Metal Gear Scanlon: V: Ground Zeroes

Haven't played GZ since it came out. Getting excited for MGSV. Fire up the video. Hear Keifer Sutherland as Big Boss. Throw up a little. Hype dies. I'm sad now.

Man i never even knew you could escape by truck during this mission. I've beaten this mission 3 or 4 times and i never saw that truck parked in there. So cool and such a smooth escape

That was so great! What a time to be alive!

Code name when I used my first name is "Lucky Jackal"

Code name when I used my last name is "Flame Spider"

Drew I have to commend you on that maiden voyage into Ground Zeroes. That was the smoothest and most well executed I have seen someone do it on their first try.

I'd rather they do a playthrough of Peace Walker tbh. Hell, even Portable Ops would be cool if they somehow manage to set that up.

the MGS train never stops.

That ending...that was awesome Drew!

You should've just done that Kojima mission just to lighten the mood at the end.

pretty sure drew/dan said no , not till long after its release (they are definitely going to play it on their own) ..and i doubt wed go backwards to po/pw again at this point. .. it was still great while it lasted :) shame we didn't get all the mother base dialogue from peacewalker:/

That escape was fucking amazing. I've 100%ed this game on three different platforms and I've never been able to use that method sneakily.

Huh, wonder why Drew's not playing TPP on PC. That seems like the one to get.

I remember Dan talking about a metal gear code name generator during MGS4? play-through and for some reason watching this video reminded me of it, i tried it and got "Screaming Ocelot" which fits me perfectly, since im probably the most quiet person.

Kills me that they don't use first person when using the dart gun. Oh well, different strokes.

Truck Sneaking Simulator 2015

my metal gear name is Ice Wolf

Have they said what completing this will get you in phantom pain? Do I need to go back and play other missions if I want everything?

I DIDN'T EXPECT ANY MORE METAL GEAR BUT THE LAST FEW DAYS HAVE BEEN FULL OF PLEASANT SURPRISES

@danryckert@drewbert A couple helpful Ground Zeroes controls tips:

• You can wake guards up by hitting RT/R2 when near them, and Snake will kick them. Kicking them again will instantly knock them back out. You can even perform a hold-up immediately after waking them up by aiming at them if they're lying on their stomachs. If they're on their backs, you have to wait for them to get up, but as long as you keep your weapon trained on them, it will still work.

• Hold-ups are MUCH easier in this game. Sneaking up on enemies by crouch-walking while you have your weapon aimed at their backs is basically foolproof (especially on normal, and even on hard on the main mission due to the rain covering up minor footstep noise).

• You can interrogate guards using hold-ups instead of grabbing them, and you can even order them to get down so they stay out of sight before or after interrogating them. They will remain in this position permanently unless you set off an alarm or another guard finds them and gets them up. You can also just knock them out instantly if you want by using the aforementioned kick.

Less helpful stuff:

• You can see your last known location on your idroid map.

• If you are next to a building/structure and an enemy is coming around the corner, aim your weapon at the corner (don't aim at the wall though) they are about to walk by, and you will successfully hold them up (even if they're facing you).

• You can zoom in and out gradually with the binoculars using up/down on the d-pad.

• If you want to look like a cool guy, you can rip enemies' guns out of their hands and aim it at them by tapping RT/R2 (I think you have to let off the left stick before this button press though, or it will result in an instant CQC throw instead) and immediately following it up by holding down LT/L2.

And most important of all: don't forget to set your helicopter music!

They Played Us Like A Damn FIDDLE!

Damn, Drew's escape with Paz was amazing to watch.

Ah man, this was great. I'm so happy that the franchise is slowly, deliberately being covered more-or-less comprehensively on the site.

@drewbert, I love that you really embraced the control scheme of GZ especially when it came to CQC. I imagine that kind of variety you've got with responding to alerts and other sticky situations is going to pay off big-time once Metal Gear Scanlon V starts off proper, and I can't wait to see what happens. And yes, that truck move was exactly the kind of crazy MGScanlon's known for.

