I wanted to preface my observations for the second half of the game with a brief "who's who" character guide, now that it seems to be focusing on smaller character moments and the swelling unrest within the Diamond Dogs in lieu of a major foe to unite everyone together in common purpose.

Snake is Snake, as reticent as he's always been. Kiefer does a fine enough job with the vocals, though it's not like Snake ever talks much in this game. I've noticed a majority of the main characters actually refer to him as Snake rather than Big Boss; this seems odd to me, as they themselves have said that a significant reason for why Diamond Dogs is able to keep growing is that they capitalize on the legend that is the Big Boss "brand", which is powerful enough to unite all these mercenaries and soldiers from across the globe. It's explained that the reason everyone we bring back is eventually persuaded to join the DDs is because of Big Boss's reputation as the ultimate soldier. It's probably nothing worth mentioning - a Metal Gear Solid game always has you play some variant of "Snake" for consistency - but I found it curious all the same.

Kaz Miller has grown increasingly unhinged throughout the course of this game's story, and he's especially ramped up the paranoia since Yorick alas'd his way to the great beyond. I didn't play Peace Walker, so this is technically my introduction to the character - the Master Miller we heard in the first Metal Gear Solid wasn't him, of course, though we can assume it was a convincing impersonation especially now after we've learned that he and Liquid are acquainted with each other. I imagine there would be some bad blood fomenting between him and Big Boss at some point in the game's story, given that Miller went on to train his would-be assassin (and clone) Solid Snake, and I'm starting to see that here with how Miller vehemently disagrees with every other decision made by Big Boss, and how his dismemberment trauma at the hands of Cipher and the Soviets has made him unstable in more ways than one. I'm not making any calls about a possible heel turn coming up (and I swear all these leg/foot puns are unintentional), but I think the contentious relationship between him, Big Boss and Ocelot may be the Diamond Dogs' ultimate undoing.

Ocelot often seems like the most rational person on Mother Base, yet I know enough from four Metal Gear Solid games not to trust him completely. His storyline through the four games highlights that while he was never loyal to any one country or organization, he did always have Big Boss's best interests in mind. That doesn't necessarily mean he has the Diamond Dogs's best interests in mind also, nor the wellbeing of any of its other staff. In fact, I get the impression that he wasn't in Peace Walker and only showed up this time because Big Boss needed rescuing from that Cyprian hospital. Also worth noting that he's still a quietly vindictive son of a boss, even more so than Miller who seems to be running (sorry, did it again) on pure vengeance these days. Hard to say what Ocelot intends to get from all this, though I think it's safe to assume that - in his mind - he'll be doing whatever benefits Big Boss the most.

Quiet has some tragic conclusion in the works, since the few times we've seen her in a cutscene after her capture she's been desperate to prove her worth to the Diamond Dogs. Gameplay-wise, that means a very competent buddy to watch my back, who I think I use almost as much as D-Dog. (Digression: I really like D-Dog. Highlighting all enemy units within 100m and being able to Fulton on his own can really make a difference, though he's not the occasional lifesaver Quiet is.) We understand more now how Quiet came to be, and why she has the powers she does. I figured there'd be a link to The End and there is; Code Talker, who created the parasite-enhanced powers of the Skulls and Quiet, first found the little bugs on the remains of the Cobras. We're still not sure where her ultimate loyalties lie and why she seems less... "Borg" than the other Skulls. Given that she's the most significant new character, I'm sure the second half of the plot is going to involve her pretty heavily.

I get the impression that Huey Emmerich is meant to be a version of Otacon with far less scruples but a similar intellect and cowardly disposition. While Otacon was genuinely aghast at the idea that his nuclear-powered, heavily-armed bipedal robot could be used for evil (did I ever mention naivety is a big element of his character?), you get the sense Huey doesn't really care who he's working for. That he's so determined to prove his loyalty to Diamond Dogs seems motivated more by the fact that Ocelot and Miller keep threatening to kill him over his perceived betrayal than him feeling a true sense of camaraderie. It's telling that, once Sillynamethropus is brought back to Mother Base, he's more excited than you've ever seen him. His work is his reason for being, his family and friends coming a distant second. Whether that makes him a bad guy or simply a negligent and selfish one is left to the beholder, I suppose. (I also like that he looks a lot like a young Gary Oldman. I'm sure that actor's penchant for playing weaselly characters and sinister villains has some bearing on this.)

I'd trust little Eli about as far as I could throw him, except I bet I could throw him pretty far. Off one of the Mother Base platforms, if the game lets me. As a pintsize megalomaniacal supervillain in the making, and one that definitely doesn't care for his genetic basis a whole lot, keeping him around seems like the least intelligent thing the Diamond Dogs could be doing right now. And I'd be saying this about the little grudge-holder even before he was given a vial of English-language vocal parasites and shown to have an apparent involvement with the temporary insanity of the Somnanbulist mech during Mission #31. My current working theory is that the young Psycho Mantis, who had been following the orders of Sir Daniel Fortesque up until that point, found a more intriguing specimen in Eli's pent up rage and hatred and decided to latch onto him instead, transplanting his will into the big robot instead of Cipher's erstwhile leader. At any rate, we've had a few ominous cutscenes of Eli attempting to kill his fellow child soldiers since the chapter break, and I don't think the game's done with him by a long shot. (Also, all the Lord of the Flies references? Way too forced.)

As for the rest of the cast, they're either exposition dumps (Code Talker) or they're too tied up in Peace Walker's plot for me to have much to say about their presence here (Paz). There is some progression with Paz's story - we see that the many photos we bring back for her is starting to unravel her trauma-induced amnesia - though I'm not sure she's ever going to factor into the main game's plot. I guess the game can't assume that players spent time checking all the doors on Mother Base for Easter eggs, and throwing her into a late-game cutscene apropos of nothing would be really out of place.

Part 7: X-Treme X-Filtrations

• I have to say, the instability of Konami's online servers is troubling, but it's perhaps not as troubling as how the game's online component operates in the first place. To reiterate a point made in an earlier update, that the game ties up so much of your resources "in the cloud" is ridiculous. It's not just the gains you earn from completing online tasks - revenue from any FOBs you have, spoils from invading other players' FOBs, rewards for the long-term high-risk dispatch missions designated as "online" - but a huge proportion of the money, resources and acquired vehicles/weapons you find in the regular single-player mode are automatically designated as "online" and become unavailable if the servers go down. Almost without exception whenever I can't connect, and it happens frequently when I boot up the game, I am greeted with Miller discussing how far in the red the Diamond Dogs are, despite having close to a million GMP locked away where I can't reach it. The worst part is that the proportion of resources kept online is always vastly greater than what you have offline, for no real reason other than to keep you online and at risk from its obnoxious forced PvP at all times. There aren't a whole lot of purely negative things to say about MGSV - I think its reputation as a 2015 GOTY contender is well-deserved, even if I personally agree with Giant Bomb's decision to hand it to Super Mario Maker - but the online component is definitely the worst part of the game. It actually surpasses the naked avarice of having microtransactions and free-to-play elements bolted onto full price retail releases into something approaching anti-user malice. An exaggeration, perhaps, but given Konami's present toilet-dwelling reputation I don't think I'm too off (forward operating) base here.
• Anyway, the second half of this game. Well, I say "half" but perhaps only in narrative terms, if not a discrete 50% amount of the game's unique content. I can immediately see why folk were disappointed by the "lightness" of chapter two, because out of the three new missions that appear after Mission #31, two are repeats. Specifically, they're previous missions that have some new, challenging rules to follow. The two I have now are a "subsistence" variant of the very early mission involving the destruction of radar dishes (#4) and an "extreme" difficulty variant of that horrible time-based vehicular destruction mission (#9). Since the game doesn't really reveal what these modifiers mean, I looked them up: Subsistence means that I'm not allowed any weapons or equipment in my loadout, excepting my default arm. I have to acquire weapons and gear on-site, not too dissimilar to how missions have always been in the Metal Gear Solid series, though here I don't even get a tranq pistol or cigarettes. Extreme means enemies kill you far more quickly, so protracted firefights are out. Total Stealth, the remaining category, means the mission is immediately failed if I get spotted.
• On the one hand, I don't believe these missions are strictly necessary for progress, and I can continue with the chain of story-crucial missions (marked with the usual gold dot for critical targets) and leave the retreads for whenever I bother to get around to the rest of the game's content. On the other hand, they're also worth a lot of money - that Extreme vehicle mission earns me 400k GMP, which is almost double the payout of the last couple of story missions - so I might just jump into them for the sake of assuaging increasing development costs. Talking of which, I've acquired a few new... let's say "reality incongruous" upgrades since starting act two: one is something called the Hand of Jehuty, unlocked after capturing a rare bird, that allows me to magically pull enemies and animals closer to Big Boss so I can more easily knock them out and Fulton them. Another is the wormhole tech for the Fulton devices, which allows me to capture soldiers and resources from inside buildings and caves. The deployment costs for both are absurdly high. We're getting to the point now, I've observed, where there's a value consideration with the higher-level equipment - I've been using the "level 3" beanbag assault rifle because it only requires 30 fuel resources to include it in a sortie, rather than the 200 the level 4 model costs with its minor improvements. There have been times when I don't think I'll need certain pieces of my usual equipment and have left it behind, but I'm also now taking into account whether or not I need that equipment to be as high level as it can be. For weapons I use all the time, like the tranq pistol and sniper rifle, I think it's worth going as state-of-the-art as possible, but for everything else I should probably consider whether or not I'll need them at their best. But then, the dilemma with this game is that you never really know what you'll need if it's your first time on a particular mission.
• Mission #33. Fortunately, you don't need to worry about bringing the right equipment on Subsistence missions, because you aren't given shit. Equally fortunate, however, is that the C2W mission that gets the first "extreme difficulty" redux treatment is also a mechanically simple one that's only beholden to some amount of luck. I'll admit to retrying a bunch: not only do you have little in the way of defending yourself if you get spotted, but Subsistence missions don't even let you have the lifesaving slow-motion "reflex mode". In truth, I got into a cycle of getting spotted and reloading until I was lucky enough to complete the bare minimum of the mission objectives - destroying the radio equipment inside the central building, rather than all three radar dishes - and get out of there as quickly as possible without anyone seeing me. The large time bonus for infiltrating and exfiltrating so quickly would offset the lack of bonuses from completing additional objectives, I figured, and I was right: that's another S-rank I probably didn't deserve through a frantic five minutes of running and sneaking, not including the four or five times I reloaded from a checkpoint. But hey, I'm very grateful that this game doesn't demote you to an A-rank maximum for restarting, because that would be an abhorrent thing to deal with in some of the longer missions. Challenge is always a very difficult thing to balance, but I think erring on the side of player convenience is always the best course. Don't force them to replay whole swathes of your game just to make things "acceptably difficult".
• Mission #34. For shits and giggles, I also completed the Extreme version of that horrible mission with the vehicles too. The game tells you that the reflex mode and humiliating Chicken Hat mode aren't available for Extreme difficulty missions, but is cagey with further details. There's a lot to glean from this mode that I wish the game bothered to surface: enemies do more damage, take more damage to be killed (or destroyed, as is the more pertinent consideration for this vehicle destruction mission), and - perhaps most crucially and inexplicably - there doesn't seem to be any checkpointing whatsoever. This is a fifteen minute mission, by design, so the fact that you could get twelve minutes in, mess up and be forced to start over or just take the crappy result is definitely not what this mission needed to improve it. However, I did previously admit that this course was the one I looked up on YouTube after completing it the first time to see how an S-rank is possible, figuring if I ever return to it it'd be in the process of sweeping up S-ranks for the game's toughest trophy and thus it would be fair to cheat a bit with some Pro Tipz. Turns out that knowledge came in useful here, as I managed to get an A-rank in spite of my bumbling. Spotted right at the end, figures, as I misjudged the distance between myself and the final few targets and got within their vision/firing range before they exploded, but an A-rank is better than nothing for now. Once I've beaten all the missions and have cash to spare, I'll upgrade my explosive weaponry a few times in case I ever come back for Round Three (and Four, since I'd need to S-rank the original too). Don't hold your breath, game.
• All right, I better get back to this story. I get the impression that the second chapter will just be a smattering of story missions and interstitial events, but I'm also hearing from those leaving comments (thanks for the replies, duders! Thanks for covering up the spoilers too! Please continue doing that!) that these missions are also some of the most rewarding. Whether they mean in a dramatic sense or a "Kojima, you so crazy" sense remains to be seen, but here's hoping it's door number two. Speaking of interstitial cutscenes, the game's plot is clearly not waiting around for me to move onto Mission 32. Since the end of the last story mission and after a handful of promising side ops and the above optional missions, I got three cutscenes, only one of which was triggered by me: the first involved the death of one of the child soldiers, and while it was presented as an accident, the game wanted me to know that Eli was in some way responsible by centering the camera on him for a few ominous moments. The second was similar, with the child soldiers attempting to retrieve their dead leader's necklace even though it had somehow ended up where the tanks were getting their hazardous chlorine douches. That event managed to rough up Quiet pretty bad, who was so eager to prove herself that she hopped down there and got some gnarly chemical burns for her trouble. She recovered quickly enough, thankfully. Those hardy skin parasites, huh? The last cutscene involved Paz, who has ceased the carefree childlike state she regressed to when we first met her and is now mostly catatonic. Maybe it wasn't a good idea to keep poking at her traumatic memories with all these photos. Hey, I'm Punished Snake, not Psychiatrist Snake. Anyway, it looks like the game's got plot cutscenes to spare and perhaps not enough story missions with which to deliver them, so I look forward to more shoehorning.
• Mission #32. Whenever I see a mission that is essentially "go extract this guy", I've learned to anticipate that something is up; that he won't just be holed up in a hut somewhere with a couple of goons to guard the door. That paranoia was validated here, as it has been several times before, by the fact that the target you want is not in the two outposts or one guard post contained within the mission area, but somewhere out in the desert with four walker guards protecting him. With a huge open space and the ability to quickly wake each other up using their walker's loudspeaker (I think? That's how it usually is with vehicles for the "eliminate armored vehicle unit" side ops, and I noticed folk waking up almost immediately after their companion spotted them sleeping), I figured this mission would a considerable challenge unless I could find some way of either separating the walkers or hitting all of their riders with tranqs as close together as possible. Fortunately, while I was still figuring out the best plan of attack, a sandstorm suddenly appeared and let me get close enough with the pistol (which has a much higher fire rate than my rifle presently) and allowed me to knock out all four from within their midst. Lucky, I guess, but I can't help but feel I might've been better served with some area-of-effect tools like a sleep grenade. It's an easy and quick mission - especially now I know where the target is - so I'll come back for the S-rank another time (the A-rank I got is fine for now).
• Battle Gear is ready. I figured out its purpose: I need it for dispatch missions. Specifically, the higher level "critical" dispatch missions which unlock useful unique items like equipment blueprints. (Digression: The nature of most dispatch missions is to earn GMP and resources while also giving people in your combat unit experience that lets them raise their skill grade, and some can even lower the enemy's effectiveness in the field, similar to destroying ammo and food storage huts in MGS3 and 4. It's a neat idea insofar is it gives the people you extract, most of whom were soldiers, an outlet to actually do the job they were trained for.) The Battle Gear is just a big quadruped tank, but Emmerich seems into it. Kind of odd we have a fifty foot tall hulking battle mech we "borrowed" from Cipher and the Soviets, but we're gearing up this puny tank to do our dirty work for us instead. (Snake won't actually let anyone near the Snagglepuss - he considers it too powerful to let into the wrong hands, hence why the Diamond Dogs are holding onto it at all. Useful deterrent too, having that giant robot looking over us.)
• Talking of things Emmerich's into, our next mission isn't a mission but a side op: like meeting Huey for the first time, we're simply to extract the AI pod in his old haunt back at the Afghan Central Base just whenever we have the time. I suspect that procuring it will segue into a mission, like the Huey encounter did, so I'm going to get some other stuff done in the local area. I like that the Afghanistan theater appears to have become the focal point of the game again, though I've no doubt we'll need to make a few more sojourns to Africa as well.
• It didn't become a mission - in fact, I didn't have to figure out how to get the AI core out of the R&D building Huey was kept in, as it took off on its own with its little jets - but it did lead to another "critical" side op: the recovery of the Man on Fire's body, supposedly crushed by the Shpadoinkle's loading platform. He's in the Supply Depot, which is one of my less favorite places to infiltrate in Afghanistan given it's difficult to get anywhere without passing through a courtyard with a whole bunch of jerks watching it like a hawk. If you're very careful, you can sometimes avoid being spotted by taking one of the underground trench/ducts to where it opens in one of the courtyard's corners, and then quickly going into one of the doors before anyone sees you. Because the game's so merciful, it stuck ol' Flame Princess right in the middle of that courtyard, necessitating the speedy removal of the seven or eight (they beefed up security) guards between you and it. If that wasn't enough, it suddenly sprang to life as it was getting Fulton'd, making me worry that I was supposed to go up against it with nothing but my small amount of remaining tranq ammo and a dog that attaches balloons to people. Nah, it was just a cutscene, proving one and for all that this was Volgin and that his corpse was kept alive through pure vengeful malice up until now. Very "King Lysandus". That reference still plays, right?
• After we safely stick Calcifer's inert body in a cage, which I hope has a high melting point, we get our next batch of missions. As with the first bunch from Chapter 2, it's a brand new mission followed by two revisits. We see our first Total Stealth mission here - the one where you steal the walker robots (#15) - and an Extreme difficulty variant of the hijacking mission with the truck full of Skulls (#16). And, as before, these two "Elite" missions have a huge payout, so I'm gonna go do them. I think once I get to around Mission 40, I'll have to put the kibosh on these bonus rehash missions. Aren't many days left in August, and the 31st is my deadline for this game.
• Wow, all right, I was going to save the tapes for their own reactions blog entry, but the one I just got was quite something: Strangelove, who I've never met but heard plenty about in this game due to her significance to Peace Walker, was not only found inside the AI pod as a desiccated corpse but is apparently the mother of our own Japanese anime fan Otacon. She was an AI programmer, the one who actually programmed Snuffleupagus, so her calling the kid Hal makes a lot of sense in retrospect. That Huey knowingly kept her in there for a year afterwards rather than deal with her death and properly bury her is super unnerving. Forget the guilt keeping you from concentrating on your work, what about the smell?
• Mission #36. Let's check out that Total Stealth mission. Even though we're in Africa now, where the difficulty ramps up, I recall it being fairly easy to find and extract the walkers. The issue is that there's at least seven guards around, three of which are the heavily-armored kind that can't get tranq'd. It took a bit of luck to knock out everyone while they were separated - I sort of wonder if creating a diversion somewhere else, like blowing up a C4 a hundred meters away in the opposite direction, would've been an easier way to handle this mission. If there's one benefit to the game's mission structure, is that completing a mission once gives you enough intel to have a better idea about how to complete it again, and that helps immeasurably with these "extreme difficulty" remix missions which don't seem to modify the important stuff like guard placement and the location of the mission targets.
• Mission #37. Still scratching my head over this one. If you remember before where I described the mission in question - #16 - I explained that it's a wild goose chase that grows increasingly more bullshit the further you get into it. It begins with a "go to this guardpost to hijack the truck" objective, followed by "find the truck on this route to hijack it", then "find out that there's two armored vehicles picking up the truck under heavy guard at the airport" and finally "the truck has Skulls on board who suddenly appear based on proximity to the truck, making it impossible to hijack or extract it without dealing with them first". Now, I figured I'd be best suited sprinting for the speed bonus again, so I deployed with a jeep and drove straight to where I knew the truck was waiting at the airport. The late-game difficulty spike once again meant that many if not all of the guards around the truck were in heavy armor and couldn't be tranq'd. That all became moot when I got close enough to the truck to trigger the Skulls, managed to extract it quickly but obviously got spotted, and began a mad dash out of the hot zone before they killed me (and on Extreme difficulty, they can do that very easily). I somehow managed to escape and... got an S-rank? But not only did I get that huge time bonus, I also got a "perfect stealth" bonus (I think the Skulls might disagree) and an enormous "no traces" bonus I'd never seen before. I imagine that's for getting in and out without extracting or tranqing anyone? It feels like I cheated the game on a technicality, but I ain't buggin'. Easy 800k GMP with the bonus.
• I looked it up, since I want these blogs to be at least halfway informative. "No traces" means never touching the R1 button or triggering reflex mode. Shooting a gun, throwing or placing a grenade/mine or using CQC just once, even if you don't hit anything, will void the bonus. As there was nothing I encountered that could be affected by my tranqs or CQC, and Extreme difficulty disables reflex mode anyway, I hit upon a winning S-rank strategy without even realizing it. Naturally, I then immediately used this newfound knowledge for evil, grabbing near-instant S-ranks for Missions #9 and #34 (a.k.a. "that one vehicle mission" and "that one vehicle mission redux") by creating a roadblock for the first tank I came across, Fultoning it from behind (gross) and then letting the timer count down with a cigar for a mission result that, while giving me squat for time or multiple vehicle bonuses, netted a huge enough "no traces" bonus that it didn't even matter. I'll be cheesing a few other older missions this way too, in all likelihood. Did I mention that I've almost checked out with this game?
• Mission #35. I acquired the cargo crate Fulton upgrade a long time ago - it was the only way I was going to get enough materials to upgrade Mother Base this century - but this is the first mission to actually require it. It's kinda cute that the game suggested I go R&D it, in case I hadn't bothered until now. I suppose someone somewhere hadn't picked it up yet, or hadn't bothered scrolling far enough on the iDroid to find them in the R&D menu. Goal here is to explore the jungle area just south of Lufwa Valley's mansion for two cargo containers holding all of Code Talker's vocal parasite research and bring them back before Cipher can nab them. D-Dog can't sniff out containers, but he sure can sniff out the three or four guards each of them predictably had. The game's in this wonderfully disagreeable place right now where every literally every guard has full body armor, instead of just a handful of them in prominent locations, so if I wanted to get past any of them I'd have to use the jungle for cover Rambo-style and either avoid them or get close enough to choke them out, since my zero-penetration tranqs are useless. Interrogation would also reveal where the containers were, if I couldn't spot them myself. I made a startling discovery in this mission: if you get on top of a container and try Fultoning it (I was a bit desperate, since I climbed on top of the second one without an escape plan), you can actually grab onto the Fulton and go with it back to base. No expensive chopper pick-up, no worrying about sneaking my way out of the hotzone on foot. That I'm just learning about this now close to the two-hundred hour mark (look, I leave this game on pause a lot, all right?) is a testament to its endless ingenuity. Kojima's always been brilliant at this.
• We're treated to a scene of Quiet getting some impromptu shock therapy back at base, as she was identified as having vocal parasites by the MRIs we're giving everyone, now we know what to look for. We learned several quite crucial things during this cutscene: Quiet's skin parasites are deathly allergic to saltwater, Quiet is probably in love with Big Boss ("join the club", Ocelot more or less says), Quiet was indeed the hospital assassin at the start of the game who almost burned to death, and Quiet can speak, but refuses to. Code Talker reaches her in the Navajo language (I assume?) and she admits that she has a vocal parasite and was instructed to use it once she reached Mother Base. What's more, it's the third English-attuned vocal parasite, the one Skullmageddon warned was "very close to Big Boss". I suppose I could've predicted the few of these twists I didn't already guess at before now, but there's still a lot about Quiet that's yet to be ascertained.
• Mission #39. This is a Total Stealth variant of Mission #5, the one where I had to rescue the bionic arm developer from the basement of the Wakh Sind Barracks. Back when I did this mission the first time, I discovered an alternate route into the base that evades a lot of the patrolling guards, cutting directly to what I designated as the "upper" portion of the outpost. Of course, I only found this path on the way out of the mission, when that knowledge had ceased to be useful. Or so I thought. Recalling the same route this time, I only had to get my way past three guards - one of those was now in full body armor, of course - and head back the way I came in. Trying to sneak in the regular way with the harsh limits of Total Stealth would've been a nightmare, considering it not only forces you to restart from a checkpoint if you get spotted (which, hey, I usually do anyway. Not easy to rescue someone once the whole base has been alerted) but removes the handy reflex mode, which normally saves me two or three times a mission. With that route, I was in and out in five minutes. I'm sure this chain of S-ranks will abate eventually, so I might as well gloat while I have the chance. Gloat gloat.
• Mission #40. This is a blast from the past: the sniper battle against Quiet. On Extreme difficulty, a single shot from her sniper rifle is enough to kill you immediately, which changes the dynamic of this fight completely. Whereas in the original mission you might get hit a few times while rooting out her nest before you're able to retaliate, that option is now way off the table and you have to rely entirely on D-Dog, her sniper rifle's glare/flash and memorizing the handful of locations she always sets up shop in. I'll admit to dying a lot here; I finally got into the rhythm of "teabagging" cover so that she'd be pushed to fire and miss at my yoyo impression, allowing me to hit her in the brief window as she reloaded. She also has a lot more health too - even with a level 5 sniper rifle, I barely took a sixth off her lifebar with a head shot. So yeah, while it's an easy S-rank to get - like the other boss fight missions, they just hand the perfect stealth bonus to you since the boss doesn't count and there's no other enemies to worry about - it's not an easy mission to complete in the first place. What I did spot, and this was immediately confirmed by the reward I received, is that Quiet is done up like Sniper Wolf, complete with the "strategically open" uniform jacket and the green make-up from The Twin Snakes.
• Mission #38. This'll be the last update for today, and sorry in advance to ZombiePie who will be skim-reading this to figure out which missions it covers. This is the next story-critical mission and the goal here is to head to Spugmay Keep in Afghanistan to find a hidden film canister that an informant stashed away with information concerning the military research and background of the "extraordinaries" we've met: Kid Mantis and Volrog (that's... a Volgin/Balrog portmanteau. Look, I ran out of my good references a while ago. Yes, those were my good references). It's a clever twist on the "extract a thing" mission, because A) you don't really know where it is, though the active area is thankfully fairly small, and B) there's a whole squad of Spetsnaz goons there looking for it, which also means they're constantly moving around searching in general - this makes it a little harder to sneak by them, though slightly easier to divide them up and remove them individually if needs must. As long as you get the body away quickly, that is, because someone else is likely to poke around the same area tout de suite. For such a mechanically simple and quick mission, it's actually quite difficult to get in and out with the item you need. Well, except I imagine it's a lot easier once you know exactly where the item is. (I tried it again - they actually move the location of the canister. I think there's a photographic accompaniment to this mission to help narrow its location down, but I have no idea where in the iDroid's many menus they stashed it.)

