I wonder how quickly they would feel okay putting a full playthrough of the game up. East Coast just did that full run of that little FMV murder mystery right after it was released. That's a little different, since they seemed to have the dev's blessings to do it, but what would be the worst that could happen if they did Phantom Pain. Konami gets mad and stops sending them early releases of their up-coming games? Like Pro Evo Soccer. And.... Wait a minute, I'm sure there are more things they make.
And Ground Zeroes is already up!
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ShadowfireVermont, in the middle of nowhereRegistered Userregular
Welp... I just watched The Substitute for the first time in decades. That is not a great movie.
I can't see them doing Metal Gear Scanlon with Phantom Pain simply because it seems like Drew wants to play it right away. Meanwhile, Dan and Jason need time to play through it themselves.
I'm really glad I watched this Blops 3 Unfinished.
If you had told me before, even like 2 years ago, that THIS would be a main menu screen in a CoD game, I would NEVER have believed you. IT'S SO GREAT. Badass lady smoking a cigar, hauling a grenade launcher, over the corpses of a bunch of destroyed buildings/robots yessssss
I'm really glad I watched this Blops 3 Unfinished.
If you had told me before, even like 2 years ago, that THIS would be a main menu screen in a CoD game, I would NEVER have believed you. IT'S SO GREAT. Badass lady smoking a cigar, hauling a grenade launcher, over the corpses of a bunch of destroyed buildings/robots yessssss
I'm just happy they got David Lee Roth to do some VO work.
Man, that last hour of the Blops 3 Unfinished was awesome. Specially if you've read Jeff's latest tweets. Grrr...if I had known I would've had a PS4 this week I would have preordered the game.
I thought Jeff mentioned last week that his ladyfriend is vegan (hence the vegan ice cream sandwich shop)? Shopping for cakes doesn't mean the wedding is imminent though, those things usually have to be ordered months in advance.
I wonder how quickly they would feel okay putting a full playthrough of the game up. East Coast just did that full run of that little FMV murder mystery right after it was released. That's a little different, since they seemed to have the dev's blessings to do it, but what would be the worst that could happen if they did Phantom Pain. Konami gets mad and stops sending them early releases of their up-coming games? Like Pro Evo Soccer. And.... Wait a minute, I'm sure there are more things they make.
And Ground Zeroes is already up!
I'm pretty sure their decision not to play through MGS V on the site is less to do with not wanting to get into trouble with the publisher, and more just that they don't feel like they should.
So this was my first time seeing any significant amount of Ground Zeroes. I've heard a lot about it, but hadn't really seen it.
I will say, visually it looks fantastic, and the gameplay looks great.
That story though is... eh....
Right off the bat, it seems like they're trying to be darker and more 'serious', and I'm not sure if that's the right direction for the series to go. Initial impression, it doesn't seem as interesting or compelling to me.
Then we get into the really gross stuff. No idea if these are still considered spoilers, but I'll tag it anyway;
I mean, right off the bat, the bolts through Chico's ankles and the way that whole thing was presented... that's just really off-putting, and stuck me as a worrying sign of things to come. Then there was the stuff with Paz. I'd heard about this, and wow, people weren't kidding when they talked about her stuff being problematic. That tape... just... no. That absolutely didn't need to be in there (not really in GB's playthrough, I looked that up afterward). I think most people will know exactly what I'm referring to. The surgery scene on the plane quickly got to a point where I couldn't even look at the screen, and the second bomb just left me shaking my head.
I know the series has thrown dark before, but presentation, context, specific content, etc, really do matter when it comes to whether or not it works. They've also certainly had eye-rolling treatment of female characters before, but this was a new low by a mile.
Even if Phantom Pain is less gross, I'm not sure if 'dark and gritty' MGS is something that interests me. Maybe they'll strike a better balance in the main game; I'll wait and look at people's impressions.
