Metal Gear Scanlon: 2 - Part 04

@slaegar: I was that idiot as well. Every time the codec sound comes up my heart skips a beat and I look at my phone.

the dan x drew relationship is the best thing about post-vinny giant bomb

Only took ~40 minutes for Jason to point them away from a dead fucking end. Jesus christ that was hard to watch.

@danryckert IMO feel free to point out stuff that maybe hasn't been noticed but is put out there in the game, like the cockroach thing. That is in no way stepping over any spoiler line and just making up for how @drewbert is playing this week to week not like how most people would play it. It is fun to see Drew play through without knowledge but things like that are obvious to a player without an audience doing the game at home.

This is the part of the game that made me quit the game 13 years go when I first played it, the Rose dialogue, the crappy you already know who the people are but we aren't telling part, and the really annoying gameplay. It just all made me never want to continue playing the game, but with this coming out I'm committed to making it through a bit ahead... mostly because I really want to watch this playthrough and don't want it to be me never having seen what transpires.

I haven't played much further than where they are, but I still think this is a terrible at least part of the game.

When you've got a few zillion clones who look like you running about, positively IDing your body should be pretty hard.

Good ole Iroquois Pliskin and Vamp now, huh? This game is so weird, I love it.

Edit: Well, I love the story, at least. Watching this is reminding me of all the stuff I didn't love about it. Namely all the camera angles and stuff. I just found it damn near impossible to see where I was going most of the time when I played it.

@mooseymcman: I hate Vamp so so much. God damn it. Still massively enjoying this feature of course. Hell I recently acquired a mint PS2 copy of Substance for... reasons.

@hassun: You know, I'm kinda torn on Vamp, for reasons. (Not to pimp my months old blogs or anything).

God I miss Mei Ling

Watching Drew play this might be the death of me, I am so glad Jason is there. Still love these though.

Raiden, head to strut B! Drew goes straight to F. I can't handle this! :p

Did anyone ever think the Rose/Jack relationship stuff was good? I've seen some bad romance writing before but wow that's some hot garbage. There isn't a single line they say to each other that doesn't make me cringe, roll my eyes, and put my face into my hand.

Nope, I've never heard anyone say anything good about that part of MGS2. It's just terrible.

I bet you could hop down and get that porno

This is like my favorite new thing. Though, you might as well call it an endurance run... speaking of... I want more of those.

Pro Tip: Do a bunch of pull-ups to level up your grip. It comes in handy later.

It always bugs me that the voice director apparently didn't understand that "J.G." is supposed to be part of the rank (Lieutenant Junior Grade), and not somebody's name.

Man, the tanker portion was so good...

Still the dumbest game I've beaten a dozen times.

Wow, I forgot Plissken shows up this early.

Thank you Jason from preventing this episode to be super frustrating.

Boy, Rose is an awful character (Raiden is terrible too, the voice actor makes some strange decisions on delivery on a lot of lines).

I thought Vamp was super scary when I was 12.

A lot of cutscenes to set stuff up. Next few episodes will be dealing with the bombs and Fat Man, so it goes up from here.

They should give Drew one "Codec call" to Jason per episode, phone a friend style, for non-spoiler time saving hints. It's clear Drew wants to figure it out himself, which is cool, but dead-end stuff sucks when they're not playing a ton of hours throughout the week.

Dan, that fucking smirk when you hear "Lunatic Fringe"!

That stuck out for me as well, just the very nonchalant way Dan states it. It made me laugh for some dumb reason.

Drew is secretly a Metal Gear pro. You always head to Strut F to get the M9 and other equipment. Haha.

But when I first played this game I went the wrong way. But since there's useful stuff in Strut F, I always went the wrong way. The president will be just fine.

It's pretty awful!

Thank you to @unastrike for nudging things in the right direction, I found that first bit a little rough. Loving the series, can't wait till Tuesday.

Funny, episode, I thought Drew was going to bang his head against the EF door forever!

Jason saved this episode. If Dan is Campbell & Drew is Snake then Jason is The Boss.

Also; the reason why the codec tutorials show Raiden with stealth camo is to re-enforce the idea that Raiden has trained for countless hours in VR.

I think of it as a necessary evil. You wouldn't appreciate MGS4 Raiden if you didn't have to suffer through MGS2 Raiden. It also has its own pay off in MGS2. That doesn't excuse Rose being terrible, but at least it's not for nothing.

Then they went and made Raiden an angsty teen in Metal Gear Rising for some reason. :(

I can only imagine where they would be if Jason didn't nudge them to the right direction...

Great video as always, slipping on the bird's poo was just hilarious.

@maajin:

No, it's really fuckin awful, I mean leaps and bounds beyond anything else in the series. Worst part of it all, it's apparently inspired by Kojimas own relationship with his wife. Which I don't even know what means. I really want to believe that it's just meant as a funny and classic romance cliche. But I kind of think that Kojima really likes it, and takes it serious.

Another thing is, that everything considered, Kojima isn't terrible at writing female characters and flirty dialog. Meryl from MGS1 is a great character, so are the women in Snake eater. In 4 stuff get's a little weird, but never as bad as the Rose/Jack stuff.

@aeonfell: That's a pretty damn good idea.

I'm pretty sure it's just supposed to be that Raiden doesn't understand that because he's a rookie idiot.

This is my favorite feature of giant bomb history.

@drewbert It's not excrutiating! Even in tutorial sequences, MGS2 has a lot of minor things that play into the rest of the game. If anything, watching this stuff AND knowing what is going on is even more interesting.

Yes, now Drew gets to experience the conversations between Rose and Raiden.

I remember thinking that Fatman was a really lame name until I remembered it was one of the atomic devices dropped on Japan in World War II.

I'm glad Jason is there to push Dan and Drew in the right direction when they're facing dead end territory. Also, if Dan doesn't remember much about MGS2, I'm almost positive he will have forgotten some elements of the plot, it should be fun to watch him be reminded about some of the twists and turns.

Thank you based Jason for saving us. I was scared it would take 3 episodes to get to Strut B

Should have played VR missions.

This is the only reason I signed up for the premium membership... So worth it so far!

I never liked Raiden in anyway until he put on a sombrero and poncho in Rising.

I don't know how anyone can like these Jack and Rose dialogues. They are so cringe worthy.

I would put Jason's Strut B hint as "time-saving" and not spoilers, since they had exhausted all of their options in Strut F already, and watching Drew run around the same building for another 20 minutes would have been excruciating.

It may be cause MGS2 is the one I played first and the most but it takes them waaaay to long to get to the AB bridge........

Haven't started yet, but if the deck is to be believed, Jeff and Dan have more than their love of pro wrestling in common (sex in bathroom stalls)

"Well you found an M9 and some porno so it wasn't for nothing." Lol

I feel like the guys should be playing with the original strategy guide. Everyone I knew that had this game had that guide and the first play through still took around 10 hours. Then again I've played this over and over.

This may be the best-ever recurring feature.

@dberg said:

"Yeah. Can't wait. Woo-hoo!"

It's not just Rose that's terrible. Everything Raiden says to her is terrible as well. You're on a top secret spy mission and you're talking to your girlfriend about lobster at "that one restaurant" instead of her making dinner? I haven't played this game or any of the games after it, but so far every interaction I've seen between Rose and Jack have been terrible, and neither one of them has better dialogue than the other.