Though to be fair, Deus only Ex Machinaed after repeatedly inflicting grievous injuries on Liquid's body, and it was about goddamned time by that point.
The ending of Splinter Cell. Sam Fisher has to snipe the big bad guy from across a courtyard and you're about out of ammo for your rifle. But lucky you! There's some ammo sitting on the railing in front of your perch. There's no reason for it to be sitting there. No guards around. No armory nearby. There's just a happy pack of ammo waiting for you just so you can finish the game.
Similarly, near the end of Velvet Assassin, you have to shoot a German officer through his window and there is, conveniently, a nearby windmill that allows you to see right into his room. But you need a sniper rifle. Some friendly German has conveniently left one in the very mill you have to take the shot from.
Why leave a sniper rifle where their commanding officer is the most vulnerable from? So he can be shot by any wayward British secret agent, obviously.
There is a difference with leaving a weapon you never had previously just conveniently lying next to the place where you can so conveniently assassinate someone if only you had just the weapon that happened to be conveniently lying there... and making sure the player has a couple shots to put in his rifle that he's had for the course of the entire level so that he can complete the end game.
Velvet Assassin smacks of lazy design, whereas Splinter Cell is good game design. It is an unrealistic conceit to just have ammo there, yes, but from a GAME perspective, it is much, much better than punishing your player for having used all their sniper rounds earlier in the mission and forcing them to play from the start again.
I'm reminded a bit of Lufia 2, considering i'm replaying it right now. It's more of the exact opposite of a Deus Ex Machina, where in the ending both Maxim and his wife end up dying in the final battle. Maxim had to sacrifice his life in order to divert an entire flying island from landing on his hometown and his child.
If you had played the original Lufia you already knew these events, but knowing this was going to happen one way or another gave Lufia 2 an almost bleak tone.
Kojima games tend to have quite a few Deus Ex Machina moments, but I pretty much expect that from that team by now, so eh.
The Phoenix Wright games are nothing but Deus Ex Machina moments.
There's not a case that goes by without some pepped up chick bursting into the courtroom, seconds before a verdict, yelling, "Nick! I got the critical evidence!"
emnmnme on
0
MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
edited May 2009
Calling Metal Gear Solid out for cliches and literary "no nos" is not interesting.
The series has never, ever, ever, ever, ever been devoid of these things. If you liked it when it wasn't quite so "bad" that's fine, but it never crossed a "line" because there never was a line.
The main character is expressely based on Escape from LA
These things in MGS are the logical progression of the previous parts of the series.
For example an oft mentioned point is lol nanomachines. Nanomachines have been in the series since mgs1. All the initial enemies had them and Snake too was injected with them. They made his codec work.
It was not sprung out of the blue.
It reminds me of people who sneer at clowns for dressing funny.
REally, sheesh, if you want to dislike something then it's alright to just dislike it. Honestly. You don't have to make up post hoc justifications for your emotion that aren't logical. Just dislike it! You are a human being, it's okay to use feelings for a piece of entertainment. Don't let anyone tell you different.
Morninglord on
(PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
It reminds me of people who sneer at clowns for dressing funny.
you're glossing over why people mock the writing of MGS. in this analogy, the clowns are putting on Shakespeare and playing it totally straight. The idea is funny until you get to the first twenty minute soliloquy.
It reminds me of people who sneer at clowns for dressing funny.
you're glossing over why people mock the writing of MGS. in this analogy, the clowns are putting on Shakespeare and playing it totally straight. The idea is funny until you get to the first twenty minute soliloquy.
Hmm.
Okay that's a good point. I didn't think of it like that.
I wouldn't say they would be playing it straight though. Playing it straight with hugely exaggerated expressions and wild flailings.
"Metal gear!!!"
Morninglord on
(PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
It reminds me of people who sneer at clowns for dressing funny.
you're glossing over why people mock the writing of MGS. in this analogy, the clowns are putting on Shakespeare and playing it totally straight. The idea is funny until you get to the first twenty minute soliloquy.
And people would probably rail against MGS's ridiculousness less if it wasn't so often lauded as good writing and storytelling when the games actually lack good examples of either.
