Why do members of the bomb crew keep referring to this game as a "Vietnam" game. I apologise for not having a direct quote from anyone but seem to recall this being alluded to several times. I guess it should come down to the fact that it's a cold-war thing set in a jungle...

I think I may be a little sensitive to this seeing as I've lived in Vietnam for 2 years, I get a bit annoyed when people just associate such a beautiful culture and place with a war. For americans and many westerners, Vietnam seems to just mean, you know, that war that happened in a jungle somewhere far away. The funny thing is, in Vietnam, understandably they call it the American war.

Also being set in the Russian jungle is a little weird, are there any jungles in Russia?

It's next to Russian Desert, just past the Russian Crocodile swamps I think.

@g00z3m4n: The geography of Metal Gear Solid 3 is wholly fictional with no real life equivalent. Not only are there no tropical jungles in Russia I bet there is nowhere you can find swamps, tropical forests, canyons, mountains ranges all within <24 hours walking distance. It's so gamey they might as well have included a lava and ice world.

MGS2 - "Excuse me. Can we have a look at your ship?"

MGS3 - "Excuse me. Can we have a look at your abandoned military facilities?" <guns drawn>

Ignorance. The Giant Bomb staff have proven time and again in both knowledge of and playing video games that they are jack of all trades, master of none.

You could say that's the drawback of their job, they can't focus on any one genre, but they also don't do themselves any favours by not looking things up before speaking about them.

Remember that Quick Look where both Dan and Jeff questioned whether or not Africa was involved with World War 2?

I guess they get around the location thing more in MGS4 by being super vague about where exactly you are (Middle-East, Eastern Europe, South America, etc) while in MGS3, a lot of the locations simply don't exist. Russia is absolutely massive but it just doesn't have the locations depicted in the game.

Speaking as a product of an American public school education, I can safely say it's just because most of us didn't get taught a lot about the larger world or where things are relative to one another. I remember that there was a push for higher standards in geography when I was in high school (long, LONG ago - I'm an Old), and one of the students in my class honestly announced that she believed that Austria was where kangaroos lived. This was a girl who consistently got straight A's in her classes.

I recently had the realization that Switzerland is nowhere near Sweden, and it kind of blew my dumb American brain.

@mathey: Haha yeah the Sweden/Switzerland confusion I am well aware of, seeing as I'm Swedish I've had a lot of people foreigners assume I'm actually from Switzerland.

I guess the United States is so big and diverse in itself so that learning about all the different states is already pretty daunting. This Vietnam thing isn't strictly limited to americans though as I've met Swedish people who were very surprised by my stay in Vietnam as they thought it's just a destroyed war-zone.

It's funny watching Metal Gear Scanlon because I feel like Dan and Drew are pretty much polar opposites when it comes to knowledge about the surrounding world. Dan is like the classic American dude, who I definitely would expect to just associate Vietnam with the "Vietnam war" or "'nam", whereas Drew has actually visited Vietnam.

Well uh... It's definitely inspired by movies of Vietnam war, like wading through swamps, dodging traps in the jungle etc.

I mean, there are no jungles in Russia, so it's obviously that, it's so obviously Vietnam war inspired. I have no idea why you would think that it's ignorant to say that.

Russia has stated many times Vietnam is closer to the Russian spirit and heritage than the Ukraine. Too bad we bought into that BS. Rates of dead/wounded in Vietnam that make our past involvement in Iraq a joke(though not a pleasant one) Now There very well may be a party, but we have showed up way early.

Vietnam thankfully is becoming history. Though we seemed to have forgotten the lessons. It now seems worthless our fear of what they represented.

This. The whole setting is clearly meant to evoke that.

@mathey: maybe people just relate cold to Switzerland and thus think it's nearby Norway, Sweden and Finland.

Wait a second...are you guys saying that Metal Gear Solid 3 isn't historically and geographically accurate?

Mind blown.

@yinstarrunner said:

It's evocative of the Vietnam War up to a point, but the enemy soldiers are nothing like the Vietcong, and the game does have environments that aren't as easily associated with the Vietnam War. The area in MGS3 where there are spike traps is a relatively small portion of the game, though admittedly those sort of traps are reminiscent of the Vietnam War and only make sense to have near a heavily contested border/warfront, so it's really fucking weird that the traps are just randomly in the jungle near a supposedly secret Russian research facility. Then again, WHY DOES THE ARMOURY ON SHADOW MOSES ISLAND HAVE GIANT BOTTOMLESS PIT TRAPS?

But yeah, MGS3 has a crazy amount of biomes that Snake travels through within a couple of days that make little sense for any part of Russia. I mean, Russia technically has a temperate rainforest or two, but there's no tropical rainforest, and there's certainly no jungle, because Russia just doesn't really have the latitude and climate for either.

In terms of my own pop culture references if you refer to something as, "Vietnam War" inspired, I already have an image of what the environment, tone and settings would be for that game. With all the movies, books, and media out there over the years people already have a clear vision of what The Vietnam War looked like, which looks pretty similar to MGS 3 environments. I don't think they were throwing the country name out there to bash it but probably to compare it to what most Americans think of when you say Vietnam War. If they had said Cold War, I probably wouldn't think Jungles and swamps but probably James Bond, secret spy shit.

...And yes, Vietnam looks like a fantastic place to visit. Drew showcasing his trip over there a few years ago kinda made me itching to take a visit next time I'm over in East Asia.

Guys I am not really too bothered about this "ignorance", I didn't even intend to point anything out as ignorance. And of course I understand that metal gear is completely fictional and also inspired by a lot of american action movies, which means you're probably correct in assuming it's got Vietnam-war movie influences.

