What Are You Currently Playing? 5.05: You Are (Not) A Gamer

[gunswordfist]

I played the demo for Retro City Rampage for the second time yesterday, I believe. I really really love the gameplay (I'm a sucker for jumping in top down games) but what bothers me is how many and how long the cutscenes are and all the handholding. The game starts out by telling you where to go and if you don't because you want to explore the city, you'll get hit by a SMB3 teleport tornado and end up in the mission anyway. Then you get screamed at about what you have to do in between every single objective. Also, the game being 15 bucks doesn't help. RCR being heavy handed with the references is a minor gripe of mine.

[Grave]

Super Street Fighter 4: Arcade Edition
More fooling around in training mode. Dropped Ibuki and picked up Yun.

Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty
Well, MGS: HD Collection to be exact. Anyway, oh dear God, there are some really annoying parts in this game that I hate (guiding Emma, walking around naked). I'll be playing this along with 3 and 4 (finally), and perhaps probably start Peacewalker as well to prepare for Metal Gear Rising. Who knows, playing this series again may boost it back up as my top favorite again.

[talonmalon333]

Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty
Well, MGS: HD Collection to be exact. Anyway, oh dear God, there are some really annoying parts in this game that I hate (guiding Emma, walking around naked). I'll be playing this along with 3 and 4 (finally), and perhaps probably start Peacewalker as well to prepare for Metal Gear Rising. Who knows, playing this series again may boost it back up as my top favorite again.

The Metal Gear franchise is definitely up there in my favorites as well. My only problem is that 3 sort of outclasses every other game in the series. Still, they are all great despite that, and despite 2 nearly bordering on shark jumper.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

You know what my favorite part of MGS2 was (the only MGS game that I've played in full)? It was the VR missions. The actual story was nothing but boring exposition and nonsense, and the main game was a bit annoying to deal with since it felt so unfocused as the gameplay was constantly being interrupted by the story. Yeah, you could skip cut-scenes, but even then what you were doing was always decided by where the story wanted to take you, so if you were having some fun trying to sneak through rooms and stealthily make your way to a certain objective, you'd either get interrupted by some annoying boss fight, or some timer would go off and you'd have to back-track to another area of the map, or some other scenario would just basically change the whole focus of your gameplay, and I'm the type of gamer who likes to focus on one thing at a time and have that one thing last for a fair amount of time to feel satisfying. I do openly welcome variety, but MGS2 went overboard with it, IMO, and constantly kept throwing something new at you without giving you enough time to focus on what you were already doing to begin with. I also didn't enjoy all of those context sensitive scenarios, like the part where you had to disguise yourself as a guard and then using a listening device to find the guy who had a mechanical heartbeat. It was an interesting gameplay concept, I suppose, but I didn't have much fun actually doing it.

Now, as for the VR missions, they were self-contained mini-missions each with their own objectives. In other words, they were completely focused and had nothing to do with the story, and they were also really challenging in a very fun way. They also came in all sorts of categories which made them a blast to play. Some of them had you focus only on stealth and make it from point A of a room to point B without ever getting spotted. Another stealth type of mission had you sneak up on all of the guards in a particular area and point a gun to their back making them freeze in their tracks without actually killing them. Then you had those arcade style target-shooting challenges, with each single weapon in the game having its own set of challenges (those were my favorites, personally). And then you had a plethora of other unique and interesting challenges to keep you coming back for more. The VR missions were addicting in their arcade-like approach, and honestly that's where I spent the bulk of my play-time for MGS2, rather than the story mode. Although, believe it or not, I actually beat the story mode TWICE in MGS2 despite not caring for it. I did it once on Easy mode because I suck at stealth games, but I'm not satisfied unless I can beat a game on its default difficulty setting, so I ended up going back and playing the game on Normal mode so that I could say that I actually did beat MGS2 for real.

[Grave]

I think everybody and their mother can agree that the story in MGS2 wasn't great, or rather more confusing than ever.

The actual story was nothing but boring exposition and nonsense, and the main game was a bit annoying to deal with since it felt so unfocused as the gameplay was constantly being interrupted by the story. Yeah, you could skip cut-scenes, but even then what you were doing was always decided by where the story wanted to take you, so if you were having some fun trying to sneak through rooms and stealthily make your way to a certain objective, you'd either get interrupted by some annoying boss fight, or some timer would go off and you'd have to back-track to another area of the map, or some other scenario would just basically change the whole focus of your gameplay, and I'm the type of gamer who likes to focus on one thing at a time and have that one thing last for a fair amount of time to feel satisfying.