Pancake on
0
MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
It reminds me of people who sneer at clowns for dressing funny.
you're glossing over why people mock the writing of MGS. in this analogy, the clowns are putting on Shakespeare and playing it totally straight. The idea is funny until you get to the first twenty minute soliloquy.
And people would probably rail against MGS's ridiculousness less if it wasn't so often lauded as good writing and storytelling when the games actually lack good examples of either.
Man who here seriously believes that though?
I don't know anyone with a logical solid reason for loving MGS who doesn't go "yep it's cheesy, but it's my kind of cheesy so I love eeeeet".
I disagree with people who claim that too. I know where MGS lies. Firmly in the wonderful land of the B.
Morninglord on
(PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
Let's face it, though - there are many gamers who mistake quantity for quality. As soon as a game has *lots* of story, they believe it's a pinnacle of storytelling.
Thirith on
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
I have seen plenty of examples, not here, but in other forums and even the world of gaming "journalism" that think the MGS games are a watershed moment for writing and storytelling in video games.
They were a watershed moment. Before MGS most popular console game stories involved furry animals or shared their plot with whatever movie that shared its name. Hardly any games put story at the forefront.
Before MGS, the only console game that had me roped in because of its story was...Snatcher.
The MGS games really don't have a great story. At best they're on par with some of the wonkier anime out there in that it has a point but its too weighed and self-important for me to really care. Ten years ago, though?
That shit be off the chain, son.
Ultimanecat on
SteamID : same as my PA forum name
0
MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
Let's face it, though - there are many gamers who mistake quantity for quality. As soon as a game has *lots* of story, they believe it's a pinnacle of storytelling.
This is true.
I also feel a great amount of arguments about these kinds of things are based on not realising that thought can happen without feel and not vice versa.
Explanation here:
First I will explain that the part of your brain that does the thinking, the grey matter, is capable of activating and you know, thinking abstractly and such, without activating the parts of the brain that generate what we think of as emotion.
These emotional parts (lymbic system, hypothalamus, etc) are near the base of the brain, near the brani stem. They're very old evolutionarily.
The thinking part is called the neocortex, it's the sci fi movie "grey matter", what you see when you see images of the brain, the folds n things. It's the part that differentiates us from animals.
So you can think about things without emotion, it's possible to calm yourself and remove emotion from a thought. It takes a lot of effort and practise, you need to consciously self regulate yourself. But you can. It's a lot easier of course if you haven't associated emotion to what you are thinking about, which is pretty damn hard for a computer game!
However you can't have emotion without also activating this grey matter. Getting emotional automatically triggers activity in the grey matter, the thinking part. Emotion leads to thought, naturally.
That's why people justify their emotions and why so many people get so irrational about things. You are thinking "man where is that thought coming from?" because it doesn't make logical sense. It doesn't! Something about what you are talking about is making them feel that is is important and since if it originates with feelings it is hard to divorce it, naturally an emotional conversation (such as likes, eg this whole forum) is not going to run entirely by logical or rational thought.
Our whole culture is entirely based on the unrealistic expectation of perfect "reason" though. We believe that to be the correct human is to only think without involving emotion: yet hardly any of us get any kind of training or knowledge in how our brain systems interact. So when we feel something, we automatically need to justify it. We aren't allowed to just feel, it's socially rejected to do so.
You can't just express that you emotionally dislike something without a "reason". It's almost an ultimate sin, even though it's entirely valid.
So, we try to justify it post emotion. That's where a lot of arguments in forums like this one fall down: the perceived need to justify everything logically when the source is likely emotional or physical.
(What's the term for like, when you like something when you act it out, like an action game. I think it starts with a k? Damn my memory. I mean that. Tactile? No. Is it kinetic? That makes it sound like some kind of psychic power though. "Lay your controller flat on the floor!" :P )
Now of course emotion doesn't happen in a vacuum and something is triggering it. But people don't look for this because they're busy justifying their emotion with a well reasoned argument, usually by making something up and convincing themselves it's true. "it must be true, yeah that makes sense". What's triggering it isn't necessarily a good reason either. It could just be the memory of playing. It could be learnt information from others that you should feel this way when this happens, etc. Lots of things trigger emotion that aren't a fully justified rational reason.
It has absolutely nothing to do with intelligence at all. You can be extremely intelligent and highly emotional as well.
