#you destroyed the metal gear last time but now it's Metal Gear 2 The Sequel To Metal Gear

[subsequentibis]

literally feel like ulysses ogre any time i start trying to type out meta analysis posts about anything

[pogaytosalad]

Heres a wip of a sequel.

Dmviolence, by jade

Hello, if youre hearing this, it probably means im dead. Either that, or im alive and just got tired of keeping this hidden. You might remember my voice from a previous recording about a takeover in sector ⬽:➻, in which id helped prevent total annihilation of the sector. At the time i was unnamed, however now you may call me Kalton. After the takeover i resigned and moved to a job at a dmv. This planet was, for some reason, in one of the most tactically advantageous locations in the galaxy. And for some reason the higher ups dedicated the whole damn planet to dmvs. Dont ask why. Now, onto the story.

I woke up, and i put on my emerald green contact lenses. Just like any other day. I put on a basic white t-shirt and a leather bomber jacket along with a pair of jean shorts. If you cant tell by now, im gay.

I live in a small apartment. By small apartment i mean a bedroom, a bathroom and a kitchen all crammed into 2 rooms. I hopped out the bedroom window onto my motorcycle. It was a diamond white motorcycle with deep red stripes along the sides and the handlebars. My pride and joy. I put on my jet black helmet and took off towards my job at the, you guessed it, dmv.

Chapter 2

I pulled up in the parking lot and took off my helmet, my blue hair a total rats nest. The doors were push doors, yet i somehow ALWAYS pulled first. I entered the dmv and went to my station. A few hours passed by and no one had come in yet, which was unusual. So naturally i decided to sit down on the floor, put in my earbuds, and enjoyed some heavy metal. A few more hours passed by, and usually by now i wouldve been yelled at by my boss. This struck me as odd so i stood up. I really wish i hadnt stood up. The place had been completely destroyed. There were drop pods crashed in through the roof and they all had the ERGON logo on them. Ergon was a multi trillion dollar pencil manufacturing company with its own military. They had previously tried to take over sector ⬽:➻ when i had been working there. I was not looking forwards to what was about to happen.

Quickly, i ducked back onto the floor before anyone saw me. There were 4 riot soldiers holding this building. This was gonna be fun. The riot soldiers are your stereotypical riot gear and police baton soldiers. But these guys had laser batons and the riot gear gave them heightened strength and speed. They also had some, dare I say, shitty energy pistols. I crawled over to one of the soldiers who wasnt being watched and broke their neck. Carefully I took the baton and the pistol. Slowly crawled my way back to my station and checked the shot count in the pistol. I had 6 shots, just enough to take care of the remaining three soldiers. I stood up quickly and shot each soldier twice in the head. First shot to open the riot helmet, second shot to kill. I vaulted over the counter and grabbed the three pistols. These things were so stupid. You couldnt even remove the clips. Once you ran out of shots, the pistol was useless. Nonetheless, i didnt have any choice. I had a laser baton and 18 total shots in 3 pistols.

Upon leaving the building, my motorcycle was one of the few things to survive. It had alot of scratches and damage, but it still worked. The helmet was shattered however. I mounted the motorcycle and took off towards the next closest dmv. Maybe id find some better gear there.

Chapter 3

Pulling up next to the second dmv i immediately noticed 3 things. 1: there was blood everywhere. 2: there were 25 soldiers here. And 3: they all had energy weapons. The reason these things are relevant is because energy weapons dont cause bloodshed. This was the result of something else. Something new i hadnt dealt with yet.

I drove up and ran over 5 of the soldiers. This was probably an incredibly bad idea, seeing as i had 18 shots, enough for 9 kills, and there were 20 soldiers left. Every single soldier turned to me and i, being the absolute genius that i am, welded the front of one of the pistols shut with the laser baton, shot it off, and threw it into thei crowd of soldiers. It exploded, releasing a shockwave of energy and disabling the soldiers. I then used the baton to cut through the riot gear and kill the soldiers. I felt like a badass. That is until a mechanical looking wolf jumped at me and started trying to rip my face off.

The wolf was a frostwolf, except it had been placed into a mechanical frame and its teeth and claws had been replaced with lasers. I tried to bash it off of me with the baton but it just bit it in two. This gave me just enough time to grab an energy pistol and shoot the wolf. It kept trying to kill me amd i wasted a whole clip on it until suddenly, the dog started to levitate in the air and got thrown aside into a wall. I got up and was instantly frozen in place. Thats when.. she walked up.

Chapter 4

The she i am reffering to is ebony. A goth/punk wannabe with light blue tear shaped eyes and black hair with purple streaks. Shes a bitch whos mind got too powerful and now she can move things without touching them. Shes been chasing me for months. Not in a murderous way. Shes just obsessed with me. Ive tried to tell her im gay but she wont listen. And now im at her mercy.

She walked up to me and kissed me on the cheek. I hated it. She looked as if she was contemplating whether or not to free me when a pod came down from the sky and crushed her. Thank god. But i honestly wouldve rathered suffered at her hand than deal with what i had to deal with next...

Out of the pod came the warden. The goddamn warden from sector ⬽:➻. Last id seen him hed been in the same situation as ebony. Crushed to death under a pod. But this time, instead of being on my side, he was here to kill me. He was huge. Like seriously huge. He was at least 8 feet tall and shaped like gaston. Whos gaston? Nobody knows these days. But its basically a way to say "extremely buff and wide". Back to the story. The warden wasnt looking very good, considering the rotten skin, obviously quickly patched together face, and muscles hanging loose out of his skin. His rotting ruined body was held together by an exoskeleton of chromium-tungsten alloy. Nothing i had was gonna cut through that. I was gonna have to get creative here..

The warden had 2 weapons, both of them were his fists. Huge gauntlets that were each about the size of a cow. Definitely bigger than his previous set. They were a golden green metal i couldnt identify. But i didnt want to get hit with one to try and find out. I ran. I ran as fast i could run into the dmv and hid. I could hear the wardens footsteps. It was as if a small earthquake happened each time he took a step.

I peeked over the desk i was hiding behind and saw him punch through the 2 desks opposite to me. It took no effort and i couldve sworn i saw him smile. Obviously i didnt. Cause he didnt have a mouth anymore. But if he did, he definitely wouldve smiled. I took a shot to get his attention and ran off towards the wall. The warden was definitely faster than i expected.

Luckily i managed to dodge the blow by a centimeter. The metal smelled of decaying flesh and popcorn. The wardens blow punched a huge hole in the wall. I hope you see where im going with this.

I ran off to another wall and we repeated this same process a number of times until the building was barely still up. I ran out the doors and threw the baton at the last of the supports, cutting through it and causing the building to collapse in on the warden. He wasnt getting out of that. I decided to search the rubble to see if i could find anything worth taking. I found a new baton, a flame rifle and a few more energy pistols.

The flame rifle was a very interesting design. The sides were painted jet black with flame decals scattered about. You could feel the heat on the inside and it made the gun warm to the touch. Comfortable to hold. Other than that though, it looked like an old fashioned 8.59mm sniper rifle. It had 4 shots remaining, so id have to use it sparingly.

I grabbed some scrap materials out of the rubble to make a holster for it and put it on my back.

The energy pistols just dangled from a keychain. The baton was simply turned off and placed through a hole in the back pockets of my shorts. I ran to my motorcycle and drove off, i needed to find out more. I had questions, and i had a sneaking suspicion that i knew where to find the answers.

I drove off again, i was dirty and there was blood on me and my bike. I probably looked like a serial killer. But i knew that if anyone was still alive, itd be jayden. They were.. well. They were a vampire. They lived in a swampland area and wore sparkly rainbow shirts and a huge sunhat. The sunhat allowed them to go outside in the sun, and they only drank coconut water. They also had a crazy amount of weaponry and used to work at ergon, before being fired for stealing weaponry. By the way, if you havent noticed by now, im using they/them to refer to jayden. Jayden doesnt have a gender. Jayden.. is kind of my crush. It probably has something to do with the fact that theyre the only person on this planet who talks to me. Other than ebony.. but ebony is... not my type i guess. Anyways, back to jayden. Jayden was on the roof of their swamp shack drinking coconut water out of a wine glass. I yelled up at them and they fell off the roof onto my back. I guess i cushioned their fall. Jayden immediately said "What do you need dear" without waiting for me to stand up, and shattered the wine glass. I informed them of the situation and asked the questions i had. Things like "what are the ergon soldiers defences like on their ships" and "how did they reanimate the warden" they had answers.

Jayden told me about the new security measures that had been put in place since id last been on an ergon ship. There was now a code for each teleportation pod and the gaurds had doubled. As for the warden, it turns out jayden was actually the first test run in reanimation sciences, and couldnt answer me because they had been unconcious in a lab when the warden was reanimated. That explained the vampire undead thing. Jayden invited me into the shack where they pulled a nail out of the floorboards and it turned into a ramp to the basement. Down in the basement? Thats where jayden kept their weapons they stole. And boy oh boy were there some interesting ones.

One that immediately caught my attention was the big rocket launcher. It had 3 barrels and each was a different colour, indicating a different effect. One was red, one was yellow, and one was green. The red barrel fired a normal explosive rocket, the yellow barrel fired an electromagnetic pulse rocket, and the green barrel fired an acidic explosive. And the launcher shrunk down to the size of an energy pistol when a button was pressed. It gathered up dirt and dust and garbage around it from the back to quickly convert into ammo but the only downside is that it would be difficult to use more than once in an area.

Jayden picked out an old shotgun. At first i didnt understand why, but then they loaded the clip. The clip was a huge drum that loaded in the bottom of the barrel. The drum was see through and inside you could see sawblades lined up side by side. When they pumped the shotgun a blade got lifted into a slot between the 2 shotgun barrels and started glowing red. When the trigger was pulled, the blade spun at high speeds and fired out of the slot, spinning along the ground like a wheel. It could cut through anything a baton could cut through and seemed to almost follow its target. The gun itself looked like an DP-12, except behind the pump, a large clear drum full of sawblades was in place. The blade sat between the barrels in place of the iron sights and got heated up by an electrical circut.

I also took a laser sword instead of my baton, it was just like the one that [3825968] had, except this one was about an inch longer. The final weapon i took was an acid thrower. It was basically just a watergun with acid in it. Ive always been partial to acidic weapons. If youve heard my other story, youd know why..

Jayden also took a submachine gun that fired freezing rounds. The rounds were essentially glorified waterballoons with liquid nitrogen in them. Though the rounds were bullet sized, enough shots from it would certainly freeze you in place. The freeze gun was about the size of the average human head, and was painted navy blue with blue saphire stripes placed along it. We both left the shack, me with my sword and jayden with a wine glass. We were ready to kick ass and put a stop to this.

We left and immediately both got flung into some trees. Guess who it was. It was ebony. Her body had been found and reanimated. I was starting to see a pattern. And now we had to fight the telekinetic who could kill us with a wave of her hand.

She was levitating. Her eyes were glowing red and her hair was floating in the air. She had a smile of someone about to rip your arms off and beat you with them. I tried to take a shot at her but my hand got knocked aside by an invisible force. So i tried the next best thing. Seduction. Fake seduction. Hopefully the whole dying and coming back from the dead thing didnt make her stop being weirdly obsessed with me.

While i faked surrender and complimented ebony and attempted to seduce her, jayden took aim of their ice gun and shot a burst at ebonys right arm. The arm froze in place and shattered. Hopefully that would lower the strength of her telekinetic abilities. It did. But only by about half. Which meant jayden got thrown into the air as i tried to discreetly unholster my acid gun. It wasnt discreet enough and the gun was knocked from my hand.

The gun flew forwards and the impact of hitting the ground set it off for a second, just enough to spray an acidic burn through her arm. Incapacitating her. Jayden ended up sneaking up behind her and impaling her through the skull with the shattered end of their wine glass. Finally ebony was dead for good.

The acid gun was busted, so we had to leave it behind. We got onto my motorcycle and took off towards my apartment building. We would need food if we were going to be traveling. An apartment complex would probably be full of foods, and alot of dead people who wouldnt care if we took some stuff.

[thisyearingaming]

2011 - This Year in Gaming

Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective - Nintendo DS, January 11th

A quirky adventure game where you are fucking dead, and you gotta work out who killed you. Ghost Trick is like Ace Attorney at first glance - it looks similar, and is made by effectively the same development team. Give it a shot on iOS.

Dead Space 2 - Multiplatform, January 25th 

Dead Space 2 was the undisputed king of alien horror until Alien: Isolation released. Yeah, you battle massive acid-spitting aliens, but it’s the necromorph babies you’re gonna be shit-scared of. It isn’t quite as unique as it’s predecessor, but it’s definitely much better to play. Bring your brown pants.

The Nintendo 3DS Releases - March 27th

The 3DS was like magic when you first fired the 3D slider all the way up - then it became a gimmick you never used again. Releasing with a few decent launch titles and being able to boast Street Fighter IV as playable, the 3DS arguably didn’t really pick up much steam until a few months after launch. While more powerful than the original DS which was six years old at the time, I can’t remember being particularly interested in it at the time.