Honestly, I don't know what you look for when it comes to this kind of game, but the MGS franchise are fairly linear to begin with. There's only 2 ways to go about it. Stealth or Gung-ho. Assuming you're trying to strategically plan your route, there's not much to really go on there either, not unless you play on higher difficulties. Much like the hack n slashers, to get the full experience of MGS games you pretty much need to play on harder difficulties (not sure if normal is worth it, but then again I'm into these games for its story) outside of MGS1 (That game scares me). The series don't really open up until MGS3, and even then it's still fairly linear in what you can do. As far as cutscenes go, can't help you there. MGS is notorious for them (and I don't mind them as long as I can enjoy them). The backtracking, well, lets face it, there's not much you can do being on a vessel and I forgot what that thing was in part 2 (oil tanker thingy?). But yeah, Kojima more than made up for all of that in MGS3.

Unfortunately, I never had Substance until now so I never had the chance to play the VR missions, and probably won't ever bother with them either.

The Metal Gear franchise is definitely up there in my favorites as well. My only problem is that 3 sort of outclasses every other game in the series. Still, they are all great despite that, and despite 2 nearly bordering on shark jumper.

Agreed, although I've yet to play MGS4, but I've seen the whole game played and it looked awesome. MGS4's gameplay just looks too good.

I also tried to play the 1st Gears of War.... I was bout ready to chuck my controller at the tv. Incompetent A.I. running directly at a turret. From what I've played so far I definitely like Gears2 over this one.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

That's all fine and dandy, but I didn't like MGS2's story mode because it just wasn't fun to play. As for the higher difficulties, I'm sure that its great on higher difficulties if you're good at stealth games. I suck at stealth games and while I could always practice to get better, I don't find the game that fun for me to try to get better at it. The VR missions were short (which made them perfect to play in small bursts, which is usually how I play games, anyways), and were actually fun for me to do. The main story may have gotten more challenging on harder difficulties, but I didn't see the point of pursuing them if I wasn't having all that much fun with the base gameplay to begin with. In contrast, even if games like Ninja Gaiden or Devil May Cry aren't at their best until you get to their higher difficulty settings, I still had a lot of fun playing them even on Normal mode. To be fair, while I suck at stealth games, I actually consider myself to be fairly good at hack n' slash games, and maybe even action games in general, as its my favorite genre of gaming. So, with those games, I could appreciate the higher challenge on harder difficulties since I enjoyed the base gameplay and genuinely wanted to get better at it. With MGS2, I'm not saying that its a bad game, but I just don't find its style of gameplay to be all that much fun. It just doesn't really appeal to me. That's about all I can say regarding that game.

[Grave]

Don't know what to tell ya then.

[talonmalon333]

The thing about MGS2's storyline is that I highly respect the themes that Kojima was trying to explore, such as censorship. But the end result was just a convoluted mess, particularly with the plot twists at the end. And the gameplay advancements weren't enough to make me like it more than MGS1... On the other hand, MGS3 easily has one of the best stories in gaming. Because it just forgoes all MGS2's overwritten material and political coverup nonsense, and it simply makes for a really good character driven story. And I think many here would agree with me that character driven stories are generally the best. I mean, the two most important characters in the game (if you played it, you know who they are) are both some of my favorite game characters ever. It also managed to avoid overloading on exposition and bad cheesyness, and the game is surprisingly funny.

So yeah, in short, MGS3 is awesome. Video games generally have mediocre writing, but I think MGS3 is an exception and very much had me emotionally invested. And even putting aside the story, the gameplay is just fantastic and a perfect improvement over 1 and 2.

[Grave]

I could probably go on forever about why I liked MGS3, starting with the music all the way up to how the game ended. Anyway, the reason I prefer MGS2's gameplay over MGS1 (of course I prefer MGS3 over both 1 & 2) is because I can't shoot in FPV in MGS1. I started out with MGS2 then went onto MGS3, and then back to MGS1. I got spoiled with being able to shoot in FPV till I won't accept any reasoning what-so-ever to go back to MGS. Even though I heard Kojima's reason why he won't do, I do await the day where I get a MGS remake.

I'll also say that there aren't many games out there that actually wows me. MGS3 is one of those games that wows me with its presentation and characters (along with Shenmue, Halo Reach, Mass Effect, and Assassin's Creed 2, of course for different reasons). I can probably point out flaws in MGS3 (along with the others), and I'd never call a game perfect, but if there was one that came close to it, it's definitely MGS3. Kojima will be my favorite game director until he decide to not do another Metal Gear game.