@danryckert, excellent idea on covering GZ as an introduction to the game. I'd still suggest emphasis be placed on Drew actually looking at cassettes in batches once the series properly begins as it's important that Drew actually understand as much of the backstory of MSF/DD's initial creation, Kaz and Campbell's introduction to BB on the San Hieronymo Peninsula and BB's split from the Patriots as possible given how much of that was covered in Portable Ops and how much it helps explain why all that was in (or alluded to in) Peace Walker to begin with. It may seem like a bunch of dead camera time but it'd be cool to see Drew's reactions on story debriefings anyway.

Sacco and Vanzetti american immigrants?!? WTF Dan. Just open the phone and check Wikipedia, it's a two seconds process.

I thought the Metal Gear name generator was fun, so I decided to look it up.

My result: Martial Arts Mongoose.

@drewbert Shooter controls are significantly better in this game because it makes it feel like pretty much any modern third person shooter.

nice run Drew

Played it like a damn fiddle

I didn't like how robotic the character movement felt in this game, I also didn't like how there was no hiding bodies in places like the portaloo. No physics either, when you picked up a body you didn't drag them around like a rag doll any more, just this weird disconnected feeling of clicking a button and getting an animation.

My least favourite Metal Gear game by far.

right, as opposed to the super smooth animations and movement of past metal gear games?

@pogman: I'm so glad I'm not the only one who thinks this. All I ever see is people praising the gameplay in GZ, when my experience with it was wildly different. Everything felt too stiff and clunky, the wild interactivity of previous games was all but gone, the alert system was confusing and a step back from MGS2/3/4's system, the new cover system felt imprecise at best and non-functional at worst, the regenerating health with jelly vision is not an improvement... overall the game just seemed to lack a sense of life. It all felt very superficial to me.

@dixavd: nice! Yeah I still got an A due to the time I took, and I didn't rescue any extra prisoners. So I bet if you were able to avoid some alerts and tighten up the time you'd be pulling easy A or S ranks!

@radassbadass: Actually all the most important tapes are unlocked right at the start. Which is why Dan steering Drew away from them is infuriating because it strips away all the context from the ending of this scene. The unlockable tapes only matter after you've seen the ending, and since you can't get them during the first mission, I doubt they'll bother to go for them. But I do hope they actually sit down and find those tapes because this is maybe one of the worst mistakes they've made. And Dan getting more mentor-y and interfering more is actually a bad thing when a lot of his advice is bad advice. It's almost as bad as brad spending half an hour running around the camp not thinking that an armory might be a good palce to look for grenades.

As a guy who have never liked how stealth worked in the older games (which I know sounds silly as I have only played MGS2) and one who find a lot of the overly dramatic stuff just bad, I have loved watching all of this. And I now think I actually want MGSV...
So, questions time!
1. I can get both MGSV and GZ for 400NOK on Steam. GZ alone is 140NOK, but I kinda feel I should try that out first to see if I actually enjoy playing it. It seems I will, as everything appears to be a lot better and more modern now. Still, what is the wisest and cheapest way to go about this?
2. Are the keyboard and mouse controls good? I have a wired 360 controller I use for games I'd rather use a controller on, but I just hate aiming guns with a stick. If there is any kind of precision shooting required, I have to go mouse.

Given what's on the worst of those tapes, I am perfectly fine not having to listen to them again or watch Dan and Drew sit through them. I'm hoping that Kojima won't go that far in TPP and am slightly heartened by the TPP ESRB rating not mentioning sexual violence where GZ's does.

Yeah Drew should just play MGSV on his own, but they should definitely still do the Quick look together!

I really though Drew would be able to stealth this one since it's so easy.... NOPE!

Do you have a console? If so there's a good chance you can get a hold of a cheap 2nd hand copy of GZ for that. Won't look as nice, obviously, but it'll at least give you an indication if you like the new controls etc. Personally, I don't care for MGS at all, always hated the way they played, and I've put about 40 hours into GZ on PS4 and steam (bought a physical copy on ps4, beat it, bought it on steam to see how the engine did, beat it and all the side stuff, then got the ps+ digital version from psn and played another 5 hours or so).

And the switching between mouse and controller is very smooth. You can drop the controller and move around with the keyboard at any point, all the prompts change immediately, etc. Haven't really looked at the mapping options for keyboard though, since I spent the majority of my time playing with a DS4 on the PC.