Portal 2 - Multiplatform, April 19th 

Valve’s final single player experience until their jump into VR was a bloody good one - very funny and amusingly written with the best Steve Merchant performance since The Ricky Gervais Show, Portal 2′s puzzle solving adventure is rarely a chore to play through, and has thousands of custom maps courtesy of the Steam community.

L.A. Noire - Multiplatform, May 17th

Rockstar’s foray into adventure games has stood the test of time as an enjoyable and often startling journey nto the seedy underbelly of 1947 Los Angeles - as Cole Phelps you’ll threaten a Jewish man with the gas chamber, arrest a paedophile instead of a clearly guilty father, quote Hamlet to a prop skull at the scene of a car crash, destroy thousands of dollars of property, and yell at a child whose mother’s just been murdered. Great fun!

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings - Windows 

CDPR hit it out of the park with a fantastically improved sequel to 2007′s Eurojank diamond in the rough The Witcher, and really introduce Geralt of Rivia to more people for the first time with this game. A branching story that sees Geralt hunting Letho, the killer of King Foltest, and allying either with smelly hippy elven leader Iorveth and his terrorists who don’t appear in the sequel or the very cool but quite racist Vernon Roche and his special forces group, who are supporting characters in the sequel.

Alice: Madness Returns - Multiplatform, June 14th

A surprisingly charming, unsettling dive into the fractured psyche of the Victorian equivalent of an actual goth gf, Alice is a sequel to American McGee’s Alice from 2000. Surreal as fuck and absolutely drowning in atmosphere. Just don’t look at any of the YouTube comments on videos of the soundtrack. Rather bizarre show...

Duke Nukem Forever - Multiplatform, June 14th

Sometimes it’s best NOT to bet on the Duke. I bought this game to kick ass and chew bubblegum, and I did neither - DNF is fucking boring, and I blame it ALL on Randy Pitchford’s devotion to ruining things I like. DNF could’ve been brilliant - either embrace your heritage like Doom Eternal would eventually do, or make it into a “last hurrah” kind of thing where Duke realises he’s getting old and can’t kick ass forever. The greatest disappointment of the 2010s so far - but worse would follow with it. The King is dead - hail to the King, baby.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Multiplatform, August 23rd

The piss-tinted prequel to 2000′s excellent conspiracy RPG Deus Ex, Human Revolution is like smashing Robo-Cop into a world where Detroit is not a humanitarian disaster zone. Adam Jensen, the gravelly-voiced biomechanically enhanced security chief of David Sarif, is dragged into a world of American conspiracies involving FEMA death camps, the government enforcing martial law in US cities and massive Chinese conglomerates plotting to control the world. Just like real life! DXHR is my favourite in the series for its design, atmosphere and narrative.

Dead Island - Multiplatform, September 6th

Eh. Wasn’t that good. Notable for having the most misleading fucking trailer since Metal Gear Solid 2, but nowhere near as fulfilling upon release. An open world zombie survival game with a focus on melee weapons more fragile than your granny’s second hip. Oh great, now there’s a dead kid on my page. Thanks, Techland!

Driver: San Francisco - Multiplatform, September 6th

A game you literally can’t buy anymore, DSF was incredible to play when it came out and has only really gotten better with time. It’s still so unique for a driving game that I’m surprised Ubisoft have had the good sense to just leave it and not go pants-on-head retarded with the franchise since. Nick Robinson had to buy Subway gift cards just to purchase this game. 

Batman: Arkham City - Multiplatform, October 18th

Arkham City was so cool at launch and it still is today. A proper Batman epic with twists, turns, and the most addictive combat arena for years. This whole thing is gold from start to finish, except for the Harley Quinn DLC. I can’t even go into detail about it here, but I fucking LOVE this game.

Sonic Generations - Multiplatform, November 1st

Sonic Generations is the best Sonic game since 3 & Knuckles, but has now unfortunately convinced Sega that not only do people despise the Adventure games, they also really want to see Classic Sonic and Green Hill EVERY GODDAMN DAY. Generations is like a proper celebration of Sonic’s history, even including stuff from every reviewer’s favourite punching bag Sonic 2006 - I really like Generations and it has a stellar modding scene on PC.

Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception - Sony PlayStation 3, November 1st

The “finale” of the Uncharted series until Naughty Dog decided it wasn’t. Uncharted 3 may not be as tight as Among Thieves, but it’s just as enjoyable. As quipping invincible action hero Nathan Drake, you’ll ruin historical artifacts and “incapacitate” about 4000 guys in your quest to find Iram of the Pillars, chased by Cruella de Ville and her mercenary squad of a million faceless Englishmen. 

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 - Multiplatform, November 8th

God I was so excited for this. World War 3 never looked cooler, and then it came out - and it wasn’t that good. It didn’t feel as epic as MW2, not as well-written as MW, and not as interesting as World at War and Black Ops. Multiplayer was... fine? I think this is the point where most people realised that Call of Duty was basically downhill from here.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - Multiplatform, November 11th

See this paragraph? You can read it. Another installment in Bethesda’s cross-franchise “Little Lies” series, Skyrim has been released more times than China’s created a pandemic. But it’s still really good and when you rub it the right way it comes all over your screen like a particularly excited storyteller, ready to point in the direction of adventure.

Super Mario 3D Land - Nintendo 3DS, November 13th

Yeah this was the point I decided I wanted a 3DS. It looked incredible and so fluid, and it really was! Playing this was great fun. That’s really all there is - I can’t be funny about it, nor overly critical. What do you want from me?

Assassin’s Creed: Revelations - Multiplatform, November 15th 

I didn’t like this when it came out - I thought the new graphic style was bad, Constantinople was dull, and the music was too different. Ezio was angrier, older, and the complete lack of any supporting cast from Brotherhood had me thinking this was a game that nobody wanted to work on - but now that I’m older, I can see this for how good it really was. Revelations blends the Ezio and Altair stories together, culminating in a satisfying emotional climax. 

Saints Row: The Third - Multiplatform, November 15

This video speaks for itself.

Minecraft - Windows, November 18th

There’s something beautiful about those early builds of Minecraft. Quiet, unassuming, and riddled with potential for exploration. I could talk for hours about the first time I was thrown into Mojang’s survival experience, about how I still get a bit weepy hearing Wet Hands by C418, about how shit-scared I still am of the mines and caves. Minecraft is immortal, and always will be. 

[journeynaut]

This decade I went from being 14 to 24. From my understanding this means this decade has pretty much shaped my tastes, beliefs, and personality more than any other decade will. It’s also an important decade because at the beginning of the decade I felt like a real person, and now I feel like a ghost that occasionally almost inhabits the same space as this flesh prison.

Anyway, here’s a list of games that shaped me in reverse chronological order for maximum pretension. Spoilers and typos will be abundant. 

Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018)

I like little, mostly irrelevant prepping activities in games. Currently, I’m playing Death Stranding, and my Norman Reedus always puts on a cap. Mostly to cover up his weird little pony, but also just as a thing to do to focus before a mission. Like, listening to Friends in the Armed Forces by Thursday before the helicopter lands. Like, grabbing your wallet in the morning. Or, like in Arthur Morgan’s case, putting on a bandana before being a nasty crime boy.

Okay, maybe that’s not entirely true. I always play characters as good and pure as possible. But after I got done doing my good boy crimes I could always return to camp. Sure, camp was always moving as we ran, but the people were there every time. The world of RDR2 is beautiful, I think the characters were my favorite thing about this game. The entire plot was that camp, the outcasts in it, and the dreams they followed. They fused a cowboy simulator with a cult simulator. It says, don’t worry, friend - just keep going and Eden is the next job.

This is a game where you give, break, and are broken in pursuit of a lie. This is a game where your perfect life never arrives and the simple pleasures you find are taken. In the end, you only do whatever little bit of good you can, thank your horse for carrying your weight and the weight of everything you carry, and lay down to go peacefully.

Night in the Woods (2017)

This last decade took my memory from me. When I was a freshman in college taking an intro psych class, the class took a short term memory test. I got second in the whole class. Now I’m sitting here trying to remember who said what in this game. But regardless, one character says something like, “Getting older is your list of first times growing shorter while your list of never agains grows longer.” Heavily paraphrased, probably.

I think there’s a Bojack Horseman episode where he says, life is a series of closing doors, isn’t it? In our modern capitalist hell, very few don’t get trapped. This game understands that sometimes you can’t get out, and sometimes you just need to break some fluorescent bulbs at a dumpster. Or in my case, procrastinate on my life by playing this game while everything fell apart around me.

World of Warcraft: Legion (2016)

Tanking in WoW was my most fulfilling gaming experience of the decade. I wasn’t great, but I could be good occasionally. There are a few moments of genuine pride I can remember. Which, now that I think back, might be some of the last times I felt pride.

I had never played WoW or even an MMO before Legion, but everyone has to get into an MMO when they’re in college, right? So I got into it for about a year, and I played it way too much. So much so, I lost myself after I stopped, both personally and in games. It was hard for me to stick to any game for a long time after I stopped playing, and it honestly still is.

It wasn’t the tanking or the pride or the addictive design elements that kept me coming back - it was the people. This became a Return To game for me. Whether I was playing seriously or just goofing off, I would return to the trans mog shop in Stormwind. There were a few players who would gather consistently and talk between queues. I barely knew anything about these people but I spent hours there with them. There was my healer and best friend who I played with every day. There was the carpet layer from Hawaii. There was the player we always assumed was a young girl but turned out to be some rich man? And behind the anonymity of my characters I was able to comfortably interact with the regulars and the passerbys and mess with the assholes. I learned that pretending to be an actor playing someone else is the best way to talk to people.

Even though I barely knew these people they became friends in the modern way people become friends where you see them every day, but are also shocked to find out any detail of their personal lives. I often wonder what happened to all the people I played with. I never said bye to them or anything. I wasn’t planning on never playing again. One day it just happened.

I’ve often thought about playing again. When WoW Classic came out I thought about playing it. I’ve even thought about getting into FF14. But you can never go home, right? Some things that were good can’t be good again.

Inside (2016)

God, this is extremely my shit. I don’t have anything touching or personal to say about this. Every moment of this game is so tight and perfect, and the aesthetic is spot on. Run on, my child, go be one with your blob friends.

Or maybe I just like it because I too am a disgusting blob monster haunted by a dreary dilapidated landscape.

Firewatch (2016)

The plot of this game is messy overall, but I think about the character interactions all the time. This is a perfect example on how good dialogue isn’t realistic. It should be what we want reality to be. Henry and Delilah have such a believable relationship, strictly because I wanted to believe in it. I wanted to believe two people could always be so perfect and so witty.

And Firewatch just won’t let you believe in it. At the end you can beg and beg for Delilah to stay, and she won’t. The game gently pats you on the head, and says, sometimes people are too broken to be perfect with each other.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (2015)

The PC version lets you set custom music to play as you drop in from the helicopter for your missions. This led to me hearing the beginning to Thursday’s Friends in the Armed Forces god knows how many times. Sure, maybe a 2009 emo song blaring out of a helicopter in 1980’s Afghanistan doesn’t exactly fit, but the mood fit. And it helped set the mood for the routine of going on missions.

Routine is what this game does so well. It’s an incomplete game with a not great story, and it fails at being a good Metal Gear Solid game. But the routine and mechanics blend together to create one of the best playing action games ever made. I never got tired of walking around my base, of boarding my helicopter to go drop into the desert, of launching random animals into the air with reverse parachutes.

This game also led to me formulating my Return To/Go Out theory of games, which I believe most games fall into. An old Mario game is a great example of a Go Out game. You never return anywhere; the princess is always in another castle. The Animal Crossing games maybe exist as the perfect example of a Return To game because you never even go out anywhere. You’re always there, where you mean to be. MGSV falls mostly on the Return To side of the spectrum, as it focuses on building up and managing your base and the people on it, something I’ll always be a sucker for.

Her Story (2015)

This is one of the last games that made me feel smart. As a person who feels chronically dumb as shit, that’s pretty rare. Sure, everyone in my life, and the university I went to, and all my grades say I’m not dumb. But we know that’s just because I tricked them all, and I’m actually a complete fool. But diving into this game’s wild and twisting non-linear story made me feel like a detective.

The Witcher 3 (2015)

Move out of the way Skyrim. The Witcher 3 was actually the best fantasy game of the decade. I played through all of The Witcher 2 in preparation for 3. I became so invested and involved with this universe. I feel like I should have so much more to say about this. In what was a very turbulent year of my life, this was the perfect escape. The world, writing, and characters are all so beautifully done. The DLC provides an emotional finale for the story. I never understood Gwent? But I did everything else in this game, and I still think about escaping into it again.

Also Triss for life.

Also also god, that show sucks shit though, doesn’t it?

Life is Strange (2015)

I love everything about Life is Strange. I love the melodrama, the stilted dialogue, the songs that still make me cry. I love the weird high school that resembles no high school ever. I’m not too much of a fan about what it says about me as a person though.