Next update will, I hope, cover the rest of the game's main missions and as many side ops and non-critical extreme missions as I can fit in before that aforementioned August 31st deadline. After that, I'm putting the game away and moving onto other things. Gotta be strong.

However, I may still create that "bonus" episode of tape intel I talked about further down the line. I've been listening to them as the game's been progressing, and it feels like it's where Kojima vented his usual overexplaining of certain aspects in his stories, whether that's the loosely "inspired by" military conspiracy theories, the supernatural elements that actually have a perfectly scientific but still completely insane explanation, and the additional backstories of some of his characters. I remember back in MGS4 how out-of-place (and entirely gross) Drebin's long-winded stories about how the individual members of the Beauty and Beast squad came to be in their unfortunate PTSD states. At least this way, Kojima can let the events of the game breathe a bit and stash his hours of loquacious clarifications in an optional repository. Anyway, a lot of those tapes are worthy of some mordant commentary from yours truly, so I'll try not to let this feature end without that extra episode.

The "Video Game Bookmark" is a notion that I've been pondering a lot recently: the possibly unworkable notion that you can put aside a game for a while and come back to it at a much later time without necessitating a full restart. These figurative bookmarks have different shelf lives depending on the media: you could probably stop watching an episodic TV show for a week, which used to be the custom rather than the exception, and not lose anything in the interim. Conversely, media of a more serial nature, like chapters of a book or scenes of a movie, make those harder to put aside for long periods of time. The longer you put something away, the less likely it is that you'll be able to pick up where you left off without missing a beat.

Games are distinct in this regard. While many have plots that require your attention to follow, and may not have a means to get you caught up by way of journals or recaps, there's also the additional obstacle of reaching a level of competency with the controls and mechanics of the game that corresponds to where you are on the game's difficulty curve. Jumping into a challenging game near the end after your skills have had time to atrophy is a difficult prospect, and why Giant Bomb's "Load Our Last Save" feature can be compelling in its exploration of how much we are able to rely on muscle memory to tackle a game's end boss: what is usually its most severe challenge.

Backloggery can be a real enabler of this approach: the backlog-tracking site established separate game designations for "beaten" (silver medal) and "complete" (gold medal) that the user is free to define on their own terms, but it's the tradition that "beaten" refers to simply seeing the end of the game's story while "complete" involves achieving everything there is to do in the game - if you've designated something as "beaten", the implication is that you've left the door open to come back and finish off whatever optional content or additional playthroughs are left.

I've made surreptitious plans to return to several games I've beaten recently, though I know not when and in what order, and in planning these eventual revisits I've determined that some will be easier to jump back into after enough time has passed than others. In fact, each presents a different scenario to replaying a game from where you left off:

• With Tales of Xillia, I have Milla's side of the story to complete. Tales games always offer a New Game Plus mode, though I believe Xillia is the first case where you get to see the game's story told from the perspective of two protagonists, with character-specific areas and cutscenes that you won't see while playing as the other. However, with Tales games, the New Game Plus feature also serves to make subsequent playthroughs considerably easier; by using a currency earned from acquiring achievements/trophies and other milestone goals, you can purchase such difficulty-assuaging bonuses as decuple XP gain, double item drops and cash, carrying over end-game equipment, holding more curatives at once, etc. I imagine when I return, the game itself will be a breeze and I can simply appreciate its story again from a different perspective. With that in mind, a revisit to Xillia is perhaps one I could defer until next year without any risk of losing my way.
• Stardew Valley is a game I had to force myself to quit, but the nature of the game is simple enough to grasp and devoid of much in the way of story that I could jump back into it at any time without incident. However, it also has a multitude of gleaned tips and knowledge to remember - what crops are ideal for the season, which villagers like which presents, where you placed all the crab traps and tree tappers, how to maximize the iridium income from the Skull Cavern dungeon, various little secrets you can exploit for additional items - and you'd lose a lot of these reminders through memory entropy the longer you stay away from the game. I'm planning on making a return (perhaps getting a bit closer to completing some of the item catalogs or achievements) around December when it becomes time to write up GOTY blogs and I need a quick refresher. I don't think I'll ever be ready to leave the game behind until I have everything, and I'm sure if additional content shows up I'll want to be around for that too, but at the same time I'm also sure that I can leave my farm for a long period without worrying too much. There is also the lingering concern that I'll get attached to the cycle again if I boot it up, distracting me from new gaming experiences.
• Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is the third and final of these hiatus games. I am presently still playing the game, but of the three here it's the one where skill atrophy will be at its most prominent if I choose to leave and come back at a far later date to sweep up whatever I have left to do. For that reason, I'm trying to get as much out of the game as I can before my predetermined deadline of September 1st. I absolutely want to see the rest of the game's story - I only have a handful of story missions left, as of writing - and I wouldn't mind completing some of the long-term achievements like certain side op chains, the non-vital "extreme difficulty" mission variants, and collections like music tapes, blueprints and rescued animals. Some of those, the extreme difficulty missions in particular, will not be easy to revisit several months later without a period of refamiliarizing myself with the game's controls and stealth mechanics, or the many different weapons and pieces of equipment that have specific conditional benefits. The prospect of trying to S-rank some of those missions after several months away seems... daunting.

(Before I commence with my usual Sunday Summaries segments, I want to congratulate both Patrick "Scoops" Klepek on the birth of his daughter Jessica, and the engagement of Dan Ryckert to his fiancé Bianca! Busy week for the Super Mario Maker boys.)

New Games!

The Summer slump definitely appears to have ended early as there's no shortage of new releases in this final week of August, matching the equally populous output of last week. All the same, there's not a whole lot here I'm interested in playing, but I suppose that's my cross to bear:

With no one significant release to highlight, let's just start with the anime and get it over with. Hatsune Miku: Project Diva X is out this week for North American PS4s and PS Vitas, giving players yet another batch of Dr. Sbaitso jams to rhythmically hit buttons to; the newest Omega Force licensed game Attack on Titan rears its ugly, enormous, skinless head to chomp the free time of anyone who has a hundred hours to drop into yet another Musou game; God Eater 2: Rage Burst (for PS4 and PS Vita) and God Eater: Resurrection (PC) will give MonHun fans plenty of big beasties to chip away at if they're already bored of last month's Monster Hunter Generations.

Elsewhere, we have DLC for a couple of big RPGs from yesteryear. Fallout 4 gets the dilapidated theme park add-on Nuka-World in which players can do their best Silent Hill 3 impressions, while the handful of CRPG fans who have been sitting on a The Witcher 3 playthrough will be Aard-pressed to ignore the new The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt: Complete Edition out this week, which combines the core game with the highly acclaimed DLC packs Hearts of Stone and Blood & Wine and probably a few other DLC freebies to appease those who have already bought any combination of the above once already.

This week also sees the timely console port of a World War 1 sim that isn't the one with all the pot-smoking celebrities, Verdun; the thoughtful sci-fi first-person puzzler Turing Test, exclusive to Xbox One and PC; yet another Resident Evil 4 remaster ("Capcom is making a new video game, y'all!" "NO THEY AREN'T!") for current-gen consoles; Axiom Verge for the Wii U, as the first part in their horribly-named "Nindies" weekly series of downloadable releases (seriously, that's so bad it could be one of mine. Did I send them that in a drunken email I forgot about?); Claire: Extended Cut, an enhanced version of the Silent Hill-inspired Indie horror game (I checked out the original some time ago); and, lest I get reprimanded by "the boss of mods" Rorie, I suppose I should also acknowledge the new World of Warcraft: Legion expansion. I guess. Between the constant WoW expansions and the time-limited Overwatch cosmetic swag, at some point these people might as well mail Blizzard their credit cards.

Wiki!

Anywaaaay, we have some more wiki leavings to sift through for this last week of August. Another lean week for podcasts means another lean week of new updates: just ten more pages, leaving fifteen for our final home stretch sometime in early September. Two of those pages were brand new: the imaginatively-titled Battle Submarine, a strategy game involving a battle submarine; and Getsumen no Anubis, or Anubis of the Moon's Surface, a tense sci-fi horror visual novel that does the text-and-sound biz that Chunsoft became known for with games like Banshee's Last Cry and Otogirisou. Check the usual list for more info.

Here's the remaining eight:

• I was so disappointed with the SNES version of Bullfrog's Theme Park; I played the PC version briefly at a friend's house, and waited almost a year for my pre-order for the SNES version - built for a system I actually owned - to arrive. Though the SNES has managed decent ports of PC management sims before then - both SimCity and Civilization has its proponents - Theme Park was underwhelming. It lacked a lot of the PC version's features and the presentation was barebones, necessitated by a lack of memory space on the cart. A lesson well learned about ports for weaker systems.
• Mizuki Shigeru no Youkai Hyakkiyakou is a virtual board game I wasn't able to learn much about, besides that it was another one of those Dokapon-type RPG hybrids. The title refers to Shigeru Mizuki, the creator of GeGeGe no Kitarou and comic book artist known for creating comical versions of youkai, the mischievous, mythological Japanese spirits and monsters that inspired the Yo-Kai Watch menagerie of playful spooks.
• What's odd about 3x3 Eyes: Juuma Houkan, a 2D adventure game inspired by the 3x3 manga, is that I've only seen one other game like it for the Super Famicom: an earlier JoJo's Bizarre Adventure adaptation. The game spends its time between walking around safe environments talking to NPCs while looking for objects to use on other objects, and in action stages where you're required to jump around and hit things. I've absolutely no familiarity with 3x3 Eyes, besides knowing it was one of the earliest serial animes to really break into the Western market, so beyond the unusual genre mixing it didn't interest me much.
• All right, Farland Story 2 is notable if only because it helped to highlight how convoluted the Farland Story franchise is and how that necessitated a huge overhaul of some of its pages. The first Farland Story was exclusive to the Japanese PC-98 computer in 1992. This game led to a huge number of sequels on the same system. In 1995, Farland Story was combined with its first sequel, Farland Story Denki: Arc Ou no Ensei, to create an enhanced graphically remastered compilation of the two for the big consoles operating that year: Super Famicom, Saturn, PlayStation and PC-FX (the Saturn and PlayStation versions came a couple years later, since they also got a few CD-specific benefits). However, some versions of this compilation remake were just called "Farland Story", which meant we had one page for two discrete games. We also had a separate page for the remastered version as it was known for PlayStation, with the subtitle "Yottsu no Fuuin". What's really weird is that Wikipedia, GameFAQs and MobyGames all had it wrong too, and in differing ways. Using all three to get to the root of the matter, I believe Giant Bomb is now the only major video game wiki that has the Farland Story/Farland Story: Yottsu no Fuuin matter resolved. I think. Anyhoo, this particular game is not the sequel to that original Farland Story, but to its SFC remake Farland Story: Yottsu no Fuuin, moving the titular story a different direction than its original PC-98 sequels did. Hence, fans of the series consider this Farland Story 2 to be more of a non-canon "gaiden" game. What a mess.
• Thankfully, the plot of the Final Fight series remains constant: criminals want to take over Metro City, and its elected leader Mayor Mike Haggar refuses to let that happen. Final Fight 3 (Final Fight Tough in Japan, which is a better name) sees the return of Guy and the departure of Cody (who was probably in jail at this point), as well as the introduction of two new fighters: Lucia the hard-boiled lady cop and Dean the... lightning guy. Other than that, it's more or less business as usual, beating up flamboyant criminal punks on the mean streets of the beleaguered Metro City.
• Ganbare Goemon: Kirakira Douchuu is yet another Mystical Ninja game that never got its due overseas, perhaps for being too silly for us gaijin to handle. It once again feels like a missing link between the great SNES Mystical Ninja game and the equally fantastic N64 one, with players bouncing between the impetuous warrior Goemon, the effeminate thief Ebisumaru, the prideful kunoichi Yae and the robotic ninja Sasuke. They all have their own "chapter" of the game to complete, each with a different ability set and a different environment to master. The game also brings back everyone's favorite giant attack robot Impact, who actually triggers the plot by casually mentioning that he comes from a different planet that has been conquered by a sports-obsessed galactic tyrant. I love these games so much; I only wish Konami bothered to localize more of them.
• Kouryuu no Mimi is the most obscure game on this list: a single-plane brawler based on a manga about the scion of an ancient family that control a magical earring that lets him have power over money and women. Yeah, one of those types of mangas. The game's decent enough in pure brawler terms, though being stuck to just the one plane is limiting, but its plot goes some places. I mean, how often do you fight a guy with no skin and then set a woman on fire?
• The Super Famicom Lodoss Tou Senki game, a.k.a. Record of Lodoss War, is one that has a bit of fun with the dense mythology of the D&D-inspired novel and anime franchise it hails from. A strategy RPG with grids and such, the game follows four different characters in discrete scenarios. Two of those characters are legendary heroes in the chronology of the books/anime, and this game explores what happened to them between when they had their famous battle with the world-threatening demon lord and the present day of the books where they have become rulers of separate kingdoms, while the third scenario concerns the sympathetic body-hopping main antagonist of the whole series and gives you a glimpse into why they are the way they are. The fourth and final scenario, which ties everything together, has you control the "main" party of Record of Lodoss War and defeat the aforementioned main antagonist. An odd structure, for sure, but I figure the game assumes that its players are familiar enough with the source material to make sense of its fractured vignettes.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain!

