Metal Gear Scanlon: 4 - Part 12

@bushpusherr: Well lots of people say things a lot of ways.

"Ever'body says words different," said Ivy. "Arkansas folks says 'em different from Oklahomy folks says 'em different. And we seen a lady from Massachusetts, an' she said 'em differentest of all."

I'm sure the coughing came naturally from doing the voice. Still, would be awesome if they could get Hayter for an interview.

J.J.Abrams will restore balance to the franchise.

Interesting point. Reminds me of Hotline Miami.

That part where you have to wait for Otacon to open the hanger door just perfectly encapsulates the difference between how Drew plays and how I played. All I did was lay down on the floor under the stairs with my facecamo on giving me like 95% or w/e, and then I tossed a flash bang into the far corner of the room every 15 seconds or so to keep the gekkos from walking towards Otacon. They would run over to check out the noise before sauntering back towards the hanger, never having the opportunity to spot me or cause any trouble whatsoever. Such a shame Drew can never seem to remember this is a stealth game unless he's in a sniper boss fight. OctoCamo makes it a lot of fun to sneak around in this one.

When I played this a few days ago, it took me a while to figure out what I could do. In fact, I think eventually Otacon may have told me to use the Mk. III to hack the console.

In my opinion, it wasn't all that obvious. I can understand why people would get it right away but...

A) They may have hinted at it, but MGS is full of indulgent conversations, so when I first heard it, I wasn't paying super close attention and just figured the dialogue was purely for reminiscing purposes and filling in back story for players who hadn't played MGS 1.

B) I honestly don't remember using the Mk. II/Mk. III to hack anything earlier in the game. I knocked out a couple of guards with it in Eastern Europe, but that's about it. As such, I didn't have the instinct to utilize the Mk. III in any way. In fact, when I saw a glowing panel, my gut reaction (and this is definitely ingrained in me from the last decade of glowing weak spots in games) was to pummel it with the grenade launcher.

C) Plus, the conversation hinting about the floor should have happened next to the panel, rather than in an adjacent room. I never played MGS 1, only watched MGScanlon 1, so I didn't remember that that panel was significant. Granted, it glows during the fight, so you find it eventually and it may be a minor point, but it's not like I knew to go right there at first.

I mean, yeah, it is by no means the most obtuse puzzle/encounter I've seen, but I can understand why it isn't immediately obvious. Plus, a bunch of people keep talking about how this is a stealth game. Based on my play through, I think it can be a stealth game (or is meant to be a stealth game - and granted, it is probably a more satisfying experience played stealthily), but a more action-focused play style is perfectly viable (and encouraged in some ways), so a combat-first problem-solving approach isn't that unreasonable in my opinion.

In the B2 Basement, you could have used the Mk3 to activate the electric floor to kill the Gekko.

sniper bison reporting in duders!! seriously thats a great name i may have to change my steam or psn name(oh wait psn is dumb!) i love being a sniper and bison are big powerful creatures but are more like gentle giants. it suits me well excep tim average sized human being. But still i love it!

The shot refils your psyche to full.

That's a bit of a weird attitude to take after telling someone else they are saying a word incorrectly, lol. I'm not particularly bothered, say it however you like, but Dan's pronunciation is generally considered the correct way.

Kojima hammering home that war is bad? lol Yeah, that's kinda the entire series. From the very beginning. The entire franchise is incredibly ham-fisted musings on war.

This is my favorite area of the entire game and the ending is just so awesome I can't wait to see Drews face when they get to "it"

Will the next episode be up tomorrow, it didn't mention it in the schedule.

I think this attitude is ridiculous. It's a video game, and Drew is just playing it like a video game. Tons of games have you killing people, but give the player a non-lethal (less efficient) option and suddenly it's some reflection of their morals? If you're invested enough in the game that you feel more comfortable tranquilizing everybody, that's great. Just don't expect other people to see it the same way. My personal view is that practically no one in this series has ever felt like a real human.

So much MGScanlon. My heart is going to burst from joy

It wouldn't save it, but I wonder how much better this would be if you were told the BnB's stories before you encounter them. The game is basically telling you to care about them immediately after they're "removed" from the plot, it makes no sense.

It's also the point where Kojima gets unnecessarily dark in his silly B-movie series; it feels like those characters belong in an entirely different game. That tone is kinda what broke Ground Zeroes for me too, and it makes me worried about what MGSV will be like.

Reminiscin' about pissin'

@mirado: The portion you're talking about drove me nuts. I'm someone who has some pretty severe vision problems and it was really hard for me to focus on what I needed to in order to complete that portion of the game and almost had to give up. x(

When I did the crying wolf fight I somehow found the perfect spot to snipe from and she never moved and I just sniped her until she was dead. Still have no idea if that was a glitch of her ai or not haha.