See, I let the entire town die to save Chloe. The crazy part is that I didn’t even think Max and Chloe were good together. When the game gave me a chance to kiss Chloe, I didn’t take it. I thought they had been apart too long, that they had too much personal baggage, that they were going through too much. But when the moment came I couldn’t let her go. I let the entire town get blown away to save her.

Transistor (2014)

Hey, do you want a cyberpunk, post-rock fueled, murder revenge love story?

Transistor had such an impact on me that Red and the Transistor are still my phone’s wallpaper and lockscreen. It’s the game I always mean to get around to playing again, but year after year I don’t. Maybe one day I will, or maybe that’s just what I tell myself about most things in life.

Regardless, this game acts as a perfect spiritual sequel to the studio’s first game, Bastion. In Bastion, everyone wanted to live in the perfect world that had been, but was now destroyed. In Transistor, the world exists - it’s there and could theoretically become whatever people want, and yet, no one wants to live in it. You’re not even trying to save the world; you want escape as much as anyone else. You just need revenge for the small part of your personal world that has been taken.

Also, at the end you get to basically fight yourself, and I’m such a sucker for when games have you fight someone with the same powers as you.

Gone Home (2013)

I had never been in love when I played this game. I thought I had, but being a teenager is dumb and weird. Of all the first times I wish I could experience again in games, this is up there on that list. Maybe even the top. Mainly because I understand love now, and I think it would make this game hurt more.

Both times I played Gone Home I sobbed, and I’m certain if I played it again, I would sob again. This was the first game to impact me in that way. As I’ve grown more and more dead inside, as I feel less and less, I seek those experiences out. Why yes, I would like to play whatever the sad new indie game is. Why yes, I would like to listen to that song that makes me emotional over and over. That scene in a show made me cry? Yes, I will absolutely watch it again.

Gone Home, like Spec Ops, taught me so much about what games could be and do. In a decade of walking simulators, Gone Home still stands out as one of the best.

Animal Crossing: New Leaf (2013)

Animal Crossing is the best goddamn game series of all time, and this is the best one because you can stack fruit.

Hotline Miami (2012)

I have never done cocaine in the 80’s, but that’s pretty much this game, right? This murder simulator game does something to your body on like, a visceral level. Imagine it’s like your 20th attempt on a level. Your hands are shaking with adrenaline, but you have a careful plan. It immediately goes bad so you just panic and start running around knifing fools and it somehow works out anyway. That’s the thing that makes this work so well, and also the thing the devs absolutely did not understand when they made Hotline Miami 2.

You know what else makes this game great? The vibes. Miss me with your vibe checks if you’re not putting off Hotline Miami vibes. It’s the trippy and psychedelic story, it’s the way you have to walk through the bodies of everyone you just murked at the end of the level, it’s the game constantly asking if you feel good about what you’re doing. Hotline Miami and Spec Ops made me reevaluate how I thought about violence in games. Which isn’t to say I don’t play violent games, just that I think more about what the games are asking me to do.

Borderlands 2 (2012)

My experience with Borderlands was different than how most people played it. I didn’t really uh, have friends, so I played it alone. But it wasn’t an inferior experience. I got to play my haiku spouting sniper at my own pace. All the guns were mine. I could laugh at the dumb jokes as long as I wanted.

Hey wait, actually, is this game still funny? If I thought it was extremely funny originally, would it still hold up? Like, Mr. Satan being Mr. Torgue still has to be funny, right?

Anyway, most of the DLC for this game is pretty mediocre or just straight up bad, but the Tiny Tina DLC is some of the best DLC of the decade. Those madmen just made D&D in a goofy ass game where guns yell at you when you shoot them, and somehow made it an emotionally resonant end to the story.

Spec Ops: The Line (2012)

We all really missed what this game was trying to tell us, huh? It constantly asks you if you’re okay with the dehumanization of minorities and the glorification of imperialism and the military that runs rampant through games. Here we are going into 2020, and goobers are still trying to argue games don’t have politics in them. Anyway, gamers are dumb as shit, and we should have listened to Spec Ops more.

Portal 2 (2011)

This came out at the beginning of this decade, huh? Guess I gotta break out the walker and sign up for AARP. Anyway, being funny is hard. I mean, I’ve never managed to be funny so I assume it’s hard. I mean, sometimes my life is funny in a cosmically ironic way, like I’m god’s personal clown and not in on the joke.

Anyway, anyway, the puzzles are fantastic, and Portal 2 is funny as hell in a way I’m pretty sure would still hold up. The humor is definitely more overt than the original Portal, but Cave Johnson is a god tier character. I can’t remember what I did yesterday, and I still remember Cave Johnson lines from like, 8 years ago.

Minecraft (2011)

*twirls mustache* Not to sound like a hipster, but I started playing Minecraft in 2010 before release. My first world seed was the most perfect seed I ever encountered. It was a large island, the size of which, I never encountered again. Like, it was big enough that it felt like I had to branch out to explore, but also small enough that I could know it all. Playing on that island was the most pure experience I had with Minecraft, in retrospect. I didn’t know what I was doing, and I didn’t realize that actually everyone else was way better at building things and playing the game than I was.

But eventually you get bored of everything, right? So I found a server and joined the forums. Over time I grew a bit bored of the game, and eventually realized I wasn’t very good at it. But I stuck around on the forums. Like, for years. Playing on that server, even as my time actually playing lessened, and being on the forums defined my teenage years.

I had a complicated relationship with the forums and the game, though. I’m not good with people. That’s just something I’ve had to learn to accept. But I’ve actually gotten better over the years. Back during my teenage years I was awful with people. I was antisocial, standoffish, pretentious, etc. I also felt like I couldn’t get anyone to like me, which I now realize was my own fault. There was a group of players I wanted to be a part of, but also could never really break into. The game and forums became what I was experiencing and also everything I couldn’t experience. It’s what I did every day but also what I was missing out on. Even today my thoughts on Minecraft are complicated. That one song, you know the one, always makes me emotional.

I originally had a different end planned to whatever this list is. It was gonna be a pretentious ending about how a few years ago I tried to go back and play Minecraft but just couldn’t because you can never go home again. I was gonna talk about my first world seed and the optimism and exploration I experienced, and it was obviously gonna mimic my decade. Because, you know, pretentiousness. But I can’t do that now.

See, I just looked up that server, and I found out it’s still active. The website looks like when I left. The same people are in charge. It’s like a time capsule. Due to a lot of personal turmoil, I asked for a server ban and a forum ban to stop myself getting back on in January 2015. That was when my time with Minecraft came to an end. But here’s the crazy thing: a couple of weeks ago, almost 5 years after I quit, someone posted on my forum profile that they missed me. And we weren’t even close friends, I thought. I mean, no one liked me, right? And it wasn’t just this one person. Multiple people had left similar messages on my profile over the years.

Normally I don’t like when people have memories and perceptions of me. Like, hell is other people, right? But this kind of hurt my insides deep down, like nothing has in a while. I don’t quite have words for it because it’s so personally tied to how I felt about Minecraft, and thus the forums, and thus a lot of this decade. Does this mean that multiple people I’ve encountered over the decade miss me? That some amount of people greater than zero miss me not being around?

Anyway, this has gotten off track, but also maybe it hasn’t. The point I was trying to make was to make a pretentious list about how silly little things we do in our free time can affect us years later in ways we won’t realize and sometimes can’t understand.

In conclusion, games track better with the most personal moments of my decade better than almost anything. Games are great. The people who play them are often terrible. Video games forever.

[tokupedia]

Kamen Rider 45th Anniversary File: Decade

2009

Sing it with me now..♬ Chan-Chan-Bara Chanbara! Chan-Bara-Bara Chanbara! Samurai Sentai Shinkenjā! Appare!♬  The 33rd Super Sentai authorized by the network! Shinkenger, Goes Forth!

RPM! GET IN GEAR! Power Rangers RPM hits the airwaves on the new Disney XD channel (formerly Jetix in the US). Decreed by Disney to be the final original Power Rangers series, the company wanted to be super cheap by pulling the plug on production and re-airing old episodes next year. The franchise would then get tossed out by the Mouse House after this harebrained scheme backfires.

Fresh Pretty Cure debuts, airing alongside Decade (and Double) and Shinkenger. This season attempts to expand the Pretty Cure brand beyond its young female demographic, which would prove successful next series...

So~(I Can Fly!) Hurry!~ (You Can Fly!) Miracles!~ (We Can Fly) DRAGON CHAAAAAAARGE!~  Tomica Hero: Rescue Fire, the sequel season to Rescue Force, debuts and... sadly is the final installment of the Tomica Hero series. Among the supporting cast for the show was the man, the myth, the legend, Hiroshi Fujioka!  Tomica Hero Explosively Completed its run in 2010.

Engine Sentai Go-onger vs. Gekiranger, the 15th Sentai Vs. series entry, is upgraded from a direct to video release to a feature film. It is the first Sentai crossover put on the silver screen since JAKQ vs. Gorenger in the 1970s. This marks the first time in history that Super Sentai has more than one film in a single year and would continue from here on out.

Victory Pose! Yatter! Yatter! Yatterman, the Tasunoko late 70s anime classic, gets a live action film adaptation courtesy of film director Takashii Miike.

Ishimori Pro declares 2009 to be the “Year of Cyborg 009″ because of the franchise’s 45th anniversary. The company does special events for the occasion, such as showcase Cyborg 009 concept art, animation cels and sketches from the private archives of Shotaro Ishinomori at areas such as Akihabara and the Ishinomori Manga Museum.

Lastly, Koichi Sakamoto of Power Rangers fame sits in the directors chair on several tokusatsu projects, including the Ultra Galaxy Movie and a few Kamen Rider movies.

(2009 was a busy year!)

Kamen Rider’s home network TV Asahi was celebrating 50 years of broadcasting and the number of main Kamen Riders in the Heisei Era had reached the milestone of 10 in total. To celebrate the two momentous occasions, TV-Asahi treated fans to not one, not two, but three Kamen Riders in a single year. The first was the non-canon Kamen Rider G, the later half of the year saw Kamen Rider W, and Kamen Rider Decade was right in the middle.

Decade brought forth tropes in super hero fiction with near limitless writing possibilities: The Multiverse and the reunified continuity trope. Not only was it now possible for a Kamen Rider to have a crossover with other Riders, but the series can go to other universes such as....

crossing over with its sister series Super Sentai!

For the first time ever on TV, Kamen Rider and Super Sentai had a team-up crossover special. While JAKQ vs. Gorenger in the 1970s mentioned Kamen Rider Amazon being part of a greater universe of heroes, this was never expanded upon any further other than a quick mention/cameo image.

Often comic book fans draw parallels of this show’s story to another...

Both serve a purpose, to unify all continuity back into one single linear pathway that audiences can follow. Thus the multiple variants of stories become one sole tale in one setting. That being said, unlike many who recommend Decade as a starting series, I would advise newcomers to hold off a little until they familiarize themselves with the Heisei era a little better, as otherwise the story elements may confuse them as they will have no frame of reference going in.

Heisei Kamen Rider up to this point allowed itself to avoid continuity ties by letting each series stand on its own aside from maybe Kuuga and Agito, but even that could be a stretch. Decade is where things began to merge back together, as after this series, Riders began interacting with one another on a regular basis in movies and direct to video films. Aside from a few teases of non-canon events like the Ryuki V-Cinema and the Den-O and Kiva Movie, Toei didn’t seem too interested in doing TV or film crossovers on a grander scale until this exact year.

So... what happened that may have changed their minds?

Oh yeah, THAT happened...Marvel made it known at the end of a little movie called Iron Man they were going to do BIG crossovers. So naturally, Toei possibly followed suit (with mixed results depending on who you ask). It is just speculation, but you have to admit it is odd timing given the franchise almost avoided crossovers entirely up to this point.

This show is also the last hurrah of Rainbow Zoukei as the costume designers, as their workload had grown to insane levels. RZ was doing Super Sentai, Kamen Rider, Ultraman, prop replacement parts for Power Rangers on top of various movies and TV commercials. In order to ease the burden, the company created a secondary studio based in Tama called Blend Master to divide the workload. Rainbow Zoukei does Super Sentai and new Metal Heroes costumes/replacements while Blend Master works on Kamen Rider from Double to the present day.

Another new addition to the franchise would be the introduction of Bandai’s Legend Rider gimmick for their Ganbaride arcade video game cabinets. Rider Cards were the primordial phase of this gimmick, utilizing the powers of past heroes in the show while being something Bandai could double up in profits on. Later iterations and Ganbarizng would incorporate the electronic collectible toy trinkets in combination with the trading cards. Another staple of this series was the introduction of the Rider lexicon term “Driver” for the belts (Get it? A belt is the driving force of the super powers of a Kamen Rider.)

The biggest thing this series did though was revive the Showa Riders presence in the franchise after a long absence from TV with a story arc about visiting the non-Heisei Rider worlds, with at least one of the originals physically appearing and returning to his role:

Tetsuo Kurata as Kohtaro Minami/Kamen Rider Black and Black RX! (Parallel universes thing, complicated to explain.)