Time for the usual weekly progress update. I just hit 64%, which isn't an exceptional boost from last time's 50%. However, I did manage to procure many more S-ranks, side ops and progress with my collections during this period, and I think I can reliably say that I'm close to the end. At least, more than close enough to finish the story - and complete two more observation blog entries - before the end of August. Boy, it should would be fun to write about something else for a change, huh?

Here's last week's update, at least: Part 6.

As stated in the lede, I'm not sure how much more of the game I'll do after that. There's a few side op chains that have story significance - right now I'm tracking down some child soldiers that escaped thanks to Eli's scheming, and there's also the rest of Paz's photographs to find - and I'm literally one animal away from a full petting zoo, which isn't a euphemism for my declining mental state after spending almost a whole month with Kojima's storytelling. I also just need to build two more platform upgrades, get a few more of my units to level 50, find three more music tapes and complete the handful of non-essential bonus missions and I think I can walk away happily enough and get started on Gravity Rush Remastered or Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze or a thousand other games I've let pile up. The rest of the game's 100% requirements, which includes S-ranking every mission and completing all the bonus objectives for each, might have to take a hike. And I am definitely not building a nuke. Where would I even put it?

Regency Solitaire!

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single player in possession of four of the five perfect games they need to progress, must be in want of a wild card. And so might Regency Solitaire announce itself if its author was as big of a hack as I am, presenting its more elaborate take on Solitaire with a framing device of your typical Bronte or Austen tale of a destitute young woman from a noble house attempting to find a dashing gentleman suitor to keep her in the manner to which she has become accustomed.

Y'all (to use the Austen parlance) are probably familiar with the basics of Regency Solitaire thanks to an amusing Alex/Vinny Quick Look, where Alex acknowledged how much he was enjoying the game in spite of himself. I'd have to mirror that sentiment; there's something about the pacing of each "hand" of the game combined with the usual unpredictability that makes it more tense than the genteel period romance story going on in the background would suggest. It's mechanically simple, to the extent that I don't feel like I need to explain how Solitaire works, but there's no denying the simple thrills of turning over the last card in your deck to find the very one you need to remove the remaining cards from the table and complete a perfect game. The hands move swiftly enough that you start to develop a fast-moving rhythm, hitting everything that's within reach in quick succession and clicking through the deck until you find another card you can use. The game also throws boons and obstacles alike at you, letting you use your winnings to decorate Bella's manse with fixtures that also improve her card game in subtle ways, such as increasing the odds of finding wild cards and occasionally removing cards from play. There's also three abilities that you can use in a pinch, each of which recharges on a cooldown after use. Ultimately, however, if you crash and burn on one of the game's many challenges (like acquiring a certain number of perfect hands), it's down more to bad luck than insufficient skill and you'll do just fine starting over. I say that, but there's more than a few times I've accidentally drawn another card while a play was still available - the game gives you a handful of undos and shakes the card you could've used, to give you a push in the right direction.

I picked up Regency Solitaire in the same circumstances as I suspect many of you did, as one of the surprise bonus games from the recent (and presently ongoing, as of writing) Humble Indie Bundle 17. As a freebie, I didn't expect too much, so it was a pleasant enough surprise. I might try the two puzzle games that were also unlocked in the second week of the bundle, Expand and Hexcells, at some near juncture as well. Was kinda hoping for something as substantial as the rest of the bundle (I'm saving Galak-Z, The Beginner's Guide and Octodad: Dadliest Catch for a future May Mastery) but I can't really say I'm disappointed either. Regency Solitaire is the most casual of casual games - it'll even let you keep moving forward if you fail one of the levels - but I'll grudgingly admit it's worth trying out. In fact, I better back to it - I wouldn't want Bella to end up with that ghastly Mr. Bleakly because of her brother's financial woes! That simply would not do.

Outer Heavens to Murgatroyd! Welcome to part six of an increasingly confused account of the events of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. When I last left you all, we learned of a virulent parasitical disease that had spread throughout Mother Base, caused by an as-yet-unknown assailant (though it's probably Cipher) for an as-yet-unknown purpose. Whatever it is, it's killing the Diamond Dogs fast, and we need to get to the bottom of it.

This update will be a bit shorter than usual, partly to make up for the marathon last time but also because I've hit something of a critical point in the story. At any rate, you'll want to be all caught up with whatever snippets of plot I've deigned to cover in-between griping about missions and discussing the game's many, many mechanics and systems. Essentially, a nasty skull man doesn't like Big Boss or his mercenary outfit very much and has made our lives difficult every step of the way. There's also a horse that poops on command. There's other details too, but I think we have all the relevant points covered here for now. Here's Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5.

Part 6: More Code Talkin', Robot Walkin' and Chode Mockin'

• Mission #26. Because of this epidemic, we're in AM mode: All Missions. No stopping until we hit the part of the story where this killer disease can get the flip off my base. I'll admit to having some amount of luck for mission #26, not too dissimilar to how Mission #21 went more smoothly than I could've optimistically predicted. My task is to extract/eliminate a human trafficker, but the mission is made more challenging by the fact that the target is on the move from the moment I begin. As an added challenge, he is taking a surreptitious on-foot route that avoids the roads, meaning he and his bodyguards could be anywhere on the large expanse of the Angola map that comprises the mission's limits. You can sneak into Ditadi Village - the one from the walker extraction mission (#15) a while back - to find a piece of intel that narrows down his route, but it also requires some searching and you're burning time all the while. Once you have the path he's likely to take, you're then on the clock to find him before he reaches another outpost - Kiziba Camp, the difficult-to-stealth-through open location from the "rescue two intel members" mission (#17) - from which it'll be considerably harder to extract him. Not only did I luck out on finding the intel tent in Ditadi quickly, but I managed to ambush his entire group a few hundred meters away from Kiziba. Sub-fifteen minute completion time and a perfect stealth bonus meant another S-rank I just kinda fell onto. AND I somehow managed to catch eight Honey Badgers with my traps (I guess they didn't give a shit about getting caught), netting another 400k GMP. Pretty lucky all round, though I'm sure the many soldiers back at base puking their guts out don't feel the same way.
• Mission #27. Another intel member to rescue, this time up in a mountainous area close to the mines. I'll admit the last mission was lucky, but this one was pure skill. Well, it was easy as hell, but I'm still taking credit for putting on a clinic. The wrinkle with this mission, because we can't just have simple prisoner extractions any more, is that the prisoner escapes on their own almost immediately as you get to the guard post, hijacks a vehicle, causes it to crash because they're half-dead and then there's a tense sequence where you need to get the now injured prisoner away from the crash area and to the LZ before all the local guards come to inspect the loud noise and plumes of smoke. I didn't do any of that. I just shot the prisoner with a tranq as he hobbled towards his escape vehicle and carried him to the LZ before anyone spotted us. Four minutes and eighteen seconds, which is like GoldenEye level fast. Before anyone cries foul, by the way, the game actually has a bonus for you snatching your friend away before he gets into his accident, so they clearly knew folk who reloaded (like I did) or retried the mission would know to prevent the crash at all costs. Add that to another perfect stealth bonus and that's another instant S-rank. I better not let any of this get to my head; I know there'll be some trickier shit coming up soon enough. I suspect the game's just being easy on me for now because of the stress generated from frequent "this many people just died while you were gloating to the internet about honey badgers" updates.
• The intel from the last two missions points us towards a possible origin for the disease from deep within the jungle and an old man named Code Talker who might help us cure it. That's who mission #28 concerns. We're going to the last location in Angola that I've yet to see: Lufwa Valley, which appears to just include a big mansion. The briefing tape intimated that there's two enemy forces to be concerned with: the PF that is guarding the location, and another force nearby that the intel gatherers have been unable to ascertain. This Code Talker seems important, and given that he also has an alias I'm wondering if it might be someone making a return from MGS3. I guess I'll find out.
• Mission #28. Right, so the other party we had to worry about? Skulls. Got the intro-credits tip off, and it wasn't long until four female Skulls showed up, all of which looked like the bald computer lady from Cybermorph. Without even asking me where I learned to fly, they beat the crap out of me with a combination of uncanny sniper shots and stealth camo. Fighting one is about as tricky as fighting Quiet - in fact, these gals seem to have a lot in common with her beyond a penchant for not wearing clothes - except now they have three friends helping them out. I had a friend too, and she helped me take down two of the four before she took too much damage and had to bail. It wasn't easy taking down the rest, and I could've saved some time and ran for the mansion serpentine-style - not called Snake for nothin' - but I was incensed that they took down my buddy. Lufwa Valley's mansion was no joke either, with a dozen two-man teams wandering around the corridors. I found the old man in the basement eventually - he's a Native American WW2 Wind Talker, which I should've figured except there's no real reason why Sandro would bring one halfway across the world except to add some vaguely racist mysticism from an entirely different culture to what we had in Africa already. Everyone was on full alert as we exited the base, and after a protracted game of hide and seek on the route out, I managed to avoid all detection and got away with an A-rank I can be proud of. Between the Skulls and the amount of stealth involved, this was not a freebie like the last two.
• In our conversation with the Grampa from Prey, he explained what I'd already sorta guessed: the parasites infest the larynx and are sound-activated, multiplying with the sound of words spoken in a specific language. We saw the victims in Ngumba with headphones stuck in their windpipe, and the intent was to teach the bugs various different languages to latch onto. English being the one exception, for reasons as yet unknown but possibly related to the fact that - in every encounter with him so far - Dry Bones spoke nothing but perfect English to us. I think. He might've said something to that dying patient in a different language? I guess we'll find out why us English-speaking types get to be the lucky ones later. There's more too, of course: the cure will render all of us infertile, which sucks for those at the base who had planned on having kids without going the easy cloning route like Big Boss. We also discover that the gnarly eyeshadow power used by the Code Talker and certain Skulls (and Quiet) is due to a different parasite that replaces the skin (really? The whole skin?) and allows for camouflage. Sure.
• All right, I didn't exactly choose this next mission, it chose me. Before I can complete the extraction of Code Talker, I have to fight off a bunch of Skulls who refuse to let us leave with him. The game does an unusual thing here: though the mission occurs directly after the previous, pretty much as we're heading back, the game lets you continue the game as normal instead of forcing you to begin the next mission right away. That is to say, it lets you go on side ops, play other missions, free roam, etc. Presumably it doesn't want to drop two difficult missions on you back to back with no means to raise funds or manpower, develop new gear or change the loadout to what you might need for "part two". That's actually an appreciated case of ludonarrative you-know-what, and rather unexpected coming from Kojima who usually maintains an iron grasp over how his narrative should be delivered and when. Would've made Final Fantasy Tactics a bit more palatable if it had something like that after the Velius fight.
• Mission #29. "Metallic Archaea" (metal spiders? Did Jon Peters produce this game?). Unlike every other mission in this game, I cannot see a way to do this one with non-lethal weapons. The Skulls that attack you are the armored kind from Mission #16 and know exactly where I am, which means I can't escape and that my zero-penetration tranq guns are pointless here. I also need to "kill" all four armored Skulls before my spare Pequod shows up (I guess we had a Pequel?) and I can complete the original mission. I think if I'm going to do this, it's about time I moved up to the heavy stuff: RPGs, grenade launchers, shotguns, mines and my little neglected buddy D-Walker. I'd love to find out if there was a way to beat this mission with stealth or non-lethal means, but I suspect I'm not going to find it because when those guys rock-up they're impervious to small arms fire. However! I am done with it being clobberin' time, and that means growing some stones, getting a little boulder with my approach, and not taking my explosive weaponry for granite.
• You know, something occurred to me while watching the following cutscenes of the vocal cord parasites being neutralized by Code Talker's cure and everyone on the quarantine platform recovering. The parasites in this game almost caused the deaths of hundreds of my recruits, but it also confers fantastic abilities on the Skulls and Quiet. I then realized that, if you were looking to find a biological and era-appropriate equivalent for nanomachines, it'd be microscopic organisms that turn you into a superhuman.
• We get another to be continued after Huey spills the beans on a secret facility further up the road from the Afghanistan Base, and our job for Mission #30 is to... assassinate Geoff Peterson? This seems kind of final. Why do I get the sense that this mission won't proceed quite as anyone expects?
• Right, I forgot about the 30+ minutes of recordings that the last mission dropped on my lap. It's quite a lot of backstory behind the parasites and the metallic archaea substance we collected after the last mission which somehow enriches small amounts of uranium sufficiently for the purposes of atomic weaponry, leading to the universal proliferation of nuclear devices via cheaply sourced and shipped low-grade nuclear materials. This is some cask-strength Kojima conspiracy nonsense which I'll almost certainly have to dissect in a future update, though I haven't heard anything yet that might explain a wormhole to a zombie dimension. For now, though, someone has to put Murray the Demonic Talking Skull in his place...
• Mission #30. I think this is the pivotal moment where MGSV remembers it's a MGS game, because we start with a very suspenseful stealthy infiltration of a multi-part base, and then game essentially takes over for about twenty minutes of exposition while Snake just sits there looking scowly and confused. Skeleton Warriors finally spills the beans on his ultimate plan: in order to spite Zero and those like him who seek to control the world through a universal lingua franca, he has developed a version of the vocal parasite that will attack - dun dun DUN! - English speakers! (I'm half-curious if that revelation changes depending on the language the player chose to play the game in, but I somehow doubt it. Like anyone would miss French speakers. Je plaisante, je suis désolé.) We're no closer to figuring out who Morte actually is, though he knew us back in our CIA/Snake Eater days and was learning under Zero at the time. This whole sequence is told on a journey back to the power plant from the start of mission #12, and ends with our enormous metal friend Sadiehawkinsdance going nuts thanks to Sidekick Mantis and Ignus (wait, is this game the true sequel to Planescape: Torment?) and the mission ends with another climactic "to be continued". Despite my perfect stealth, I apparently took too long to reach Skullomania, so I only got a B-rank this time. That's going to be a very difficult S-rank to get later on given how many guards I had to sneak past. Maybe there's a better route besides belly-crawling for ten minutes?
• Mission #31. Well, now we have to escape the enraged Sonnyandcher before it can stomp us to paste, like it seemingly did to our good buddy Jack Skellington (and I hope he's dead, for no other reason except that I'm running out of talking skeletons to refer to him as). Miller changes the mission parameters, however: we need to destroy the mech, since it can't be allowed to roam free with a nuclear arsenal. Easier said than done, perhaps, but fortunately Cipher left a lot of tanks around for us to borrow. I also made the smart decision to immediately quit the mission and jump back in with an RPG strapped to my back. When you aren't trying to hide from it, Sallah-el-kahir's size actually works against it somewhat, giving you plenty of room to avoid its attacks - who gave this thing a Balrog fire whip? - and a couple of obvious weak points to aim at. For all its build-up, it's a typical Metal Gear fight: use rockets to attack the weak point, try to not get immediately killed by its many weapons designed to take down tanks and armored vehicles and are thus overkill for a scruffy man with an eyepatch. I also liked that you could hit its "pilot", the junior Psycho Mantis (until anyone tells me otherwise), when it briefly goes into reflex mode. If a floating kid in a gas mask ends up being the true antagonist of this game, I'm going to have some words with Kojima-san. It was a surprising S-rank, though perhaps not given that they just hand the perfect stealth bonus to you, but my favorite part of the end results screen has to be the "Neutralizations: 1". Yeah, but it was a big "1". Still, we have one last thread to tie up...
• Spooky Scary Skeleton is where we left him, trapped under a big collapsed girder bleeding to death. To remind us that Big Boss is a future bad guy, we decide to blow off three of Boni's limbs to speed up the exsanguination as revenge for all the pain, phantom and otherwise, he's caused us for the last decade. To punctuate this, the duo of Snake and Miller momentarily resemble their past selves, hatred flashing across their faces. So glad I chose to play this game as non-lethally as possible, so that I could see my nonviolent temperament reflected in the characters I've grown attached to these many hours. Whatever, at least I'm not chowing down on hamsters in this one. We walked away from our "perfect revenge", only to have Huey show up and deliver the final blow for forcing him to work on his dream project of a giant bipedal mech. Dude, banned for kill stealing.
• And so the game ends (sorta?) with the triumphant team returning to Mother Base with our prize in tow: the suspiciously intact and operational Snackerdoodle mech. The stinger leaves us with an ominous scene of Eli being gifted with the last vial of the English-language vocal cord parasite by Lil' Mantis as the Diamond Dogs face an uncertain future without a vindictive rival to keep them in check. Roll credits.

Well, it's been a blast everyone, I hope you've had... wait...

..."Chapter 2"?

Like Snake Eater itself, I've seen another week lost in a dream of boxes and bipedal robots. I should've realized something was up when I was informed that it could take hundreds of hours to beat Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. Big RPGs and open-world games can take me that long as a matter of course, so I was ill-equipped to deal with just how big this game actually is. Still, there are worst things to spend an entire month doing. Like the time I was trapped down a well for twenty-nine days back in '87. If you ask me, it was the fault of that baby in Texas who copied my whole style and got the world's attention instead. I'm not bitter though. I used that time to learn how to macramé with whatever weeds were in reach, so it was time well (agh, trauma) spent.

Well (agh!), that's quite enough talk about that. We have some summaries of the week to come - and the week that's been - to discuss. Now that we're finally emerging from that cold, dark Summer, we have the warm embrace of the Autumn and Winter release schedules to look forward to, so expect to see things ramp up in the months to come. I mean, in the world of gaming in general, not from me. I'll be playing MGSV missions.

Forever.

New Games!

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided sneaked up on us in a manner similar to Mirror's Edge Catalyst a couple months back. For being two long-awaited sequels to last-gen bangers, they sure arrived without a whole lot of fanfare, though I suspect for the latter it had the enormous shadow of No Man's Sky to hide in. That suits Adam Jensen just fine; he operates better from the shadows. I'm looking forward to this game a great deal, though at the same time it's one of a few releases this year where I'm happy to have my usual six month plus gap between when a game comes out and when I finally get around to playing it. The reason for that, of course, is because I've been playing MGSV since the start of this month and I could really use a break from open-world stealth once it's over. From reports, such as Jeff's review, it looks to be more of the same with certain aspects gratefully pared down (boss fights) and others beefed up (skill trees? side-quest quality?) but perhaps not as impactful overall as Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Like I've always said about sequels, if you're building a game to follow up a lemon like Invisible War, that's a far easier job than following up the well-regarded sequel you just made. If nothing else, it's not difficult for your game to look more enticing by comparison.

Another big release is King of Fighters XIV, one for all the SNK fighter fans out there who have stuck with that series for decades. SNK's whole library has always been an intimidating thing to jump into for me; if a game wasn't Arcade (or Neo Geo, which might as well be the same thing) exclusive, it was a region exclusive for Japan. I guess it's different for UK folk, since Arcade machines never really made the splash here that they did in Japan and the US. We had 'em, of course, but you had to live in a big city to see any on a regular basis. For me, it was rare trips to theme parks and city centers, and only for as long as I could spare before joining the rest of the family on a spinning teacups ride or heading to my job interview, depending on which year we're talking about. At any rate, I'll readily admit that I'm not an authority on SNK fighters and their enormous rosters, but I hope this one does well by the fans. It's been a rough year for the FGC what with the half-finished Street Fighter V and a relative dearth of anything noteworthy from that genre in 2016.

I'm looking forward to finally playing Inside before the end of the year, and I think the PS4 version due out this week was always going to be my best option. I'm sure it wouldn't be incredibly taxing for my PC - having very few colors helps (maybe) (look, I'm not a "tech guy", all right?) - but the whole point of having a console is that I don't need to have those worries. In some sort of monochrome platformer exchange program, Steam is getting PS4's bastard-hard N++ this week in return. Coincidence I'm sure, but I like the idea of those two bartering new releases. As long as more games reach as many systems as possible and we can get past this whole "my system's better because exclusives" mindset the better.