I think I'm just burnt out on 'dark and gritty' in general too, and have been for a while. It can work when done right, but it feels like a lot of people, both content creators and the audience, have come to automatically equate 'dark and gritty' with 'critically good'.
Yeah. I lost interest in MGS after playing 2 way back when, but I picked up Ground Zeroes during the most recent Steam summer sale. I loved the way it played, but the plot and writing were complete turn offs.
Zxerolfor the smaller pieces, my shovel wouldn't doso i took off my boot and used my shoeRegistered Userregular
It's a dour theme combined with the incredible tact, subtlety, and restraint that Kojima is known for. I'm looking forward to playing MGS5, but not because I'm excited by its storytelling potential one bit. Granted, I'm someone who isn't enamored with the Metal Gear mythos to begin with and think it's schlocky nonsense at best, so...
If Chico and Paz were just away at summer camp, learning to make popsicle stick crafts and swimming in the lake every day, there'd be no need for Big Boss to come in and rescue them.
Sometimes in story telling shitty things are done to good characters for the sake of showing just how bad the villain is.
Yes, some of it comes off as (torture)porn, but this is how the story teller wants to illustrate the story. It's ok to be uncomfortable with it. That's probably the reaction Kojima was going for.
If Chico and Paz were just away at summer camp, learning to make popsicle stick crafts and swimming in the lake every day, there'd be no need for Big Boss to come in and rescue them.
Sometimes in story telling shitty things are done to good characters for the sake of showing just how bad the villain is.
Yes, some of it comes off as (torture)porn, but this is how the story teller wants to illustrate the story. It's ok to be uncomfortable with it. That's probably the reaction Kojima was going for.
Because there's absolutely no middle ground between summer camp and what happened in Ground Zeroes.
The issue isn't that they were captured, or that 'bad things happened to good characters'. The problem isn't even that there was torture.
It's very much about certain specifics that absolutely didn't have to be in there. They easily could have had the exact same mission with the exact same characters, without certain very distastefully used elements.
To me, it comes off as a very misguided attempt at being 'gritty' more than anything.
Edit: You're still allowed to be excited for Phantom Pain, and no one is judging anyone that's planning on playing it.
It's not exactly unreasonable if some people find certain elements of Ground Zeroes off-putting though.
Also yes, Jeff was right to eat the whole piece of cake cause it's cake and if he's not vegan, he'd want to make sure the vegan cake he's buying is legit. And it was probably his wedding cake.
And Kojima's gone on record (in not so many words) that he's purposely trying to shock and be provocative for the sake of video games, which ties into the earlier thread conversation, because he wants games to be taken as seriously as movies. It's not done particularly well, but I get it, I guess
It's just getting a bit tiring for people to use that type of plot point for lazy reasons. Feels like cable dramas just figured it out recently as well. It's a shortcut to whatever feeling they're trying to get across.
GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
edited August 2015
There are parts of Last of Us I find INCREDIBLY hard to sit and watch, but I think the story would be less without them. I don't think causing the player/watcher discomfort is the litmus test we want to use for content, when in fact some content is specifically made to cause discomfort.
I haven't gotten to the less savory part of Ground Zeroes yet, so I may be really put off by it, I don't know...I just don't like the insinuation that because something made you feel uncomfortable that the punch should have been pulled. In many cases causing you discomfort was exactly the point.
There are parts of Last of Us I find INCREDIBLY hard to sit and watch, but I think the story would be less without them. I don't think causing the player/watcher discomfort is the litmus test we want to use for content, when in fact some content is specifically made to cause discomfort.
I haven't gotten to the less savory part of Ground Zeroes yet, so I may be really put off by it, I don't know...I just don't like the insinuation that because something made you feel uncomfortable that the punch should have been pulled. In many cases causing you discomfort was exactly the point.
I didn't find the tape when I played Ground Zeroes, so I looked up the tape on youtube. It's...... pretty bad.
Like I'm not saying it crosses any lines and shouldn't be in the game, just because I'm not sure if there should be any lines that games should be forbidden from crossing.
