@redfox742: I only don't know why it's hamfisted as it's actually done in the most elegant way possible, through the vehicle of the players imagination. Nothing is explicit or gratuitous. The voice recordings are a genius move because they leave the worst of it to your imagination. Kojima manages to convey some of the worst realities of modern day war and detainment without showing you a single exploitative image. Instead you are faced with the aftermath of a broken down Paz, which Snake has to literally carry to safety.
You are taking this weird stance that I mentioned earlier where with women it's fetishization while with Snake it's character growth. In all honesty I don't remember any time where Snake was tortured and he came away from the experience enlightened in any way. The torture moments were never major story reveals - in fact they usually facilitated some sort of story exposition that didn't yet make any sense to the player and only later became clear during the end-game info dump Kojima is so keen on. The only time it's really meaningful would be during the microwave tunnel in MGS4, if we qualify that as a torture scene - and it's really well done even if it is a literal pain to playthrough, which is the point.
@sethphotopoulos: people want more mature themes in games as long as they have nothing to do with anything remotely sexual. Ground Zeroes dealt with numerous themes that the press, made up mostly of people in their mid twenties, is not comfortable or emotionally mature enough to handle - such as rape and torture conducted on women. We are fine with men getting tortured, after all Snake (Big Boss) gets his eye shot out of his face after lengthy beatings and electrocution, but he's considered a heroic man for withstanding it, rather than an oppressed victim. As such Kojima was called disgusting and said to have taken things way too far, when ironically in the news we hear of equally grotesque torture conducted in real life prison camps, on real people.
@dusker: A cool little known factoid about New York City is that each New Years as the ball descends it also erases all memories of winter from everyone in the town. It is always very humorous and often very inconvenient when the entire city suddenly wakes up and realizes that it's winter again, and oh my god that means there's going to be snow - wait do we even have trucks and snow plows ready for this? Oh shit it's too late, it started snowing and we haven't mobilized anything! Then the obligatory NYC snow day occurs when no one can get to work because no plows have been running because no one remembered that this happens every single year.
It's truly a mesmerizing phenomenon. One year when I worked night shifts I had to come home at 3am and was wearing a suit with formal leather half-shoes. It started raining halfway throughout the day and by night time the snow had amassed to literally about 3 feet - still no plows in sight. Taxis are of course not running, so after getting out of the subway I had to wade through 15 blocks of knee high snow in my formal attire. It was pretty annoying.
@doctordonkey: Well to each their own of course. I don't think their parkour is bad at all and it never felt bad even in inFamous 1 where it was a lot more janky than it is now. InFamous 2 eliminated the problem your having with either the ice-launcher ability or the electricity pole booster that shot you up and then you just rode the rails. The climbing itself is sometimes finnicky about finding handholds but the game is generally so floaty that it's never a problem. I mean I won't argue with you here because it's obviously a matter of taste, but personally I love it.
Took this video today, it's really everything I love about climbing in games. Fluidity, the sense of scale and the slight chills when you look down and it's a sheer drop.
// Spoilers for the third power in the game if anyone cares //
@quid_pro_bono: Sadly she's a lot less cool and a lot more whiney in the DLC. I also enjoyed her in the main game but she really seems like a different person in First Light, although I suppose the circumstances call for it.
@brodehouse: I haven't watched Fraser in about 15 years so many of those comparisons flew right over my head. All I'm getting is that the person that won was not the person the people wanted to win.
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