red_dread posted:

Petrol posted:

bloodborne update: i got as far as the bit in old yharnam with the machine gun guy. i dont think im going to persist at this point because i dont have the time and energy, and im also highly strung and find it almost impossible to relax and enjoy the gameplay. im sure i'll come back to it one day because i do think it's a very good game, it's just not something i can properly enjoy right now.

protip: drop down to a little bombed out house near the lantern, jump down to where like 30 poison monkeys are just chilling, sprint through them while he's firing past the hunter(s), take a right to a door that leads to a ladder.

because you turn 360 degrees and walk back out the store

red_dread posted:

Petrol posted:

bloodborne update: i got as far as the bit in old yharnam with the machine gun guy. i dont think im going to persist at this point because i dont have the time and energy, and im also highly strung and find it almost impossible to relax and enjoy the gameplay. im sure i'll come back to it one day because i do think it's a very good game, it's just not something i can properly enjoy right now.

protip: drop down to a little bombed out house near the lantern, jump down to where like 30 poison monkeys are just chilling, sprint through them while he's firing past the hunter(s), take a right to a door that leads to a ladder.

yeah i've been watching youtubes to get as far as i have and i get the idea of what im meant to do next but ive just hit my limit for now. i have enough on my plate at the moment and theres no point playing something thats gonna make me more stressed out. i know some people say these kinds of games help them de-stress but that aint me haha

Petrol posted:

i'm beginning to think dr pepper might not even be a real doctor

i don't like to talk about it much but i did my residency with dr pepper

serafiym posted:

I've been playing Red Orchestra 2, so whenever I'm forced to play the Germans I just refuse to shoot Soviet soldiers, maybe shoot over their heads if I have to, do "marks" (only for squad leaders for stuff like artillery) on our own bases, throw smoke grenades at the guys firing MG-34s, etc. I have a bad reputation in the fascist-infiltrated community already.

I like all of those games. Also RS2 where you can play as the NLF / PLAN. Nailed the last guy on a map -- zero reinforcements on both sides -- with one of those fougasse mines that ignites and immolates the player when he steps on it. He stepped into the wrong bunker: it became his tomb. RS2 supports unicode as well so the 60-player server saw my name pop up with a unicode hamsick in the kill counter with a cute little flaming fougasse emoji as they lost.

The next game in the series is called '83 so I'm looking forward to playing as a Warsaw Pact soldier rolling up Helmut Kohl and his goons.

jansenist_drugstore posted:

each variation of their suggestion communicates the exact same thing, that 911 was caused by a magical possessed flying piece of metal

hulking 353bee

Guyovich posted:

peace walker had you killing contras and cia so i wonder how much of that was a misguided desire for "balance"

Yeah and I can talk, but that also meant that Ground Zeroes was probably the most objectively pro-Communist media product mass-consumed in the West in the last decade. You repeatedly break into an illegal U.S. black site in Cuba to shoot U.S. Marines, extract prisoners intended for "extraordinary rendition" and recover cassette tapes describing the glory days of the Sandinistas. At the end of the game, the entire map is obliterated through a surprise airstrike with the obvious goal of burning your avatar along with the rest of the evidence and witnesses. The only thing you're told with certainty about the jets that drop the bombs is that they're Western in origin.

It speaks to why I don't think Kojima was ever a smart pick to revive the Silent Hill franchise, which should have been retired a decade and a half ago anyway. It's like the Quentin Tarantino Star Trek thing that keeps rising from the dead in the press: it's real bad in this way that people who post here used to call "goony" until it came to dominate Hollywood, slamming two names nerds know together and charging admission to see the roadside wreck it produces.

As the Silent Hills tech demo or tonal preview or whatever it purported to be, P.T. had all this stuff in it that seemed to provide an explicit economic context for the Eros-Thanatos/strangers-under-one-roof drama that made the best Silent Hill games work. You lose your job and can't find a new one. You and your spouse now depend on their paycheck to pay bills, so they won't quit their job even though their boss is either trying to get them to run away with him or ginning himself up to rape them. The specter of an unplanned pregnancy, regardless of parentage, becomes the ultimate symbol of guilt, shame and fear in the household; it might be worse if the baby were yours. An ersatz Alex Jones is on the radio telling you the entire world is conspiring against you—which is exactly what the world of the game is doing in increasingly frustrating and confusing ways—and when he's not on the air, you're hearing a newsreader describe an epidemic of men in the U.S. who are suddenly reaching for the rifles they keep around the house and killing their families, then themselves, while chanting what sounds like a broadcast from a SIS numbers station.

