Mirado

He's already cracked three of the major steps he needs, mainly using the bomb-omb to bust the goomba out, using the goomba to free the p-block and to kill the dry bones, and using the p-block to form the bridge he needs to get at the pow block.

All he needs to do is realize that he can stand on the pow block like he did in the 2nd GB stage and use it with the trampoline, and it's already wrapped.

This should help to quiet some of the growing dissent. While I remain skeptical of CIG's ability to deliver everything that has been laid out, attaching such big names to a project implies a level of resource investment that should translate well to the rest of the project. Maybe they aren't snorting cocaine in solid gold Veyrons after all?

@lyrebird: Well that's good, as I was worried Patrick would spend most of his time stuck at a figurative brick wall, which would make for poor viewing. As long as there's some difficult platforming throughout, I imagine he'll die in a variety of ways even if he figures out what to do relatively quickly. Glad to hear there's a good amount of classic Dan trickery in there as well.

To those that have tried the level: does it seem like that trick is the main obstacle, and that Patrick's success hinges on that? I caught a bit of a stream which had a lot of item carrying, but the actual traversal didn'f seem that hard, at least the part that I saw.

Yeah, if Dan isn't going to resort to hiding a star in an invisible block to get through some impossible portion of a level, then I think Patrick can take whatever he throws at him.

There are three things that break the Hoth map right now:

1) Spawn camping. The ability to get behind a spawn and lock it down with a stationary gun is so frustrating; they need to give you a brief period of invincibility before you take your first shot. In one instance, a Rebel got behind our spawn and used one of those gun towers to mow down something like 15 people, as you spawn in facing the wrong way and can't get a shot off. You either need spawn protection or the choice of multiple locations beyond just teleporting onto a friend.

2) Party imbalances. This is going to sound like common sense, but it'll tie into number three as well. By this, I mean the only time I've ever won on the Rebel side is when either I had a group of friends playing, or someone else did. With 20 player sides, the ability to coordinate almost half of your team is so powerful that it just tosses the gameplay balance away. "But that's true for most games!" To some degree, yes, but problem number three amplifies it to a crazy degree:

3)The win conditions are randomly spawned. By that, I mean if you save your orbital strike and actually use it on the AT-ATs when they are vulnerable, or get in a snowspeeder and tow cable them, you can win almost every time. But by having these things spawn randomly, there's no guarantee that they'll ever fall into the hands of a player that knows how to use them, and there's no place that you can wait for them to spawn with 100% confidence. This makes having a party so crucial, as the more players you have who actually know how to properly use the tools you are given, the better chance you have of getting those tools into their hands. It may be possible to win without either of those, but after 100 or so games, I haven't seen it.

Now, those last two will probably even out as more people learn what to do, but every time I see some collect one of the few snowspeeders or orbital strikes and proceed to use them on nothing/crash directly into the ground, I shed a single tear, as I know that match is probably over.

Half-Life 3 is a toxic name. You've got to call it anything else, as that "3" is going to carry such impossible expectations that no game could ever hope to live up to. Hell, I hope they just dump whatever it is on Steam with no fanfare, as any sort of lead up will cause stratospheric levels of hype.

With that being said, I could go for an open-world Half-Life as long as it retains the tight narrative of the older entries. A Half Life where a rebel tells me to pull down four Combine towers is NOT the kind of thing I'm looking for, though, so they'd need to find a way to incorporate the layout of an open world without a lot of the usual open-world trappings, if that makes any sense.

@jesus_phish: Quiet's whole ending doesn't make any sense, really. "I'm going to get away from Big Boss because the strain could mutate and infect people without speaking." "I was going to let the Russians kill me and hope the parasites won't mutate in that time and hope they don't have a English speaking interpreter, or something, but since Big Boss came here, we can blow up some tanks or whatever." "I won't speak English because I'm carrying the strain that'd kill Big Boss." "I just spoke an assload of English in front of Big Boss in order to save Big Boss." "I guess I'll wander into the desert to die, but I'm going to take my rifle and pose like I'm actually going to kick more ass anyway."

I have no idea what's up with that. Hell, she's capable of taking a near direct hit from a tank shell and hopped into a pit full of chlorine gas, I think she could have survived having some sort of operation done to yank those things out, even if that surgery would kill most normal people.

I feel like this is the fourth topic about this. My answer remains the same: Ocelot, between MGS2 and 4, putting together his crazy private armies and setting the stage with EVA to pull down The Patriots.

Motherfucker's too cool to not get his own game. Hell, Raiden was the star in two of them, and that's just a crime...even if Revengence was kind of awesome in a really dumb way.

@dudeglove said:

1) Y'know, I think this one is left unresolved. His eyes are the same as Code Talker's, and while it may be mistranslated, the line "Eyes on Kazuhira" does seem to indicate something is up if you take it literally.

2) Aww, I liked Baker Ocelot. There's a fair bit of nuance in there, including him basically riffing on the shit that he did back in MGS3.

3) So the Huey thing is a bit up in the air in some cases (Chico was the one who dumped a lot of info in Ground Zeroes, although Huey did let the choppers land), and pretty concrete in others (locking Strangelove in the AI pod, causing the outbreak). They kept him around because he was developing that sweet Battle Gear (still salty that it was cut and reduced to just a deployment checkbox) and giving them information on Skull Face. I'm not sure why they didn't just blow his brains out, but he got what he deserved in the end.

4) Well, I think it's the fact that two people respect The Boss (three if you count Strangelove), and then most people respect those two. There's a lot of bluster in the series about how she was charismatic to the point of being hypnotizing (Portable Ops had a program in it designed to replicate her power over speech, which led to the creation of Gene, but, y'know, it's Portable Ops so I'm not sure how canon that is). After a while, I think Zero just started using that as a justification rather than a real goal, and Big Boss dumped her ideals when he tossed her bandanna into the sea. Ocelot is her son, so his motivation makes sense, and Strangelove had a real crush on her, so there's that.

5) No idea! The Mantis you get in MGS1 and this floating kid share nothing beyond looks; his powers and personality are totally different, outside of the fact that they both levitate things.

6)They mentioned some kind of examination, but don't go into great detail about it.

7) Again, unexplained. He shares a lot of Alzheimer's related symptoms, but that's not something that you really transmit.

8) XOF is there to kill Big Boss, plain and simple. That's why he sends in the girl assassin that becomes Quiet, and the XOF crew to wipe everyone out on the off chance they did try to pull something like plastic surgery. Now, it seems that The Man on Fire and Float Child are there for the same reason, but are obviously not working with XOF at the time as they kill a hell of a lot of XOF troops. Could they have changed their faces to something else completely? Well, I guess, but Zero wanted the legend of Big Boss to keep going (his motivation feels really inconsistent with what we were led to believe in all of the pre-relelase marketing materials and quite a bit of BB's dialog in MGS4, i.e. that they got locked in an endless war against each other), so you needed at least one Big Boss to do that.

9) Look, don't read too much into it. The End has the same shit going for him and he apparently can wear a ghillie suit without croaking as well, so I don't know. You've got everyone using wormhole tech as well without batting an eye so let's just chalk this up under "I don't know, Metal Gear?"

10) Hell yeah I did! D-Dog plus the Infinity Bandanna means you never have to resupply at all, unless you are jacking containers and vehicles. It's amazing, although I do find myself shooting a lot more people in the head as I don't want D-Dog to fulton some A rank scrub back to my team of elite S/S+/S++ ranked god men.