Decade is a very divisive series, some love it for upping the stakes of conflict with the fate of reality itself hanging in the balance and a war between Riders of past and present series with a super powerful rider that had a cool belt voiced by radio personality Mark Okita.

On the opposite end of fandom, some hated it for undermining their favorite Riders with what some assessed to be a Marty Stu fanfic-y character who was almost super-invincible and ultimately served as a plot device.

On the upside to fans who dislike the show, at least we got a female Rider and a meme out of it...

ONORE DECADE!

Speaking of which...KAMEN RIDE: DECADE!

“The Destroyer of Worlds, Decade. What do those eyes see as he travels through many worlds?"

(Mr. Kadoya, circa 2014 in a crossover with Kamen Rider Wizard, lookin’ like a boss.)

Real Name: Tsukasa Kadoya

As a child, Tsukasa was often alone with his sister, but soon discovered she had the ability to create trans-dimensional gateways called Dimension Walls.

Tsukasa ran off into one of them one day and in his later years, came into contact with Dai-Shocker, a revived amalgamation of all the past villains the Kamen Riders had ever faced. They tricked him into playing the role of their Great Leader (which a teen Tsukasa thought was a “fun idea” at the time) and later offered him a new weapon to test out: The Decadriver. The belt device was the intense labor of Dai-Shocker scientists who HATED the Kamen Riders. The Decadriver could duplicate and surpass the powers of all Kamen Riders to obliterate them once and for all or use them as lifeless tools to enhance the Decade system. Tsukasa tested them out, but this ended badly for him as the overwhelming shock of crossing multiple universes all at once caused mental trauma that wiped his memories away. The Decadriver was somehow left hidden and abandoned in an unspecified alternate Earth.

Cut to 2009 and an amnesiac Tsukasa is on an Earth working as a photographer for the Hikari family. Natsumi Hikari is having strange nightmares about a figure who kills all the Kamen Riders in a great war, enveloped in a magenta light. Strange things then start happening as random unexplained catastrophes occur such as monsters appearing from silvery walls and people being randomly teleported to unfamiliar locations and slaughtered by more monsters.

As this happens, a familiar face appears to Tsukasa: Wataru Kurenai aka Kamen Rider Kiva who asks him where his “buckle and cards” are and that this “world will end if he doesn’t do something“. Tsukasa at first does not understand and is confused by all this, but Natsumi later finds the belt and gives it to him when she is being attacked by some Worms. Tsukasa transforms into a new Kamen Rider and then remembers how to fight, using the powers of past Kamen Riders to defeat waves of monsters effortlessly.

Once Wataru and the other Kamen Riders freeze the world in place with their combined powers to prevent further destruction, the veteran Rider explains to Tsukasa that the parallel worlds of Kamen Riders are merging due to an outside force and will destroy all of existence if it isn’t stopped.

To that end, Tsukasa as Kamen Rider Decade must go to the 9 Worlds and destroy the nine Kamen Riders of those worlds to preserve the Prime universe. Wataru laments that creation cannot come without destroying something and promises to hold the world in place for as long as he can with his comrades until Decade “fixes” the multiverse.

Decade ends up doing the exact opposite after befriending the Riders and connecting their stories. This at first did not sit well with the Prime Universe Kamen Riders and they attacked Decade to preserve their existence and those of their loved ones, thus the Rider War began.

But by being a destroyer and connecting with heroes, Decade did find a way eventually to save everyone. Tsukasa now spends his days traveling across space and time, exploring new parallel worlds and helping those in need in his own unique way.

(As many Rider Scouts will tell you: This one idea has massive fanfiction potential as Decade could have visited any number of universes of beloved franchises along his journey: Marvel, DC, Image, Transformers, Doctor Who, Star Trek etc.)

In one non-canon moment of a video game, an enemy called him the Destroyer of Worlds. Decade then casually responded that he is “retired” from that role. Even in Kamen Rider Taisen (*ugh*) any mention of this title seems to annoy/upset Tsukasa, as he feels he is beyond that part of his life.

Powers:

Decade can become invisible, make copies of himself, has expert markmanship and sword skill, enhanced strength and has the ability to travel across dimensions to parallel Earths.

Decade’s signature ability is for his Rider System to analyze an opponent and if it is a Kamen Rider, copy its data for Decade to assume the powers, weapons and forms himself in the form of Rider Cards. The Rider Cards can also upgrade/seize a Kamen Rider into a new form dubbed as a “Final Form Ride”, transforming them to act as a support such as a new power, a vehicle, a weapon or a device such as enhanced armor.

Decade himself can Final Form Ride into a giant sized version of the Decadriver for Kamen Rider J to wear and he assumes control of Kouji’s body as a giant sized Decade. Decade can obtain the power of Kamen Riders through cards in one of two ways, the first is the Magic of Friendship and the other is straight up beating them to near death and sealing the weakened Rider in a card in a manner somewhat similar to the Blade System with the Undead. Decade prefers option one, but in a rare instance used the second one as circumstances forced him to.

The Decadriver is also compatible with other card systems such as the Gosei Cards from the Goseigers and the Decadriver is shown it can utilize Super Sentai weapon Rider Cards.

Using some kind of construct projector somewhat akin to ZX’s Virtual Image Projection Unit, Decade can assume the form of ANY Kamen Rider. (As confirmed by recent toys, Decade can go up to Kamen Rider Drive currently. But Ghost and Ex-Aid are likely part of his card deck by now). Upon tinkering with it apparently, the Decadriver can holographically disguise itself as another Rider Belt (such as 1′s Typhoon) and through a voice modulator, Decade can fully impersonate a Kamen Rider for stealth/infiltration missions. This image projection is enhanced even further in Complete Form, as Kamen Riders in their ultimate forms appear on command and seemingly mimic Decade’s movements like a shadow for a double final form Rider Finisher.

In his more deadly Violent Emotion mode, Decade can obtain and use any power of a Kamen Rider automatically, even sometimes without the use of the cards and no form change needed. He is seemingly so powerful in this mode that almost no Kamen Rider can stop him and his Rider Kick pretty much becomes a human seeker missile (As shown when he chased down Skyrider in the air and kicked him, turning the airborne 8th Rider into a falling fireball.)  Complete Form can summon the powers of the Heisei Rider’s ultimate forms and utilize their Rider cards in those forms to enhance Complete form further.

Tsukasa as a human is bestowed with new skills in every world he visits to serve whatever purpose the multiverse needs him for. (Ex. knowing the Gurongi language)

Weaknesses:

Decade, much like the the future Gokaigers who would adopt his same power copy gimmick, is not all powerful on his own in base form and can be beaten in some instances. (Blade in King Form gave Decade quite the beatdown once with just one slash of his sword)  This is more to showcase that Decade on his own is neither stronger or weaker than any previous or succeeding Rider in base form and through the comradery of his fellow Riders sharing their strength with him, he can become the strongest of all of them.

His Rider Cards at first had a one use limit, it is uncertain if this still applies in some capacity. When the cards were used they would seal away the powers selected until they were activated again after gaining a Rider’s trust. Some universes disrupted or negated his power such as the World of Negatives, which rendered all his cards useless until he upgraded to Complete Form.

His Rider Belt is basically a big bullseye, as stabbing or damaging the Decadriver at close range will shut down the device and de-power Decade. Though if the first episode is any indication, dimension wall energy can automatically repair the belt. Still, like most modern belts which are not surgically attached to the Rider, Tsukasa could have the Decadriver knocked away from him or he could lose it.

The Decade system was designed to defeat Kamen Riders, thus other superheroes are immune to the copying of powers on some level. (though this does not guarantee opposing sides victory).

Kamen Riders sometimes had a bit of animosity towards Decade given his reputation and even after the Rider War, some view him akin to a Nuclear Option, as in someone who should only be called upon in a crisis or as an absolute last resort. Like Kuuga, Agito and Kiva, Decade has a dangerous side to the power he wields that could end all life..well..everywhere, especially if he succumbs to his darker impulses such as with using Violent Emotion mode.

Gear:

http://kamenrider.wikia.com/wiki/Decadriver

http://kamenrider.wikia.com/wiki/Rider_Cards

http://kamenrider.wikia.com/wiki/Ride_Booker

http://kamenrider.wikia.com/wiki/Machine_Decader

http://kamenrider.wikia.com/wiki/Final_Kamen_Terminal_K-Touch

Signature Finishers:

Dimension Blast: Using the Final Attack Ride: Decade Card, Decade uses the Ride Booker in Gun mode to fire a charged shot

Dimension Slash: Using the Final Attack Ride: Decade Card, Decade uses the Rider Booker in Sword Mode and executes an energy charged Rider slash.

Dimension Kick: Decade’s Rider Kick which is executed using the Final Attack Ride:Decade Card. Variants include the Enhanced Dimension Kick in Complete Form which utilizes the power of the 9 Heisei Riders in conjunction with his own power and the Final Dimension Kick which after using the FinalKamenAttackForm Ride Card, turns all the Kamen Riders into Kamen Ride cards that Decade flies through to enhance his kick to maximum power.

Enemies:

Dai-Shocker

http://kamenrider.wikia.com/wiki/Dai-Shocker

Dai-Shocker is a supergroup of past Kamen Rider Villains from various parallel Earths who scour the multiverse to find like-minded individuals to convert/recruit into their army for one ultimate goal: Total conquest, subjugation and absolute rule of the entire multiverse and creation itself!

Out of all incarnations of Shocker, that is a pretty ambitious goal for evil and difficult considering that Kamen Riders exist on other worlds as well as other superheroes who stand in their way. Tsukasa was once their Great Leader, but turned against them and the organization had been crippled and splintered into various forms such as Super Shocker and Space Shocker, but manages to revive at least once.

Narutaki

http://kamenrider.wikia.com/wiki/Narutaki

Nobody knows what his deal is, but he has a wide array of powers including the ability to create Dimension Walls, summon evil Kamen Riders or monsters and assumes the form of past Generals such as Colonel Zol of Shocker. He hates Decade for some reason and sees himself as a prophet of the Rider’s nature as a destroyer, warning other heroic Riders to try and stop him. He does flip-flop his allegiance at times.

Some fans have theorized he is an incarnation of the real Great Leader, while a still of the pre-production film shots of what would become Decade: Final Chapter gave a bombshell to his possible identity:

That pink camera is Tsukasa’s..so some speculate from this image that he is an older Tsukasa from an alternate reality.....

Sadly due to unknown legal issues and production delays, this plot was tossed out along with several other story ideas. So Narutaki’s identity and purpose for antagonizing Decade is never explained and his character was taken to a...very weird direction...

All we can say to those good stories and his identity not being told to us is...

ONORE DECADE!

Now we must go on the road to another Rider’s world.... til next time...

[xiakha]

Metal Gear Primer: The Fandom Pain (6811)

Oh boy here goes.

I am not super into the MG/MGS fandom, I only lurk, but this is a down and dirty primer for a friend that introduces the series and all of the characters (...and the ships). If this is super inaccurate, I am sorry. There are probably plenty of ships that I won’t have here. If someone notifies me, I’ll try to fix it if I can. There’s just so much ._.

Beware! Spoilers abound and will be unmarked. If for some reason you care about the plot of these games and want to discover them for yourself by playing the game, this is not for you. (That said, the gaming experience is obviously quite separate from any paragraph long description I could generate and would be worth looking into, or at least watching Let’s Plays of)

Theme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6miaTf1gF4g

It starts with a man by the name of Kojima. Hideo Kojima always wanted to be a film director, but went into video games instead. After a shaky start in the video game industry under Konami, he was told to take over the assignment of Metal Gear from a senior associate. He turned a fairly straightforward Contra-esque game into the first stealth action game, emphasizing evasion and avoidance over direct combat. This was his first notable hit and he would continue to innovate and expand his repertoire with Snatchers and Policenauts, but at the end of the day, he always went back to Metal Gear, first willingly, but then less and less every time until MGSV. After this last sequel, Kojima split with Konami to form his own independent studio, and we await his first game as an independent producer. So it is at least somewhat important to note that the story of Metal Gear is also in many ways the story of Kojima, and each reflects his artistic journey to that point.

Metal Gear (1987) 1995. Solid Snake infiltrates a nation-state called Outer Heaven that was established in South Africa by a mysterious legendary mercenary. Snake’s unit, FOXHOUND, had previously sent one of its top agents, Gray Fox, to infiltrate Outer Heaven, but it lost contact with Gray Fox. Therefore, FOXHOUND commander Big Boss sends Snake, a solid rookie, into the fray to both investigate Outer Heaven and rescue Gray Fox in a mission called Intrude N313. With the help of Big Boss over the radio and some local resistance members, Snake penetrates successfully.