When you hear those same radio news broadcasts in Phantom Pain, they're playing around and inside a secret, colonialist human-experimentation lab on the Angola-Zaire border guarded by apartheid-era mercenaries. Along with a seemingly random assortment of other mass media audio from around the world, those broadcasts are being blasted through speakers into the locals being used as test subjects—not played into their ears, but literally down their throats, a wire replacing their voice boxes with the depersonalized products of global media as the victims' lungs swell into giant, fluid-secreting tumors.

That whole business, politics with context, is something Konami's other big-name decades-long series does not do, or does not do particularly well, and that's maybe a defining element of it: the Silent Hill games are Jacob's Ladder, but with the war in Vietnam replaced by the conflicts buried the lawns and floorboards of the United States small-town household. Wherever you happen to be in each game, it's most of the time like any other small town or city in the U.S., a contemporary and homogeneous setting, but connections to the outside world through radios and smartphones are cut off as the static pouring out of them becomes a mechanism for detecting otherworldly monsters waiting in hiding to attack the player's avatar. It's an element of the story that the setting has no context. No one is going to fly over and drop a bomb on Silent Hill.

That's why Kojima's Silent Hill game probably wouldn't have worked out if he'd been allowed to make it, because everything that works in that series cuts against Kojima's overreaching obsession with historical context and player freedom in his own projects. Silent Hill is a place where geography and politics are made meaningless, replaced with the uneasy intimacy of a small family living a lie and the esoteric agenda of a mystery cult that the earlier, better games are careful to leave mostly undefined, but that obviously threatens secular-Protestant society through gender-neutral, or possibly matriarchal, pagan polytheism, funded with illegal drugs. Even before the first game came out, before anyone on Team Silent knew they were kicking off a commercial franchise and, really, before they knew anyone would give a shit about their game at all, the developers spent extra time creating something that's become a hallmark of the series, a farcical secret ending that mocks the sort of player-consumer who demands a comprehensive, simple-minded, expository-dialog-driven "canon" explanation for every story they consume in any medium. Which is tough luck, because with the team's soundtrack composer taking over as producer with the third game, the series then became more or less supporting material for dark ambient / industrial / downtempo concept albums, which worked fine for years IMO.

But unlike Yamaoka, who worshiped Suda51 and had the idea he'd design video games before he decided to compose music for them, the #1 thing about Kojima that annoyed the hell out of his coworkers back when he was planning out the first Metal Gear game was, he didn't know anything about how to design or program a video game, and he didn't really care. Kojima couldn't have fit his expectations to the technology even if he'd wanted to, since he didn't know how any of it worked at that point. Instead, he blithely forged ahead, designing a game that was outright impossible to build, then using way too much time and money to build and release less than half of it, something he still does even though he knows better (it's probably why he got fired). He's a childish person in a lot of ways, and with stuff like the Beauty and the Beast unit in MGS4 folding down into just Quiet in MGS5, you can tell that, in middle age, he's fighting some sort of eternal just-past-adolescence internal battle between the part of him that wants to be taken seriously and the part that wants his stories about grim cloned Kurt Russells, who never find peace because they're too stylishly good at making war, to feature a 1:3 ratio, on the outside, of PG-13 bikini-beach episodes.

So I always felt confident Kojima's Silent Hill game would be bad, especially because he took on Guillermo Del Toro as a collaborator, a guy who started out interrogating nostalgia in cinema but seems to be rapidly reverse-aging into Mexico's most bearded toddler. But I was morbidly curious to see the exact sort of company-killing debacle that might result from a Silent Hill game that tries to care a whole bunch about surplus labor power.

cars posted:

Guyovich posted:


peace walker had you killing contras and cia so i wonder how much of that was a misguided desire for "balance"



Yeah and I can talk, but that also meant that Ground Zeroes was probably the most objectively pro-Communist media product mass-consumed in the West in the last decade. You repeatedly break into an illegal U.S. black site in Cuba to shoot U.S. Marines, extract prisoners intended for "extraordinary rendition" and recover cassette tapes describing the glory days of the Sandinistas. At the end of the game, the entire map is obliterated through a surprise airstrike with the obvious goal of burning your avatar along with the rest of the evidence and witnesses. The only thing you're told with certainty about the jets that drop the bombs is that they're Western in origin.

It speaks to why I don't think Kojima was ever a smart pick to revive the Silent Hill franchise, which should have been retired a decade and a half ago anyway. It's like the Quentin Tarantino Star Trek thing that keeps rising from the dead in the press: it's real bad in this way that people who post here used to call "goony" until it came to dominate Hollywood, slamming two names nerds know together and charging admission to see the roadside wreck it produces.