So it's not right to look down on those who do this either. That's propogating the problem isn't it! They're gonna think they must justify their emotion more! Even more made up post hoc justification.
And to be honest, they're just pieces of entertainment.
Morninglord on
(PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
Let's face it, though - there are many gamers who mistake quantity for quality. As soon as a game has *lots* of story, they believe it's a pinnacle of storytelling.
There's a whole crowd of 'jrpg with more than 50 hours of playtime = epic story, yo' people out there, and they scare me a little.
Thing is, if you invest in a plot (and, perhaps more importantly, characters) for 50+ hours, you tend to convince yourself that you care. I don't think that Final Fantasy X had a fantastic plot and many of the characters were annoying, but I wanted to finish the game, and by the end I found myself caring about the characters. I think it's a protective mechanism of sorts.
Thirith on
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Max Payne 2 was maybe 10 hours long at most, and I found myself more heavily invested in those characters then any other video game characters to date.
Of course, Max Payne 2 is the motherfucking pinnacle of gritty noir storytelling in video games thus far.
I tend to not do that. I play mainly for the mechanics, or the gameplay, which is probably why most rpg's hold fairly little interest for me, and something like Tales of Symphonia was good fun, even if the story and writing were subpar.
That said, I'll fight anyone who doesn't think FFVI was the best story ever.
(It wasn't. My young self was really impressed, though, probably for reasons close to what you describe. It's a kind of jrpg Stockholm Syndrome.)
Kinda on-topic, since we're talking about story-telling here, but really I would like to see more properties take the multi-faceted approach to story telling and hit it from different mediums. Like a really well-crafted universe that's explored through films, games, television and literature.
That would really knock my socks off and that's what I'm waiting for. The key part would be treating them all equally. The books and games couldn't be throwaway while the television series and movies are stellar, for example.
Thing is, if you invest in a plot (and, perhaps more importantly, characters) for 50+ hours, you tend to convince yourself that you care. I don't think that Final Fantasy X had a fantastic plot and many of the characters were annoying, but I wanted to finish the game, and by the end I found myself caring about the characters. I think it's a protective mechanism of sorts.
I kept playing FF X, hoping it would become enjoyable and worth playing. When I reached the final battle with Sin I shut it off and deleted my save file. I was shocked that I actually went through with it when the idea crossed my mind.
They were a watershed moment. Before MGS most popular console game stories involved furry animals or shared their plot with whatever movie that shared its name. Hardly any games put story at the forefront.
Rot.
Well, maybe not in console gaming, but there were a lot of PC games with much better stories than MGS long before.
Kinda on-topic, since we're talking about story-telling here, but really I would like to see more properties take the multi-faceted approach to story telling and hit it from different mediums. Like a really well-crafted universe that's explored through films, games, television and literature.
That would really knock my socks off and that's what I'm waiting for. The key part would be treating them all equally. The books and games couldn't be throwaway while the television series and movies are stellar, for example.
I can see the books/games and books/movies crossovers working really well, but I think we've been shown through many attempts that any games/movies crossovers are pretty much doomed to failville (with a few exceptions of games based on movies). Niel Blookamp (?) made some awesome Halo video shorts to hype up Halo 3, but I can't see a full movie based on the Halo universe being anything but a big pile of fanservice dogshit.
Video game stories are by design strung out with long combat, exploration or puzzle set pieces (compared to a movie) and this allows a good writer to tell the story in really punchy episodic moments within the game. Condensing these story moments into a smooth movie would be almost impossible.
Writing a new story in a video game universe would be equally difficult to keep the 'feeling' of the games within the structure required in a movie. Let's go again to the Halo movie, how could that movie keep the frantic pace of the fighting in Halo, and make it interesting over a 90 minute feature? The Neil Blookamp videos were fun because they were 5 minutes each, enough time to watch the eye candy and go "oooh" without getting bored.
