Saturday, June 28, 2008

MGS4 Notes

These could be spoilers. You've been warned.
  1. If I'm going to play a Brother's Keeper mission, and said brother at one point tries not to get in trouble, but later goes out of his way to get in trouble for no apparent reason, then I hate it. Seriously.
  2. Also, if said brother follows a space-filling curve when there are obviously better paths that he should be able to see with his own eyes, then I hate it.
  3. Too many sick people at the end of Act 3/beginning of Act 4. What the heck?
  4. I don't think this is just poor translation, but the conversations are even more stilted than ever. Not one bit of this sounds like two people having a conversation. It sounds like two people reading lines. Spontaneity is zero.
  5. Partitioning the game into 4+ acts has really broken the game into pieces that make it feel like a series of set pieces instead of a continuous adventure. At this point, MGS3 is winning.
  6. Is this just the culmination of the gameplay ideas (when you do play, it is at least entertaining) across a patchwork of pieces that Kojima felt were needed to tie the whole sprawling story up with a bow? That is, because it wants to be the end, it has no choice but to go from place to place to make it coherent ... and fails to be as coherent as the previous games precisely for that reason.

2 comments:

ruffin said...

Woohoo, MGS4 news. What's you GTA4 completion %? What's the MGS4 play:movie watching ratio? You've almost got me wanting to return to MGS3, but I can't imagine how spoiled my food must be by now...

Unknown said...

There are times when I'm playing this that I wish I were still playing MGS3.

On the other hand, MGS4 really does take the sneaking and combat of the previous games and make it much, much more accessible.

I guess I'm saying I'd rather have MGS3 world with MGS4 combat/sneaking.

As for play:movie, I'd guess it's 2 play for every 1 movie, but I'm quite conservative in how I play. No kills, which means I have to drain the bosses, and I've been doing that with the tranq gun. I'd guess I've spent at least 3 hours on just the two bosses I've seen so far. Outside of that, I sneak a lot and try to collect items when it seems feasible to spend the time doing it, so I'm probably going to have a pretty long time-to-finish at the end.