I guess I'm just sad that many people's sole impression of Vietnam the country, is war. When my lasting impression from living there is (in Da Nang) an amazing place with lots of warm friendly people. Though I'm not blaming anyone for being ignorant, as I am personally ignorant about much (if not most) of the world.

Thanks for the replies though, I guess I personally never agot any Vietnam-war vibe from the game when I played through it aside from it taking place in a jungle (There are more jungled war-ravaged places in the world than Vietnam). Yes I have seen my share of Vietnam-war movies too, Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, Apocalypse Now, Good Morning Vietnam etc.

@bisonhero: I always assumed those pit traps were only at 10-20 feet at max. At the end of the pit you'd eventually get dropped into the Arctic Ocean eventually succumbing to either being drowned to death or hypothermia as your caught in the rippling cold currents.

I don't associate Vietnam with the war, but that may be because I'm not American. I have a couple friends that lived/visited Vietnam, so I'd be down to fly there for a couple of days actually. So yeah, Vietnam sounds like a cool place to visit.

I'd think that many people associate Vietnam with the war and wartime attitudes more than the country itself, which is unfortunate, but shows how much of an impact that era.

There is a reason many Americans associate Vietnam with the war. That war was a major turning point for our culture both in terms of international diplomacy, and the politics of war in the public eye. The coverage and reporting of the war in the USA was unprecedented, giving civilians insight into the nature of war they never thought about before. For the first time ever, housewives in the midwest were seeing warfare in color on their television, and in many cases the most graphic groundbreaking footage.

The fallout of which was a war that many young people, political activists, and regular citizens didn't believe in became even more sour in the public eye. This in turn caused veterans who returned home to be treated poorly along with the fact that our veterans administration just didn't provide almost any of them with adequate mental and physical care. The effects of which still are present in our society through the way many of our grandfathers and fathers were treated. Drafted into a war many of them didn't support, subjected to the horrors of a guerilla war, and then upon return ostracized by the citizens of their home country.

It was a major event in our culture, and despite Vietnam being a rich vibrant culture, it's just the first thing many from the US think about because it really changed our society in many ways.

Cold war and jungle, can there be any better description than Vietnam? Most people dont know much about the actual country of Vietnam and its neighbours and so on but i dont know much about Kansas and its neighbours either. its not ignorant, we live in a large world and im perfectly fine with people thinking that i live in the alps and make watches when i say im Swedish.

MGS3 is a weird amalgamation of things, one of those things being the jungle setting of Vietnam. Either Kojima was just making up the fictional jungles of Russia for the hell of it or he was trying to deliberately invoke a major event (Vietnam War) which was very much part of the 1960's/early cold war era, for better or for worse. I think it's perfectly fine to call it a Vietnam War game because that is clearly the time period it was trying to invoke. Obviously, it's not a Vietnam game in the sense of its literal location. Pretty sure the GB guys know that very well.

@g00z3m4n: It's very sad that Vietnam is often only associated with war to most Americans, but that is starting to change with time. I think the younger generation here (in America) is already starting to forget about it. Honestly, I think more people my age know about Rambo than the actual Vietnam War.

It is a stand in for Vietnam, but not really Vietnam but the Vietnam of 1980s action cinema of Rambo and Missing in Action and other even crappier movies.

This is the second "These metal gear games make me feel bad about myself because X" post i've seen, I don't understand.

Of course they don't mean to hate on Vietnam itself. It's just our idiom for "Jungle War". Believe me, the US fought plenty of jungle battles for all sorts of bad reasons, but thats just the one we think of first because it was kinda the worst conflict we've ever gotten involved in where lots of people on both sides died for no reason other than anti-communist paranoia.

No one who reads their history thinks that the Vietnamese were the bad guys in that conflict.

You guys can make your own jungle espionage game and call it the American war game and we'll be even.

without knowing i think its there frame of reference, it roughly happened around the same time as the cold war, but was more influential on american history then the cold war (the game is loosely inspired around the early cold war)

I heard Dan straight up say that Metal Gear Solid 3 was in Vietnam during one of the Metal Gear Scanlon 4's. Which bothered me because he's a big enough MGS fan to know better, and he literally just watched Drew play through that game. Considering that though, that must have just been a slip based on association; he isn't that dumb or ignorant. He just isn't careful enough about not seeming ignorant. Jeff and Brad don't seem to mind messing up information, or being apparent about their lack thereof, because they're assured about how much they actually do know. But hey, as the SAS motto goes, Who Dares Wins. They used that in honor of The Boss, I don't know if you knew that.

Funny that I've beat the game so many times and it only just occurred to me that jungles don't actually exist in Russia. I questioned the fact that so many different environments could be so condensed into one locale, but I thought maybe it were possible in the biggest land mass in the world. I thought that MGS3 was one of the few video games that I've learned a substantial amount of information from... I hope most of those codec conversations are accurate.

@hunterob: I think if there's anything we've learned from Metal Gear Scanlon, it's that Dan is not a very big MGS fan.

I think in terms of the detailed backstory and some of the gameplay stuff, sure he might not know everything. But just because he's not in-depth doesn't mean he's not a, "big mgs fan." My mother doesn't know shit about boxing but she's a big Manny Pacquiao fan for example.

Speaking of that very topic I was super surprised Dan didn't know about the humping crawl in Metal Gear Solid 4 but I assume it's probably because of the way he played 4 that he might not have seen it. Anywho, I'll probably save that discussion for the Metal Gear Scanlon thread.