1) Non-lethal attacks have always been consistently more efficient since the series introduced them in MGS2. There's never been any incentive to kill and in fact there's always been huge downsides.

2) It's like getting excited at how "totally awesome, bro!" the action scenes of something like Apocalypse Now are.

Little problem I have with the strategy so far. Drew and Dan never ever think to look at unequipped items. They just scroll through what Drew equipped at the beginning of the game.

@eedobaba: Drew literally goes into the items list and swaps items in this episode. Why comment before watching the whole episode? You'll probably backpedal and say it doesn't count because he hasn't up to now - well it's true he hasn't, but he did in this video.

My random generated code name was Screaming Ocelot, Liquid Ocelot screams but he just screams BROTHER!!!

I'm disappointed in their opinion of the beauty back-story stuff. Dan implied a consensus of people who didn't like it but that seems false. It does feel drawn out but in this game everything is.

As someone who has a negative mental health history I like the focus on the PTSD these different women have. Its a very small part of the game that isn't just war porn and near future bullshit.

You have complained in almost every MGS video about something or another. Have you actually enjoyed any of this series at all?

Drew is playing this absolutely fine, and his attitude to the B&B sob stories is absolutely fine too. And saying this game "painstakingly humanizes" them is absolutely ridiculous. It's a codec call after a fight where they explain the "tick" that each boss has (rage, crying, etc.).

I just started watching this series with this game but we've all definitely been calling him Drewk Togo when he does sniper boss fights right?

What are you talking about that stuff is entirely on kojima, he is a man of many interests and that's kinda what makes his games so tonally random, he wants to put in the grim serious war commentary but also wants to put in dumb sex jokes at the same time. Often the latter detracts from the former and that's just how it is with this series. He wants to have both kinds of cakes and eat them too and its why the series often comes off so muddled and weird and really hamfisted and silly in places where it wouldn't have been had he wanted to stick to a single tone.

That is the dumbest thing I've ever read. It's a fucking video game, not a real war, what the fuck does killing people in a video game have to do with whether war is bad or not? Are you one of those people that are so out of touch with reality that they think that killing random pedestrians in a GTA game makes you a psychopath?

Having a vision of a wolf walk by you when you're from a poor African village is pretty weird. You likely wouldn't know what a wolf even was.

Edit: Well, slap me silly and shave me naked. There are scattered grey wolf populations in Africa too. Even near lions and stuff. What a remarkable animal.

Drew 'Sniper' Scanlon

They're making a video here. If you're playing at home with all the time in the world you can take it slow and methodically tranq enemies, but you WILL fuck up, and at that point the non-lethal approach becomes unviable. Playing by yourself you could just restart the checkpoint and try again, but Drew and Dan don't really have the luxury, and at that point just going in guns blazing is a more reliable and faster way to get through the game. It's also a matter of personal preference.

There is really NOTHING to "get" with game trying to paint a harrowing picture of war or trying guilt trip the player over his or her actions. You kill characters that are of no consequence to you and you don't relate with or spend time with. They're literally nameless, faceless enemies that are being shoveled at you.

The game isn't humanizing anyone, all the characters are over-the-top caricatures of what a person might be in real life or how they might behave.

@sarriss

The B&B backstories are shoved in your face after the boss fights in a single info dump and like Drew said: They seem really one-dimensional.
They're just fucked up stories that are written to make the character seem "edgy" after the fact, or make sense of why the characters went completely insane in a way no real person ever would. And when all the bossfights end with gratuitous ass and boob shots and the boss slowly crawling and walking towards you trying to hug you, it's -believe it or not- really fucking hard to take any of it seriously.
I like when games delve in to the mental aspects of characters and their actions, but here it just doesn't work. It's ham-fisted and slapped across the player's face in a flash and only after the bossfight, at which point all meaning or effect it could have had on the player's actions is already moot.

What does this sentence even mean

@briarpack: Would you rather have each B&B member stand around for 5 minutes before each fight telling you about their past? I think this is a lot better.

@lazyaza: My hypothesis was so patently absurd that, surely, it must have been a joke. Right?

@drewbert@danryckert@unastrike Today's Tips and Easter Eggs:

Feeling stressed and psyche running low?

Apart from using Regain, eating food and calling Rose, there are many other ways to relax: Listening to music, reading Playboy (for the articles) or sitting inside a box are all viable options. Feel free to kick back and relax!

As for the Easter Eggs:

Did you forget Otacon's Password, Snake? It's a good thing he remembered it eventually, but there's a few other codes you could have used as well:

14893 would give you 100.000 Drebin Points, while 78925 and 13462 would give you two special iPod songs... One that increases Snake's accuracy and one that makes soldiers fall asleep when Snake touches them. Remember: Music is a powerful weapon.

Also, don't forget about the Camera you picked up in the previous episode. The ghosts of Shadow Moses still linger in the hallways.