But it's pretty fucking bad.
There was a steam sig here. It's gone now.
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GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
Fair enough. I mean I love Battlestar Galactica as a series, but the scene where Athena is raped i can't watch. So I get it...I just don't feel that something should be censored because I personally fund it unsavory.
Fair enough. I mean I love Battlestar Galactica as a series, but the scene where Athena is raped i can't watch. So I get it...I just don't feel that something should be censored because I personally fund it unsavory.
It's not about censorship, and I hate when people make that false equivalence.
The shit in Ground Zeroes is bad because it is handled incredibly clumsily.
Like, torture rape vaginabomb may as well be something an emotionally disturbed teenager would come up with in some kind of misguided attempt to be edgy and subversive.
If you need to show your villain is a bad dude, sexual violence is basically the laziest method to do that at this point and there are real, if subtle, social repercussions to making light of those experiences by using them to make your literal skull headed villain seem more cartoonishly evil.
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GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
I agree with you it's lazy as fuck as a way to show someone as mustache twirlingly evil...but it's a hard sell to me that somehow sexual violence is the one case where it causes behavioral repercussions while splitting someones head open with an ax is totes cool. In the end you find one more unsavory than the other (rightfully so on some level), and you're arguing from that place. If we're going to say that sexual violence in video games has a subversive social effect, than it becomes untenable to argue that "regular" violence does not as well. Is that a position we're now willing to take, that in fact violence in video games DOES have social repercussions? I don't think it's a tenable position to say that somehow sexual violence is "worse" in this regard, at least from a logical instead of emotional position. I'm willing to be wrong on this though.
I agree with you it's lazy as fuck as a way to show someone as mustache twirlingly evil...but it's a hard sell to me that somehow sexual violence is the one case where it causes behavioral repercussions while splitting someones head open with an ax is totes cool. In the end you find one more unsavory than the other (rightfully so on some level), and you're arguing from that place. If we're going to say that sexual violence in video games has a subversive social effect, than it becomes untenable to argue that "regular" violence does not as well. Is that a position we're now willing to take, that in fact violence in video games DOES have social repercussions? I don't think it's a tenable position to say that somehow sexual violence is "worse" in this regard, at least from a logical instead of emotional position. I'm willing to be wrong on this though.
Violence in videogames does have social repercussions. So yes.
Insomuch as any content of media has an effect on the viewer. Not a transformative "violence in whatever causes violence", but in all different sorts of ways. If it didn't then no one would ever utter the phrase " man, that really got to me" or "that really made me think".
There are parts of Last of Us I find INCREDIBLY hard to sit and watch, but I think the story would be less without them. I don't think causing the player/watcher discomfort is the litmus test we want to use for content, when in fact some content is specifically made to cause discomfort.
I haven't gotten to the less savory part of Ground Zeroes yet, so I may be really put off by it, I don't know...I just don't like the insinuation that because something made you feel uncomfortable that the punch should have been pulled. In many cases causing you discomfort was exactly the point.
I've played The Last of Us.
The stuff in Ground Zeroes is way, waaaay worse than anything in The Last of Us. Also, again, presentation, content, and context all matter.
I'm not against games making the player feel uncomfortable for artistic purposes. The stuff that makes people feel so uncomfortable though doesn't provoke extra thought. It just feels like it's there to be gritty for the sake of gritty. It's tasteless without purpose.
Also, don't bother bringing up censorship. No one is trying to get this thing banned, which is what censorship is. Some people feel the content in question goes too far and is distasteful without purpose. That's not attempted censorship, it's expressing an opinion. People with that opinion aren't trying to stop people from playing Phantom Pain. Heck, I find elements of Ground Zeroes extremely distasteful and ill advised, and there's a good chance I'll play Phantom Pain at some point.
Honestly, it's getting pretty old to have critique equated with censorship. They are not the same thing. I don't like those things in Phantom Pain. I don't think they should be banned though, and I don't think creators should be forcibly stopped from including things like that.