EDIT @Xagarath Thief: The Dark Project kicked Metal Gear's ass, especially because the ending wasn't HURR DURR DNA IS A COOL WORD I FOUND IN THE DICTIONARY LOL IMMA TALK NOW LOL WHY ARE THE BIOLOGISTS GETTING READY TO KILL ME HURR DURR
EDIT @Xagarath Thief: The Dark Project kicked Metal Gear's ass, especially because the ending wasn't HURR DURR DNA IS A COOL WORD I FOUND IN THE DICTIONARY LOL IMMA TALK NOW LOL WHY ARE THE BIOLOGISTS GETTING READY TO KILL ME HURR DURR
I was more thinking of System Shock, but pretty much.
Writing a new story in a video game universe would be equally difficult to keep the 'feeling' of the games within the structure required in a movie. Let's go again to the Halo movie, how could that movie keep the frantic pace of the fighting in Halo, and make it interesting over a 90 minute feature? The Neil Blookamp videos were fun because they were 5 minutes each, enough time to watch the eye candy and go "oooh" without getting bored.
Well, that's exactly what I don't want to happen. They shouldn't try to give the same experience, or even the same story, just be set in the same universe and roughly related to one another.
Let me use an example of an existing television series: Babylon 5. Not an action-driven series. Pretty much just political sci-fi drama. But the Earth-Minbari War that's referenced at the beginning of every episode? Bam, a quality outer-space shooter could be there to fill that gap.
Think of the Doom movie, they tried to tell a story without going full retard.
Then they went full retard with the FPS view of The Rock blasting shit to pieces with the big fucking gun. And it was equal parts awesome and jaw-dropping what the fuck is this shit.
The movie execs would demand some part that would 'appeal' to the pimply faced gamers that they think represents the target audience. And to be even more negative, they're probably right - if you made a Halo game without Mister Cheef blowing the shit out of some alien assholes or a Freespace movie without a retardedly awesome space battle, everyone would scratch their heads and wonder what the fuck kind of movie you were making. It would be like a Star Wars movie without Jedi.
There's a pretty retarded deus ex machina moment at the end of X-Men Origins: Wolverine (the game, not the movie, although the movie kinda has one too)
Oh noooo, the tower's collapsing! Wait, that wouldn't kill Wolverine anyway, it'd just hurt him and annoy him when he has to dig his way out of the rubble. ...Gambit?!
Also, unrelated but what the hell was with Wolverine's girlfriend walking into/under the water Godzilla style? That was stupid as hell.
Also, not originally a video game but the eagles in Return of the King were pretty silly. I don't remember how they were presented in the book, but I'm leaning toward "just as sudden and dumb"
The cavalry showing up just in the nick of time has been a staple of entertainment since well, forever.
That's why the ending to CoD4 was so badass where:
everybody gets killed before the good russians show up
Dude I just played through CoD4
Such a dramatic ending, I almost thought Cpt. Price was going to make it, then I see the medic pounding on his chest and I'm like NOOOOOOO! I don't think I explicitly saw what happened to Gaz, I assumed he died too. The part in the middle where you play the marine who gets nuked is pretty fucked up too.
The Deus Ex Machina moment that sticks out in my mind most recently happened in Star Ocean: The Last Hope, for those of you who have played it all I have to say is dilithium crystal and you probably know exactly what I'm talking about and for those of you who haven't.
You time travel and land on 1950 Earth, where you are captured by what is their version of the U.S. military. During your escape which is another Deus Ex Machine moment all together you find and befriend a fellow escapee who joins your party. Down the road a little bit you get re-captured where an obviously insane scientist that runs the place tells you a sob story about how she wants an alternative energy source for Earth and you the main character for various reasons sympathize with her cause so you give her the main fucking power source straight from your ship. Cut to a few minutes later she puts the dilithium crystal in her pre-made reactor where another of your party members tells you that shit is about to hit the fan because that crystal won't work like that in the machine and some crazy quantum singularity or whatever technobabble shit is about to happen that will destroy the planet. So of course you eventually escape again and manage to make it to your ship where you realize you have nowhere to go seeing as how you gave the mad scientist your only power source, oh but what do we have here? That escapee you picked up is wearing another even better one around her neck as a pendant? Lucky us! so you escape and go back to your own time where, of course, you find out that wasn't your Earth but an alternative reality version of it... retarded
Fun game but shit, can go to zero to full retarded in 2 seconds.