Other worthy mentions this week, and it's a surprisingly busy one to signal the end of the Summer slump: Worms WMD, the revamp that got Dan reinvested in Team 17's violent vermiforms; Madden NFL '17, the handegg juggernaut that won't ever be stopped; the curious and thoughtful adventure game Obduction, from the creators of Myst and Riven; the bouncy first-person adventure game Valley; and a hell of a lot of Wii U and 3DS games joining the Nintendo Selects range, perfect for extending your Wii U backlog in preparation for its imminent demise. A price drop might finally convince me to pick up Nintendo Land and Wind Waker HD.

Wiki!

Managed twelve pages this week, which is more than last time but hardly the sort of pace needed to complete the Super Nintendo's 1995 catalog by the end of this month. By my count, I've still got 25 game pages left to polish off in the next nine days. Maybe if my completionist tendencies get the better of me I might complete the last few in a rare burst of industry on the final day, but let's not let my keyboard write any checks my wiki-ing can't cover.

Back to a summary of the more notable games this week, since these were all Japanese exclusives and many are as uninteresting as they are obscure. One whole third of this week's batch were new pages too: EMIT: Value Set, Honke Sankyo Fever Jikki Simulation 2, Seijuu Maden Beasts & Blades and Shounin yo, Taishi o Dake!!. Read more about those (or at least as much as I was able to dig up) by either perusing their linked pages or checking the usual list of Super Famicom Super Also-Rans.

With the remaining eight, there's only really four games of note. The other four include two (!) licensed bass fishing games (released on the same day even: the 15th of December, like everything else this week), a generic Go Go Ackman platformer sequel based on a Toriyama comic with little Western exposure, and an odd comedic virtual board game involving heists and the pulling thereof.

Jikkyou Oshaberi Parodius is the fourth Parodius game, though the first to be console exclusive. It's also the first Parodius game to have voiced commentary - its title basically means "chatty commentary Parodius" - but it is, of course, as nonsense as everything else going on. Like previous console versions, Konami threw in a handful of their legacy characters too: the babies of Bio Miracle Bokutte Upa and the heroes of the TwinBee series, but unfortunately no Goemon and Ebisumaru this time. Worth playing for its ridiculous bosses and levels and for its decent Gradius-inspired shoot 'em up core. Like many games released around this particular moment in time, it saw enhanced CD versions for the two new consoles: PlayStation and Saturn.

Nichibutsu Arcade Classics 2: Heiankyo Alien is the follow-up to Nichibutsu (a.k.a. Nihon-Bussan)'s compilation of Arcade games, but focuses on a single title this time: the influential 1979 maze game Heiankyo Alien. Players can choose to dig holes to trap aliens in the original 1979 blocky PC-8001 style or in a 16-bit enhanced mode that adds extra obstacles. The game even has competitive multiplayer, where burying aliens simply drops them on your opponent's grid for them to deal with.

Princess Maker: Legend of Another World is a Super Famicom exclusive entry in the Princess Maker series, the second of which would find some internet notoriety due to a leaked complete translation that would never become a commercially available product for its localizers for various unfortunate reasons. Raising a pre-teen girl to become a confident young woman by organizing her education and balancing that with maintaining her physical well-being and happiness, each Princess Maker can end in several ways depending on how effective a guardian you were and the sort of woman you molded your daughter into being. Legend of Another World was heavily based on the mechanics of Princess Maker 2, but a lot of characters and events were reworked.

Tales of Phantasia is the inaugural game of one of the most influential and expansive RPG series of all time: Bandai-Namco's Tales, which just last week saw the Japanese debut of its sixteenth core entry Tales of Berseria. Introducing a lot of concepts that would become trademark to the series - the real-time action-based LMB system, which allowed for fighter game-style control over your character in combat, as well as the many recurring item names, themes, concepts and the series' penchant for changing its tone from serious to jovial in a heartbeat - Phantasia now seems fairly anodyne compared to its more narratively and mechanically complex sequels, but was a revelation at the time for its innovations, character work and ludicrous time-travelling story. It also has the Tales record for most ports and remakes: the game is presently available for Super Famicom, PlayStation, GBA, PSP and iOS. Now let me tell you where I dwell...

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain!

Week... three? I've been playing this game for so long now, but I'm determined to finish it. I did reach two milestones last night: Mission 30, which looks to be a conclusive story mission in one fashion or another, and 50% completion. That percentage is, I'm hoping, the overall completion including optional stuff like side ops, bonus mission objectives, catching all the animals, completing all the development projects, building all the Mother Base platforms, etc. rather than recording the progress I've made in the main game, because I think I'm going to have to set a hard deadline for the end of this month. I have so much in my backlog left to play - more so now that I've bought Divinity: Original Sin and Xenoblade Chronicles X (why do I keep buying these enormous games?!) - and I refuse to let MGSV turn into another Stardew Valley where I feel obligated to write an entire blog narrowing down a good place to call it quits. I can be too obsessive for my good, though I suppose a lot of that can also be a compliment to the long-term appeal of a fantastic game like MGSV. It's not like I won't frequently quit games cold turkey only a few hours in if they're not speaking to me at all. Like Stardew, I'll reach a self-determined point where I need to move on already, abd probably come back to it a few hours a week to move inexorably closer to that golden 100% between sessions of whatever else I happen to be focused on at that time.

That said, I'm still way into getting Big Boss into various scrapes. The missions continue to be hit and miss in the most basic metric that is my enjoyment of them, but they're all at least distinctive and well-considered. The creep of new developments adding new venues for stealth approaches, the simple joys of taking out an entire guardpost or outpost without getting spotted and the game's trademark ludicrous story are all doing their part to maintain my interest too. I will finish this game, not because I feel obligated to do so by some odd personality quirk, but because the game deserves it. Even with all the tales I've heard about the game's abrupt and disappointingly inconclusive end, I owe it and the overall series that much.

Visceral Cleanup Detail!

Talking of games ideal for short intermittent playthroughs, I decided to check out the core Viscera Cleanup Detail game this week a few months after playing its Shadow Warrior-themed demo/tie-in because I was curious to see what sort of additional features the full game enjoyed.

I think what's immediately striking is that there's a heck of a lot of game here. I was expecting maybe four or five scenarios of comparative size to the singular VCD: Shadow Warrior area, but there's actually eighteen right now. Each has a distinct environment, though most share the same sanitation problems to tackle: bloodstains, dismembered body parts, bullet casings, regular trash, radioactive materials, etc. In addition, the number of tools the player is given access to has increased, along with a device that can boost you up for the sake of removing all that awkwardly high blood splatter. Naturally, this device is as low-rent as the rest of your janitorial equipment and frequently jams. The game also has a plot of sorts for each of its levels. While you can glean what happened in the Shadow Warrior level from context alone - Lo Wang happened, is what - in the core game there are data pads and notes to read while picking through debris both organic and otherwise that help fill in some extra backstory regarding what sort of horrific event occurred and why. The other big addition is a hub-like "office", actually just a leaky janitor closet, where you can decorate the shelves with any "keepsakes" you stole from the levels.

I didn't do so hot on my first level, Athena's Wrath, a well-lit corridor that had some elevated window ledges that housed some of the more elusive viscera and trash to eliminate. I neglected to fix any of the bulletholes, largely because I didn't realize that was something you could buff out. (How do you clean a hole? Best not answer that, actually.) I appreciated that each of the dead "employees" scattered around the environment had punch-out cards like mine, and I figured I might get a bonus if I brought them all to the punch-out machine used to quit the level - they made a noise and vanished, but nothing came of it at the end so it might be that a missed one or the game has yet to incorporate additional mission tasks (or I just didn't notice if they got added after the first clear, like MGSV's missions). The 87% cleaning rate I ended up with was apparently dissatisfying enough to my superiors for a demotion, but I'm not sure how much further down the totem pole I can really go, so... hey, NBD.

If I play VCD again, and I just might because the game still has this relaxing zen-like quality to its repetitive routine and completionist-baiting tendencies that folk these days generally refer to as "podcast gaming", I'll be sure to try another of its many scenarios. I can definitely appreciate that this game is meant for multiple people - many hands make light work, as I've said before about this game, and particularly-synchronized players can delegate specific chores to each other, whether that's fetching new buckets or carrying garbage to the incinerator and so on in a manner similar to that recent Overcooked! game. However, there's also something inherently amusing about the janky Unreal Engine physics that only a casual multiplayer environment could really capitalize on. I'd like to see a few knuckleheads like the Giant Bomb Squad tackle a four-player co-operative clean-up and see how quickly it takes them to complete it; or rather, how quickly it takes for them to descend into chaos, sabotage and bickering.

Boomshalashaska! Welcome to another tension-wrought episode of Mento Gear Solid V! I packed a lot into this update in my rush to hit an ideal end point - Mission 25, which I believe to be the halfway point of the game - so it's a little bulkier than usual. However, at this juncture I've already explained so much of how the game operates that I'm able to focus on mission rundowns and story beats without stopping frequently to discuss a brand new feature that's been foisted on me out of the blue. MGSV seems to do that a lot.

Also in this episode: A lot of features that get foisted on me out of the blue. Hitting child soldiers. Weird diseases. More nicknames for Bones Jackson and the Human Torch. Quiet dentistry. A few half-assed recaps of the story so far. And a certain seal is broken, to my ultimate displeasure.

With all those enigmatic portents, let's get on with this update:

Part 5: FOB-washed

• Mission #17. Gotta rescue a couple of Intel team members who got themselves captured. Hoped this would be one of those slow and deliberate missions where I scope out the joint and recover the prisoners from their hidden cells, but instead I was forced to quickly find the first guy who had escaped and had several enemy search teams combing the Savannah for him, and then forced to quickly find the second guy in the enemy camp who was about to be picked up by some hardcore-sounding mercs from Cipher. All these ticking clocks are not what I would call conducive to careful, cautious stealth gameplay. Not much to say, got spotted by a whole pack of guards right at the end before grabbing the second one, took the hit of a perfect stealth bonus and the big penalty for the combat alert for a meager B-rank. I could've reloaded, but I have no idea where the checkpoint would've put me, and if I'd gone any slower I'd have been screwed anyway. An unpleasant rescue mission.
• Mission #18. All right! A new worst mission ever! That's quite the achievement after that multiple-target vehicle-hijacking mission back in Afghanistan. This mission is a little bit of a morality play, as you're told to execute six Mbele freedom fighters by their bitter rivals (and currently ruling) ethnic group, the Buta. Presumably they want the Mbele dead because they can't believe they're not Buta. The first guy was a regular soldier who switched sides to work with the PFs when you first see him. I extracted him as a matter of course, but Miller was adamant that we ought to be killing them as outlined in our mission parameters. It's when you find the next five prisoners in the subsequent outpost that the mission takes a turn: they're all children. The next half of the mission involves escorting them all downriver to where the LZ awaits. Now, you probably instinctively flinched at "escort mission", but it gets worse: one of the kids can't walk, so you're forced to carry him to the LZ while the rest of the Little Rascals are mostly autonomous (except for when you get more than 50m away and they just stop), and that means dumping his emaciated ass whenever you want to get a primary weapon out. The second wrinkle is that the river route is absolutely crawling with guards, and if you're like me and trying to be quiet you're probably low on suppressors and ammo for your sleepy-time gun at this point. I have two sleepy-time guns, but going through two whole outposts whittled their ammo/suppressors down a lot. Third, the guys back at the base find out in like two minutes that the prisoners are gone, despite the fact that they tossed them deep in a cave with no guard, and as soon as that happens about four guards spawn about twenty yards away - not from where you found the kids, but from wherever you happen to be standing - and start jogging downstream with searchlights. When I finally got into the LZ, I was spotted as I was boarding the Pequod and all the kids got scared and wouldn't jump in the chopper with me, and I flew off staring at them all crouching on the ground as more teleporting guards started to close in. I was about to throw my controller at the screen, knowing I'd failed the core rescue mission at the very last second and was penalized all to shit besides for getting spotted several times, but then Miller piped up talking about how awesome I was as I stared in disbelief at another S-rank results screen. WHAT EVEN.
• Agh. Well, my intent was to create an unbroken series of mission reports this update to demonstrate that I was serious about getting on with the game's critical path rather than faffing about with extraneous entries explaining how capture cages work, but after that last mission I have to take another time out and unwind with some side ops. Sometimes missions that sound better on paper - Snake discovers that the rebels he's been sent to execute are children! He mounts a daring rescue downriver while the jailers search for them! - end up playing abysmally in practice, even with all of MGSV's sophisticated gameplay tech. If you created a supercomputer who could design and program games better than any living person with a technical precision beyond mortal ken, it still wouldn't be able to figure out how to make an escort mission fun. So here's what I can take from all this: sometimes what works in the movies doesn't work as a video game. You'd think the thousand shitty licensed platformers I've encountered during all my SNES wiki editing would've told me that much, but it's an immutable fact of game design even in its modern state. Design games to be games, not movies, even if that means a few cinematic set-pieces that probably looked awesome as they played out in Kojima's mind are left on the shelf.
• So maybe I misread the conclusion of the last mission and maybe I didn't. The game instantly takes me back to Mother Base (giving me a chance to shower and rip down another anime Paz poster) with a cutscene featuring just one of the kids, presumably the one that couldn't walk since that was the only one I could successfully get on the Pequod. Walking around, the kid hassles Miller a bit and is sent on his way by medical personnel, and we get a cutscene where Miller outlines what he intends to do with the multiple children (??????) we brought back. They'll be given lessons in the three Rs - reading, writing and reloading - and small jobs to do around the base, but the intent is to arm them as soon as they're ready. We are, after all, a mercenary outfit where everyone must do their part to pay for all my cardboard box upgrades. One day that brat's going to risk his life in one of the most dangerous warzones on the planet so that I can afford to put a red stripe around my box instead of forest camo. Makes you proud.
• While checking out some side ops, I also noticed that a few of the core missions have "reset" their rewards: the GMP you earn after a mission is halved if you play it again, but it apparently goes back to the normal amount after enough time has passed. That meant I could revisit an easy one like eliminating that Spetsnaz commander in mission #3, take him out with a high-powered rifle from 150m away and run off for an easy S-rank. Five minutes later, and I got a healthy injection of GMP to spend on various upgrades I was lacking the cash for. I guess it might be worth keeping these revisits in mind if I want to take a break from whatever stressful garbage the next big mission has in store for me. Especially those I sucked at the first time, since you also receive bonus rewards for achieving A-ranks and S-ranks for each mission.
• Mission #19. It's another tailing mission, though a mercifully short one. We simply follow a guy in his jeep along a few hundred meters of road before his clandestine rendezvous with his commander. Now, I wasn't sure to attack while both men were still in the area, or follow the commander a bit so I could get the jump on him without as many guards around. I decided that I was done following jeeps for today and went for the first option. I got spotted of course, despite the use of a sleep grenade to take down the nearest handful. There were a lot of guards, and there was nowhere for Quiet to get coverage (I forget how to use her when I'm standing in some random place rather than a demarcated guard post or outpost), but a few tranqs and sleep grenades did the trick and I grabbed both dudes, the two cars they were using and a few other nearby guards before bailing. At least I got a free AV after listening to their conversation about nukes, so that was neat. I wonder if I replay the mission, I can just go straight to where the boss man is waiting...?
• Right, the story. I've been really negligent with that. After the first mission in Angola, we sort of breezed right past the whole "corpses in the oilfields" terror to an ongoing plot about what Cipher's doing in the area and whether or not it has anything to do with the production of nuclear weapons. This is a plotline that's been developing from mission #16 - the one with the Skulls accompanying a truck with nuclear materials on it - and each successive mission has shed more light on this line of inquiry, either directly via mission directives (the intel from #17) or indirectly (like #18, which had nothing to do with anything) with post-mission exposition drops regarding the analysis of the uranium-enriched materials we recovered. Riveting stuff, and you might be wondering why I didn't describe it all in rapt detail as it occurred. Well, the answer to that is fairly simple: it's... oh hey, there's a new mission about a place ominously referred to as "The Devil's House" by the child soldiers we rescued! Let's go get spooked!
• First though, we get a scene where Huey describes a new "Battle Gear" he's building for us. He made it sound like it was going to be a walker with four legs instead of two, though I suspect it still won't be as impressive as the mech that attacked us at the end of the Afghanistan chapter. We won't be using it yet; the game just wanted us to see a cutscene where we sign off on its production, letting us know that we can visit the unfinished construction work on Mother Base at any time. You know, I haven't really used D-Walker yet - I'm not the "all-out" sort of MGS player, so while a giant walking tank seems fun it doesn't strike me as the most subtle approach - and I'm fairly sure I won't take to this thing either.
• I also wondered how long I could continue not mentioning Psycho Mantis Jr., the ragamuffin in the gas mask who has the same floating trick and can throw things around with his (her?) mind. Now that I've recently watched Stranger Things, and that the game is set in roughly the same era, I figured I'd drop the whole gaslighting bit and wonder aloud if we don't have a similar Firestarter situation on our hands. Plus, given that I first saw the telekinetic tyke accompanying the fire guy, that comparison might prove to be more apt than I realize. So, yes, I did notice them floating around during the intro and again when the Saha- Sehan- Sallycantdance big robot showed up in Afghanistan. I'd assume they work for Cipher and their leader Papyrus (nyeh heh heh!), but assuming anything is a mistake with this series.
• Felt bad to do it, but I sacked everyone at HQ that was C rank or lower in their best discipline. Got no time for scrubs, as the popular vernacular goes. I've been running out of room for a while, and the various platforms are getting extraordinarily expensive to produce - I'm not sure why every platform bar Support needs the same Fuel resource, seems like they could've spread it out a bit more with the other types. At any rate, I've been focusing on Base Development for faster resource production and R&D for better gear. I'm not wholly invested in the dispatch missions - you can only ever send two squads out anyway, at least at the level I'm at - to focus too much on the Medical or Combat wings. Intel stopped being useful a while ago now that I have D-Dog or Quiet on almost all missions, and I'm trying not to depend on Supply drops as much to conserve GMP. Still, though, you see one of those yellow A+ or A++ soldiers on the field, and you kinda have to drop everything to go grab 'em.
• Mission #20. All right, back to the critical path. Mission #20 was an exercise in suspense. A vast majority of it is uneventful but directed in such a way to make you feel uneasy - after passing through Munoko ya Nioka Station ("The Snake's Mouth", since it rests at the end of a winding valley) it's a long trek to the target area of Ngumba Industrial Zone. Along the way, you pass through a guarded area of "permanent mist", which is enough to put me on edge after the last few Skull encounters. Finally, you reach the apparently deserted Industrial Zone, following a blood trail to a bunch of infected civilians dying on makeshift hospital beds including, alas, our child soldier leader. Then all hell breaks loose, with Skeletor, Psycho Boytis and Fryguy showing up to torch the evidence. Yet, before you get spotted by the Monster Mash, the cutscene almost suggests that they were here to put everyone out of their misery irrespective of you turning up. That, perhaps, this facility is what created them along with the Skulls and they're determined that no more should suffer. The subsequent "boss" fight with Cinder took a quick turn for the worse as he's fairly indestructible, but then I realized you could destroy the water tower and douse Blaze to incapacitate him long enough to call the chopper in. The arrival of the Terrible Trio should've been an unexpected twist... except, because the game is pretending each of its missions are separate episodes of a TV show complete with opening credits, I saw all their names before I even stepped off the Pequod. That's also served to spoil the surprise appearances of various other characters too - I knew when Skulls were going to show up, when I'd meet an important NPC like ol' Stalfos and what sort of enemies I'd be facing. It's a bizarre stylistic feature for anyone wanting to maintain any semblance of surprise with their plotting, which I'm fairly sure Kojima would.
• You know, when I completed Mission #18, I was given a special reward from the kids that in turn allowed for a new development item: the water pistol. I figured it was a fun goof, something I could use to squirt the guys back on Mother Base. That the very next mission related to those rapscallions involved fighting a man made of fire has given a whole different context to that novelty offering. They knew!
• Mission #21. Our goal this time is to... oh wait, something's up.
• Mission #22. So some genius PF has found out where we are (we hid this enormous multi-decked oil rig so well) and has taken over the R&D platform. I had to interrupt the last mission to handle it, because the 400+ trained soldiers I have on the facility can't deal with it themselves. It's the standard "find the boss man, take him down" mission, which would've been made extra easy if I remembered to bring a lethal sniper rifle - interrogate a dude for his location, pop him from three decks away - but I figured he was worth more to us alive. There's no way I wasn't going to get spotted climbing that labyrinthine tower on the core R&D deck, but fortunately I managed to extract the prisoners (well, some of them) already and the mission doesn't have a ranking to worry about. Seems more like a tutorial invasion to set up a certain big feature of the game that I've been dreading.
• That feature being FOBs, or Forward Operating Bases. These are Mother Base clones that expand our staff limits and capabilities but draw more heat than our Mother Base, which essentially means they can be targeted by people playing online who get their jollies from stealing resources and manpower from other players. I need to build one to continue, and honestly the security team - the new category that was created for the purpose of defending FOBs, who I believe are at the most risk of getting Fultoned - is probably the best place to dump all these low-level soldiers I keep needing to dismiss. If someone takes time out of their day to Fulton away a bunch of B-rank soldiers, more power to 'em. I'm more concerned that all my unprocessed materials (thankfully the legit stuff is protected) will disappear with a relentless series of invasions from griefers who have very few other targets left on the PS3 servers for this game. At any rate, this at least means that I can increase the staff size and levels for all my departments, which had been limited by the huge amount of resources needed to upgrade the platforms I had left. I can upgrade the FOBs too, and increase those numbers further. I also notice that FOBs have their own unique currency for getting set up: Mother Base coins. I've been getting these as daily rewards from time to time, but nothing like the quantities needed to set up a new FOB. I'd assume they're either PvP currency or some sort of Michael Transaction dealie. Either way, I'm not going after them and I'm going to pretend this part of the game doesn't exist as best as I am able.
• Anyway, Mission #21, for real this time. I really liked this mission, because it allowed me to be sneaky in a strategic way. It was also easy, which if I'm being honest is about 70% of the reason why I enjoyed it. The goal here is to eliminate/extract a CFA official (CFA are one of the rival PFs in the area, who we believe has ties to Cipher) as he takes an inspection of the Nova Braga airport. Security's been beefed up as you might expect, with a handful of guards in walker gears and at least one gunship patrolling the skies. However, by interrogating a guard for the official's predicted route - or seeing it for yourself and restarting so you can make use of the intel - you'll notice that he eventually drives far away from where all the guards can see him before doubling back. It was simply a matter of laying down some electromagnetic stun mines around that point and sweeping up the official, the gunrunner he was with and the truck they were in and quickly getting out the way I came in. Easy S-rank, and fun too. Why can't all missions be like this?
• Apparently I caught eight Tree Pangolin, a creature designated as "Super Rare", by setting down all my traps right at the LZ. That's a quick and easy 400k GMP to add to the reward pile. Don't you just love days when everything goes right? It'll give me perspective knowing that the game can be generous when it wants to be if and when I get another nightmare mission like the child soldier escort one.
• Listening to the intel for the next mission, we have the challenging subject of kicking some kid's ass. Child soldiers are raiding other locations from within Bwala village, the first location we encountered in Angola, after all the CFA soldiers posted there mysteriously died and left the boy scouts with no other way to feed themselves than through warfare. Early intel for this mission suggests that they're being led by a blond white kid who is suspiciously stronger and faster than the rest. Wait... in which conflict and which era was Raiden a child soldier again? Didn't he get mentored by Solidus, not Big Boss? Maybe it's some other blond combat prodigy urchin...
• Mission #23. This mission was probably easier than it looked, but I had to make things complicated by indirectly Fultoning every child soldier in the village because the mission briefing told me so. Well, it told me that it "would be cool if I did" in so many words. You can't Fulton children because the ride is too dangerous to their fragile, half-starved little kid bodies (not to mention traumatic, I'd bet). The indirect method, I discovered on the internet, is when you supply drop in a low-cost vehicle like a jeep, fill it with kids and then summon another jeep. All vehicles are automatically Fultoned back to base free of charge when they become surplus to requirement, and thus I managed to get several carfulls of anklebiters zooming into the stratosphere before they could say "Are we there yet?" in Afrikaans. White Mamba, as predicted, was an obnoxious little shit who took several CQCs to stun, and then proceeded to manspread on the Pequod. I took way too long to Fulton everyone, even if I did all right with the sneaking around part, so I ended up with a B-rank. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to start a literary punk band called Manspreading On The Pequod.
• The kid's name is Eli, so I don't think it's Raiden (pretty easy to remember that his name is Jack, Rose called him that enough times even after he told her not to). Could still be Liquid Snake, but I think the age is off? I forget how old Solid Snake is in the 1980s, but I feel like at least one of the first two games was set then and he would've been in his 20s at least. But... fuck man, when you start considering hypothetical ages of fictional characters, you've gone too deep and gotta pull out. Whoever he is, he pulled a knife on Big Boss and paid for it with an immediate arm dislocation. He's going to be a handful, that one, though maybe not two for a while. While I didn't get any bonus mission points for my earlier largesse in recovering all those kids, I did get a challenge bonus reward for it, so that's cool. I mean, I did it for the shorties first and foremost of course, but it's nice to know I'm getting rewards for punching children in the face, loading their unconscious forms onto a convertible and then launching that convertible into space. It's like they get to be in their own ZZ Top music video. Kids love ZZ Top; they all look like rowdy Santas to them.
• Mission #24. On the surface, this mission seems fairly standard: rescue two prisoners. Of course, at this stage of the game, it's going to be anything but simple. As soon as I arrive at the guard post, both of them are getting prepared to be driven off in opposite directions. I had the presence of mind to take out the first vehicle as it rolled towards me with another electromagnetic mine (those things are really paying for themselves) and I guess I made enough of a commotion at the guard post to distract the guards heading the other direction with the second prisoner. They didn't even have time to hop in the jeep before both were asleep and all three were escorted back to Mother Base by Delta Air's more comfortable sister service.
• Also, it took god knows how many hours, but I finally extracted a Hungry Hippo. Just three more and we'll have game night at Mother Base ready to go.
• Rather than hang around the area and complete a nearby side op for the sake of convenience, I'm instead booted back to Mother Base so I can... have a shower, according to Miller. Well actually, it's so I can be there when Quiet goes apeshit on some random grunt and tries to stick a knife down his throat. I suspect the guy she attacked might not be on the up and up - I'm more inclined to believe her than him if it came down to a decision. We send her back to her sunbathing pit with extra guards and I get word that Eli is probably Liquid Snake after all, or some other product of the Les Enfants Terrible project (Gaseous Snake? Plasma Snake? Bose–Einstein CondenSnake?), and they even throw in a line about the "age being about right". Well la-de-da, Captain Counting, excuse me if I haven't got the MGS chronology down pat.
• Mission #25. Oddly enough, I have to extract two people here as well, though only one is a prisoner - the Mbele rebels' General's brother who is also his number two in command. The enemies are more child soldiers, their leader being the second target, so it's another mission we're going to have to handle with kid gloves. I say "handle" but what I mean is "punch", and by "with kid gloves" I just mean kids. Such is the life of Big Boss, who must feel like an even bigger boss pummeling all these ten-year-olds. Dealt with this one the exact same way I did Bwala village in mission #23: took all the kids with me along with the mission targets using the "car trip" method. Fittingly, the General's "#2" - who opted to stay with the Diamond Dogs - has sanitation problems.
• Speaking of which, looks like one of us (looking at you, Ocelot) brought that disease from Ngumba's Industrial Zone back to the Mother Base. A number of Mother Base staff has a case of the chesty wormies, and it's my job to separate the unhealthy ones to the Quarantine Platform we just had built, about which I made the immediate decision to start referring to it as Leper Island because I'm proactive in a crisis, dammit. I have to now guess which dudes in my facility - and I will point out that I have over 500 now, at least at present - is an unknowing vector for the disease and quarantine them ahead of time. Of course, there's no way of knowing who has it, so I guess my options are to quarantine as many people as possible and lose a huge amount of staff levels, or let the disease run rampant. Awesome. I guess I better keep doing missions until a cure is found...
• The audio tapes concerning this epidemic highlight one hypothesis I suspected - Quiet only attacked that guy because he was already infected - and suggests a second, in that the infected have something in common and it's to do with their "mouths". I figured it out after checking the handful of folk put into quarantine already: they all enjoy the same flavor of chewing gum. I noticed a backwards-talking little person strutting around the base offering sticks of gum to everyone he met, so now I suspect that we have our biological warfare saboteur. Actually, they all spoke the same language - Kikongo. As a precaution, I stuck everyone in quarantine who also speaks that language as their first, or second, or fifth... all right, so there were a lot of folk to quarantine. I hope jamming a platform full to the brim of potentially sick people doesn't make things worse...