@jangowuzhere: Considering he said he doesn't have a ps4, not really.

@tagyhag: @doomsder: They've already said they will not do phantom pain as a series.

@drewbert@danryckert I know you guys aren't doing this for V (or at least not right away if you do what Jeff kept suggesting and we get anything at all of it) but I really hope for a video of you guys watching the MGSV trailers like you've done in the past for the prior games. The trailers for this one are outstanding and some of the most powerful and memorable content the series has had - and they aren't even in a game yet, I'd love to see both your reactions and thoughts on them.

Anyway, I've been a GB fan since near the beginning and this is the first thing to really be on par with the P4ED, hope to see more content like this but I'm just glad all this exists as it is. This is really the type of content that makes GB such an amazing site and is totally unforgettable. You two better be doing the QL, it wouldn't be right for it to be anyone else.

Have fun with Phantom Pain.

I mean, if Kojima's going for a far more realistic take for MGSV... Along with child soldiers, sexual violence is just one of the sad but accurate realities of war.

Oh man, I should probably just wait to post this but do they not listen to the tapes? Dan says the intel replaces codecs but I'd say the tapes seemed like the crazy metal gear I was used to way more then anything else.

@berserker976: Yeah I hated the alert and cover systems as well, they felt like a step back.

Not a single thing? You should see Dark City ASAP. The movie is amazing. Its Roger Ebert commentary track is double-amazing. Kiefer isn't even the star, he plays a tragic mad scientist type who would totally fit in a Metal Gear game.

This is so masterfully done, and after watching it again after having not played it for at least a few months it just makes me way more excited.

Yall should definitely watch the RedBand trailer for MGSV its amazing

Great feature. This almost made me get the HD collection early on, but now I'm definetly getting at least Phantom Pain.

...and now that it's over, can we get some more Demo Derby love? Or Danjo-KaDrewie?

Also, @danryckert@drewbert "Why would I not want to just kill them?"

Well, every MGS game since MGS2 has had it that if a guard finds another guard asleep, they just wake them up and go on their way instead of calling out an alarm. In fact, they find nothing suspicious about a guard suddenly going for a snooze in the middle of a conversation, letting you take out groups of guards quickly and quietly. And the suppressor on the tranq gun never breaks. Plus enemies will just go "Huh? Meh..." if you miss with a tranq dart and it hits the wall behind them, whereas if you use a gun (even silenced) they'll go into caution and radio about being shot at with unknown suppressed fire.

Just like every other MGS game, there's tons of pros to just tranquilizing guards and no cons.

@galacticpunt: This is the first time I have seen anybody else mention Dark City. Did time just forget that movie or something?
Anyway, watch Dark City everyone.

@sor_eddie: I'd call it darker, not more realistic. Even just GZ still plenty full of Metal Gear sci-fi stuff (esp. given when it's set). The iDroid, Sullface's magic paint eraser lazer thing, combo mic binoculars and on and on. And it looks like it'll get even sillier in the best way in TPP. I can't wait to use my rocket fist on enemies like I'm freaking Megaman. It's not more realistic imo.

Kojima is more than welcome to put whatever he wants in his games. In fact, the significantly darker tone makes a lot of sense given that this is by all indications a giant revenge tale that leads to Big Boss' heel turn. I'm okay with that meaning darker elements get included. Sexism and torture are both terrifyingly common in real life and things the MGS series has touched on before (though the more overtly sexist stuff is generally played for creepy laughs). The child soldier aspect of things isn't a fresh element either by any stretch. There's a way to touch on all those things and convey how awful they are without going over the line into being unnecessarily gratuitous/lurid. Kojima's absolutely never been one for restraint, but the tape where Skullface does what he does to Paz and Chico crosses that line for me even taking into account the point of it being there in the first place and the context in which it's occurring.

We know from trailers that little kids with AKs are showing up in TPP and that torture figures fairly prominently. We'll see how those get handled, but I'm not going to be mad at Kojima leaving out further on screen/on tape sexual assault, which it seems like he has at least enough for the ratings board to leave off a specific warning about that. I love this series past the point of reason even if I have problems with parts of it, and I want this last hurrah to be something I can enjoy with as few qualifiers as possible.

We'll find out in a couple weeks (the wait is killing me)!