The Deus Ex Machina moment that sticks out in my mind most recently happened in Star Ocean: The Last Hope, for those of you who have played it all I have to say is dilithium crystal and you probably know exactly what I'm talking about and for those of you who haven't.
You time travel and land on 1950 Earth, where you are captured by what is their version of the U.S. military. During your escape which is another Deus Ex Machine moment all together you find and befriend a fellow escapee who joins your party. Down the road a little bit you get re-captured where an obviously insane scientist that runs the place tells you a sob story about how she wants an alternative energy source for Earth and you the main character for various reasons sympathize with her cause so you give her the main fucking power source straight from your ship. Cut to a few minutes later she puts the dilithium crystal in her pre-made reactor where another of your party members tells you that shit is about to hit the fan because that crystal won't work like that in the machine and some crazy quantum singularity or whatever technobabble shit is about to happen that will destroy the planet. So of course you eventually escape again and manage to make it to your ship where you realize you have nowhere to go seeing as how you gave the mad scientist your only power source, oh but what do we have here? That escapee you picked up is wearing another even better one around her neck as a pendant? Lucky us! so you escape and go back to your own time where, of course, you find out that wasn't your Earth but an alternative reality version of it... retarded
Fun game but shit, can go to zero to full retarded in 2 seconds.
It wasn't even Earth? That's just not fucking fair. I want my freedom from Conservation of Energy dammit!
The thing about video game movies is that they're almost always made with the idea of raking in cash in mind, as opposed to telling a story.
Now, most movies are like this, and it doesn't necessarily make a movie bad. But the writing is going to take the back seat when they really just want to get it done and start cashing checks. They're usually marketed toward two audiences: young teenagers who want to see it because "they totally are coming out with an (x) movie!!!" and older gamers who'll see it once, buy the dvd on impulse a few months later, and maybe watch the dvd twice when they're bored. So we get movies that are usually the equivalent of Generic Ahnold Action Movie.
Now, you can make good movies that are highly profitable and thematically complex - The Dark Knight pulled it off pretty well, and based on a comic book no less - but they're pretty rare, and I just don't think the video game market has had somebody work with it yet who wanted to make a complex, well-written movie based on a game.
Maybe I'm crazy, but I think MGS1 is some of the best writing and acting every seen in a video game (with some sour lines here and there). I don't like it ironically or anything like that.
surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
edited May 2009
The ending of Beyond Good and Evil. Worst ending EVER.
It is revealed in the last 5 minutes that the main character can heal people with her hands, is actually an energy source stolen from the alien bad guys 300 years ago, isn't actually human and just looks like it, can fly, glows green and saves the day. YEAH. And then they go ONE FURTHER and do a HUGE DICK MOVE cliffhanger just AFTER the credit sequence. NUL POINTS UBISOFT
Maybe I'm crazy, but I think MGS1 is some of the best writing and acting every seen in a video game (with some sour lines here and there). I don't like it ironically or anything like that.
You should check out Uncharted for PS3.
The writing is more natural, funny when it needs to be, there are never any lines that make you winch. And they're all delivered incredibly.
I mean, it's not deep stuff, it's akin to a summer blockbuster, but as for well-acted, it's high up there.
Let me use an example of an existing television series: Babylon 5. Not an action-driven series. Pretty much just political sci-fi drama. But the Earth-Minbari War that's referenced at the beginning of every episode? Bam, a quality outer-space shooter could be there to fill that gap.
Yeah but you'd be left with a game where either you were massively outclassed by fucking bullshit broken enemy ships and died in every mission or one where you basically just raped everything like you had godmode on.
They were a watershed moment. Before MGS most popular console game stories involved furry animals or shared their plot with whatever movie that shared its name. Hardly any games put story at the forefront.
Rot.
Well, maybe not in console gaming, but there were a lot of PC games with much better stories than MGS long before.
I specifically tailored my response for that exception. Of course PC games with amazing plots had been released before MGS, but MGS was one of the first console games to even give much thought to its plot - plus, you know, cinematic style and all.
In fact, I'm having trouble thinking of any games before MGS that tried that hard to make you feel like you were in a movie (and that includes the Last Action Hero video game).
Vaguely similar to a deus ex machina in video games is the fact that many characters are hardly ever subject to the same rules in a cinematic scene as they are during gameplay.