After finding and rescuing Gray Fox, Solid Snake learns of “Metal Gear,” a bipedal walking tank with nuclear capabilities. With Metal Gear, Outer Heaven hopes to become not just a recognized state but also a new superpower. Snake rescues the scientist, Dr. Madnar,  who was forced to work on Metal Gear and is able to make quick work of the bipedal tank before it is completed, but not before running into traps that seemed specifically set for him. Moreover, Big Boss starts to become erratic, sending bad advice and even breaking the fourth wall to dissuade the player from continuing the game. Lo and behold, that mysterious legendary mercenary is Big Boss, who was playing both sides this entire time. Snake takes Big Boss out and gets out of Outer Heaven before it implodes.

Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake (1990) 1999. Snake is brought out of retirement to infiltrate Zanzibarland in Central Asia. New FOXHOUND commander Roy Campbell and “Hell” Master Miller send Snake in to rescue a Dr. Marv, a scientist who discovered/created a species of algae that can mass produce petroleum-grade hydrocarbons and thus relieve the on-going energy crisis. Dr. Marv was kidnapped by Zanzibarland soldiers to take the world hostage through energy control and captured Soviet nuclear weapons. In the midst of infiltrating, Snake finds out Dr. Madnar was also captured and forced to make another Metal Gear, Metal Gear D. When rescued, Dr. Madnar reveals that Gray Fox, who had gone missing since Intrude N313, is piloting Metal Gear D. Dr. Madnar also reveals that Zanzibarland is led by none other than Big Boss, back from the grave.

Later in the game, Dr. Madnar has one final reveal: he’s gone somewhat vindictively loony after the scientific community rejected him and his little bipedal tank project, so he wasn’t so much captured as invited back under Big Boss’s wing. After taking care of him, Solid Snake takes out Gray Fox in Metal Gear D and takes out Big Boss by take an impromptu flamethrower to his eyepatched butt. Big Boss dies.

Metal Gear 2 is known as the game that no one played in which the story actually came together with larger ideas and themes such as nuclear proliferation and the horrors of the war engine.

Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes (1998) 2005. FOXHOUND, Solid Snake’s former unit, has agents go rogue under the name “Sons of Big Boss” and take over a nuclear weapon disposal facility on Shadow Moses Island off the coast of Alaska. They want Big Boss’s remains and a billion dollars or they use Metal Gear REX against the United States. Colonel Roy Campbell and Master Miller pull Snake out of retirement for this one last-last mission. Again. Snake is to infiltrate the target and neutralize the threat as he sees fit. He meets up with FOXHOUND agents along the way, and they have a strange habit of dying around him. Of note are Sniper Wolf, Revolver Ocelot (who does not die but has his arm sliced off) and Psycho Mantis (who is basically a fourth wall breaking meme on his own). As for allies, Snake meets up with Meryl Silverburgh, another infiltrator; Hal “Otacon” Emmerich, the new scientist forced to make Metal Gears; and a mysterious Cyborg Ninja, who slices off Revolver Ocelot’s hand.

The leader of the Sons of Big Boss, Liquid Snake, reveals to Solid Snake that they’re actually brothers, both clones of Big Boss, thus raising this sequel’s main question “To make the perfect soldier, are GENES the deciding factor?” as the two were a part of a secret cloning project in the 70s known as Les Enfants Terribles which was an effort to replicate the perfect soldier that was Big Boss. Liquid also reveals that he was impersonating (the recently deceased) Master Miller over the radio to trick Snake into doing his bidding, activating Metal Gear REX. They have a fight. The Cyborg Ninja reveals himself to be Gray Fox back again. Gray Fox sacrifices himself. Liquid loses. REX is basically destroyed. Snake is told he has been injected with a virus called FOXDIE that targets and kills FOXHOUND members, but is “programmed” to kill Snake “sometime in the future.” Snake rides off into the sunset with either Meryl or Otacon. The idea that GENES control one’s fate is thus at least half refuted as Snake decides to take his own path and not be the perfect soldier They want. Revolver Ocelot, de-armed, appears after credits to deliver the plans to Metal Gear to a shadowy figure, possibly the US President.

Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (2001) 2007. Solid Snake and Otacon now run a NGO called Philanthropy that wants to put a stop to all of this Metal Gear nonsense. Snake infiltrates a tanker to investigate Metal Gear RAY. At the same time, mercenaries attack the ship for RAY. They are led by Colonel Gurlukovich who brought his daughter, Olga, and Revolver Ocelot along to steal the RAY. Revolver Ocelot has two arms again, one grafted from Liquid’s body. Upon interaction with Snake, Ocelot seems to have some kind of psychic weirdness as Liquid’s personality somehow reveals itself from the arm. Ocelot under Liquid’s control steals RAY for himself, blasting a hole in the ship, abandoning Colonel Gurlukovich, Olga, and Snake to their respective dooms in a sinking tanker.

2009. Codename “Snake” from the newly reformed FOXHOUND infiltrates Big Shell, an offshore facility placed over the tanker spill. Big Shell has been taken over by a group that calls itself “Sons of Liberty” and is led by a man claiming to be Solid Snake. “Snake” quickly renames himself Raiden and meets up with Iroquois Pliskin, a man who claims to be a Navy SEAL. There’s a lot of hostages and stuff. What you need to know is that the entirety of the Big Shell mission is supposed to be reminiscent of the previous games, drawing the question “To make the perfect soldier, are MEMES the deciding factor?” playing on the theory that the circumstances and ideas around a figure make them who they are. The mission goes quite off the rails, Iroquois is revealed to be Solid Snake, trying to clear his name. The man calling himself “Solid Snake” is actually Solidus Snake, a “perfect” clone of Big Boss, who was elected President. He was also a warlord in the Liberian Civil War who conveniently(?) raised Raiden as a child soldier. There’s even a Cyborg Ninja, who is Olga, who only agreed to be the Cyborg Ninja because they’ve taken her child.

This entire scenario was devised by an AI called GW (or George Washington), who has been guiding Raiden along as the Colonel (but not Campbell) trying to make another perfect soldier by recreating scenarios. There’s a fight on a huge submersible fortress thing called Arsenal Gear that houses GW. In order to break free, Raiden uploads a virus into Arsenal Gear and causes the Colonel to freak out in fourth wall breaking ways. Raiden and Snake crash the fortress into Manhattan where Raiden fights Solidus. At this point, Raiden has more or less completely left the path of déjà vu shadowing Snake, and he’s able to katana Solidus to death. Thus, the idea that MEMES controls one’s fate is somewhat refuted as they fail to make Raiden into the perfect soldier They wanted. “They” is also finally revealed to be a shadowy organization called The Patriots, who all take names (like GW) after Founding Fathers. Ocelot seems to be working directly for The Patriots, psychic weirdness besides.

Going back to Kojima, many people argue this video game as an introspective look into what people are looking for in a video game sequel. More of the same? Would they be more upset about having the same exact things happen again, or being given something completely new? Kojima, being the sort to continue to push the envelope, did not settle for more of the same as Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake kinda ended up being.

Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (2004) 1964. After the end of World War II, the world was split into two... East and West. This is Kojima’s love song to Cold War spy movies, and the key word this time is SCENE. A CIA Agent, code name “Naked Snake” is sent into the jungles in the USSR to rescue a defecting Soviet scientist named Sokolov in what is called the “Virtuous Mission.” Snake infiltrates with the help of Major Zero, Para-medic, and his mentor in the FOX unit, The Boss. He retrieves Sokolov and finds out more about the Shagohod, which is a nuclear equipped tank (sounds familiar, I know). En route to exfiltration, Snake gets sucker-punched by The Boss, who promptly defects to the Soviet Union into the hands of Colonel Volgin, a madman with electrical powers, taking Sokolov and the Shagohod with her. This is a devastating blow to Snake and he almost gets blown up for his troubles as Volgin detonates a nuke. The Boss is blamed for the detonation.

A week later, Naked Snake is sent back into the jungles to kill his mentor as a part of a deal between America and the Soviet Union called Operation Snake Eater. Since The Boss has clearly gone rogue and is the reason for this international incident, killing her, destroying the Shagohod, and putting down Colonel Volgin’s uprising is the best way to make amends. Snake is assisted by his crew (Zero, et. al) over the radio, and an American defector named EVA, who is clearly supposed to be the Bond girl. Snake runs into the Cobra Unit, the Boss’s old unit of supernaturally afflicted emotion based superhuman soldiers, who are calling themselves now “Sons of The Boss.” He kills all of them. He also runs into the Ocelot Unit, which is lead by none other than a young Ocelot (minus Revolver). Ocelot is defeated several times and Snake even introduces the young man to revolvers. Next, Snake gets captured by Volgin, fails to stop Sokolov from getting brutally killed, and gets his eye shot out by Ocelot in quick order. He then fights Volgin and the Shagohod and somehow wins. In the dust, he finds out about the Philosophers, a shadowy organization made up of victors of WWII that hid a ridiculous amount of cash, known as the Philosopher’s Legacy, that Volgin was trying to take for himself. Turns out the Americans were trying to secure it, which is part of why Snake was sent out there. Snake then fights and kills The Boss in probably the most emotionally charged battle in all of MGS. He gets out, but not before being betrayed by EVA who turns out to be a Chinese spy and who steals the location of the Philosopher’s Legacy. EVA also reveals to Snake that The Boss didn’t really defect. Her mission was to pretend to defect get close to Volgin to steal the Philosopher’s Legacy from him, but after the nuclear strike, The Boss was offered as a sacrificial lamb.

Back in the States, Naked Snake is given the title “Big Boss” for surpassing the Boss, is hailed basically the perfect soldier. As Zero builds Snake’s praises as a propaganda piece for his new organization called Cipher, Snake becomes increasingly disillusioned by everything around him, eventually leaving the States completely. After end credits, Ocelot pops up again, tells the KGB that they could use Snake’s work in the jungles as blackmail against the United States, and then tells the CIA that the information that EVA stole from Snake was fake. He had the actual information and would be able to give it over to America so that the United States and the Soviet Union would each have half the Philosopher’s Legacy. Basically Ocelot is playing EVERYONE. He’s also The Boss’s son.

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (2008) It would be hard to argue that MGS4 isn’t the culmination of this entire clusterfuck of a series. I’ve tried my best to omit anything in the previous details that isn’t relevant to understanding this game or the ships discussed afterwards.

2014. Solid Snake has prematurely aged a ridiculous amount and looks kinda like Solidus Snake, only less buff. They literally call him Old Snake. This also means he looks like Big Boss if Big Boss hadn’t kicked the bucket. Snake is still working with Otacon and they’re raising Olga’s daughter, Sunny, together. Campbell basically hauls Snake out of retirement one last bloody time to end the story, basically. All guns are now ID-locked, meaning only people who are authorized to shoot them can shoot them, meaning there’s a ridiculous amount of control in War now. And this is possible because of nanomachines. Ocelot, now going by Liquid Ocelot, is raising an army of nanomachine’d super soldiers for some nefarious reason and Snake needs to take out Ocelot once and for all now he’s been built up to be this magnificent bastard mix between Liquid and Ocelot in the last three games.

At first, Liquid Ocelot’s after Big Boss’s remains again because Big Boss’s biometrics unlock something about the Patriots’ AI or whatever, giving control of everything to potentially him. Raiden shows up, this time he’s the Cyborg Ninja, and he and Meryl Silverburg do their part covering Snake’s old man butt. EVA reveals herself as the leader of a resistance movement against Liquid, Big Mama. Turns out she is the surrogate mother that gave birth to both Liquid Snake and Solid Snake under the direction of Para-medic, who ran the Les Enfants Terribles project. Ocelot goes after the lot of them to reveal he no longer wants Big Boss’s remains. He actually blows them up. Instead, he’s just going to destroy the Patriots’ AI system and replace it with his own, so he’s in control. To do this, he needs a nuke, but the only place without an ID-locked nuke is Shadow Moses Island. There’s a gratuitous battle of the abandoned Metal Gear REX piloted by Snake defeats Metal Gear RAY piloted by Ocelot. That’s okay for Ocelot, he’s got a new and improved Arsenal Gear, now called Outer Haven. Yes, like Outer Heaven. It has the nuke that Ocelot needs to destroy the Patriots’ AI. They stop him by putting a virus into Outer Haven that destroys Ocelot’s system, the Patriots’ system, and basically leaves civilization teetering on the brink as the system controlling it is destroyed. Snake fisticuffs with Ocelot in this amazing boss battle that echos all of the final boss battles throughout the series, and Ocelot finally dies.

This would be happily ever after, but Solid Snake’s FOXDIE is about to go off. He decides to go out on his own terms, but is stopped by Big Boss! Yes, Snake’s “father” Naked Snake survived the flamethrower to the face all the way back in MG2. Surprise. He stops Snake from killing himself just in time. Big Boss explains how the Patriots were formed with the idea that they’d follow the Boss’s final wish, to see a unified world. Zero took the wish to mean that he needed to control the world to unify it, thus Cipher, the Patriots, and everything that happened since on the shadowy government side. Big Boss took the wish to mean that he should unify the world’s soldiers, giving them a refuge and a consistent means of living. Thus the war. But Big Boss now sees that neither of them were right. With that said, Big Boss reveals lastly that the FOXDIE has mutated to something that won’t kill Snake but will kill him. So “Father” and “Son” have a touching moment. Big Boss finally finally finally freaking dies. And Snake is finally finally finally able to live out the rest of his shortened lifespan actually on his own terms.

