Metal Gear Scanlon: 2 - Part 06

Kept us waiting, huh?

Looking forward to more Drew-rage

I am so glad I didn't sleep tonight.

hahahahahahah #Drewrage2014

I believe in you Drew!

Let's do this!

Also, Drew it is okay if you think MGS2 sucks. You wouldn't be alone in thinking that.

@erinisadrunk: the nerve of you people..

I love this series.

I'm on my phone and won't be able to watch this til I get off work at 7. I'm still excited to see this pop up though!

So in this series Drew tackles a game series he had always been interested in but never gotten around to. I would really love to see Dan do something similar with him at the helm.

Anyone else notice how every complete play through video series (Endurance Run, Dark Souls, Metal Gear) are for Japanese games? Much has been said about the stagnant nature of some Japanese devs and the scene over there.... but it seems like when people get around to those games they really wish they had time to play they always end up being from Japan. Is it just that the best output from Japan has been really time consuming stuff that doesn't fit well into the current nature of games media? I think so.

Jason is their Otacon, but could be their Mei Ling since he is always reminding them to save their data.

Well I was going to go to bed but I have to see what the world's great spy team is up too.

oh boy oh boy oh boy

This game ends with a Raiden-Rose murder suicide, right?

God this Metal Gear Scanlon is great. Allows me to relieve these classics like its new somehow. Hope they do MGS Subsistence.

nice, drew

@kid_gloves said:

I mean, Western games are 10 hours long, for the most part, so that wouldn't make for much of a video series.

BioWare and CD Projekt RED and so on are the exception to the rule. For whatever reason, more Japanese games get the green light to A) pad their game out with a ton of grinding, or B) pad their game out with a totally nutso story with lengthy exposition (see Metal Gear, JRPGs, etc.). Western games have largely become about short bursts of instant gratification, probably for the same reason that ANY HUMAN BEINGS AT ALL go to see the Transformers movies.

@kid_gloves said:

This would actually be pretty cool. Dan's mentioned a few times that he didn't have a PC growing up and never got to play all the Sierra and Lucasarts adventure games.

@danryckert How bout it, Daniac Mansion? Grim Dandango? Dan & Drew Hit The Road?

Dan-Scan best tag team

@mattclassic: Full Throttle. I don't have a pun for that, but they should play Full Throttle.

Dan Ryckert: Fool Throttled

Yep, Peter Stillman. Still a totally bland, forgettable character. It's like, what if we took a character like DARPA chief/Armstech president, but give them 40 times as much dialogue.

Yep, Rose and Jack reminiscing about their relationship, still insufferable.

Raiden's "No!" at 39:05 was like, the perfect example of why the voice direction/casting/entire character of Raiden is terrible.

Three darts is too many.

Drew Scanlon will return in: You Can't Die Twice

Wow, I'm impressed to see Drew finally play slowly and carefully and take people out at every opportunity instead of just running around with everyone still awake and getting caught left and right. He did a lot better and it seemed a lot less frustrating. Keep it up, duder. The M9 is your best goddamn friend in this game.

EDIT: Also the box. The box is your second best friend, and I'm glad to see it got you out of a sticky situation, but you should be using it a lot more if you want to make things easier on yourself.

I pretty much always have the M9 and the box equipped unless I need something else. You can't equip the M9 while you have the box on, but it will STAY equipped while you're in the box if it's equipped when you put the box on, and that lets you quickly de-equip the box, dart a dude (not aiming in first person) and then put the box back on.

It's basically the same strategy Dan said of just shooting for the chest if you know they're far enough away to fall asleep before they get to you, but since it takes like five seconds for a suspicious soldier to actually remove the box from your head, you can do it from much closer (and they fall asleep right on you, instead of in their designated routes, so they are less likely to be seen by other guards). Just a tip.

~....and Friday morning is saved! Yaaaaay~~

Most Improved Player

Drew, if you are looking to get rations off guards you're going to have to start holding them up and making them shake down i.e wiggle for you to drop goodies, you get more stuff from holdups than dead or asleep bodies.

Also, don't forget to actually attach that new suppressor to your lethal gun, at the moment the 2 are not connected together.

Someone should tell them how the saving in this game works.

Nice to see Drew is back ! Awesome Episode cant wait for the next one ! Things gona be more interesting !

danime!

One episode closer to MGS 3.

@bisonhero: Raiden's VO being poor and all over the place has become so deeply ingrained with the Raiden character that it's kind of endearing. I think the character would be more insufferable if the VO was delivered straight and proper.

@dberg: I do get an odd sense of camaraderie out of commiserating with people about just how awful everything in the Plant chapter is, right up until about the last 90 minutes when everything gets super nuts. But jeez, Raiden's VO is only one of the many completely awful things you have to endure during the Plant chapter. At least things finally take that turn for the crazy when you get to Arsenal Gear.