What's this? She just irrevocably got killed from being stabbed by a sword? I could have sworn that 20 minutes ago massive shards of ice had crashed down on her and I just brought her back with an item.
Or really any time someone dies from a single gunshot when during gameplay they probably get shot over 100 times in a minute.
Let's face it, though - there are many gamers who mistake quantity for quality. As soon as a game has *lots* of story, they believe it's a pinnacle of storytelling.
There's a whole crowd of 'jrpg with more than 50 hours of playtime = epic story, yo' people out there, and they scare me a little.
It seems they just don't take writing quality as a variable.
I used to wish for a very long RPG when I was teenager, but I never really thought about the quality of the writing involved. I didn't take into account how difficult it would be to keep a story interesting for that period of time.
It must be tough, because many games fail at doing a truly good job of it.
Posts
-...Die.
There is a difference with leaving a weapon you never had previously just conveniently lying next to the place where you can so conveniently assassinate someone if only you had just the weapon that happened to be conveniently lying there... and making sure the player has a couple shots to put in his rifle that he's had for the course of the entire level so that he can complete the end game.
Velvet Assassin smacks of lazy design, whereas Splinter Cell is good game design. It is an unrealistic conceit to just have ammo there, yes, but from a GAME perspective, it is much, much better than punishing your player for having used all their sniper rounds earlier in the mission and forcing them to play from the start again.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
If you had played the original Lufia you already knew these events, but knowing this was going to happen one way or another gave Lufia 2 an almost bleak tone.
Kojima games tend to have quite a few Deus Ex Machina moments, but I pretty much expect that from that team by now, so eh.
Switch: 6200-8149-0919 / Wii U: maximumzero / 3DS: 0860-3352-3335 / eBay Shop
There's not a case that goes by without some pepped up chick bursting into the courtroom, seconds before a verdict, yelling, "Nick! I got the critical evidence!"
The series has never, ever, ever, ever, ever been devoid of these things. If you liked it when it wasn't quite so "bad" that's fine, but it never crossed a "line" because there never was a line.
The main character is expressely based on Escape from LA
These things in MGS are the logical progression of the previous parts of the series.
For example an oft mentioned point is lol nanomachines. Nanomachines have been in the series since mgs1. All the initial enemies had them and Snake too was injected with them. They made his codec work.
It was not sprung out of the blue.
It reminds me of people who sneer at clowns for dressing funny.
REally, sheesh, if you want to dislike something then it's alright to just dislike it. Honestly. You don't have to make up post hoc justifications for your emotion that aren't logical. Just dislike it! You are a human being, it's okay to use feelings for a piece of entertainment. Don't let anyone tell you different.
you're glossing over why people mock the writing of MGS. in this analogy, the clowns are putting on Shakespeare and playing it totally straight. The idea is funny until you get to the first twenty minute soliloquy.
Hmm.
Okay that's a good point. I didn't think of it like that.
I wouldn't say they would be playing it straight though. Playing it straight with hugely exaggerated expressions and wild flailings.
"Metal gear!!!"
And people would probably rail against MGS's ridiculousness less if it wasn't so often lauded as good writing and storytelling when the games actually lack good examples of either.
Man who here seriously believes that though?
I don't know anyone with a logical solid reason for loving MGS who doesn't go "yep it's cheesy, but it's my kind of cheesy so I love eeeeet".
I disagree with people who claim that too. I know where MGS lies. Firmly in the wonderful land of the B.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
I have seen plenty of examples, not here, but in other forums and even the world of gaming "journalism" that think the MGS games are a watershed moment for writing and storytelling in video games.
Before MGS, the only console game that had me roped in because of its story was...Snatcher.
The MGS games really don't have a great story. At best they're on par with some of the wonkier anime out there in that it has a point but its too weighed and self-important for me to really care. Ten years ago, though?
That shit be off the chain, son.
This is true.
I also feel a great amount of arguments about these kinds of things are based on not realising that thought can happen without feel and not vice versa.
Explanation here:
First I will explain that the part of your brain that does the thinking, the grey matter, is capable of activating and you know, thinking abstractly and such, without activating the parts of the brain that generate what we think of as emotion.