You’d think that was where the story ended. And it probably should have! If Kojima had his way. No instead we got

Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker (2010) 1974. Naked “Don’t call him Big Boss he hates that” Snake has established a mercenary group called Militaires Sans Frontières with help from Kazuhira “Master” Miller. They had met in the jungles of Colombia and Snake owned Miller’s entire mercenary group. Snake “convinced” Miller to join him. Thus, MSF. They’re approached by a man by the name of Ramon Galvez Mena, who says that Costa Rica has been taken over by an occupying force and, having no military of its own, needed someone to help liberate it. Snake doesn’t buy it and immediately identifies Mena as KGB, but Paz, Mena’s student, has a recording of The Boss, which convinces him to go investigate it. As payment, they receive an off-shore facility that Miller dubs “Motherbase.” Anyway, there’s another nuclear tank. This time it has feet instead of drill wheel things, it’s fail-deadly, meaning it will launch if it’s armed and gets destroyed, and it’s known as “Peace Walker.” A guy named Hot Coldman wants to use it to demonstrate the ultimate deterrence. To defeat Peace Walker, Snake finds and “recruits” wheelchair bound walking technology enthusiast Huey Emmerich and Dr. Strangelove, an AI specialist who was in love with The Boss and is basically there to be a lesbian for much of the story. She starts off hating Snake because he killed The Boss and took her title, making Strangelove so obsessed with her possibly former lover that she makes the AI that drives Peace Walker a copy of The Boss’s personality. Yes it’s very much hard science. The idea is, as Peace Walker is run by an AI, it doesn’t need someone else to confirm the launch of the nukes it has on board.

Mena reveals himself as Zadornov of the KGB and attempts to steal Peace Walker. Hot Coldman activates a data uplink to NORAD to convince American officials that the Soviets had launched against them and that they had to retaliate, thus giving the AI an opportunity to respond without outside input. Instead of preparing to launch the nukes, Peace Walker, under the control of The Boss’s personality, walks into a lake, drowning itself and rendering its launch and the data uplink broken and dead, preventing all out nuclear retaliation. Snake takes this to mean that The Boss always meant to abandon her principles as a solider for soldiers and abandon him as well. He’s upset enough that he decides he will take the matter into his own hands and provide that place for soldiers himself, even if the Boss doesn’t want it. He won’t abandon the battlefield or those who serve on it like his mentor did postmortem.

While this was happening, Huey was doing his bit and had actually made a bipedal tank. Better than Peace Walker’s quadrupedal design. It’s called Metal Gear ZEKE and they armed it with the nuke retrieved from Peace Walker, but it gets taken by Paz, who is also not who she seems like Mena, but instead of the KGB, she’s a spy for Cipher, aka Major Zero. She gets tossed into the sea. With this final insult from a former friend, Snake decides to take up the Big Boss title and take action as the legendary soldier by declaring Motherbase an “Outer Heaven.”

You would think that tie in with MG1 would be the end of it. You’d be wrong.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (2015) 1975. Big Boss and Militaires Sans Frontières catches wind that Paz is still alive. In order to not screw up an UN nuclear inspection, they sink Metal Gear ZEKE again and the nuke, and they need to recover Paz who knows about their nuclear capabilities. As Snake is offbase retrieving Paz, MSF is attacked by this elite force, XOF, that no one saw coming. Motherbase starts to sink. Big Boss picks up Kazuhira Miller via helicopter as they make a retreat into the unknown. They realize Paz has a bomb in her. The on-board Medic cut her open to pull a friggin bomb from her guts. When Paz, in pain but made full conscious, realizes they pulled the bomb out of her guts, she indicates that there’s a second bomb. But before they can properly deal with it, she launches herself out of the helicopter in an attempt to save everyone else. She explodes mid-air and the helicopter crashes.

1984. Big Boss wakes up from a nine year coma. He finds out his memory’s been fucked with because there’s metal shrapnel in his head and face that may or may not cause hallucinations as well. He’s also lost his arm. Things kinda suck for Big Boss right now. He’s completely emaciated and weak as hell. Vulnerable. Even so, the word gets out that “V has come to.” A few weeks after returning to consciousness, the hospital that Big Boss is in gets attacked by XOF again. He’s saved by a man with bandages wrapped around his face who might be a hallucination and calls himself “Ishmael.” There’s an escape sequence that involves avoiding XOF soldiers, staring at Ishmael’s ass crack, and more almost hallucinations: A Man on Fire, and a tiny floating boy with immense psychic powers. Big Boss gets out with Ishmael, but the ambulance they’re in crashes. When Big Boss comes to again, Ishmael is gone. Outside, there is a man in cowboy gear on a horse. Ocelot. Revolver Ocelot. They run away together and get on a boat to a new Motherbase in the Seychelles. This is perfect because it means they’re in range of Afghanistan, where Kazuhira Miller’s been captured.

Big Boss, now calling himself Punished “Venom” Snake, goes in, rescues his XO, and gets attacked by these zombie-esque dudes called the Skulls Parasite Unit. They’re parasite-based super soldiers (not genetically enhanced or nanomachine enhanced) with whom Venom has to wrangle with several times in the game. They’re terrifying. Having rescued Miller, minus an arm and leg, the group of them swear revenge against the people who destroyed Motherbase and MSF, calling their new group Diamond Dogs. But to do that, they need men and they need cash. So Venom starts working to generate capital for Motherbase and kidnap recruits by fulton balloon. Primarily this involves sticking his nose into the Soviet-Afghan War and the Angolan Civil War. At basically every step, Ocelot says one thing and Miller does his best to contradict what Ocelot says as a bad idea. This includes fultoning home a wolf-dog puppy. Ocelot says yes and Miller says no (The doggy stays and is called D-Dog and he is a GOOD BOY). Along the way, the Man on Fire returns to fuck shit up and that boy with the psychic powers, Tretij Rebenok, pops in to make things spooky. The main antagonist is revealed to be a man by the moniker Skullface, who is the head of XOF, a branch of Cipher that Major Zero originally commissioned to clean up after FOX, and “took care of” the minor details behind the Virtuous Mission and Operation Snake Eater. Skullface, tired of being used by countless masters, having lost his face, his home, his mother tongue, his very identity, wrested control of Cipher from Zero and is now using the research Cipher has been doing for his own malicious ends. Namely, parasites that can do basically magic. The superpowered Skulls are only the tip of the iceberg. Venom also captures this parasite-powered super-sniper, Quiet. He decides not to kill Quiet after defeating her, and Quiet returns the favor by saving Venom from a pursuant fighter jet sent by Cipher. Miller wants nothing to do with Quiet, as she’s obviously an assassin sent by Cipher bent on killing Venom and destroying the Diamond Dogs. Things aren’t as bad as Miller makes them out to be, and Ocelot sees Quiet as an asset, since she has had so many opportunities to kill Venom but has not acted on a single one after being defeated and captured.

They get wind of Huey Emmerich’s whereabouts. They go to capture him too and Kazuhira Miller kinda licks his chops over getting revenge on Huey as well as Huey was the one that called the nuclear inspection on MSF “to resolve them of all guilt.” Huey’s been busy working under Skullface, making a new Metal Gear known as Sahelanthropus. Despite being barely finished, it can move on its own accord thanks to the help of the psychic boy, Tretij. Venom Snake captures Huey and gets the hell out of Dodge. At about this time, the Diamond Dogs expand their operations into Africa as well, as it’s known that XOF and Cipher have been working with the various paramilitary factions there. So Venom goes in to snoop again. He picks up Eli, who is this jerk-ass kid who leads a bunch of child soldiers who don’t have adult handlers. Eli is clearly a twelve year old Liquid Snake, and he HATES his “father” Big Boss. Anyway, all of the adults in the child soldiers’ villages have died. Upon further investigation of the reasons why, the second third of the parasite research comes to light: “vocal cord parasites” that kill everyone that speaks the language they’re attuned to. There’s a bunch of neat theory crafting that says that these parasites should be living in symbiosis with us, but they’ve been changed/nuked to be harmful instead. As a vocal chord parasite rampages through the Diamond Dogs, Venom enlists the help of Code Talker, a Navajo parasitologist who was captured and forced to work for Cipher. This brings into light the last third of the parasite research: Metallic Archaea that can convert regular uranium into weapons grade uranium. Skullface wants to spread nuclear weapons to every single faction possible and make it simple for these factions to acquire more nuclear weapons as a part of deterrence. The trick is that he can also deactivate the Metallic Archaea so that only the nuclear weapons that he wants to work will work. He also wants to spread the English strand of the vocal cord parasites to wipe out what he sees as the most virulent language of the modern world. This way, he will be able to take revenge against everyone who has in some way betrayed or slighted him. Venom stops this shit. Tretij betrays Skullface because Eli is a lot more interesting to him. This causes Sahelanthropus to run amok, nearly killing Skullface. After Sahelanthropus gets fucked up, Miller and Venom shoot Skullface, holding the gun together as the recoil is too much for Miller alone to handle. Their revenge is now complete. Or is it?

The rest of the game is spent wrapping up plot points. Huey was discovered to be selling secrets to Cipher, and then causes an outbreak of the language parasite by surreptitiously increasing X-ray exposure on his coworkers, trying to make the parasite mutate. Eli and Tretij steal Sahelanthropus, which was being refurbished by Huey, flying it off Motherbase through the power of powerful psychic energy. Tretij is thus free to become Psycho Mantis and Eli Liquid Snake. Miller decides that’s enough shit that Huey’s been allowed to get up to, and they find Dr. Strangelove’s remains in one of Huey’s projects. Turns out Dr. Strangelove had a child with Huey and that child was used in experiments, which Dr. Strangelove protested, which lead to her getting killed. That child is of course Hal “Otacon” Emmerich. Upon learning about Dr. Strangelove’s fate, Venom and the Diamond Dogs discharge Huey from service and exile him. That fucker. The Man on Fire is revealed to have been Volgin, whose electricity superpowers (possibly powered by parasites) had kept him in a coma. He was also seeking revenge through the aid of Tretij. But after Tretij left, the remaining psychic emanations of Volgin finally die off. Quiet is revealed to have been one of the assassins sent to kill Venom in the Hospital, but she’s done so much for Venom at this point, that’s practically a wash. She was originally going to get revenge on all of them by killing Venom and then releasing the English strand of the vocal cord parasite on Motherbase. She no longer wants to do that, but upon finding out that the parasite can be mutated and activated even if she doesn’t speak a single word of English, she escapes Motherbase and goes AWOL, trying to make sure she doesn’t accidentally kill everyone she’s come to know and love.

The final twist in the game is that Venom Snake isn’t Big Boss. He’s the Medic who was caught in the explosion on the helicopter. Major Zero through Cipher decided that, through the use of hypnosis and reconditioning (because this is what Ocelot is good at), they would make a decoy double for Big Boss, just in case Big Boss needs to die. Instead of being furious with this idea, Big Boss goes with it, and uses Venom to the utmost of his ability, even posing as “Ishmael” to make sure his decoy survives. Ocelot auto-hypnotizes himself to forget he had run this entire hypnosis process on Venom so that he could work under Venom without giving up the ghost, or the phantom, so to speak. When Miller finally finds out after the credits, he’s furious. He completely disavows Big Boss and decides to support “his Phantom and his sons.” Thus setting up the events of Metal Gear. At the same time, Venom learns about this... and accepts this. Kinda. It’s ambiguous if he’s that loyal to Big Boss or if he’s given up being separate from the legend. In this sense, this might be one of the only “clone/remaking of Big Boss” that is truly successful. Partially because it had to be successful. Partially because Big Boss was involved directly.

The Phantom thus dies at Solid Snake’s hands in Metal Gear, patching up a plot hole in the continuity.

Now the part that people actually care about.

Metal Gear Solid is the game that everyone in the fandom basically started out on because Metal Gear was before a lot of people’s times, and Metal Gear 2 wasn’t properly distributed in the US until about Metal Gear Solid 3′s re-release.

There are some hints of Big Boss/Solid Snake, Gray Fox/Solid Snake, and Miller/Solid Snake but these are primarily after the fact when their characters are better established. Nothing that was concurrent with the games (at least nothing I’m aware of).

Expect a lot of hatesex.

Metal Gear Solid:

Snake/Meryl and Snake/Otacon are basically the two most obvious ones and both of these ships revolve around the characters that you primarily interact with and “save” in some way in the game. The two endings either have Snake and Meryl riding off into the sunset on a snowmobile (if Meryl is saved) or Snake and Otacon riding off into the sunset on a snowmobile (if Meryl dies).

Solid Snake/Liquid Snake is somewhat present as it’s the typical protagonist/antagonist ship with a bit of incestuous spice.

Snake/Ocelot kinda exists in the way that Ocelot clearly enjoys torturing Snake and Ocelot is that kind of super flashy/flamboyant character.

