Quick Look: Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes - Extra Ops

@bybeach: It wasn't a burn on Revengence, there are multiple logos for all the Metal Gear games throughout (from Ghost Babel to Metal Gear Touch), it'll say "nothing special" for all the titles that aren't necessarily canonical or "A Hideo Kojima game" titles, one of those two.

3>3>3>3>3>3>3.

It's not really that earth-shattering - he thought the length of the game was ridiculous, as do a lot of people. Called it "basically a paid demo", which Brad disagreed with. Said he finished the main game, and got a 'B' ranking, in 61 minutes.

The KWO will probably thumbs down this on YouTube.

I've never gotten into the MGS series, specifically because I can't get into games like these if the story is complete nonsense. Phantom Pain interests me a bit, specifically BECAUSE it seems to ditch some of the pretentious bullshit.

I like weird games, but MGS always seemed to be on the wrong side of the "line", with regards to weirdness. Just my opinion.

Why wont Brad just look where the searchlight is pointing? I fucking hate watching Brad play games.

Gosh this really hits home how Jeff made it a habit to value games based on their length and difficulty back in the day. He's mentioned before that he definitely put the concept of "value" a lot more prominently back then and it's interesting to contextualize his feelings of games knowing this now. I guess it's open to interpretation what it means that his impressions haven't changed of games that are veritable classics these days (i.e. Super Metroid and MGS) despite his changing feelings on customer value in games.

It's moments like these though that rekindle my desire to go back and play through the franchise myself having never done so. As divisive and subjective the series has been, especially when picking/ranking them, I kinda want to know where I stand on it myself.

@scotto: @bybeach: Well, he also mentioned finding some of the things that happen in the story offensive and "disgusting" and implied it might make Kojima a bad person that he put it in the game.

Which was... pretty damn ominous, coming from Jeff.

Poop jokes!

Huh, I must have missed that part somehow. Admittedly I was playing Titanfall while listening to it last night.

I don't understand why this is a quick look and not some other thing like a livestream. They've already quick looked this game and this is an hour and 36 minutes of a game with not a ton in it already. Weird.

Nothing against Brad personally, but holy smokes it's tough watching him play certain games sometimes.

My only guess is that maybe Brad wanted to try and demonstrate that there's more than an hour of videogame in this package.

What do you know, Vinny cannot remember things, Brad is clueless during a QL, and Jeff let's us know how much he hates MGS1. Giant Bomb, Giant Bomb never changes.

I hope Brad yelled "turn those machines back on!" when he found those grenades.

@brad@jeff@vinny about shooting cameras: the enemy control center will send the "closest" guy to investigate if you shoot it. So, if you neutralize the enemies in the camera's immediate surroundings, nobody will investigate and you can just keep trucking along. :)

"Just like old times"

How could they even let Kiefer say that line of dialogue....

Weird that Jeff doesn't like MGS1 for those reasons, where as MGS2 has less gameplay and is like...barely 2 hours without the cutscenes, which were longer than in 1's for sure. And I love 2, but the bosses in that game are really weak as well, definitely worst in the series.

Also, MGS1 is essentially a remake of Metal Gear 2 in a lot of ways.

And yeah Revengeance is really good, but I would rather play a different action game if I had the choice, or a different MGS game if I wanted Metal Gear. It was great for what it was, but I had more fun with the crazy items like the knockout gas cigarette case in MGS3 or the tornado gun in MGS4 than the slicing MGR.

I find it odd Jeff called Metal Gear Solid short in a dismissive tone. Outside of speed runs it's longer than most main stories/parts of games today, of course a lot of it is is codec and cutscene stuff, but if you take away dialogue and cutscenes from most games they get shortened by a lot.

Also these extras are awfully lazy, they could have done so much more with Raiden and the deja vu idea. Instead of packing them in as console exclusive extras they should have been on both platforms with some extra dollar spent on developing something cool.

Take out the electricity, then shoot the cameras. :)

MGS4 is one of the worst high-profile releases ever. It's even worse than MGS2, which was at least cool when it came out and only became obvious garbage years later.

I understand Jeff's love of the batshit stuff in Metal Gear, but the implementation of that stuff in 4 and 2 was just terrible, it was the most boring and dry way to communicate concepts of evil world-running AIs and genetic whatevers and war changing.

Plus Big Boss' story is just more interesting than Solid Snake's, since Snake was just a generic soldier for the most part.

@scotto: I'm not sure I agree. I don't think he's particularly good at SC or Dota, he just memorizes build orders in SC but from what I've seen he has no ability to think on his feet about it. He just masses guys and then directs them all around in one herd. Maybe SC is just that simple, I never played that much of it.

I also don't think he's actually that good at Dota. His teammates often seem to carry him, and he gets easily distracted watching other parts of the map for no real reason. He's just absorbed a bunch of trivia about the game.

He is good at MK, Quake, and other very twitchy games, though, that is true. But that doesn't mean he should then be exhibiting his lack of skill 15 years after those types of games have (unfortunately) gone out of favor.