These emotional parts (lymbic system, hypothalamus, etc) are near the base of the brain, near the brani stem. They're very old evolutionarily.
The thinking part is called the neocortex, it's the sci fi movie "grey matter", what you see when you see images of the brain, the folds n things. It's the part that differentiates us from animals.
So you can think about things without emotion, it's possible to calm yourself and remove emotion from a thought. It takes a lot of effort and practise, you need to consciously self regulate yourself. But you can. It's a lot easier of course if you haven't associated emotion to what you are thinking about, which is pretty damn hard for a computer game!
However you can't have emotion without also activating this grey matter. Getting emotional automatically triggers activity in the grey matter, the thinking part. Emotion leads to thought, naturally.
That's why people justify their emotions and why so many people get so irrational about things. You are thinking "man where is that thought coming from?" because it doesn't make logical sense. It doesn't! Something about what you are talking about is making them feel that is is important and since if it originates with feelings it is hard to divorce it, naturally an emotional conversation (such as likes, eg this whole forum) is not going to run entirely by logical or rational thought.
Our whole culture is entirely based on the unrealistic expectation of perfect "reason" though. We believe that to be the correct human is to only think without involving emotion: yet hardly any of us get any kind of training or knowledge in how our brain systems interact. So when we feel something, we automatically need to justify it. We aren't allowed to just feel, it's socially rejected to do so.
You can't just express that you emotionally dislike something without a "reason". It's almost an ultimate sin, even though it's entirely valid.
So, we try to justify it post emotion. That's where a lot of arguments in forums like this one fall down: the perceived need to justify everything logically when the source is likely emotional or physical.
(What's the term for like, when you like something when you act it out, like an action game. I think it starts with a k? Damn my memory. I mean that. Tactile? No. Is it kinetic? That makes it sound like some kind of psychic power though. "Lay your controller flat on the floor!" :P )
Now of course emotion doesn't happen in a vacuum and something is triggering it. But people don't look for this because they're busy justifying their emotion with a well reasoned argument, usually by making something up and convincing themselves it's true. "it must be true, yeah that makes sense". What's triggering it isn't necessarily a good reason either. It could just be the memory of playing. It could be learnt information from others that you should feel this way when this happens, etc. Lots of things trigger emotion that aren't a fully justified rational reason.
It has absolutely nothing to do with intelligence at all. You can be extremely intelligent and highly emotional as well.
So it's not right to look down on those who do this either. That's propogating the problem isn't it! They're gonna think they must justify their emotion more! Even more made up post hoc justification.
And to be honest, they're just pieces of entertainment.
There's a whole crowd of 'jrpg with more than 50 hours of playtime = epic story, yo' people out there, and they scare me a little.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Of course, Max Payne 2 is the motherfucking pinnacle of gritty noir storytelling in video games thus far.
That said, I'll fight anyone who doesn't think FFVI was the best story ever.
(It wasn't. My young self was really impressed, though, probably for reasons close to what you describe. It's a kind of jrpg Stockholm Syndrome.)
EDIT: In response to Thirith.
That would really knock my socks off and that's what I'm waiting for. The key part would be treating them all equally. The books and games couldn't be throwaway while the television series and movies are stellar, for example.
I kept playing FF X, hoping it would become enjoyable and worth playing. When I reached the final battle with Sin I shut it off and deleted my save file. I was shocked that I actually went through with it when the idea crossed my mind.
Well, maybe not in console gaming, but there were a lot of PC games with much better stories than MGS long before.
I can see the books/games and books/movies crossovers working really well, but I think we've been shown through many attempts that any games/movies crossovers are pretty much doomed to failville (with a few exceptions of games based on movies). Niel Blookamp (?) made some awesome Halo video shorts to hype up Halo 3, but I can't see a full movie based on the Halo universe being anything but a big pile of fanservice dogshit.
Video game stories are by design strung out with long combat, exploration or puzzle set pieces (compared to a movie) and this allows a good writer to tell the story in really punchy episodic moments within the game. Condensing these story moments into a smooth movie would be almost impossible.
Writing a new story in a video game universe would be equally difficult to keep the 'feeling' of the games within the structure required in a movie. Let's go again to the Halo movie, how could that movie keep the frantic pace of the fighting in Halo, and make it interesting over a 90 minute feature? The Neil Blookamp videos were fun because they were 5 minutes each, enough time to watch the eye candy and go "oooh" without getting bored.
