This episode gave me "Edge Of Tomorrow"/"Groundhog Day" flashbacks so much! The planned restarting and waiting for 'events' to happen (half naked man etc.) whilst trying to get the planned outcome was great.
@lazyaza: Drew looked at the Gunsmith side-ops and essentially wrote those off. I think Dan did make mention of them unlocking custom gun parts but didn't make a big deal of it. It's filed away under the non-essential parts of the playthrough.
@hatking: Can I ask how the tapes are a 'bad' exposition mechanic compared to the codec call mechanic from MGS1-4? In the grand scheme of things, I can see that viewpoint, but to me the yellow tapes and codec calls (the mandatory calls) perform an identical function, except with the tapes you aren't forced to watch the call itself, i.e. you can still continue to move around/complete missions etc.
I guess some players (e.g. Drew) need to be 'forced' into listening to dialogue by making it non-optional and can't really multi-task, but surely it's just semantics as some of the tapes aren't truly 'optional'. If you don't listen to some of them (the yellow marked ones) you haven't experienced the full game, no matter how much you tell yourself that they were optional/filler etc.
Kojima even subverted player expectations of the side-ops missions list by making some side-ops mandatory! I'd extend that way of thinking to the tapes. he doesn't force all of the tapes on you, but he goes far enough to marking them as yellow.
At worst they (Dan, Drew) should have treated the yellow tapes as a core part of the game. What's the difference between playing a tape and standing still on Motherbase whilst listening to it, and watching the forced codec calls in the previous games? Absolutely nothing, if you think about it.
You can try to argue about the 'content' of those tapes as being unimportant in pertaining to some of the story beats of the game, but every story has some elements that are uninteresting. Can anyone genuinely say that every mandatory codec call in the previous games was fascinating and not occasionally filled with padding?
Had the same opinion as you initially, having not played Undertale. Just got to Thunder Snail (which I love!) and then reflected on the wide variety of music that I've heard so far and realised that the Undertale OST was criminally underrated during the Giant Bomb GOTY by almost everyone except Austin. Maybe one UPF in the future they'll realise their mistake and chalk it up to ignorance at the time...
The sheer number of Hotline Miami 2 tracks meant I was going to like less of the OST (30 of 49 tracks) than the original (20 of 24 tracks), but I still loved it more than anything else this year. Tough year though!
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