This seems like a good place to stop. The game's now introduced two methods of gradually reducing the number of Mother Base staff I have over time - though I've stemmed the negative flow temporarily for both right now, via quarantine for the virus and Mother Base insurance for the PvP (first hit is free, fortunately, but it won't last long) - and I have to wonder just how much MGSV actually respects my time, given I'll have to keep replenishing my numbers faster than they can die off. I've brought up respecting the player's time as a universally applicable game design tenet before now and I realize it's one that Kojima, being the eccentric auteur that he is, regularly disregards - consider his original plan to make The End's boss fight take a real-time week or more (or, hell, how the online dispatch missions in this game take almost as long). It's something to consider as I move slowly but inexorably toward the game's conclusion, but at least I reached the halfway point with this update and I'm almost certainly going to stay focused on missions for the time being, at least until this whole epidemic is sorted.

I certainly still admire the game for its mechanical complexity and versatility and I still enjoy playing it, don't get me wrong, but I'm bracing myself to hit Burnout Junction (™, Criterion Games) soon and I want to be sure I've seen all there is to see story-wise before I reach that point. There's a lot more hokey plot to mock, so stay tuned for more of that early next week.

Another week of Summer, another week of... actually, it seems like a lot happened this week. No Man's Sky has seen polarizing reactions from the faithful and skeptical alike, Overwatch and the Olympics are getting their O-synergy on (which I think is also a sexual euphemism) and Nordic has changed their name to THQ Nordic to profit from the former publishing giant's impressive legacy of half-assed licensed platformers and wrestling games that still fill bargain bins to this day.

For me, though, it's mostly been more Metal Gear Solid V. Why didn't anyone warn me that it was such a big game? It's been two weeks and I don't know if I'm even a third of the way through it. It might be time to stop messing around and focus on the missions already. Or play around in cardboard boxes some more, who can really say at this pivotal time?

New Games!

Now that we've calmed down a bit after the unbelievable No Man's Sky build-up, let's take a look at what we can expect from the third week of August.

I think I'm not alone when I say that my most anticipated game this week is the follow-up to the 2015 sleeper hit Grow Home, named the somewhat-accusatory Grow Up. B.U.D. the botanical bot once again takes to vertiginous heights in his endless quest for scientific discovery, with some familiar and all-new mechanics for keeping aloft and reaching ever higher checkpoints. I suspect it'll be more of the same, but I have to wonder if the success of Grow Home didn't give that team the confidence to try out some of their more out-there ideas in a sequel.

Bound follows right after last week's Abzu as another dreamlike 3D action game full of colorful minimalist artwork and deep mysteries to solve. I remember being awed by the papercraft-inspired graphics during its E3 trailer; similar to the craft paper world of Tearaway but more fragile and origami-like in nature. I liked how everything seems to burst into confetti when destroyed. We'll have to wait and see if it's as inventive mechanically as it is visually - my big problem with Tearaway was that, for all its imagination, it was a fairly so-so 3D platformer underneath.

Hitman's fourth chapter, set in the bustling city of Bangkok this time, is due for a release next week. I'm already up to my knees in elaborate stealth mechanics with MGSV, but then I suppose most of us anticipate the new Giant Bomb content that follows each Himan update more than the updates themselves. It's a brand new city that Brad will only play once or twice beforehand, get horribly disoriented by once it's crunch time and gets shot after pulling out a gun in a busy street. So that'll be fun for anyone who enjoys awkward flailing around. Really, who doesn't?

The 3DS sees two big releases this week: Metroid Prime: Federation Force and Style Savvy: Fashion Forward. Not the FFs I've been looking forward to (when is XV out, again?) but I know the Style Savvy series has a huge following akin to Animal Crossing, and any new Metroid game - even one so far removed from the core tenets of the Metroid series - will no doubt invite a lot of scrutiny. The 3DS will soon see a new Phoenix Wright game and the Dragon Quest VII enhanced port too, so it seems like a good time to dust that thing off.

Finally, to keep my anime pals in the know, we have the PC port of the PSVita dungeon-crawler/visual novel Conception II, a game about finding a nice anime lady and creating star babies with her to use as fodder for monster-bashing. It's a Spike Chunsoft game, they of the Mystery Dungeon series, so here's hoping it turns out to be a decent enough port. We've had some issues with those of late, and it sometimes feels as if Falcom - traditionally a PC game developer - is the only Japanese RPG developer who is comfortable with the platform.

Wiki!

Oh boy. I think my declaration of intent to complete December 1995 by the end of this month was a little hasty. As I've mentioned previously, I only work on the wiki when I have podcasts to listen to, and now that the Bombcast has a live stream it's taken a big chunk out of my regular wiki schedule. What I didn't realize is that my favorite podcast about bad movies - We Hate Movies - is also taking the month off. I'm down to just the Beastcast and the two 'casts from the McElroy boys for wiki work listening material.

As such, I only processed ten new wiki pages this week. One of those is new, but since there's only ten I'm just going to go through them all alphabetically. Now you'll get to see the dross I usually leave out:

• American Battle Dome is the one new page this week, and it's a completely bizarre adaptation of Atari's Warlords that uses pinball flippers instead of paddles to block balls from the quadrant of the screen you're protecting from your three rivals. As balls enter your particular territory, the gravity changes so that "down" is wherever your flippers are waiting, creating a game that is very difficult to follow with its multiple gravity wells. It's definitely the sort of game I'd hope to see on an episode of UPF one day. Warlords plus Pinball seems like a custom-made combination for our own Jeff Gerstmann, and it's not like those guys haven't gotten attached to a few unusual multiplayer Super Famicom games in the past. I think the weirdest part is that it's an "American" Battle Dome that was never released in America.
• Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon Super S: Fuwa Fuwa Panic sees the various Sailor Guardians in another puzzle game, this one roughly combining SameGame and Puzzle Bobble where you have to pop balloons to create chain reactions which then dumps trash on your opponent. Like the many other Sailor Moon licensed games for the Super Famicom, it seems a bit thrown together for the sake of cashing in on the anime's huge popularity at home, but at least Bandai experimented with a few different genres - even the last puzzle game, Kurukkurin, had a different set of rules. If they gave that property to Western devs, it'd be all platformers and brawlers all day.
• ClockWerx is one of those oddly common cases of an American PC game being licensed and adapted by a Japanese company for consoles, who then don't release the game in its region of origin for copyright or monetary reasons. This seems to happen more frequently with puzzle games, especially Brøderbund's Lode Runner. ClockWerx takes the frantic spinning gameplay of Clu Clu Land for the NES and adapts it into a more thoughtful puzzle game where the player has to carefully consider a route through a series of obstacles and nodes and execute on it. The game's a bit inexact for my liking, but apparently the CD-based versions for Sega Saturn and PlayStation have some neat claymation cutscenes.
• Doraemon 4: Nobita to Tsuki no Okoku is, perhaps obviously, the fourth game for the Super Famicom based on Doraemon, the loveable robotic cat from the future that was sent back to keep an eye on bespectacled loser Nobita Nobi, ensuring that he avoids the event that puts several future generations of his family in massive debt. I think this game was the first to introduce Dorami, Doraemon's more advanced sister, as a playable character. Definitely don't quote me on that though. There's hundreds of those games.
• I'm guessing Dragon Quest VI: Maboroshi no Daichi, or Realms of Reverie/Realms of Revelation as its known in Europe and North America respectively, is perhaps the biggest name out of the ten pages I looked at this week. The second and last game in the profoundly popular Dragon Quest series to come out on the Super Famicom, it drops the multi-character scenarios of DQIV and the generational shift of DQV to concentrate on a single hero who finds a way to pass between worlds, uncovering a plot that threatens the destruction of both. The game brings back the switching classes feature of Dragon Quest III, which would go on to be a major component of Dragon Quest VII and DQIX as well, and was one of the most graphically impressive RPGs of the 16-bit era. Of course, these days you're better off seeking the official English localization for DS.
• Masters New: Harukanaru Augusta 3 is a Japanese golf game from a Japanese developer that is nonetheless based on the Masters Tournament that occurs in Augusta, Georgia every year. It's even licensed by the Masters Tournament and Augusta National Golf Club, though none of the Harukanaru Augusta games ever left Japan. They're big on golf over there, but not so big on sharing I guess. As console golf games go it's a bit on the "dry and serious" side of the spectrum, with digitized photos for much of its golfers, backgrounds and courses for a limited sense of realism.
• Mickey to Donald Magical Adventure 3 is a sequel to Capcom's superb The Magical Quest Starring Mickey Mouse and The Great Circus Mystery Starring Mickey and Minnie that was criminally never released outside of Japan. A GBA port would eventually appear ten years later which was graciously localized for all regions. Playing as either Mickey or Donald, you'd progress from one fantasy storybook trope to the next, each time changing costumes to fit the surroundings. What's impressive is that not only does every costume confer different power-ups that allow you to progress through the current stage, but that the power-ups are slightly different depending on whether you are Mickey or Donald. The Knight costume, for instance, makes Mickey sink in water but Donald float, because Donald is wearing a barrel like a big goof instead of Mickey's steel armor.
• Super Momotarou Dentetsu DX is yet another in Hudson's train management board game sim franchise, which started as a joke spin-off based on their earlier Momotarou-themed RPG series but quickly surpassed the original in popularity. The differences between this and previous Dentetsu games are known only to its fanbase. Or anyone who can read the Japanese Wikipedia page for the game, at least.
• Super Puyo Puyo Tsuu, or 2, is the sequel to the bean-busting puzzle game that proved to be Compile's most enduring franchise, rather than its many fine shoot 'em ups. A refinement of the extant mechanics of Puyo Puyo, rather than some bold reimagining, it nonetheless blew up the same way its predecessor did.
• Last, we have Tintin in Tibet, an action-adventure game based on the Belgian Tintin comics which, perhaps naturally enough, was only released in Europe. It's one of a handful of games for the system where English is a possible language, but not the default. As well as basic action sequences, like avoiding luggage falling from a train, Tintin would talk to NPCs in comic-book style cutaways and it closely followed the events of the comic of the same name. The animation isn't half bad, but the game has a reputation for its intense difficulty.

Lumo!