EDIT @Xagarath Thief: The Dark Project kicked Metal Gear's ass, especially because the ending wasn't HURR DURR DNA IS A COOL WORD I FOUND IN THE DICTIONARY LOL IMMA TALK NOW LOL WHY ARE THE BIOLOGISTS GETTING READY TO KILL ME HURR DURR
I was more thinking of System Shock, but pretty much.
Well, that's exactly what I don't want to happen. They shouldn't try to give the same experience, or even the same story, just be set in the same universe and roughly related to one another.
Let me use an example of an existing television series: Babylon 5. Not an action-driven series. Pretty much just political sci-fi drama. But the Earth-Minbari War that's referenced at the beginning of every episode? Bam, a quality outer-space shooter could be there to fill that gap.
Then they went full retard with the FPS view of The Rock blasting shit to pieces with the big fucking gun. And it was equal parts awesome and jaw-dropping what the fuck is this shit.
The movie execs would demand some part that would 'appeal' to the pimply faced gamers that they think represents the target audience. And to be even more negative, they're probably right - if you made a Halo game without Mister Cheef blowing the shit out of some alien assholes or a Freespace movie without a retardedly awesome space battle, everyone would scratch their heads and wonder what the fuck kind of movie you were making. It would be like a Star Wars movie without Jedi.
Also, unrelated but what the hell was with Wolverine's girlfriend walking into/under the water Godzilla style? That was stupid as hell.
Also, not originally a video game but the eagles in Return of the King were pretty silly. I don't remember how they were presented in the book, but I'm leaning toward "just as sudden and dumb"
But don't call him Shirley.
Fun game but shit, can go to zero to full retarded in 2 seconds.
It wasn't even Earth? That's just not fucking fair. I want my freedom from Conservation of Energy dammit!
Now, most movies are like this, and it doesn't necessarily make a movie bad. But the writing is going to take the back seat when they really just want to get it done and start cashing checks. They're usually marketed toward two audiences: young teenagers who want to see it because "they totally are coming out with an (x) movie!!!" and older gamers who'll see it once, buy the dvd on impulse a few months later, and maybe watch the dvd twice when they're bored. So we get movies that are usually the equivalent of Generic Ahnold Action Movie.
Now, you can make good movies that are highly profitable and thematically complex - The Dark Knight pulled it off pretty well, and based on a comic book no less - but they're pretty rare, and I just don't think the video game market has had somebody work with it yet who wanted to make a complex, well-written movie based on a game.
You should check out Uncharted for PS3.
The writing is more natural, funny when it needs to be, there are never any lines that make you winch. And they're all delivered incredibly.
I mean, it's not deep stuff, it's akin to a summer blockbuster, but as for well-acted, it's high up there.
Yeah but you'd be left with a game where either you were massively outclassed by fucking bullshit broken enemy ships and died in every mission or one where you basically just raped everything like you had godmode on.
I specifically tailored my response for that exception. Of course PC games with amazing plots had been released before MGS, but MGS was one of the first console games to even give much thought to its plot - plus, you know, cinematic style and all.
In fact, I'm having trouble thinking of any games before MGS that tried that hard to make you feel like you were in a movie (and that includes the Last Action Hero video game).
Vaguely similar to a deus ex machina in video games is the fact that many characters are hardly ever subject to the same rules in a cinematic scene as they are during gameplay.
What's this? She just irrevocably got killed from being stabbed by a sword? I could have sworn that 20 minutes ago massive shards of ice had crashed down on her and I just brought her back with an item.
Or really any time someone dies from a single gunshot when during gameplay they probably get shot over 100 times in a minute.
It seems they just don't take writing quality as a variable.
I used to wish for a very long RPG when I was teenager, but I never really thought about the quality of the writing involved. I didn't take into account how difficult it would be to keep a story interesting for that period of time.
It must be tough, because many games fail at doing a truly good job of it.
Phantasy Star IV actually sticks out in my mind for this.
It's the only time I've seen a game use a plot death, yet still acknowledge that normally characters walk happily away from being maimed.