Gnometank, if you're wondering what some of the specific content is that we're talking about in Ground Zeroes;
There's a recording you can find that makes it clear that the villain forces a tortured underage kid to rape another tortured prisoner. There's also a scene where a surgeon visibly and graphically digs through the guts of a living, non-sedated person to retrieve a bomb, and then that same person later dies because of another bomb that was planted in her genitals during the previously mentioned torture.
Like, you could have a rescue mission without explicitly and tactlessly laying out that shit.
Posts
According to the MGS thread right here, it doesn't seem like it's anything fancy. Just some soldiers you can recruit for your Mother Base.
And Ground Zeroes is already up!
Jeff has steered me wrong.
Steam: MightyPotatoKing
If you had told me before, even like 2 years ago, that THIS would be a main menu screen in a CoD game, I would NEVER have believed you. IT'S SO GREAT. Badass lady smoking a cigar, hauling a grenade launcher, over the corpses of a bunch of destroyed buildings/robots yessssss
Law and Order ≠ Justice
ACNH Island Isla Cero: DA-3082-2045-4142
Captain of the SES Comptroller of the State
I'm just happy they got David Lee Roth to do some VO work.
I'm pretty sure he also said he had to be the one tasting because his friends were vegan.
Sounded to me like it could have been someone elses wedding.
.
Island. Being on fire.
Curse my lack of attention!
We had a dessert buffet (after a plated dinner) that was awesome and all our guests were super into it.
Dessert buffets, i highly recommend them
I'm pretty sure their decision not to play through MGS V on the site is less to do with not wanting to get into trouble with the publisher, and more just that they don't feel like they should.
So this was my first time seeing any significant amount of Ground Zeroes. I've heard a lot about it, but hadn't really seen it.
I will say, visually it looks fantastic, and the gameplay looks great.
That story though is... eh....
Right off the bat, it seems like they're trying to be darker and more 'serious', and I'm not sure if that's the right direction for the series to go. Initial impression, it doesn't seem as interesting or compelling to me.
Then we get into the really gross stuff. No idea if these are still considered spoilers, but I'll tag it anyway;
I know the series has thrown dark before, but presentation, context, specific content, etc, really do matter when it comes to whether or not it works. They've also certainly had eye-rolling treatment of female characters before, but this was a new low by a mile.
Even if Phantom Pain is less gross, I'm not sure if 'dark and gritty' MGS is something that interests me. Maybe they'll strike a better balance in the main game; I'll wait and look at people's impressions.
I think I'm just burnt out on 'dark and gritty' in general too, and have been for a while. It can work when done right, but it feels like a lot of people, both content creators and the audience, have come to automatically equate 'dark and gritty' with 'critically good'.
Steam: MightyPotatoKing
Law and Order ≠ Justice
ACNH Island Isla Cero: DA-3082-2045-4142
Captain of the SES Comptroller of the State
Sometimes in story telling shitty things are done to good characters for the sake of showing just how bad the villain is.
Yes, some of it comes off as (torture)porn, but this is how the story teller wants to illustrate the story. It's ok to be uncomfortable with it. That's probably the reaction Kojima was going for.
PSN: Beltaine-77 | Steam: beltane77 | Battle.net BadHaggis#1433
Jeff announced he was getting married about a month ago on his tumblr.
PSN/Steam/NNID: SyphonBlue | BNet: SyphonBlue#1126
Because there's absolutely no middle ground between summer camp and what happened in Ground Zeroes.
The issue isn't that they were captured, or that 'bad things happened to good characters'. The problem isn't even that there was torture.
It's very much about certain specifics that absolutely didn't have to be in there. They easily could have had the exact same mission with the exact same characters, without certain very distastefully used elements.
To me, it comes off as a very misguided attempt at being 'gritty' more than anything.
Edit: You're still allowed to be excited for Phantom Pain, and no one is judging anyone that's planning on playing it.