I took a chance on this isometric puzzle game throwback after watching the Quick Look, and I came away with an eerie feeling that you sometimes get when a piece of media is filled with obscure references and you picked up on every single one of them. It's almost as if there are secret video cameras all around my house of which I am incognizant. Steeped in a lot of British in-jokes (Trapdoor! Crystal Maze!) and even more British video game history, Lumo itself hearkens to the various pillars of the isometric puzzle-platformer genre, which was inexplicably popular in the UK and not so much everywhere else. Solstice seemed like the biggest point of reference - the hero of Lumo is also a diminutive sorcerer whose face is mostly concealed by a giant wizard hat - but the game invites a lot of comparisons to the ZX/C64 output of Ultimate Play The Game, presently known as Rare. You probably played a few of them if you bought that Rare Replay collection, albeit for about five minutes before saying "huh, neat" and went to load up Banjo-Kazooie or Viva Pinata instead. I wouldn't blame you. Thirty years is a long time in the ever-evolving world of video games.

Lumo naturally carries over a lot of the issues of those games too, most significant of which is controlling a character where north is actually northeast (the alternate control scheme alleviates this, but also creates another issue where the default four-way directional movement would make a few rooms far easier to navigate) and how it's not always easy to figure out where you are in a room via a limited sense of depth perception. A shadow beneath the character can help steer you on the right path, but it's not always visible if there's objects in the way or no light source overhead. The game has its little flights of fancy too, creating set-pieces inspired by the likes of C64 hits such as Marble Madness, Pac-Mania, Q*Bert, Nebulus and Zaxxon, and these can be hit or miss depending on the game in question. I really didn't care to play Nebulus again, not after the Game Boy port Castelian almost drove me crazy in the 90s. It's fair to say that, given the genre, these elaborate recreations and the references to Zzap!64, Your Sinclair! and the Pimp My Spectrum demo, the game is a love letter to the C64 and Spectrum ZX late-70s/early-80s era of British gaming first and foremost. It won't lose you if you aren't some British nerd in their late 30s, and it might be fun for an outsider to get a glimpse into a scene that doesn't get as much play as the usual NES/SNES callbacks, but if the game had a specific niche in mind that it caters towards it'd be them.

What surprised me is that the game has a very fair difficulty curve for its standard "Adventure" mode, and then ratchets up the difficulty to absurd (and unfun) levels with its "Old-School" mode (limited lives! Start over if you die!) and the various no-death and time-based achievements for its set-pieces. The game definitely has both casuals and the insane speedrun folk covered alike. Given that no room takes more than a minute to pass through, and that you always respawn at the last door you entered, you're probably not going to be stuck for long even if there's spikes and traps everywhere. Finding all the hidden cassettes and other secrets might take some doing though, and I don't think I even found two thirds of them. As such, even though the game's only about four hours long, it's got some legs to it if you want to try to find everything.

Ultimately, I might place Lumo in the same box in my mind that Life of Pixel and the NES Remix games currently inhabit. A game built by a retro gaming enthusiast for retro gaming enthusiasts, that's in some way intended to be an interactive monolith to video game history but also competent enough (with a handful of caveats) to stand on its own two feet and appeal to a wider audience who probably doesn't give two bumblebee cursors about the myriad technical differences between a Commodore Amiga and an Atari ST.

Metal Gear Solid V!

I feel bad that I once again don't have anything to offer here, besides pointing at the last two entries - Part 3! Part 4! - of Mento Snake's continuing misadventures throughout Afghanistan and Angola, and if we're going through the entire globe alphabetically we might be here a while.

Instead, I thought I'd give you a percentage update - 29%! Thanks for asking! Yeah I know that's not particularly high after playing for two weeks! - and leave you with this bonus comic. It feels like it's been a hot minute since I whipped up one of these bad boys:

Welcome back to Mento Gear Solid V: I Already Regret the Pun Name I Gave This Feature! We finally reach the Angola-Zaire border this time and complete the first handful of missions, but like previous entries I'm still discovering huge amounts of this game and my observations are going to be as mechanically-focused as ever. I realize the whole point of this observations format was to register my utter incredulity at Metal Gear Solid's many fine, ridiculous cutscenes and story beats, but MGSV more represents the half of Kojima that is an unfettered auteur meijin of game design, and less so the half that's unabashedly a fan of dumb action movies and equally daft military conspiracies of the 20th century.

I've had my ups and downs with Metal Gear Solid V and, like Metal Gear Solid 2 and Metal Gear Solid 3 before it, I've thought about quitting early because it was frustrating me too much. But, like MGS3 (and unlike 2), I've turned a corner on it and am not only appreciating the level of depth this game demonstrates on the regular but also having a lot of fun with its open-ended approach to mission design and player adaptability. I don't think I'll ever understand the GOTY accolades that Metal Gear Solid 4 received from many venues, almost including Giant Bomb, but I can understand it here. It's not only a Metal Gear Solid game, but one of the most endlessly creative open-world games I've ever seen. Of course, time (and another thirty or so missions) will tell if it's able to keep me engaged for the long haul. Check back in when I get to Part Nine or Ten. For now, though, let's make the GMP rain down in Africa (and if Toto isn't on one of the cassettes, someone done fucked up):

Part 4: All Quiet on the Naked Front

• It's really funny and sorta cool that there's a lot more enemy decoys around. Funny because they aren't convincing at all - you might as well hire Otto Pilot from Airplane! - and suggests that the Soviet army isn't so much getting smarter than getting desperate to fill the gaps left behind by everyone I've given free blimp rides to. But that's also what's cool about it: the game is demonstrating that the soldiers aren't just passively taking my antics in stride, but are being reactive and attempting countermeasures. I've also noticed a lot more soldiers with gas masks - what I can derive from this is that, up until now, using various forms of crazy purple knockout gas would've been an effective strategy also. And don't even get me started on those helmets. My face falls every time I hear one of those loud "donk!"s.
• I also appreciate that you get a tiny, tiny GMP reward for destroying decoys. It's like a consolation prize for being a half-blind idiot. (But hey, guess how I found that out in the first place. Pot calling the inflatable kettle black.)
• So I was doing the target practice side ops on the Mother Base rig, since it seemed like easy money, and discovered two things: First, fuck the target practice mission on the R&D platform. It was like playing Where's Waldo, only thirty-five times in a row in five minutes with a high chance of falling to your death. Second, the Medical platform has a weird door with a blonde girl behind it. It's Paz! I guess! As in, the underage girl with a bomb in her hoo-ha from Peace Walker. She miraculously survived - the bomb was extracted and she fell into the ocean before Snake's chopper went down, but I imagine the original cutscene made it seem like she died - but now she has a dissociative amnesia disorder and I have to jog her memory with photos that weird ex-Grandma Base soldiers have on them. As a side ops category it makes as much sense as any other.
• Right, before I forget and we can start on the Angola missions: I shot a bear in the face with rubber bullets until he eventually fell over and then tied a balloon on its paw. Felt that was important to note down. OK, now we can move on.
• Mission #13. This is our first introduction to Angola, what I imagine is probably the setting for the second half of the game. It looks about as big as Afghanistan, though perhaps more of a vertical band than a giant circle. What's also striking is the difference in climate: Afghanistan only had two modes, desert and plains, but from what I've seen of Africa so far it's very green and balances jungle, marsh and grasslands. It's going to mean changing my cardboard box design, for one. This particular mission I figure is meant to be an introduction to the African theater: it not only guides you through a location crawling with guards (speaking Afrikaans, which means I'm going to need another translator side op before I can start interrogating anyone or listening in on their radio conversations) and introduces the type of environments you'll have to anticipate, but also how the country is doing politically. It's pretty bad, as you might expect; and problems around here concern child soldiers and oil leaks, as well as the sort of instability rampant in the continent. The mission itself was straight forward enough: Snake has to sabotage and turn off various parts of a disused oil refinery to halt a leak into the local rivers, while also avoiding the Cipher-funded private forces patrolling the area. We're back to stealth and recon, so that's a relief.
• Another scene with Quiet. She shows off her skills once again by shooting the helicopter's rotor blades while in motion, though oddly enough the game doesn't then slow them down to show that each blade has a hole in it. I guess we just take her at her non-verbal word that she pulled it off? Ocelot's convinced, but then Ocelot's an idiot who gave his loaded revolver to a potential enemy. Either way, Snake's on board with bringing her along on... oh wait, we can't communicate with her. Sorry, Quiet. Back to your sunbathing pit. Hope you like lattice patterns on your back.
• I've been using the capture cages a lot, but I'm wondering if it's mostly a waste right now considering it costs money to deploy with them and they aren't quite high enough level to capture the rarest creatures. I think this could be a real money earner with at least one more upgrade - I captured a fox once, no feedback on whether it was mysterious or could lead me back to some amazing leaves, and I got a huge amount of extra GMP for it because it was designated as "rare". I suspect that even fully upgraded the majority of my catches will continue to be gerbils and bats, but without the chance of a super rare or ultra rare catch right now it strikes me as fairly inert. I'll definitely keep an eye on new animal capturing developments as they roll in. Maybe a proximity laser-guided roach motel, or a really really technologically advanced box with a stick holding it up.
• Mission #14. My prediction that I would immediately follow Angola's introductory mission with a task that involved procuring an Afrikaans translator wasn't far off the mark, as one appears in the very next core mission. Unfortunately, it's a tailing mission, which is bad for two reasons: first, having to tail someone in any game sucks and always has even in the already-deliberate stealth genre, and second because the mission moves at its own glacial pace which occludes the chance of a high score, since I've been reliably informed that "time taken" is the largest factor in the score-tallying process. I'm not sure if coming back to this mission and heading straight for where the last - and only essential - prisoner is being kept would work, since I observed that they get moved around a lot and the interpreter wouldn't be there. I suppose I could immediately go after him next, making sure to tag him at the start of the mission to make it easier on myself. That could be a feasible S-rank strategy, but it might also be the case that I'd only need to extract the interpreter once and then he'd no longer be an essential element of the mission. Either way, that's for late-game super-advanced stealth expert Mento Snake to figure out if/when I return to this mission for a better rank (though I got an A, so I'm happy with that for now).
• I've been finding female prisoners, which I wasn't expecting. Laughing Wallaby was one of the British prisoners I rescued in the last mission, and thus probably the most visible female NPC yet ('cause Quiet's invisible, you see), but I've found a few before now as part of "extract prisoner" side ops. I got my first one, Rancid Dhole, killed while on a dispatch mission, but have recruited several more since then. I guess I could feasibly play as one of these instead of Snake, huh? It's cool they added female protagonists in to reach an expanded audience, and that Quiet isn't the sole representative of her gender in the game, but they're surprisingly rare all the same.
• More Quiet! Ocelot seems adamant that we should take her on missions. He also explains that she eats via photosynthesis (not how that works, you need green chlorophyll pigment and she doesn't look like She-Hulk to me) and that she can't be submerged in water or wear clothes because she breathes through her skin and either would asphyxiate her. I look forward to the extra lore entries that describe how she'll die if she doesn't shake 'em every five minutes with a stripper dance due to the way she stores various life-essential vitamins in her chest like a dromedary's humps and can only distribute them throughout her body with rigorous jiggling. It's science. Words and deeds, naysayers.
• Also her default uniform is "Naked" because, and I quote: "Exposes the maximum amount of skin, supposedly so as not to impede her transcutaneous respiration." (Emphasis mine.) I hope Kojima can be more honest with himself now that he has his own studio for real and no corporate oversight committee to worry about. You want bikini snipers in your game? Or Reedus with a fetus? Just go for it, dude, don't make up weird excuses to clutch onto some kind of moral high ground. I think that's what put people off the character most: when she was just a stripperific sniper, that was a little gross but mostly whatever. The same harmless cheesecake BS common to the series, like staring at Eva's cleavage or Meryl in her underwear. Hell, I've seen a lot worse on Steam lately and at least this time the sexy femme fatale doesn't have PTSD and collapses into a nervous sobbing breakdown in the middle of their boss fight. It's the bizarre justifications for why she's wearing next to nothing and doesn't talk back that is making things messy. Photo-fucking-synthesis.
• Anyway, I'm suspending my beef with Quiet's design until two things occur: I reach the late part of the story where Quiet's characterization comes full circle, and after I've spent enough time with her as a companion to recognize what she brings to the field in that capacity. A sniper with superpowers, unusual limitations and some deeper plot relevance might pull through as a half-decent construct, but I'm still really skeptical about some of the choices they've made already. Because it insults my intelligence, more than anything else.
• Mission #15. All right, enough of Quiet for now. Mission 15 has us infiltrate a village and emancipate the PF there of their four walker mechs. I feared the worst initially - the walkers were tricky to avoid during the final mission in Afghanistan, where they regularly patrolled the enemy's main base with moderate speed. Instead, the four walkers here are simply sitting on top of a hill with no pilot. The handful of guards around them took me by surprise (more on that in a moment), but I avoided a firefight and extracted the quartet with a decent enough A-rank. That's including the amount of time I was wasting cherry-picking all the guards with A or above for their skills and a prisoner or two. I'm starting to see a pattern here: the missions I am able to accomplish well the first time are also the ones I like the most. Funny, that.
• So here's more on Quiet. She's very different to D-Dog and D-Horse as a buddy, and there's two significant differences right off the bat that means she'll take some getting used to. The first is that she cannot presently help me without going lethal, as the sniper bullets she uses aren't exactly the type you wake up from. By building the bond between us, I should be able to upgrade her gear to include a tranq rifle, at which point she'll be deadly. Well, not deadly, but you know what I mean. Indispensable. The second issue is that I was able to walk too far away from where she set up, and now I can no longer get in contact with her. She's stuck wherever I left her, and there are no commands to bring her close like D-Horse. I kinda figured she'd uproot (lil' plant humor for you there. She eats through photosynthesis, you know) and start following me as soon as I left the area, but I guess not.
• She also sings a lot over the radio. Well, hums. Incessantly. It vaguely sounds like a duck quacking, which is even more distracting because it makes me think there's a rare waterfowl around somewhere. I'm not sure if this goes away if you increase your bond, or if it's something that's only triggered by talking to her on the radio. Either way, I guess it's good to know she's around even if I can't see the giant green laser sight from her rifle. Well, until she's no longer around because I walked too far. Fuck, I should probably go back and get her, huh. (Update: I discovered the "Buddy Support" iDroid menu has options to change Quiet from "scout" to "attack". The latter is default and has her stick to one place picking off targets for you. The former allows you to move her to a different location, marking enemies and weapons/vehicles in advance before you get there. What's odd, or rather irksome, about this is that the Buddy Support option is right underneath the Supply Drop option, suggesting that you're simply having a buddy dropped in to replace the one you have. It even says as much when you highlight it in the menu. And every other "tell your buddy to do a thing" command was accessible via the L2 radial menu. Some uncharacteristically lousy UI design.)
• Let's talk about side ops, since I've been doing a few of them to get the lay of the land here in Angola - as well as get used to Quiet, and find a few of those delivery invoices that'll let me fast travel to the locations they pertain to. One thing I've noticed is that a lot of side ops are recurring: both in the sense that you can do the same one again after enough time has passed, and that many side ops are successive with an identical objective but in a new location. So extracting a prisoner, for instance, means sneaking into an enemy location and rescuing the prisoner there. Straightforward, and you'll get multiple instances with names like "Extract the Prisoner #3" and "Extract the Prisoner #6". There's also a similar side op for capturing high-level soldiers - funnily enough, the way they randomize the stats on these so-called elites irrespective of my current heroism, which I've learned is what governs the skill levels of enemy soldiers and volunteers, sometimes results in a primary target that is far less competent than the others around him.
• There are some side ops that are a bit more fun than abducting people too. Mine clearing, for instance, brings back the claymores and their little lights to create puzzles where you can either figure out the best way to get behind and collect the mines for yourself, or destroy them the old-fashioned way (that is, shooting them from a distance, not the old-old-fashioned way where you walk into them). Eliminating tank and heavily-armored units present distinct problems: the tank will absolutely destroy you if you get spotted by it or the guards, so the goal is always to destroy/extract it first, while the heavily-armored goons that look like a Baton Rouge cop fell through a kitchenware display won't be affected by the weak penetration of my tranq pistol, so my best bet is to individually choke them out. It's the same gameplay, but made a bit more challenging than the norm. I particularly like the weird ones you get ever so occasionally, like taking down the confused former Mother Base staff for the sake of curing Paz's amnesia or extracting a ferocious bear. You can't easily tranq either, but you're also not allowed to kill them and they are much harder to sneak up on. I'm glad I invested in this beanbag assault rifle.
• Mission #16. It's another "hijack a moving target" mission, and one of those ones where the initial intel doesn't even cover half of the bullshit you're going to have to deal with. The game introduces its second "breed" of Skull unit here: if the former were scouts, these guys are the stormtroopers. Heavily armored and very fatal once they spot you, they move just as fast as the other type and don't seem to go away eventually if you run far enough. They seem to bring the mist with them, instead of it being a large area of effect that you can leave by heading in one direction long enough. Essentially, don't get to the point where the convoy realizes it's under attack and deploys them. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a way to not do this: their activation appears to be proximity-based rather than "time after ambush"-based, so as soon as you get close to any of the three vehicles - one AV out in front, one behind and the transport in the middle - four of those armored bastards jump out of the truck and start looking for you. My strategy, then, was to quietly extract all three vehicles (I didn't need the AVs, but why not grab 'em too? I didn't want them shooting down the Fulton over the truck) by using previously-placed decoys to distract the Skulls. I'd also ensured the AVs wouldn't leave by placing three electromagnetic mines one after the other down the road. Having escaped all attention, I got away on the Pequod with an S-rank. Yet... I have to admit that I died so many times trying to figure out what to do with the Skulls that I'm actually feeling a little guilty about it. If I died so often that I was offered the Chicken Hat - the ultimate humiliation - could it be said that I deserved that S-rank? I'm going to say "Yes" so I don't feel obligated to replay that mission.
• I should bring this up now before I forget: For as much shit as I give some of these missions on an individual basis, I can really respect how disparate each of them feels to play and how many different ways you can go about accomplishing them. I'm sure for every mission I didn't do well on, like that earlier vehicle mission (#9, see Part 3), there's a few strategies online that I didn't consider - in fact, I know this is true because I just saw a YouTube video of someone S-ranking that mission with perfect stealth (no detections, no kills). He used a combination of lethal explosive weaponry, from mines to rocket launchers, to quickly anticipate and eliminate each vehicle soon after it appeared. It was a marvel to behold, and one I might replicate if I get close to the end of the game and feel the completionist twitch take over, but it was also fake as hell that destroying a vehicle - presumably with its driver(s) still on board - didn't count as a kill. Likewise, every mission that I miraculously S-ranked, like this one, feels like a success not only because I accomplished the mission with honors, but because I found a solution that, while maybe not the ideal or intended path, was evidently one that worked.
• All right, let's talk about Peace Walker and my progress in stitching together its plot from context clues and tapes. (To digress a moment - I plan to do a more comprehensive entry for the tapes alone, since they pack a huge amount of the game's exposition and lore.) Here's what I've gathered about PW so far: Big Boss and Kazuhira Miller helped put together BB's idea of a politically-unaffiliated nation of mercenaries named Militaires Sans Frontières, inspired by his time with his mentor The Boss. This occurred some time in the 1970s after the events of the fateful Snake Eater mission, the entirety of which was depicted in MGS3. Much of PW is spent in Nicaragua, which is where they met a Dr. Galvez (actually a Russian spy), Paz (also a spy? Kinda?), Chico (a child soldier) and Amanda (some kind of rebel leader?). They also picked up Dr. Huey Emmerich at some point, as well as someone called Dr. Strangelove. The conclusion of that game had Big Boss fight an AI that was based on The Boss, and the various walker mechs under her control. Beyond that, the finer plot details have not really been explicated upon as thoroughly, leading me to suspect that players were absolutely expected to tackle Peace Walker first. Yet I gotta go with my girl Beyoncé here when I paraphrase Single Ladies: "If you liked it then you shoulda put a number on it." (also, it's kind of a weird coincidence that she also has a robotic left arm in that music video, huh). No reason it couldn't have been MGSV and this one MGSVI if it was so vital to the overarching lore of the series. (I actually have similar reservations about Kingdom Hearts III, for that matter: How much of that game's story will be dependent on the lore from the many spin-offs and interstitial chapters released since Kingdom Hearts II? KH2 was heavily influenced by Chain of Memories, the GBA card-based spin-off few people liked or played, so there's cause for concern.)
• So I'm starting to come across Boasters more and more frequently. Special skills are hidden bonus abilities that soldiers can randomly have, and they offer various positive and negative affects. While scanning a soldier you get their skill levels for the various units they can be placed in - combat, R&D, base development, support, intel and medical - but not what their special skill is. "Boaster" is a negative special skill that gives you a false impression of these unit skills when you first scan them in the field. In other words, they're not nearly as gifted as they appear. I've started to learn that while you don't know what a soldier's special skill is, you know what "type" it is by the icon it uses. The personality-focused ones, which also include all the deleterious "troublemaker" special skills and the comparatively useful "diplomat", have a distinct circular symbol. If I see a guy with fantastic skills and one of those circular symbols underneath, I'll know to treat that readout with a healthy dose of skepticism. Personally, even if it is annoying to accidentally snatch up one of these jerks, I like that they occasionally have these little personality flaws. I sort of wish Kojima's silly sense of humor took it a little further, giving you functionally irrelevant skills like "good kisser" or "daydreamer". One of my favorite aspects of Sega's Valkyria Chronicles was how each unit under your command had a semblance of a personality and a background due to their various quirks and talents, whether they were positive, negative or had no bearing on the gameplay whatsoever. (Update: After upgrading my INT-Scope again, everyone's special skills are displayed after scanning them. Handy!)
• I'm going to leave you all today with a rad discovery: the weaponsmith. This guy required a chain of wild goose chase extraction side ops, but he's definitely worth the trouble; he's able to configure any weapon to support different stocks, ammo types, scopes, barrels, you name it. Initially, I thought about how cool it is that I can now apply a suppressor to my tranq sniper rifle, or boost the scope magnification of my non-lethal assault rifle. Then it occurred to me that new weapon parts would come from developing the dozens of lethal weapons I've been leaving alone, and I'd have a huge supply of parts with which to build some quality non-lethal gear. I'd have to keep building whatever was newest (and most expensive) to get parts superior to the ones I have already, but it's opened a whole new world in loadout customization. This game is like a giant onion, and not because it makes me cry whenever someone breaks Huey's legs again (it doesn't, for the record).