Snake/Gray Fox is barely present, the fight that happens includes bits where Gray Fox basically wants Snake to hurt him more. And that gets somewhat expanded on. In extra games that I haven’t listed because they are of dubious canon, it’s revealed that Gray Fox served as a child solider under Big Boss so there’s also that connection.

Snake/Sniper Wolf exists only because there’s a whole “She needs to fall in love with you to kill you” weirdness around her femme fatale character.

Metal Gear Solid 2:

Snake/Otacon is going strong as the entire first section is basically about Otacon commenting on the outrageous things Snake gets up to.

Snake/Ocelot gets expanded upon slightly because of the ridiculousness of Ocelot’s appearance and exit.

Raiden has a girlfriend called Rosemary who is revealed to be an AI, but there’s another actual Rosemary that Raiden has become semi-estranged to but that Rosemary is also involved with the Patriots... It’s complicated.

Snake/Raiden and Iroquois/Raiden is pretty big, as this is gruff older dude with somewhat effeminate younger dude (with amazing hair). Snake also tells Raiden to “choose his own fate” so that’s also a charm point.

Solidus Snake/Raiden is a thing that probably has a lot to do with daddy kink, as Raiden was a child soldier under Solidus Snake, and hateshipping the protagonist and antagonist.

Raiden/Vamp (a mid-boss) kinda exists? It’s mostly because Raiden gets flirted with in a dangerous way and finds out that Vamp is a bisexual.

Snake/Iroquois is largely a part of a running joke in which everyone wants to know what happens to Iroquois Pliskin who clearly not Snake.

Metal Gear Solid 3:

Naked Snake/The Boss is a big one, it’s implied Snake has feelings for his mentor, which makes his final battle with her even more tragic.

Naked Snake/Ocelot is compounded by the way Solid Snake/Ocelot was a thing, but this has been expanded into a full on “Ocelot has a giant crush on this dangerous hunk of a man who trained under Ocelot’s mom.”

Naked Snake/EVA is another ship that happens largely because they have sex and a lot of suggestive comments/flirting before then.

Naked Snake/Volgin is kinda the typical protagonist/antagonist ship with the extra kick of Volgin having tortured Snake. Volgin also is strongly implied to be at least gay if not bi and extremely sadistic. He apparently has a relationship with an officer named Ivan Raidenovitch Raikov (who looks ODDLY LIKE RAIDEN), and part of what EVA was originally tasked to do was get close to Volgin to steal the Philosopher’s Legacy, etc. Volgin/Raikov and Volgin/EVA are not unheard of for that reason.

The Boss/EVA isn’t unheard of, if only because that’s basically the only given/possible woman/woman ship that’s present. The only other female presence is the voice of the Paramedic.

Metal Gear Solid 4:

Snake/Otacon is still going strong and it’s tragic! Snake’s in his twilight years! They have a daughter! Otacon looks like a rugged handsome nerd and not just a nerd! There are a lot of melancholy domestic fics here.

Snake/Ocelot has taken a REALLY WEIRD TURN now that it’s been revealed that Ocelot had a thing for Big Boss. Especially since Ocelot is pretending to be Liquid Snake at the same time. A lot of fuck ups all around. Ocelot also can kiss Snake in their ultimate battle on top Outer Heaven.

Raiden/Vamp returns because they had a rematch in this game. Except Raiden is a cyborg now.

There’s a bit where Snake/Raiden exists in a “Raiden is taking care of the geriatric Snake” sorta deal.

Johnny/Meryl is now a thing. Johnny being a gag soldier that constantly gets diarrhea as toilet humor. He still gets diarrhea in this game. They also get married. Yes, they marry Meryl off to the shittiest character.

Is there a thing for Snake/Big Boss? I really don’t know?? They have one scene where they’re Old together and they kinda have a making up after awkward years of wtf.

Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker:

Now, there are “dates” that you can go on as extra fanservice missions. Really there are only two that are really notable: Big Boss/Kaz and Big Boss/Paz.

Big Boss/Kaz is amazing because it goes from Big Boss dominating Kaz to it being a mutually reciprocated relationship but Kaz still kinda feels like he’s under Big Boss’s thumb. There’s also an aspect of Kaz wanting to live up to Big Boss’s expectations.

Big Boss/Paz is kinda squick because she’s allegedly only 18 (really 25 but that’s not revealed until she reveals her true nature as a spy). It’s mostly the schoolgirl crush on the handsome older man sorta deals.

Strangelove/The Boss makes a bit of an appearance because Strangelove retroactively becomes a big part of The Boss’s backstory, even if it’s not explicitly stated that The Boss reciprocated those feelings.

Strangelove/Huey is also a thing if only because Huey obviously has a thing for Strangelove.

There are a few other minor characters due to the game being much more of an ensemble game.

Metal Gear Solid V

Shit gets complicated/interesting here.

Venom/Miller/Ocelot As “Big Boss” has an established relationship with both of them, so there’s an O3P revolving on Venom Snake. Venom/Miller and Ocelot/Venom are both popular as well with kinda opposite dynamics.

Big Boss/Ocelot and Big Boss/Miller are also major as these are both the “true versions” of the “fake” ship that is Venom/et al. That said, aftergame Big Boss/Miller becomes a straight up hateship.

Big Boss/Venom is also kinda a thing because of the way that Big Boss is controlling/behind Venom’s actions and motivations. A lot of it basically becomes emotional abuse based on like super gaslighting.

Somehow I’m pretty sure Big Boss/Ocelot/Miller is rarer than Big Boss/Venom/Ocelot/Miller. Possibly because by the Big Boss reveal, there’s no way Miller sits and takes it unless Venom is there too.

Ocelot/Miller is also somewhat of a hateship because they’re constantly at odds with each other and have the same love interest(s). With how smarmy/smug Ocelot can be and how pissed off Miller is, there’s some good content here based on Miller’s frustration/exasperation.

Venom/Quiet is kinda pushed in the game (they have a vaguely romantic scene together) and they work great together (Venom works well with all of his partners. D-Dog included) and there’s a bit of tragic hateship-ish involved.

Miller/Quiet is also a thing simply because Miller hates Quiet and Quiet is a superpowered cryptid and Miller has half of his limbs but Miller is the XO and Quiet is technically like a PoW, so there’s really weird power dynamics going on.

Liquid Snake/Psycho Mantis becomes a thing retroactively because Eli/Tretij is kind of a thing but it’s uncomfortable shipping two clearly underaged boys.

No one likes Huey, but there might be something where Huey gets his ass kicked by Skullface. And everyone else. Huey’s not a good person.

Venom/Skullface and Big Boss/Skullface is theoretically something that should exist, but is probably more rare than it should be because there are so many better ships out there already. Skullface also looks pretty nasty and not handsomely rugged.

AND THAT IS THAT FOR A PRIMER ON METAL GEAR SOLID I’M SO SORRY IT’S SO LONG BUT THERE’S SO MUCH.

[wherethestoryhasimagination]

More BoTW ‘sequel’ ideas;

(expanding upon this for @ramune-explosion )

additional links provided :3 likely best to gain full context from them;

SS TP MM

when you pick your starting Rune, your guardian programming is able to access secondary features not able to be run on Slate tech; (the other runes might be available later)

Bombs; instead of only creating bombs full of blue energy, you can also perform a variation of the Guardian’s trademark Beam attack; a quick shot that does the minimal damage of the bombs, usually used to get other explosives to go off, or a charged beam like the Guardian Scouts use; (Upgrades may give you the ‘super armor’ that the scouts get while charging)

Cryonis; instead of only freezing water in block formations, you can now create a Ball of Ice that does everything a Ball can do. roll around, run into things, get bigger if rolling through snow, hit switches... (maybe freeze non-water objects to make them brittle?)

Magnesis; not just moving individual metal objects; you can also electrify them temporarily; (a bit like thunder Blight) (maybe an upgrade will make thrown metal weapons home-in slightly on targets)

Stasis; not just stopping Time; can also accelerate certain objects; (maybe an Upgrade could let you reverse aging time on an object (with a hearty cooldown) to get something to return to where it once was; or maybe that should be the default; idk; stasis is kinda funny; a few possibilities here)

Camera; not just pictures; Advanced Tracking can Highlight Targeted objects, and provide much more specific Arrows, rather than just radar blips. perhaps also highlight enemies through walls? a good utility;

Disguise choice; Gerudo, Goron, Hylian, Zora, Birb... (and perhaps some other ‘secret’ disguises not available at the start) (like Shieka Monk) (customization is a Yes)

you start with just one, but might be able to get others later; each with certain base abilities & potential Upgrades. (some ‘plot shrine’ will give you your first, (maybe more?) upgrade part, which will automatically be used to create your disguise+base ability)

Picking Gerudo Male... As the one with the Triforce of Power... well... that might make things a deal harder at the start; to the point where the Player would be strictly warned about the consequences; A real, No-stealth, Glass cannon kind of choice; The Triforce of Power is Pleased by this Disguise, and leaks out a tiny bit more of its energy to you.

Goron; full Flameguard, but weaker stealth. later upgrades may give one-handed 2-handers, roll attacks, ext...

Zora; the ability to actually swim properly without getting waterlogged; faster swim speeds, (up to the rate at which Sidon went during the divine beast combat), waterfall climbing, ext...

Birb; far superior gliding, a weaker version of Ravioli Gale (which can be upgraded further), better stealth, ext...

Traditional Gerudo; (the advised, easier start choice) well, the Yiga Clan hideout isn’t far from Town; you can easily enter, and very likely get official Training in weapon use as a guard(ian). With Gerudo Town as a base of operations with plentiful access to decent items & gear, things ought to be a bit easier on you...

And if Link just so happens to be hunting you, and has seen through your disguise, (the guy has faced enough Yiga to know their disguises)... Well, they might cause a scene if they tried anything in town. You are safe there. maybe you’ll even sit at the same Bar.

Hylian; highly convincing disguise; upgrades include various quality/ease of life options, better Horse control, and, as a high tier upgrade, the famous ‘slow time’ ability Link possesses. (A Goron or Zora out in the Snow is very suspect, but a Hylian, well, they could be anywhere!)

(bonus surprise?) if you make and wear the full Guardian Armor Set, people might mistake you for Link

(extra thought; would better monster disguises be worth a thought? As a Bokoblin, while people would still call attention to you if you did bad things, it wouldn’t be as harsh a response as if you were found out to be ‘That Rouge Machine!’)

upgrades for your Guardian Tech exist as well; Runes, Tools...

The Scientists probably help you even though they know what you are cause they can be a bit kooky like that; just fascinated to see how you develop.

‘meals’ work differently; (unless you got the Hylian gastro-generator Upgrade)

You have a far more discerning Eye for Guardian Parts; while others might just see a dozen of the same type of Screw, you can tell the differences between them; Some that can be ‘cooked’ into ‘stamina’ restoring ‘meals’, electric resist, temporary hearts... basically all the usual cooking effects; Gemstones can be used in cooking to, with unique effects of their own. like maybe temporary elemental damage, changing the color of your default Guardian weapons to match;

yea, that’s another thing; while nearly every other weapon in the game would be better than them, (unless you upgrade them,) you should always have access to weak variants of the Guardian spear, sword, & Ax; (maybe you can unlock a guardian boomerang, or some other weapon types as well)

The great Plateau is, instead of a dizzying drop, a brutal climb. But, many important things can be found there... The Other Runes, for example, & a Certain Monk living under the shrine of Resurrection who will make sure you EARN those Runes. (maybe you can extract something from the 1-hit obliterator?)

maybe Shrine entrances will take you even further bellow the Shrines to the ‘Maintenance Level’. As a Guardian, you get taken to The Works, presumed to be there to fix things by the Shrine workings.

Also, forget needing to pray in very specific locations to upgrade, to the point where you have a dozen not-Spirit orbs waiting to be used; you are a clever Machine; you can upgrade wherever you want; (though maybe have certain high tier upgrades require a certain location in the maintenance level to get)

Plenty of potential here; it could be a Mechanical mess, or maybe things broke down a while ago, and dirt & rocks & such have gotten in, creating a whole new kind of environment. (might be cool if some variant of Mogma(Skyward Sword Moles) were to be found, with a secret disguise available for them with their own thematic upgrades) (also, at this point, a full and proper skill tree would probably be good; it isn’t as simple as ‘Heart or Stamina’ after all... Though different upgrades may include/be Hearts &or Stamina for different races. (high stamina birbs, high Hearts Goron...) )

|3 ... I’m running out of steam at the moment for ideas on Gameplay quirks... there’s probably something obvious that is a part of the base game that I’m missing...

! ah, Koroks? hmm... there could probably be some kind of excuse for Koroks, if they were to be re-used... either on the Shieka advanced Tech side of things, or the ‘right heart to see them’ side of things.