I have no problem with Brad in terms of his personality (except when he gets indignant or refuses to admit he's wrong) and think he's great on the Bombcast, but dude should not be recorded playing games.

Haha, yeah, Jeff is so wrong about MGS1. Like, it's not even worth explaining, everyone reading this but Jeff knows why MGS1 was so good at the time.

Though it is apparent that Brad has fanboy-level knowledge of MGS1 because he played it when he was in his late teens, compared to the age Jeff and Vinny would've played it. The part where he says "I want your input on the hard version of the quiz show" was laughable when he clearly has a more encyclopedic knowledge of MGS1's script than Jeff and Vinny.

I remember completing MW3 in 3h20m according to the in-game timer. MP didn't last much longer.

GZ at 10+ hours at the moment.

Titanfall $60 MP only always online, what a great value for money right guys.

You can hear a little bit more of Kiefer in the briefing audio logs. I think he's great for the role, but I always thought David Hayter sounded kind of awful.

I share Jeff's annoyance with Brad not fucking paying attention to the helo's spot light. "Where are they?!" I dunno Brad, Jeff and the game only mentioned the goddamn helicopter spotlight like 5 goddamn times!

The salt in this comment section is delicious.

I wonder if the guy in the outhouse at the end of the QL wrote into the Bombcast?

@dan_citi said:

Yeah, MGS2 has very little going for it aside from the shock value of "oh shit, surprise, you don't play as Snake for most of the game." And the ending has those handful of Codec calls where Campbell makes no sense because he's this glitched out AI. Like, that's it. That's all I remember thinking was actually well done in that game.

Everything about the gameplay and level design and boss design is pretty bad and forgettable, with all of the bosses being much less interesting then anything in MGS1 or 3.

A HIND D???

Brad pls ;__;

@bacongames said:

Yeah, I think Jeff writes really interesting reviews now, but it's really hard to take any of his opinions on older games seriously for exactly the reasons you lay out. The criteria he judged all games on are weird, even later into the 90s when games were changing. It's funny to hear how many games he basically hated while reviewing at Gamespot, yet had to give a 8 or 9 to because of the Gamespot review scale (Majora's Mask, for example).

On the other hand, Jeff still has certain eccentricities, like where he doesn't seem to like games that make him play in a particular playstyle. Like how he plays fantasy games with the fastest weapons he can attack with, and just kills stuff faster than it kills him, which leads to him liking the combat of something like Kingdoms of Amalur, but then not playing stuff like Dark Souls or Monster Hunter because his chosen playstyle is generally punished and not effective.

Jeff is hipster-ing his as OFF around the 50 min mark. Original Metal Gear Solid... disappointing? How the fuck could something so revolutionary, so fresh, so not-done-before be disappointing? "It was too short" Oooooh okay, we get it Jeff, you think you were so good at video games.

MGS4 was terrible, btw Jeff. Fan service marathon. MGS3 was the best.

To select the alternate costumes, press left and right on the mission select screen. The left and right arrows are only visible on the mission that allows you to change your costume.

@Brad when reflex mode activates, if you follow the on screen prompt to press L2, your aim will snap to who ever has seen you.

Man, Jeff's insane taste in video games would be completely fine if he didn't shit on the things I love without any regard to other opinions. I know it's mostly done for entertainment, but fuck does Jeff sound jaded sometimes.

But whatever, I laughed at his hate for Yoshi's Island so I can't really get mad when he shits on my turf.

@fitzgerald: can we stop saying hipster already? because all it really means now is "somebody likes something I don't like or doesn't like something I like" and I feel like we should just be calling that "an opinion"

Please get rid of Sutherland, he phoned in his vo, get David Hayter.

So confused at Jeff's comments; He liked Metal Gear and Metal Gear Solid 2, but not 1? Weird.

@customotto:

You should take a break from the internet. It won't become less stupid any time soon.

1:16:30

Giant Bomb reacts to the breaking news of Facebook/Oculus Rift!

@dan_citi: As far as I can tell Jeff seems to hate almost every video-game with actual gameplay.

@fitzgerald:

Wow it is PAINFUL listening to these guys try and piece together Metal Gear history from broken memories.

haha thanks

No, being hipster is all about "I liked/disliked something BEFORE everyone else thought it was cool to like/dislike something." And that is what Jeff is doing here. He is taking his current-day jaded feelings of Metal Gear and applying them wrongly to the past, as if his old self back then knew that Metal Gear would spin out into this huge, overly saturated, overly fan-serviced franchise. Which he couldn't have. He's being an ass.

...but before y'all start jumping on me: he's easily the funniest guy on the Bombcast, and his love for Persona 4 redeems him greatly. He's the reason why I got started on Persona in the first place.

The end of this game is pretty fucked and really skeeved me out. IGN actually put up a good article about it today (spoilers obviously)

Wow... I honestly thought that the Xbox version they were playing was the 360 version... That looks pretty junky compared to the PS4 version. That resolution change adds a lot of noticeable jaggies to Snakes hair and stuff.