As the Silent Hills tech demo or tonal preview or whatever it purported to be, P.T. had all this stuff in it that seemed to provide an explicit economic context for the Eros-Thanatos/strangers-under-one-roof drama that made the best Silent Hill games work. You lose your job and can't find a new one. You and your spouse now depend on their paycheck to pay bills, so they won't quit their job even though their boss is either trying to get them to run away with him or ginning himself up to rape them. The specter of an unplanned pregnancy, regardless of parentage, becomes the ultimate symbol of guilt, shame and fear in the household; it might be worse if the baby were yours. An ersatz Alex Jones is on the radio telling you the entire world is conspiring against you—which is exactly what the world of the game is doing in increasingly frustrating and confusing ways—and when he's not on the air, you're hearing a newsreader describe an epidemic of men in the U.S. who are suddenly reaching for the rifles they keep around the house and killing their families, then themselves, while chanting what sounds like a broadcast from a SIS numbers station.

When you hear those same radio news broadcasts in Phantom Pain, they're playing around and inside a secret, colonialist human-experimentation lab on the Angola-Zaire border guarded by apartheid-era mercenaries. Along with a seemingly random assortment of other mass media audio from around the world, those broadcasts are being blasted through speakers into the locals being used as test subjects—not played into their ears, but literally down their throats, a wire replacing their voice boxes with the depersonalized products of global media as the victims' lungs swell into giant, fluid-secreting tumors.

That whole business, politics with context, is something Konami's other big-name decades-long series does not do, or does not do particularly well, and that's maybe a defining element of it: the Silent Hill games are Jacob's Ladder, but with the war in Vietnam replaced by the conflicts buried the lawns and floorboards of the United States small-town household. Wherever you happen to be in each game, it's most of the time like any other small town or city in the U.S., a contemporary and homogeneous setting, but connections to the outside world through radios and smartphones are cut off as the static pouring out of them becomes a mechanism for detecting otherworldly monsters waiting in hiding to attack the player's avatar. It's an element of the story that the setting has no context. No one is going to fly over and drop a bomb on Silent Hill.

That's why Kojima's Silent Hill game probably wouldn't have worked out if he'd been allowed to make it, because everything that works in that series cuts against Kojima's overreaching obsession with historical context and player freedom in his own projects. Silent Hill is a place where geography and politics are made meaningless, replaced with the uneasy intimacy of a small family living a lie and the esoteric agenda of a mystery cult that the earlier, better games are careful to leave mostly undefined, but that obviously threatens secular-Protestant society through gender-neutral, or possibly matriarchal, pagan polytheism, funded with illegal drugs. Even before the first game came out, before anyone on Team Silent knew they were kicking off a commercial franchise and, really, before they knew anyone would give a shit about their game at all, the developers spent extra time creating something that's become a hallmark of the series, a farcical secret ending that mocks the sort of player-consumer who demands a comprehensive, simple-minded, expository-dialog-driven "canon" explanation for every story they consume in any medium. Which is tough luck, because with the team's soundtrack composer taking over as producer with the third game, the series then became more or less supporting material for dark ambient / industrial / downtempo concept albums, which worked fine for years IMO.

But unlike Yamaoka, who worshiped Suda51 and had the idea he'd design video games before he decided to compose music for them, the #1 thing about Kojima that annoyed the hell out of his coworkers back when he was planning out the first Metal Gear game was, he didn't know anything about how to design or program a video game, and he didn't really care. Kojima couldn't have fit his expectations to the technology even if he'd wanted to, since he didn't know how any of it worked at that point. Instead, he blithely forged ahead, designing a game that was outright impossible to build, then using way too much time and money to build and release less than half of it, something he still does even though he knows better (it's probably why he got fired). He's a childish person in a lot of ways, and with stuff like the Beauty and the Beast unit in MGS4 folding down into just Quiet in MGS5, you can tell that, in middle age, he's fighting some sort of eternal just-past-adolescence internal battle between the part of him that wants to be taken seriously and the part that wants his stories about grim cloned Kurt Russells, who never find peace because they're too stylishly good at making war, to feature a 1:3 ratio, on the outside, of PG-13 bikini-beach episodes.

So I always felt confident Kojima's Silent Hill game would be bad, especially because he took on Guillermo Del Toro as a collaborator, a guy who started out interrogating nostalgia in cinema but seems to be rapidly reverse-aging into Mexico's most bearded toddler. But I was morbidly curious to see the exact sort of company-killing debacle that might result from a Silent Hill game that tries to care a whole bunch about surplus labor power.

ialdabaoth posted:

yr a p good writer dadholes

ty