I swear I'm going to run out of random gameplay observations eventually, and future updates will almost entirely be mission reviews and story scrutiny that will cover more of the game per entry. There's just so much in this game that I wanted to highlight, that we're now at the point where we're four entries in and barely one-third of the way through the game's crucial content. This might call for some more focused playing: at this point, I have almost all the tools I need (though some better versions wouldn't go awry), so maybe the next entry will cover more of Cipher's African doings and less marveling at incidental mechanics and telling that darn woman to put on some clothes. Until next time, folks.

Heavens to Mother Base, it's only another episode of Mento Gear Solid V! When I last left you all, I was complaining non-stop about how difficult Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain was and attempting to disguise it as enlightened critique. You'll be ambivalent to hear that this is one again the case with Part 3, its kvetching already in progress. I'm covering the remainder of the missions and events that occur in Afghanistan (though I'm sure I'll come back at some point) and preparing to move to the sunny shores of Angola which, like Africa itself if you believe Dan, is a country in Africa.

Normally I try to pad these introductions out a little so that the image I insert in here doesn't mess up the formatting of the bullet point list (gettin' too real already with this episode) but I'm actually at a loss for how to broach the subject of how I feel about this particular Metal Gear Solid. The story's getting stupid in that wonderful way that only a Metal Gear Solid story can, but I'm also starting to grasp that this game isn't really structured in a way conducive to my usual format. Or maybe it is? I suppose what I mean is that I can play this for ten hours without seeing anything story significant to remark upon, leading me to fill this war journal of mine with inane entries about D-Horse's poop command or Ocelot's stupid face or how I wish I could find a way to combine the two, but it's also a pretty good means of getting my views out on the game's many individual missions, which I'm learning can fluctuate wildly in how effective they are both on their own standalone merits and as part of Metal Gear Solid's usual approach to stealth mission design.

One of those aforementioned wonderfully dumb aspects about this game is how each mission is presented like an episode of a TV show, with a pre- and post-mission credits roll for the "actors" and its "director" Hideo Kojima, former lead designer for Konami and current President of the Norman Reedus fan club, "We Need Us Some Reedus™". It's easier to think of these missions as miniature Metal Gear Solid games as a result, even if only a handful actually contain the bizarre nonsense military conspiracy writing I've grown to expect and love like tolerate from this series. Maybe the relative scarcity of all that from mission-to-mission is why I'm tepid on the game so far and why so much of it feels like filler, but I can leave all the reviewing for the feature's conclusion. For now, let's see some damn dots already:

Part 3: Huey, Screwy and Kablooey

• The Medical Unit showed up just after I completed that last mission (#10). Closely linked to the next unit type unlock, as I suspected, the medical bay can assist in the R&D of drugs like series mainstay pentazemin - which steadies your aim - and a few fun ones like being able to see lifeforms around you if you're looking for critters or are moving through the interior of a building. Guards can't be marked easily from a distance if they're indoors, which leads to a lot of surprise encounters if you aren't prepared for them. Medical staff also tend to soldiers that come back from dispatch missions all busted up, hence why it's a bit odd the doctors got unlocked first. Well, at least I managed to find a few surgeons while out on the field. Simply a matter of moving them over to the medical wing via the staff management widget. Having doctors without borders around is like a novel spin on the Militaires Sans Frontières of Peace Walker, only now it's... "Médecins Sans Frontières"? Weird.
• Mission #7. In this fun little mission, you have to kill (or extract) three Soviet colonels as they meet up in a local village. The village is crawling with guards, of course, but once you know where they meet it's not hard to quickly get there in advance without arousing suspicion. The colonels then show up to the hut one by one - the first is already in there - so it was simply a matter of tranqing each one as they arrive and carrying them outside using the far door away from the guards to Fulton them to back to Mother Base, which appears to be an acceptable non-lethal solution in every assassination mission - the clients are simply told that "we took care of them". I'd have gone with something punnier, like how they underestimated Big Boss due to their inflated egos or that they've gone to the big soldier recruitment drive in the sky. Anyway, because I was able to jog straight to the meeting place, grab all three colonels without getting spotted and get a bonus for the extractions, I managed to net my first S rank. I think speed was the biggest factor there: you can lose a few thousand points getting spotted, restarting from a checkpoint or killing a guy, but a fast mission completion can be worth a huge amount in comparison.
• And with that, we have unlocked combat units and dispatch missions. I can now build up a unit of my toughest recruits and send them off on little missions that get completed while I'm busy saving the world elsewhere, one New Romantic cassette at a time. These dispatches operate almost identically to the ones from Assassin's Creed Brotherhood and its sequels, except I have to manually accept the rewards for some reason. Maybe it's like a lootcrate thing. I'm also recruiting a lot of crappy staff members who volunteer themselves as one of the rewards, so I'm going to have to cull this base of its "E" weenies at some point. Anyway, this is handy as another source of revenue, but I'm starting to hit feature creep with how much there is to keep track of. Doesn't help that the biggest flaw of the PS3 version - which I was gifted to me shortly before I bought a PS4, so that's what I'm playing - is that it takes forever to load anything on the iDroid. I have to keep micromanagement to a minimum.
• So here's something fun: I loaded up the game, was told that the Konami servers were having a few problems (possibly because some former Konami game developer turned masseuse decided to give them all a mineral scrub) and that I couldn't log in, and found that my GMP account was somehow 80k in the red. Apparently a lot of your GMP is tied up online, so I'd suddenly lost close half a million because I didn't have access to the cloud I was storing it on. At that point you either let everyone walk out because you can't pay them or just stop playing until Konami's servers blink back to life. What a strange way to handle your online component. (P.S. I'm not even dealing with FOB bullshit yet. I'm sure that's a whole bunch of extra headaches to deal with.)
• Mission #8. The first mission that called upon attacking vehicles, and probably not the last. I devised of a smart plan of stopping these tanks in their tracks by dropping in a vehicle in their path and then Fultoning them all as they stopped to figure out a way around, but couldn't act on it because of my unfamiliarity with the mission and the way the game's checkpoints can sometimes be too generous for their own good. When you hit the absolute last time you can accomplish the mission, moments before the tanks arrive at their final destination of the mountain base from Mission #6, the game chooses to make a checkpoint save there instead of, say, at any point before the tanks get there so you still have time to stop them. The last, desperate attack on the base and its many soldiers in full view of the tanks probably cost me a better rank than the "B" I got, which strikes me as the gentlemen's "F", but like many missions in this game I was happy to see the back of it. I really don't see myself coming back to half of these - they're just so annoyingly designed with alacrity in mind, when MGS (or really any stealth game) should be about taking one's time and getting a clear picture on the whole situation before acting. I suppose that's what mission retries are for. Still, though. Ugh.
• D-Dog is now big enough to join us on missions! The scamp is useful for picking out enemies, prisoners, plants and other useful map objects within range, though I sort of have my Intel team for most of that. I think for missions like #10, where I had to rescue a bunch of prisoners from inside a building as quickly as possible, he'd be invaluable. I am starting to get the idea that a lot of these early missions would be considerably easier with some of the tech (and pups, in this case) I'm unlocking now. At any rate, I'm torn between continuing to build up a bond with D-Horse - I've unlocked the poop command, so we're getting along just fine - or getting a headstart on double D over here. Might be for the best if I take him on some Side Ops so I can get used to the little guy before he joins me on something more substantial.
• Turns out there is a Side Op I should get to completing, as evinced by how it's marked as "essential": the game color-codes its missions, side ops and dispatches with a gold dot if it's story important, or leads to some unique reward. For this particular Side Op, I'm to help one Dr. Huey Emmerich defect from a Soviet-operated facility. Now, here's the first SMAKA in a while: SMAKA #3, Huey is Otacon's dad and also someone who featured prominently in Peace Walker. Presently, Miller blames him for letting Cipher destroy the Mother Base of Peace Walker, and once we've retrieved him he intends to have a long chat with the withdrawn robotics scientist. Hey, I wonder if grabbing this guy will let me have a D-Robot I can bring on missions? Something like the Metal Gear buddy from MGS4.
• On the way to the power plant where Huey works, I bumped into our sniper friend Quiet. She's holed up in a section of ruins with a convenient amount of cover, but after observing her turn invisible, sprint across the stage at the speed of sound and leap three vertical stories to another nest, I've decided that I clearly wasn't meant to fight her yet and followed the mission objective marker to bug out of there. Of course, I immediately lose a huge amount of heroism for doing so, so I guess fuck all mission objectives forever. This game can be awfully cryptic at times. At any rate, I'll come back once I've R&D'd a tranq sniper rifle and fight her at her own game. I doubt a pistol with an effective range of 30m is going to get me far in that battle, and I strongly suspect I don't actually want to kill her.
• Getting into the Power Plant to spring our wayward weaponized walker wunderkind wasn't so bad, but I wasn't quite prepared for what followed. Not only is Dr. Emmerich working on a new giant bipedal robot (that part wasn't surprising), but Spinal was there too and quickly had Huey and his Trenc Iron Brigade walker escorted to a more secure location after learning that I was onto him. Now it's suddenly...
• Mission #12: ...a new story mission. I figured I'd have to go back to Mission #11 to continue the plot, but Quiet's really more of a side-piece. Sorry, side-quest. My words and deeds have shamed me once again. The goal now is to sneak back through the power plant (which has naturally replenished its staff) and head to the local Soviet headquarters to recover Dr. Emmerich from wherever Mr. Bones stashed him. It's a good thing I can call supply drops whenever, ain't it?
• Well, I got a C for that one. Turns out they don't appreciate it when you spend eighty minutes to complete a single mission. Frankly, I don't particularly appreciate a mission that takes eighty minutes to complete, so I suppose that makes us even. Once I'd finally reached the interior of the base - I may have been a bit klepto on all these wonderful cargo containers - I was then required to carry Emmerich back out of the base the way I came. All the enemies had reset in the meantime, of course, and the game gave me a "fuck alerts" options with a miniature walker robot that some of the guards were using to patrol such a large base. Before getting out, I was attacked by Manny Calavera's enormous new Metal Gear, the Spellcheckfuckeduponus, and had to quickly evade it to reach the LZ in what was a particularly irksome sequence of hiding behind rocks until it finally gave up. It's not easy hiding from something twenty feet tall, turns out.
• More story ensues. This particular Emmerich gets tortured a lot - presumably that was one for the fans - but it seems he's clueless about the events that lead to the destruction of the previous Mother Base, which I'm just going to call Grandma Base for clarity's sake. When the bad guys dropped Grandma into the ocean, they were operating incognito as members of a nuclear inspection squad, like Hans Brix. Only it was a Hans Tricks! They were secretly Cipher's strike team XOF (which is perhaps the dumbest backwards alias since Alucard first lamented humanity's hard lot) and sank it. Huey actually believed they were who they said they were, and I sort of believe him. I can believe this entire family is as guileless as each other. Then again, listening to Otacon whine non-stop, you get the impression his dad was kind of a jerk (along with how Snake keep killing everyone he loves and that Kill La Kill is a garbage anime for garbage people), so I'll just let Miller and Ocelot get the truth out of Ironside while I get back to work.
• The conclusion of that mission also leads to unlocking the next big region of the game: Africa. Specifically, the northern territory of the nation of Angola close to its border to Zaire (since renamed to the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is one of those cases that exemplifies the fact that if you have to put "democratic" and "republic" in the full title of your country, it's probably neither). I imagine the game's going to ramp up its difficulty now and presumably its rewards to match, because it's getting expensive to build anything. All the same, I don't want to leave Afghanistan yet, as I've got some unfinished business. Like a certain underdressed sniper I left all alone in a drafty ruin.
• Mission #11. MGSV brings back an old favorite for this mission - the sniper boss battle. The arena is far smaller than the one in which Snake faced geriatric grenade-bait The End, but the idea is the same: the enemy sniper quickly moves from vantage point to vantage point after she's made, generally finding some way to slip past the player's attention en route, and the first warning sign you get is either a flash of scope lensflare or a full metal suppository depending on which direction you're looking. Quiet's far too quick to pin her down with normal gunfire, and I didn't think I could reliably hit her with my non-lethal weaponry last time, so now I've made my triumphant return with a tranq sniper rifle and a magic dog that tells me where people are hiding. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I managed to walk away with another S rank this time instead of the prior embarrassment of fleeing the scene. Given the circumstances, I think this would've been the one S rank that was mine to lose: no guards means a whole lot of easy bonuses. Now those are some words and deeds I can be proud of.
• Some hard emotional swings occur next: Miller wants me to finish her off, while Ocelot thinks we can gain more by keeping her around and extracting information about Cipher. Presumably, Ocelot thinks "Quiet" is one of those ironic names people sometimes have. They deduce that she's one of the Skull units, the recurring badass undead warriors who I strongly suspect are tied to the Cobra Unit in some way if only because this series has a nasty habit of repeating itself when it comes to boss squads. The matter is moot, though, as she escapes our grasp on the flight back after I elect to bring her with us because why wouldn't I want someone like that on my team. It seems she can go into "ghost" mode, get some gnarly eyeshadow and then pull off weird phantom shit to perform her more inexplicable abilities, like slipping a pair of cuffs and vanishing.
• Turns out she was here the whole time though (Big Boss didn't think to wave at the air around chest level? What happened to the man who once ogled Eva's cleavage?), and rematerializes to keep a MIG off our six by shooting its missile and its pilot with a sniper rifle we kept on board in case of miracle bullshit. I'm starting to wonder if she's the vengeful gestalt of everyone who ever got banned from Overwatch and CS:GO for using wallhax.
• Quiet freaks out the Mother Base personnel with her combat bikini and ability to turn translucent (probably more the latter, but then there aren't a whole lot of women around), and they escort her away with Big Boss promising to pull the trigger himself if she ever proves to be too much of a problem. I hope my dire wolf wasn't in earshot when I made promises to murder anyone who turned evil on us. Or Ocelot for that matter. Without him, I'd have no-one to tell me that ravens are deified by certain indigenous Canadian tribes every time I looked at a bird. Would that be the same indigenous tribe that also reveres miniguns torn from fighter planes?
• Out of curiosity, I went to visit Quiet in her new habitat all the way out on the Medical platform (thanks to @mirado for the tip about using delivery boxes to get places, saved me an expensive chopper deployment). Naturally, she was sunbathing topless while The Cure was playing on an invisible radio. I'm just going to ignore this ridiculous woman until she becomes relevant to the gameplay at some point in the near future.
• Mission #9. "Backup, Back Down", a.k.a. the Limp Bizkit mission. This is the last remaining mission for Afghanistan (for the time being, at least) and the last thing I want to do here before I start sweating the Angola stuff. Like many missions, it gives you a selection of starting points; unlike many missions, the starting point you select is very important, and if you pick the wrong one and don't have a vehicle you pretty much need to start over and pick the correct one instead. The reason for this is that the mission requires the destruction (or extraction) of various enemy vehicles before a bunch of Mujahideen show up for a raid, and the first few vehicles are already on the move from one location to the next as you begin. Your starting points therefore include: the place they started from, the place they're heading to, the place they're heading through if you want to ambush them, and - the option I initially selected - a place that is a million fucking miles from any of the above. This is definitely a D-Horse mission too, so puppers is going to have to sit this one out. What's more is that the mission actually has seven of these armored vehicles to either capture or destroy, and they all appear at specific but distant points on the map. You need to play the mission at least once to know where they all are, when they show up and how best to reach as many as possible for the best completion grade.
• I'm beginning to accept that the game is built on retries, which is why it gives so much consideration to deployment costs - each piece of equipment you bring with you, or buddy or vehicle, carries with it a (admittedly small) price every sortie - and to additional bonus conditions after the first completion. You have so very little actionable intel before getting into a mission, and so situations like the above or others where some unexpected hurdle appears in situ are irritatingly common. Once you've played a mission once or twice and know it inside out, that's the point where you can start finding the optimal route to success and getting those S-Ranks. It does, however, mean that your initial forays are almost certainly doomed to awkward failures unless you're quick with the checkpoint restart button or can think on your feet, like I apparently can't whenever a stealth approach goes to shit and I begin to panic and start throwing bait bottles at people.
• So, for instance, with the above mission I started in the wrong place with the wrong equipment. The game has a wonderful depth of resourcefulness with its various gadgets, especially as you get further in and can R&D new types of gear to suit your playing style, which means that I could then restart the mission with a much more beneficial loadout. In this case, I took a vehicle, started at the north drop point (where the first two vehicles were heading towards), used a bridge and my a vehicle as a barricade, sneaked up behind the enemy vehicle as it parped its horns angrily and 99 Luftballoon'd that mother back to the mother of all bases. Pretty effective, though I'm sure I could've been faster.
• I say that, because I managed to score my first "E" rank. Until now, my worst had been the "C" for Mission #12. You know what? I feel absolutely no compulsion to return to that mission for a better score. It was beyond awful. You are essentially forced to quickly drive between several chokepoint locations to destroy/extract vehicles before they reach their destinations, but you drive by a heavily fortified supply base each time. I got spotted so often that I actually ended up with a minus score for "play rating" (pushed, barely, back into a positive by the bonuses). Ideally, I think I can set up shop away from that base and not have to pass it at all, but it means patiently waiting for all the enemy vehicles to come to us and I dunno if that's the most exciting thing in the world or would result in a much better score given I'd be running down the clock. Either way, I appreciate that they went for a more exciting action-packed mission that relied on explosives and schedules, but it blew chunks regardless.
• All right, maybe I'll try it again. Later, when I have better gear (which I think will eventually become code for "never" once I burn out around mission 43). I know seeing that "E" every time I scroll down is going to bug the hell out of me, though I'm equally sure it won't be the only disappointment on the ol' report card if I discover a mission equally as repellent. Given this game has around fifty missions (I've heard), you can't expect them all to be winners. That I'm barely a quarter of the way through them is probably the bigger concern.