Because you picked up the Camera so late in the game, someone might already have used it to take some pictures. Try going to the Photo Viewer in the Main Menu to check them out.

Drew's actually playing incredibly awful and sloppily and continues to refuse to look at any of the control sections, read the manual, or use the built-in in training mode. People seem to have this weird thing in their heads that asking people to read the manual before they play a game is "demanding perfect pro-level gameplay" or something, it's really weird. When Drew gets to the parts where the controls completely change, I'd bet money he dies and reloads so many times because he can't be bothered to look up controls, instead just blaming the game for being "obscure" despite there literally being a button devoted to control help at all times.

And I meant that the series humanizes the enemies in general, not just the bosses. It gives you very valid reasons for not killing even grunts in each game, such as how in MGS3, the KGB soldiers are allied with you against Volgin's GRU uprising as well, they just don't know it, or how in MGS4, the PMCs are literally just poor people trying to put food on their tables for their families - a fact that Big Mama talked about for like 3 or 4 minutes just two MGS episodes ago.

@briarpack what are you talking about? if anything, the non-lethal approach in MGS has always been insanely overpowered compared to lethal ones. The tranq pistol is completely silent, takes enemies down in a single hit, even if they're fully alert, and if a guard finds a sleeping enemy, he just wakes them up and goes on his way instead of sounding an alarm.

"You kill characters that are of no consequence to you and you don't relate with or spend time with. They're literally nameless, faceless enemies that are being shoveled at you."

Gee if only the series had always given you incredibly good reasons, both gameplay and storywise, why you shouldn't be killing those 'nameless, faceless' guards or something... oh well!

I've mentioned this in the MGS comments like 4 or 5 times now.

Drebin telling you a B&B sob story afterwards is supposed to be a reflection of the themes of dehumanization and war as a business that make up a lot of MGS4. Snake even outright says "Why are you telling me this? Am I supposed to feel sorry for her or something?". To him, this is just business; cold, impersonal business. After all, "I'm no hero, never was. Just an old killer hired to do some wet work."

Mine is Thunder Catfish.

Regain®

Revolver Crocodile here to say that Drew doing's just fine playing it the way he wants to and there's no reason for anyone to get their underwear pinched up over it.

F L A M E A N A C O N D A reporting for duty... o7

EDIT: Pentazemin with dat lean! *soulja boy voice*

Man, all that stuff about the bosses and their background is super tacky.

The back story on Crying Wolf is heartbreaking, and for me the most memorable part of the game... I'm actually glad that Dan and Drew talked over it so I didn't have to concentrate on it again.

My Metal Gear Name is "Revolver Crocodile"

When they kept saying Nikita I could only think of Maggie Q. I think that character is a contender for being as badass as Snake.

Also yo those frog people have been ladies in every instance.

I got the codename "Shotgun Catfish".

Because killing me is as easy as shooting (cat)fish in a barrel. With a double-barrel.

It's supposed to be tacky. I mean, the butt shots and camel toes are inexcusable, although that is what the regular game is 100% of the time with Old Snake's butt and crotch too. But the backgrounds being annoying loredumps that you don't care about is Snake's exact mindset fighting those guys. Regardless of Hideo's intent, the "work" that is the game stands on its own and should be interpreted as such. To Snake and us, The BB is simply an annoying and artificial team that Liquid put together to glorify the Cobra unit, Foxhound and Dead Cell; all bosses from previous games that Liquid and Ocelot is the only connective issue to. They matter to Liquid, and he put them on top of his PMC house of cards, but Snake don't care and is just mowing through them to get to Liquid.

@spacecouncil: I was Martial Arts Eel. There can only be one Eel so well have to settle this with a martial arts tournament.

I wonder if Kojima is a big M*A*S*H fan after hearing that crying wolf thing again.

Upon fighting Crying Wolf:

"This type of stuff is my favorite!"

- Drew

Uh... are we watching the same video as you recorded?

Because every single other encounter in this series, short of a few bosses for whom it was impossible, has been run-and-gun/grenade until you get into trouble, maybe hide if you get into trouble in combat, rinse, repeat. You NEVER take any time to assess situations in these games, especially when the game gives you a free pass to do exactly that, unless it is. quite literally, your only option.

I'm not saying you're playing wrong (I'd probably do it mostly the same), but your tendencies in this series strongly contradict your statement here. I don't care if you might say you play this way because you think playing tactically would be "boring" for viewers, or whatever excuse you want to give - It's simply not true. You've repeatedly ignored viewer suggestions and interests.

I remember loving that sniper fight. Pretty sure I went straight for the tower, sniped her from high up. Not sure why Drew was so insistent on being on the ground and out in the open so much, but hey he got the job done. Think he just finds all that sneaking, camo, wall-hugging stuff too tedious; complete opposite for me, I find the straight-up gunfight stuff kind of boring.