex and Metal Gear Ray
- Solidus falling to his death in front of Federal Hall, in front of the George Washington aka GW statue
- People walking around a disaster zone as if nothing was happening
- Snake shows up for a pep talk
- There's a point where Raiden and Snake are talking that you can press a button to zoom in and see Vamp standing in the background
- They have a copy of the virus and thus they know who the Patriots are
- Rose was a real person after all
- Otacon's fucking bird just flew away
- Everyone in the background is moving in slow motion
- The magic of the digital age lets us pass along our sad and messy history
- POST-CREDITS CONVO
- One of the biggest contributors to their group is a Patriot
- The Patriots all died about a hundred years ago O_O
Oh, and we're not done yet.
The VR Theory is a very plausible fan theory. Tl;dr ahead
- Spoiler:
Metal Gear Solid 2 is an art-piece about digital control. None of it is real and none of it happened.
- The game uses the trappings of a beloved game and then keeps lying to the player over and over, setting up situations that the player should hate but also keeps creating excuses to keep playing it (You're not Solid Snake but here's the real Snake prodding you on, Campbell's acting weird but it's Campbell so keep going, there's something up with Rose but she's got your back so keep going, Olga's baby will die if you don't keep going) right up to the end, when the game reveals that most of it isn't real and by beating the last boss, you actually help the bad guys win, but you keep doing it anyways.
- The way to "win" is to actually what AI Campbell tells you, shut off the game. They can't control you if you don't let them.
- Raiden is a whiner because that's what Kojima thinks of gamers and he's your game avatar into this world. His weird relationship with Rose, his fuzzy memories, his weird connection to Solidus, all the AI being characters created in his head, even Snake and Otacon kind of appearing how he thinks they should be and in increasingly unrealistic ways, it's all just Raiden convincing himself that this must be reality to spur the player into continuing to play the game.
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Re: Metal Gear Solid Watch-along
by Enail Mon Nov 09, 2020 8:24 pm
E14
- Spoiler:
-evil genes
-that Disney villain reveal that Gaseous killed Raiden's parents
-why not have nanomachines with the secrets of GW inside Raiden, I guess? Feels like we're just kind of throwing everything in kitchen-sink style at this point just to make sure there's enough
-I love that he gives you a sword like he wants a fair fight, but he gets two swords and octopus arms that shoot missiles and let him rocket-launch himself across the room
-trying to convince him he's just a weapon b/c his name was used for a weapon too, that's their weakest argument yet
-Bye, Gaseous
-Snake popping up for an existential pep-talk
-how much faith you have decides the future?
-go put down the controller and live your life, essentially
-the dog tags belong to Kojima? this is getting very meta
-And then throwing them away b/c he's not going to be just a character in a videogame written by someone else anymore
-"Choose for yourself what you want to do," says Snake. "I want to help you find the Patriots." "Nope, choose something else."
-that damn parrot
-so Rose was a fake fantasy girlfriend who was disgusted by how completely Raiden refused to even try and recognize the real her or anything, but for some reason now she wants to try again with nothing more than "see me for what I am this time, okay?" That's the dumbest fucking thing yet, there was absolutely nothing to make this plausible in their interactions, it's pretty much just putting her back into boring fantasy girlfriend mode for no reason. If they'd wanted to get this kind of ending and all the fake mindfuck stuff, they needed to do something after her big reveal to plant a seed that they had any kind of actual connection or understanding. He doesn't give her anything to disprove that he didn't see her or to suggest he'd do better next time. Bleagh. The best I can hope is that it's still part of the message of "see, all you'll get playing videogames is cheap fantasy trying to give you obviously fake meaning, you should have turned off the game like we suggested."
-oh god, they're even doing the babies-ever-after thing, this is so generic romance
-going into real people footage, to imply he's left the scripted videogame world, while still giving us that romance that's the epitome of that
-that last little blurb was getting a bit much in didactic-ness
-uh-oh, the Patriots have been funding Snake's operation
-and they all died 100 years ago? This is setting up some total wtf-ery for next time!
I loved how wack-job they got with some of the crazier elements, it felt like they took what they've done and decided to really, truly go all-in on doing what they it. And their understanding of the internet was pretty impressive! But they also tried way too hard to cram too many things together in it and it landed up feeling pretty messy and incoherent at times, and a lot of the thematic/Raiden character development stuff felt quite forced, and even getting almost mean-spirited about it towards the player? And the forced romantic happy ending, ugh, but maybe that was making their point too, which half mollifies me and half just annoys me more. So it was both better and worse than the last one, but I'd say I enjoyed it more overall even though I was lost 90% of the time.
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Re: Metal Gear Solid Watch-along
by Enail Mon Nov 09, 2020 8:26 pm
That VR Theory stuff would make a lot of sense with some of the stuff at the end that didn't quite work otherwise.
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Re: Metal Gear Solid Watch-along
by bomaye Mon Nov 09, 2020 8:37 pm
I really like the VR Theory
Do you have any interest in doing more of them during a lighter anime season? 3 and IV are kind of the "full story" (IV is long as hell, but it's chapter'ed so that can be easily cut-up/doesn't have to be done all at once) and then the others are filling in parts that don't totally know about.
- Spoiler:
Especially when it comes to Snake and Rose. Snake is depicted as the legendary hero he's supposed to be, he matches and reaches the expectations of the legend, tells you what you need to hear to tough it out and do what you want, and because he's Snake, you believe him. Rose as your fantasy waifu that looks and acts exactly the way you want but turns out to be completely fake, but then you do what the video game wants to you do to anyways and your reward is that you get your fake fantasy waifu back. You conquered the castle, you slayed the dragons, you beat the evil King, here's the Princess.
Do you have any interest in doing more of them during a lighter anime season? 3 and IV are kind of the "full story" (IV is long as hell, but it's chapter'ed so that can be easily cut-up/doesn't have to be done all at once) and then the others are filling in parts that don't totally know about.
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Re: Metal Gear Solid Watch-along
by Enail Mon Nov 09, 2020 11:20 pm
- Spoiler:
- It really improves the story to look at it in that light, too, because there is enough there that clearly aims for that message that it doesn't at all feel like a stretch, and it wraps up a lot of the more flawed elements into something more well-thought-out. Though, I think they could have done it a lot more smoothly and effectively if it was intentional.
Yeah, I could do them in a light season. I've been a little tight on time lately, so I might want to wait on one where I'm not watching any anime, though, I'll have to see.
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