Now that my tenure in Afghanistan is over, for however long that lasts, I think it's time to take a bow on this episode and start it back up after I touch down in the cradle of civilization and start tearing shit up again. Just, you know, non-lethally. (Hmm, I really wonder how much longer I can keep up the pacifism before missions like #9 drive me insane.)

Hey all, how's the Summer treating you? I guess the Olympics started this week, despite everything threatening to fall apart, but I don't know how much of it I'll end up watching. Probably just intermittently side-eye the medal tables as soon as all the rich people sports start up, like fancy cycling and fancy boats and fancy horses, and Team GB starts earning some of that cheddar. That gold medal cheddar. Gold Cheddal.

In personal gaming news, I've purchased two new games this week, continuing to expand my PS4 and Steam backlogs ever upwards. The first is Batman: Arkham Knight, which I guess got enough mixed press that it dropped to a reasonable price fairly quickly. I've been a fan of the way Rocksteady's Batman series handles stealth and collectibles (each one's a little puzzle!) so I'm not going to throw it under a batbus just yet, but I also suspect that it might be one of the many open-world franchises I'll have to drop in the future for time reasons. I've noticed that a majority of the small list of games I've played this year have been enormous open-world games and... well, I get attached easily to the exploration and completionist aspects, but I'm not sure if I can stand too many more and it's really making my intermittent games writing suffer with how difficult it is to get around their similarities from case to case. On an incidental tangent about episodic RPGs, I spoke to former mod and current internet pal @sparky_buzzsaw about how I might be ready for an RPG with a bit more linearity and story focus to it, if only because this procession of immense open-world games is beginning to take its toll.

So I'm thankful that Indie games are around to provide bite-sized palate cleansers between these bloated "retail" industry games. I'm actually really looking forward to playing and writing about Lumo, my second purchase and the isometric spiritual successor to Rare's early output and games like my beloved Equinox, at some point next week. Now that I'm yet again caught in another giant open-world game - that would be Metal Gear Solid V, which I'm still enjoying but am on the fence about whether or not I can go the distance - I'll be once again implementing my "Indie Intermission" approach to ensure I'll have something else to write about in these summaries other than MGSV week after week. For reasons related to my other blogging activity, I both don't want to and can't write too much about MGSV here anyway.

New Games!

No getting around No Man's Sky this week. It's going to be everywhere on video game sites and podcasts come August 9th, and then everywhere again on the 12th when the PC version shows up. The game's taken on a mythical quality since its first breathless reveal at E3 2014, making promises both real and imagined that it would be the sort of procedurally generated space exploration game that you could feasibly play for hundreds of hours and still be discovering new things. Between the early leaks that suggest it's a great but not life-changing game, to those obstinately convinced by its potential to be the one video game to end all video games, you have poor wildman-bearded Sean Murray and his hardworking team at Hello Games stuck somewhere in the middle who just wanted to make a great game that would resonate with people and sell a lot of copies. It's perhaps for the best that there won't be any early reviews - the day one patch wiping all progress will ensure that much - because I can imagine any comment section to a "8.8"-style early professional outlet review will be horrific to watch. I've kept my expectations in check, as I'm sure have most of you, and will find out for myself how good No Man's Sky is eventually. Long after all seventy trillion of its planets have been named after internet memes, most likely, but around to it I will most assuredly get.

Surprisingly, there are other games coming out this week too, though it's still barely a smattering. Comedy rhythm endless runner hybrid doodad Tadpole Treble is out this week for Wii U, having already hit Steam to high praise back in May, and it reminds me of those musical stages from Rayman Legends. The enhanced Kingdom: New Lands, coming to XBOne and Steam on August 9th, adds more content to last year's gorgeous-looking side-scrolling monarch strategy sim that also slipped me by. Online Uno's coming back for PS4 and Steam (with the XBOne version out next week), presumably with less webcam nudity this time around. Honestly, though, that was the soul of the experience. Couldn't get ten minutes into one of those games without someone showing you their "wild card" unprompted.

Also out on Steam, since every other system is taking a siesta, we have a port of the Vita turn-based RPG Ray Gigant, the new "executive decisions simulator" Reigns from Devolver Digital, the competitive robot arena fighting game Blade Ballet, the visual novel spin-off set in the BlazBlue universe (what?) XBLAZE Lost Memories, and something called Malazard: The Master of Magic which, I discovered, is some VR thing and has nothing to do with empire sim ne plus ultra Master of Magic. Don't get my hopes up like that, jerks.

Wiki!

Wiki work is going to slow down a lot now that the mod team has live Bombcasts to monitor, but I'm still hopeful I can achieve my goal of completing the final month of 1995 before the end of August, and thus the end of Summer. That means an average of fifteen games a week if I'm going to complete all sixty (actually sixty-one, I miscounted last time) games in December 1995's SNES/SFC line-up. I only managed fourteen pages this week, two of which had already been covered in a previous Wiki Project, but thankfully this week is an Adventure Zone week so maybe that extra podcast hour can give me a chance to catch up. December is the Japanese holiday rush for new games, so expect many more Super Famicom obscurities (and a few SFC entries for well-known RPG franchises) in the coming weeks.

Right, so those fourteen games. They included three new pages, so be sure to check in on my latest Super Famicom Super Also-Ran list for more info on those forgotten non-classics. This week actually saw an even spread of East and West: seven Japan debuts (all but one of which were exclusive to that region), six North American debuts and a European PAL exclusive. Let's just whiz through the highlights:

On the North American side, we have: the nausea-inducing Boogerman: A Pick and Flick Adventure; the video game adaptation of Toy Story (weird to think that a Pixar movie could be old enough for a SNES licensed game); and the inimitable (because why would you want to copy it?) Aerosmith on-rails shooter Revolution X. As always, the North American studios continue to bring out their best and brightest.

On the Japanese side, we have: Dokapon Gaiden: Honoo no Audition, the third game in the abjectly cruel Dokapon RPG/board game franchise; Fushigi no Dungeon 2: Fuurai no Shiren, which remained a Japan exclusive until its DS localization in 2008 as Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer; Ochan no Oekaki Logic, the first of three picross games headlined by Hebereke characters; and a little game called Mega Man X3, featuring some kind of blue robot gun boy.

Metal Gear Solid V!

Sorry folks! I'm saving every tidbit and opinion regarding Metal Gear Solid V for my ongoing reaction series, the first two parts can be found here and here. I'm putting it all out on the table with those blogs, which leaves little extra to remark upon for these Sunday Summaries.

How about some statistics, instead? Doesn't feel right to leave you with nothing but a couple of links. Let's see what the numbers say about my MGSV progress...

So far I've completed ten missions, one of those with an S rank and four others without raising any alarms. My overall completion is at 11% which... isn't promising after a whole week. At least my mission completion is at the slightly better 17%. It's still early days yet, but I better get a move on if I hope to beat this game before the end of Summer.

Suffering Shagohods! I'm back again, and so soon after last time. Turns out Metal Gear Solid V is absolutely packed with features and mechanics to talk about, so even though I didn't make much plot progress since part one there's more than enough observations here for another update.

Progress through the game has been... slow. I tend to take my time with stealth games (when I'm not being forced to move, at least) and it's beginning to dawn on me just how much of a timesink an open-world stealth game might be. I'm going to double-down on the missions for the time being, perhaps only completing any Side Ops if they're in the vicinity, and try not to lose my cool so much. While I don't particularly appreciate that the default tranq weapon has less bullets than I have fingers and toes (wait... 21? No, that's right), as long as you're fast on the grabbing button, you can usually make do with choking people out and can get some decent intel on collectibles in the process. I'm all about those collectibles, especially if it means I can keep myself dressed in the finest of sneaking suits. It is the manner to which I have become accustomed, after all.

• Whenever you complete a mission, it sprouts a whole bunch of bonus objectives for you to accomplish if you decide to re-challenge the same mission with better gear later in the game. It's an effective means of increasing longevity, but I wish I could see all these bonus objectives the first time through. It might be risky with low-level gear and my inexperience, sure, but some of them are just fetch quests and spins on the primary objective (for instance: shooting the target at a distance, or completing it without resistance, or not using any assistance).
• After your training at Mother Base, you get three new missions you can take on in any order. The game now settles into a cycle of mission -> free roam -> mission, where the free roam sections allow you to complete Side Ops, often unlocking better recruits or new blueprints for the R&D department, and run around collecting shit if that's your bag (of diamonds (or feces (sorry, "biological material"))). I'm into the open-world aspect, but it's also a little intimidating. It's a big map and I'm not really sure where anything is yet.
• As for the recruits thing, that's what the balloons are for. You attach one of those to anyone who is out of it and off they go. The chopper then sweeps them up before they float off into space. Well, most of the time. I try not to think about the few times it's failed. Just saying, there might have been a few Laikas.
• Mission #3 is to assassinate a Spetsnaz recon captain, though you have the alternative to Fulton the guy (he's got a high rank for martial ability, which unfortunately isn't a job I can assign to anyone yet). Both times I attempted this mission he was fast asleep deep within the barracks, and both times I almost walked into him because he wasn't marked and was lying fairly close to the wall. I also found Kim Wilde's "Kids in America" tape here too, and I can't even begin to imagine why Soviet soldiers would listen to that. Maybe living for the music-go-round is universal?
• Got my first crash soon after the first of the three "open" missions. Well, not so much a crash as it freezing on the loading screen. Just me and my tool-tips as I waited over ten minutes for the resume button to show up. Hopefully that's not a frequent thing - the game's being constantly patched, which is surprising given Konami's laissez-faire (that's French for "We no longer give a shit about anything besides pachinko and health spas. Would you like us to clean your balls? In either sense?") approach to game development of late.
• As well as collecting "biological material" from underneath the bunks of soldiers, which I may or may not have done, you can also capture live animals. Ocelot gives me some excuse about protecting the indigenous wildlife from the perils of war, preserving them from crossfire, and animals are recorded as "rescued" on the results screen with a small boost to GMP (my presumably leather-bound currency) and Heroism, the latter of which I'm still not certain what it does. This seems like an incredibly altruistic spin on "hey, attach a balloon to a wolf and laugh your ass off as it yelps away at the speed of light".
• Talking of wolves, I managed to find a wolf puppy. Apparently you can just Fulton it right away. I shot it first with the tranq gun and Ocelot (or Miller, they sound the same) told me off. What? You don't want to take that terrifying balloon trip conscious if you ask me. Anyway, D-Dog is back at base but still a tiny baby puppers, so I'm probably not going to see him in action for a while.
• They've really taken to heart the complaints about how OP tranquilizer weapons are in earlier MGS games. In addition to the ammo scarcity, if you don't shoot an enemy in the head with a tranq, they have time to radio in the news that some random dart just appeared in their arm, eat a sandwich, watch a movie, raise a kid, live long enough to see themselves become the villain and then finally zonk out. This might be rich from a guy who spent the last nine years in a coma, but these guys need to get their low blood pressure checked.
• Mission #4 involved blowing up some radar dishes, and was when I realized I'd have to R&D the remote-detonation C4 explosives if I was going to do this effectively - the alternative was to chuck grenades at them and hope no-one notices. New weapons and equipment are regularly unlocked for research once you've built up your R&D and Supply departments, which is where most of the Fultoned recruits go early on. It's not an easy area to sneak around in either, though you do have the choice of coming in at the top which makes you harder to spot, somehow. People just don't look up, I guess. We're like dogs in that way.
• I also discovered that many bases have an anti-air jamming box thing in them. Blowing these up lets you helicopter land in more places, so I've been doing just that whenever I've accomplished all I need to in an area and am ready to bug out.
• It's neat that you have a mobile base of sorts by taking to the sky in the Pequod (yes, that's the helicopter's name. I don't remember Ahab hunting Moby Dick with a tomahawk missile, though it would've been a lot easier on the guy) and using the iDroid Mother Base menu from up there, including where to go next for a mission. It's a handy fast travel system too, though the chopper can only "land" in certain drop zones. You can at any time select the option to return to this air base from the Select menu though. I like when a game opts for convenience over realism. We suspend our disbelief for all sorts of things already, I can't see why video games should be any different if it's for a good cause like fast travel.
• Mission #5 is a rescue mission, which is good because we're a rescue team, not assassins. Specifically, we're saving the Soviet scientist who made my arm, and in doing so giving ourselves a future upgrade path for ol' clamps over here. A lot of R&D topics, like weapons or armor, require experts beyond a certain level and that means having to find them in the general armed populace. The base he's held in is interesting: if you try the direct path, there's a chokepoint from the lower area to the higher area, which makes it very dangerous since this path has guards on it. You can go also around to the far side of the base to reach the higher area, which is one of those things I'm glad I know now but maybe would've been happier to learn earlier. There's an inconspicuous incomplete building where he's being held captive, and according to the bonus objectives there's a hole that leads all the way down to the basement where you find him, and you can Fulton him out from the basement level by threading the needle. What happens if the ceiling catches him though? Does he just float there a few feet off the ground?
• For that matter, what happens when you inhale a Fulton? Do you start squeaking or just explode?
• I've been working on a few Side Ops. They pay less than full missions, but I'm curious about how they work. Right now it's normal stuff like finding blueprints (you can find these in the regular missions too, but you often have to interrogate a guy with CQC to get the location out of him, and I can't ever get that close without getting spotted and losing my perfect stealth bonus), rescuing guys and perhaps extracting a sheep? Maybe later Side Ops get a bit more distinctive and weird. I might just leave them be unless they're conveniently located - it takes long enough to get around without making detours for a bunch of minor errands.
• Challenges! As soon as this achievement-based reward system opened up, I managed to net a huge amount of resources and talented recruits for a few of my previous accomplishments. Like the game's assortment of actual achievements/trophies, these are earned from a mix of story-related progression, optional challenges and milestone goals. I'm not going to pay too much attention to it - I can go achievement-hunting after the game is over, if I'm not completely burned out - but I will check back on it periodically for the freebies. I really appreciate "tangible" in-game achievement systems like these in RPGs and open-world games - for each achievement, Tales of Xillia gave you Grade (a recurring Tales system that is essentially currency for new game plus bonuses like XP doublers), Stardew Valley allowed you buy new cosmetic headgear and Xenoblade Chronicles gave you little XP boosts.
• Mission #6. This feels like a big one. My goal is to sneak into a mountain fortress and the former base of the Mujahideen rebels in this vicinity, and recover an anti-air weapon before the Soviets can find it. I get to start around a kilometer away, so already I'm dreading the fact that there's going to be 30 minute plus "endurance" missions where I have to complete the whole thing without screwing up, or lose a lot of bonuses. Honestly, while I'm not ruling out coming back to these missions for their bonus objectives, I might draw the line at S-Ranking them all. Unless some late-game developments make it super easy, like a tranq sniper rifle or one of those stealth camouflage gadgets from the first MGS.
• As expected, as soon as I grabbed the weapon from deep within the compound (and man was it difficult to find my way through there), all hell breaks loose. I get my first clouded glimpse at the new Metal Gear, come face to face with Hugo Weaving and the Skulls Unit almost manage to clobber me. I just ran, like last time, but I have no idea how you'd get through all that without taking a few hits. Good thing Snake can walk most of those bulletholes off. As for Skullomania, he appears to know Big Boss and have a grudge against him, which makes me wonder if he wasn't someone from MGS3 or Peace Walker (let's hope it's not the latter) that I left in a burning building for no doubt heroic reasons.
• Other tidbits learned from that long mission: First, animal cages are a good way to get some free shit if you remember to space them out. You get them restocked after every ammo supply drop (I needed two because I kept running out of tranq pistol ammo. I really only get 21 shots?) and I have no idea if that causes the last lot to vanish, but at the end of the mission I got a little extra cash and heroism, not to mention the start of a pretty rad petting zoo going. Albeit, the sort of petting zoo that has ravens and snakes. That one's going to have to be for big kids.
• Second, don't summon a supply drop if there's a rock outcrop over your head. Some lucky goat just got a whole bunch of free balloons to play with.
• Third, I've been finding a lot of posters lately. I didn't catch if they added anything besides extra GMP, but I distinctly recall that you can customize the cardboard boxes (which I've not been using enough) with girly pictures to distract guards, so maybe the posters are related to that? Either that or there's some MGS2 style Easter egg where Big Boss plays with his Little Boss, and I can do without that imagery.
• Fourth, don't hit the triangle button accidentally when trying to interrogate a dude for information. Turns out an amateur tracheotomy isn't the best way to get a guy talking. Dang it, and I'd managed to get so far without kills that mission too. Checkpoints aren't as generous as you'd hope.
• Four new missions just popped up after that last big one. Sensing a pattern here. If I complete a certain number of these missions, will another story one suddenly pop up the same way the anti-air weapon did? (I refuse to call anything "honey bees". Too many unfortunate MGS3 flashbacks. Fucking bee gun that shoots bees at people...)
• Managed to upgrade my field tech, which I definitely appreciate as a recon- (and stealing-) focused player. My binocs can now identify an enemy soldier's skill levels for various aptitudes - I'm presently stopping for any "B"s or higher I can find - and my balloons now work for machine gun emplacements and mortars, both of which I can get a decent profit on. I also have way more balloons to play with, but I dunno if I'll ever need more than 24 at once. I guess by the time I'm lifting whole cargo containers and vehicles, I'll appreciate having a few extra.
• Talking of upgrades, I managed to unlock a new Mother Base division to send my balloon fighters to: Intel. While R&D gives me more tech to unlock, Base Development increases resource procurement and Support speeds up various utilities like support drops and pick-ups, a good Intel division will fill in maps with additional data. Right now, they're giving me approximate locations of enemies within a nearby enemy base, represented by large red radii that encompasses their patrol route. What's interesting, which is to say amusingly dumb, is that I knew an Intel division was coming: there's a full set of roles that each soldier might be proficient at that the game makes no effort to conceal until you're ready for them. Why they're choosing to keep Medical and Combat locked for the time being is anyone's guess. I suppose both relate to being able to send out soldiers on their own dispatch missions, and you don't want to give players that ability right away. That'd be too fun.
• Playing Metal Gear Solid, you live for those "aha!" moments. I just had one while scoping out this supply depot: Take On Me was playing on a radio nearby.
• Mission #10 (eh, I was in the area). This one really grinded my gears, to the point of unattractive apoplexy. A two-part rescue mission that can be a one-parter if you decide to head straight to the only prisoner that matters before they get transported to a second location. Very irksome mission overall, in that there's a bonus condition to save three prisoners at the starting location (one gets shot about a minute after you start, so fuck you if you don't know exactly where he is) and the base that the other guy gets sent to seems to be filled with preternaturally observant guards. Fortunately, I somehow managed to scrape by with an "A" (the game only tells you if you retried or not from the nearest checkpoint; it doesn't dock you per reload) due to the number of extra prisoners I managed to emancipate. Remind me next time to systematically remove everyone in a base before I start trying to fireman's carry the prisoners out of there. Man, this game's just going to get harder and harder isn't it? I might do some Side-Ops until I have better gear... though that only mitigates the "I suck at stealth" part, not eliminate it.

Anyway, I had intended to keep going until I hit the next big story mission, but I think I'll cut it off here. I need to recharge after that last mission - it took well over an hour despite what the mission timer actually said, with all those restarts putting me 300m away from the base each time - and I might as well do that with another list of sarcastic reprimands for this annoying series. Did I mention that I'm not good at stealth games?