Bump it, screw MGS2, I'm gonna start wit 3 and go straight to 4 and PW.

[talonmalon333]

I could probably go on forever about why I liked MGS3, starting with the music all the way up to how the game ended. Anyway, the reason I prefer MGS2's gameplay over MGS1 (of course I prefer MGS3 over both 1 & 2) is because I can't shoot in FPV in MGS1. I started out with MGS2 then went onto MGS3, and then back to MGS1. I got spoiled with being able to shoot in FPV till I won't accept any reasoning what-so-ever to go back to MGS. Even though I heard Kojima's reason why he won't do, I do await the day where I get a MGS remake.

I'll also say that there aren't many games out there that actually wows me. MGS3 is one of those games that wows me with its presentation and characters (along with Shenmue, Halo Reach, Mass Effect, and Assassin's Creed 2, of course for different reasons). I can probably point out flaws in MGS3 (along with the others), and I'd never call a game perfect, but if there was one that came close to it, it's definitely MGS3. Kojima will be my favorite game director until he decide to not do another Metal Gear game.

Bump it, screw MGS2, I'm gonna start wit 3 and go straight to 4 and PW.

I do really love the gameplay enhancements that MGS2 made. It's just that the story was ridiculous, and I didn't care for most of the characters in the game. Plus, the Big Shell wasn't a very interesting setting, and the amount of times you gotta run back and forth on it doing the same things hurts it. MGS1 generally had you continuously moving forward with little back tracking.

They should remake MGS, perhaps on the 3DS assuming that Snake Eater 3DS did well.

[Grave]

I can understand the argument against backtracking, and people are in the right to not like it, but for some oddball of a reason backtracking don't bother me. I guess when you wind up getting lost in games and continuously keep traversing the same areas over and over it has a different effect on people.

We're in agreement about the characters though. I think out of all the characters the ones that I ended up liking were Snake, Ocelot, Vamp and Fortune. Raiden, while I never hated his character, I just thought he was okay. I understand the points people have against him being whiny (and I agree for the most part) I just never minded him.

[talonmalon333]

I can understand the argument against backtracking, and people are in the right to not like it, but for some oddball of a reason backtracking don't bother me. I guess when you wind up getting lost in games and continuously keep traversing the same areas over and over it has a different effect on people.

We're in agreement about the characters though. I think out of all the characters the ones that I ended up liking were Snake, Ocelot, Vamp and Fortune. Raiden, while I never hated his character, I just thought he was okay. I understand the points people have against him being whiny (and I agree for the most part) I just never minded him.

I probably should've rephrased that (because I really do think MGS2 is a great game). The backtracking might've been a flaw, but it didn't actually hurt the game. It just didn't improve it, if that makes any sense.

As for the characters, I didn't particularly mind Raiden. He was okay, but he's really no Snake (love how much MGS3 makes fun of him). Putting aside the main characters which are awesome (Snake, Otakon, and Ocelot) the characters I thought were okay were Raiden, Rose, Olga, and Solidus. I like that Solidus was a guy who wanted the best for American, but ultimately became a terrorist. I actually hated Vamp.

And if you want to count them, I also thought the GWs were really interesting.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

I can understand the argument against backtracking, and people are in the right to not like it, but for some oddball of a reason backtracking don't bother me. I guess when you wind up getting lost in games and continuously keep traversing the same areas over and over it has a different effect on people.

I don't mind back-tracking either, but I hate it when its used as blatant padding.

Good examples of back-tracking for me are in games like Halo: Combat Evolved and Ninja Gaiden Black. In both games, when you go back to previous areas that you were at before, you find that you traverse the levels in completely different ways than before, and on top of that you have new sets of enemies to fight that weren't previously there, making the experience still feel fresh despite revisiting a very familiar environment.

One problem I had with the back-tracking in DMC4 is that for the most part they didn't even bother to change up the enemies that you fight as Dante when progressing through the game. It was literally almost entirely going through Nero's levels in reverse, without much variation (with maybe just a few new enemies thrown in along the way). I still did tolerate it because playing through those areas as Dante is what made playing through those areas again still feel fresh, but it still felt cheap to have to basically go through the game again from reverse, just as Dante. I don't mind that for a subsequent play-through if you gained the ability to play Nero's levels as Dante and vice versa, but for a single play-through it felt more like padding, to be honest.

[talonmalon333]

I don't mind back-tracking either, but I hate it when its used as blatant padding.

Which is how I felt about MGS2 at times. A little bit padded.

[Grave]

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