It's not exactly unreasonable if some people find certain elements of Ground Zeroes off-putting though.
He's....he's had a hard life. He deserves some rest.
3DS Friend Code: 2165-6448-8348 www.Twitch.TV/cooljammer00
Battle.Net: JohnDarc#1203 Origin/UPlay: CoolJammer00
His girlfriend/fiance is vegan. He's mentioned it a couple of times. No, he is not. No he does not plan to be. She's fine with it.
And Kojima's gone on record (in not so many words) that he's purposely trying to shock and be provocative for the sake of video games, which ties into the earlier thread conversation, because he wants games to be taken as seriously as movies. It's not done particularly well, but I get it, I guess
It's just getting a bit tiring for people to use that type of plot point for lazy reasons. Feels like cable dramas just figured it out recently as well. It's a shortcut to whatever feeling they're trying to get across.
3DS Friend Code: 2165-6448-8348 www.Twitch.TV/cooljammer00
Battle.Net: JohnDarc#1203 Origin/UPlay: CoolJammer00
I haven't gotten to the less savory part of Ground Zeroes yet, so I may be really put off by it, I don't know...I just don't like the insinuation that because something made you feel uncomfortable that the punch should have been pulled. In many cases causing you discomfort was exactly the point.
I didn't find the tape when I played Ground Zeroes, so I looked up the tape on youtube. It's...... pretty bad.
Like I'm not saying it crosses any lines and shouldn't be in the game, just because I'm not sure if there should be any lines that games should be forbidden from crossing.
But it's pretty fucking bad.
All hail King Caravella, First of his Name.
Law and Order ≠ Justice
ACNH Island Isla Cero: DA-3082-2045-4142
Captain of the SES Comptroller of the State
It's not about censorship, and I hate when people make that false equivalence.
The shit in Ground Zeroes is bad because it is handled incredibly clumsily.
Like, torture rape vaginabomb may as well be something an emotionally disturbed teenager would come up with in some kind of misguided attempt to be edgy and subversive.
If you need to show your villain is a bad dude, sexual violence is basically the laziest method to do that at this point and there are real, if subtle, social repercussions to making light of those experiences by using them to make your literal skull headed villain seem more cartoonishly evil.
Violence in videogames does have social repercussions. So yes.
Insomuch as any content of media has an effect on the viewer. Not a transformative "violence in whatever causes violence", but in all different sorts of ways. If it didn't then no one would ever utter the phrase " man, that really got to me" or "that really made me think".
I've played The Last of Us.
The stuff in Ground Zeroes is way, waaaay worse than anything in The Last of Us. Also, again, presentation, content, and context all matter.
I'm not against games making the player feel uncomfortable for artistic purposes. The stuff that makes people feel so uncomfortable though doesn't provoke extra thought. It just feels like it's there to be gritty for the sake of gritty. It's tasteless without purpose.
Also, don't bother bringing up censorship. No one is trying to get this thing banned, which is what censorship is. Some people feel the content in question goes too far and is distasteful without purpose. That's not attempted censorship, it's expressing an opinion. People with that opinion aren't trying to stop people from playing Phantom Pain. Heck, I find elements of Ground Zeroes extremely distasteful and ill advised, and there's a good chance I'll play Phantom Pain at some point.
Honestly, it's getting pretty old to have critique equated with censorship. They are not the same thing. I don't like those things in Phantom Pain. I don't think they should be banned though, and I don't think creators should be forcibly stopped from including things like that.
Gnometank, if you're wondering what some of the specific content is that we're talking about in Ground Zeroes;
wasn't this Austin's idea
I got the honey one, and just made a PB&J with it (strawberry jam, for reference)
Holy fuck
It's absolutely amazing
3DS Friend Code: 2165-6448-8348 www.Twitch.TV/cooljammer00
Battle.Net: JohnDarc#1203 Origin/UPlay: CoolJammer00