@almostswedish said:

Yeah, it's getting kind of out of hand. They would accidentally succeed in MGS1 by saving right after a boss fight (when it had just checkpointed), or right as they enter some nondescript hallway. But in MGS2, man, their track record is pretty bad for spending like 5 minutes in one of the primary Big Shell rooms accomplishing things (nodes, taking out guards, getting items), only to save before actually checkpointing anywhere.

@drewbert! @danryckert! The game only checkpoints when you transition between rooms and it shows the room name. If you save while standing in the middle of the room, the game won't remember anything you've done since entering the room.

PLEASE FIX DANS MIC! I jump out of my chair every time it blows out like that.

The idea that they are padded out in length is interesting. Obviously the really great games out of Japan in recent years are great times for their entire length, but a lot of decent to good stuff is also as long and you have to deal with a bit of extra length that maybe doesn't work out to its strengths. Lots of good and interesting things are put out but they aren't fantastic and they are then ignored and picked apart for their faults. Clearly there are fans, and vocal at that, who think its a shame that good ideas are overlooked because of time commitment .... then pigeonholed into stereotypes to make it easier to explain away. Western RPGs have been in vogue for a while now, but JRPGs have been far more advanced when it comes to emotional storytelling for decades now/

It is kinda bizarre that we get numerous people annoyed at how short western games tend to be, and numerous people annoyed at how long eastern games tend to be.

I hated the Rose-Raiden dynamic when I first played this game but I actually think it's pretty funny hearing it now.

It reminds me a lot of the type of stilted delivery and silly conversations you get in something like Deadly Premonition. I'm still undecided how deliberate it is or if it's just genuinely bad, but the way the story ends up playing out makes me think it was deliberate.

Edit- What a successful day of MGS for Drew! Seems once Drew started taking his time and thinking about what he was doing, the game isn't that hard after all!

I don't know if anyone has shared this with @danryckert and @drewbert yet, but if you click the left stick while holding square, you'll lower your weapon. At least, that's how it worked on the Xbox 360 version of HD collection.

Dan. Tell Drew he can auto-target enemies in First-Person by holding L1.

@drugged said:

The Francis York Morgan/Emily Wyatt dialogue was like, a million times more natural than anything Jack and Rose ever said to each other. And it was like, contextually reasonable, whereas as long as Raiden isn't actively under enemy fire, Rose thinks it's appropriate to keep fucking hinting at it being their anniversary tomorrow.

I think its more along the lines that output from Japan tends to be more time consuming games(from a story line perspective)? Game development in the US has(for the most part)become obsessed with open world games/relatively short shooters. Open world games allow devs to pad out the time playing with running around or side quests. I could probably blast through the story missions in Far Cry 4 in a few days, but it would take me a lot more time to get through Metal Gear or your traditional JRPG/RPG. Since Japanese developers haven't really embraced open world games they tend to make games where the story content of the game itself is close to as long as it would take to get a 'satisfying open world experience' or maybe even longer.

Oh god...Rose...It's all coming back to me...

What an awful, awful character.

Has nobody been kind enough to tell Drew yet that you can shoot the radio on the hip of a soldier to disable his radio? And that reinforcements will never come if you do this?

Has no one told drew about the thing that is never explained ever within the game but people who looked shit up and have played the game for 13 years know about? Seriously I know people love this game but what drew is experiencing is what a first time player in 2001 would have experienced, things people ferreted out about the systems are cool but if the game doesn't let you know its a bit crazy to think a new player would figure that stuff out.

I feel like I should point out that I love this series, super entertaining to me, some of the best content on the site. I just find the responses to a person figuring the game out as it is super silly.

Great job, Drew! You could be looking around in first-person a bit more sometimes, but you got this super spy stuff on lock this episode.

That said, every time Rose opens her mouth my appreciation for Metal Gear dies inside that little bit more. I mean, all the dialogue in Metal Gear is bad, but ... it's just ... so painful.

I enjoyed playing through MGS1 again following along after Drew in the episodes and I love the Plant part of MGS2 in concept. (The part where Kojima says, "Oh you thought I was crazy? I'll show you crazy and also fuck you.") But I think I'm just going to play the Tanker in MGS2 and call it, leave Solid Scanlon to battle out the rest.

Oh this episode reminded me of Ames and the hostage situation and the GRU getup. Can't wait for that.

Another fine episode! Time to go do some pull-ups off the side of a strut connecting bridge!

And then the boss fight where there is no boss fight happens! Think you know how these games work? FUCK YOU! We will destroy any idea of how any shit works 24/7 to keep you uninformed of the systems!