& Great Fairies... maybe they can help you get some of the last stages in a particular upgrade path, or maybe they physically enhance your non-organic Body, like they do to Armor; give you more health, more stamina, more base-Defense... (Maybe they could be the source of some more... unique, non-machine like upgrades; like the gastro-generator which lets you heal via people food)

Ending Ideas;

there could be just about anything down there. including the ‘neutral-?bad?’ ending; ‘fixing’ things down in The Works is the most lucrative source of Upgrade Parts, but if you Fix Everything... Then a whole lot more than just Shrines, Towers, & those massive Spires around The Castle will start popping up; ‘You did what you were designed to do; now bear witness to the World We Designed you to make; the Era of The Shieka will return’ You Survive;

‘Bad?-POWER’ end, you’ve gone around and blown up all kinds of important stuff; attacked towns & destroyed their fortifications & fully operational Guardian Stalkers... When you make it to the birb Divine Beast, you get a total Power Trip; Controlling the Beast Directly, able to rain down destruction. You Survive;

‘neutral end(s)’ you didn’t really blow anything up, but you didn’t really do all that much good either. When you win the contest being held to find the next Pilot of the Divine Beast, you are found out. You are Targeted; Link is ready to finally settle this;

(if you somehow manage to beat Link;) Zelda won’t stand by & watch Link Die; With her greater control over her Divine Power, and Greater understanding of the Ancient Tech, She Purges your Programming; You Die;

(If Link beats you...) You Die; but by beheading/helm splitting; your Program still exists... You Still have the Triforce of Power... maybe you’ll manage to find a new vessel eventually... you kinda survive in that way; Via... Reincarnation...

(good end; helping make things right with The World) :) You win the Divine Beast Pilot Contest, and you get to Fly it all the way to Hyrule Castle... (bad end if you start shooting; Link rips you from the controls, & fights you; same kind of results as neutral ends) But, once there... Link & Zelda finally realize who/what you are; much later than they do the other time; you must be acting much more like a real person...

Link has The Master Sword at the Ready, but... has their doubts about how much of a threat you are...

You drop the disguise...

You drop to your Knees...

You distill information in the way that is traditional for Ancient Shieka Tech...

...

You start to Cry...

In a moment of recognition, Link catches a drop with their Shieka Slate...

Your Memories begin to play back on the screen...

The beauty you’ve seen in this World... How much better it is than The World the ancient Shieka had planned...

The joy in meeting new people...

The help you’ve offered... The help you’ve gotten...

Your acts of kindness... And the kindness you’ve been shown in turn...

Every Smile you have seen along the way...

Your perspective of Link and Zelda... Fearsome Destroyers who hold control over whether you live or die...

...

You tell them that you don’t want to die...

...

And they tell you that everything is going to be ok...

[loudcreationsublime]

“It’s been over 2077 days considering that we introduced our strategy to create Cyberpunk 2077.” This is just how CD Projekt Red began their letter to fans, concealed within the trailer they went down at E3. Cyberpunk’s original trailer remained in 2013, however the studio revealed their plans to create the residential or commercial property also previously. 6 years ( and also counting!)may seem like an infinity, however it’s far from the longest delay we’ve had for a video game.

From JRPGS to trash-talking shooters, allow’s forget our impatience for Cyberpunk by taking a look at some of the longest waits in pc gaming history.

Final Fantasy XV, 2006-2016 2006 was a thrilling time to be a Final Fantasy fan. Not just was Final Fantasy XIII introduced, it debuted alongside a trailer for a totally separate game, Final Fantasy XIII Versus. Versus assured to be a dark experience with real-time fight as well as an enigmatic protagonist. Yet as time extended on, Versus missed a concerning number of occasions. Square Enix guaranteed that advancement was proceeding(initially

it was a PS3 unique, after that it wasn’t, then it was again …), yet it was very easy to lose hope as the years extended on. In 2013, Square Enix dropped the pretense. FF XIII Versus was dead, however not gone; it was now a completely brand-new entry in the collection, Final Fantasy XV. According to the studio,” it had not been coming any type of time quickly “. That declaration was appropriate. For several years, trickles of information come with by hold-ups kept followers anxiously waiting for concrete info. 7 months after our cover story, FF XV launched in November of 2016. All in all, it weathered its ten-year development rather well!.?. !! Although we had some nits to pick, a trip with Noctis and his buddies was a gratifying end to a decade long journey.

Joe documented the entire history of the advancement in exhaustive detail, if you’re interested to go deeper on each time we were disappointed by the absence of a Final Fantasy.

Too Human, 1999-2008 Perhaps much better known for its delays compared to its mediocre action, Too Human started growth in 1999 forthe original Playstation. Pitched asa sci-fi story embeded in the long run, Too Human would spread its 90 hrs of gameplay throughout 4 CD-ROMS. The game guaranteed cybernetic improvements as well as” 60 mins of cinematics,”yet development stalled when designer Silicon Knights was obtained by Nintendo. Although the studio announced objectives of bringing their sci-fi epic to Gamecube, five years later on, we still knew nothing about Too Human. By then, Silicon Knights had serviced both Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem and also Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, but it had not been till the studio partnered with Microsoft that we heard new details about this interesting RPG. In 2005, Silicon Knights claimed Too Human would not only be launching for the Xbox 360, however would be a trilogy.

Nine years after its initial news, Too Human released to testimonials that were greatly warm and, sometimes, actively hostile. We provided it a 6.75 and also claimed”you’ll likely never desire to listen to anything regarding Too Human again.” Also still, Silicon Knights assured they would certainly complete their trilogy (which wasn’t truly sci-fi anymore, however more of a mess of Norse folklore).

Ultimately, Epic Games’ claim over making use of the Unreal Engine eliminated Too Human completely. As an outcome of the suit, Silicon Knights was ordered to destroy all video game code for any type of items utilizing the Unreal Engine and also Too Human was pulled from the Xbox Live Marketplace. The workshop declared bankruptcy in 2014, most likely securing the fate of any kind of more titles.

The Last Guardian, 2007-2016 For a group that had just released 2 previous video games, Team Ico held an impressive online reputation. Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, both PS2 titles, got a status that remains to this particular day. When Colossus first launched, we stated that it”breaks narration barriers none people knew existed … this is the narration experience of the year.”It complies with, consequently, that Team Ico’s following game would be the subject of both enormous hype and also intense scrutiny. We first saw The Last Guardian in a trailer at E3 2009(a trailer which looks amazingly much like the last item in 2016), yet it had actually been in advancement for 2 years at that point. Unlike Final Fantasy or Too Human, the core concept of The Last Guardian never ever fluctuated; Fumito Ueda’s story of participation in between a kid as well as a big cat/bird formed both the emotional core as well as gameplay focus of the game, but this dedication meant a wealth of technical concerns.

The original trailer was in fact running on a PS3, Ueda verified that it was rendered at half-speed, then accelerated to look typical. For the next numerous years The Last Guardian floundered, unable to hit the minimum required frame rates for playability. It never ever completely went silent, the video game was plainly in problem. Ueda teased a gameplay demo in the Team Ico collection that never occurred, then parted ways with Sony. Producers leapt ship. The Last Guardian remained to miss practically every major gaming event. Officers remained to ensure the sector that the video game existed, declarations of little convenience in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

In 2015, The Last Guardian surfaced again, relatively unmodified despite the leap in console generations. A trailer at E3 2015 promised the video game would certainly appear the list below year as well as it did, ultimately releasing in December 2016. The game still encountered a variety of technical problems, but it recorded the magic assured in the original trailer, as well as made great on Fumito Ueda’s nine-year-old vision.

Grimoire: Heralds of the Winged Exemplar, 1997-2017 There’s probably a factor you haven’t come across Grimoire. An enthusiasm task from a solitary designer, the game makes basically no concessions to the modern-day player. Saying that the game is rooted in 90s CRPGs is deceptive, since”

rooted”indicates development. Grimoire is a 90s CRPG, it just ended up being released twenty years later on. Created by Cleveland Mark Blakemore, the video game’s advancement isn’t nearly also documented as larger tasks. Revealed in ’97, one sneak peek declared it would be out later that year. It had not been. In 1998 there was a beta testing period, then the game primarily vanished up until 2013 when Grimoire revealed an indiegogo campaign. It elevated concerning 4 percent of its $250,000 goal and also assured a launch later that year (once more). Ultimately, in addition to a news that “the best roleplaying game of them all is ultimately all set,” the video game dropped on Steam in 2017.

Grimoire: Heralds of the Winged Exemplar flaunts that it has 600 hrs of web content. It additionally doesn’t have a guidebook. With deep character customization and also an enormous breadth of areas, there could be 20 year’s well worth of product concealed in the video game. I simply have no interest in finding it.

Star Fox 2, 1993-2018 Started virtually quickly after 1993 initial, Star Fox 2 was the target of a ruthless equipment cycle. The video game’s enthusiastic objectives, consisting of randomized levels as well as real-time approach components, were powered by the SNES and also its Super FX chip(the very same type as used in Yoshi’s Island). As well as unlike whatever else on this list, Star Fox 2 was essentially completed within its priced estimate growth period.

However, the tail-end of the SNES’s lifespan was likewise the beginning of true 3D graphics from consoles like the N64 as well as the Playstation. Being Afraid that Star Fox just would not withstand the comparison, Nintendo axed production completely.

That would certainly have been completion of the tale, if not for a shock announcement from Nintendo: The SNES Classic, a re-release of the author’s epic console, would include the full Star Fox 2 in its entirety. The game’s ambitions were probably grander than its execution, the launch of Star Fox 2 is an unusual success for anybody who values the background and conservation of timeless titles.

Doom, 2008-2016 Doom 4 will look

better compared to Rage. John Carmack assured this in 2008 when revealing the development of the title, as well as he had not been lying; the game simply took eight even more years to prove him. Ruin 4 fought with identification for much of its advancement. The initial pitch for the video game was a cinematic, scripted, aggressive take on the franchise, a”Call of Doom “if you will. With Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare’s launch the previous year, making an FPS with setpieces and also automobile sectors felt like a dish for success. Years later, reduced morale as well as direction from the heads of the studio motivated a total reboot of the title.

The new question was just what this reboot would certainly be. One studio head supposedly stated that” Doom 4 can and also ought to be as big as Skyrim.” Carmack claimed that “Doom implies two things: shotguns as well as demons.”

The earliest we saw just what would eventually be the last version of the video game came from a teaser in 2014. Doom’s last type was a much cry from its Call of Duty-inspired beginnings; the video game is a true callback to the original video games, avoiding tale, prolonged discussion, and also even refilling for a pure first-person demon-killing experience. It kicks butt. Ruin’s reboot was even successful sufficient to necessitate a sequel, Doom: Eternal. Duke Nukem Forever, 1997-2011 Probably one of the most infamous postponed video game of them all, Duke Nukem Forever is a display of the hazards of long advancement cycles. Battle Each Other Nukem 3D, released for the PC in 1996, was a smash hit. Nearly promptly afterwards, 3D realms revealed service a follow up, planned to be finished in 1998 at the newest. They chose to collaborate with the Quake II engine, however really did not also obtain code for the software program before they beginning mocking up potential screenshots.

Currently having actually missed their 1998 projection, they leapt to the Unreal engine and also continued to make sluggish progression. Videos and displays were still run out and also received well, but had no end date in sight. In 2004, 7 years after originally introduced, Duke Nukem Forever apparently leapt engines once again, touchdown on Doom 3’s impressive technology (although the workshop after that rejected the report ). 3D worlds continued to hemorrhage personnel; after the group’s heads spent numerous their very own cash, Forever made little perceivable progression.

In 2009, author Take-Two took legal action against the studio for cannot provide the video game, and also although it was cleared up in a manner that preserved the progress that had been made on the game, Duke seemed in his fatality throes. Salvation originated from Gearbox Software, that included a multiplayer mode and also provided it the last press out the door in 2011.

Forever is not a success story, nevertheless. The globe had relocated ahead in the game’s 14-year development, and also Duke had not. From outdated gameplay systems to the character’s trademark misogyny, Forever can not hide the weight of its puffed up development.

Still Waiting

Certainly, lengthy delays typically aren’t a thing of the past. Cyberpunk’s development cycle is at the very least seven years long at this moment, however there are various other video games- several of which were seen this E3- that we’ve been waiting equally as wish for.

Beyond Good And Evil 2, 2008-??? Before Beyond Good as well as Evil was a method for Joseph Gordon-Levitt to obtain you to do complimentary art for Ubisoft, it was a 2008 trailer

without a launch date. Ubisoft stated the whole trailer, a 2 minute consider Jade and also her piggy close friend sitting in a desert, was provided in-engine. And afterwards, 9 years later, we saw it again. We aren’t sure what caused the hangup in development. Supervisor Michel Ancel spent years far from the job, dealing with Rayman’s platforming reboots, yet whether this was a choice by him or by Ubisoft is any individual’s assumption. When Beyond Good and Evil 2 re-emerged last E3 as a pre-rendered trailer, Ancel said that it was effectively a different and also totally new game than the E3 trailer nearly a years earlier.

Amongst other points, this probably suggests that Beyond Good and Evil 2 is still a lengthy ways off. This E3 brought another pre-rendered trailer, a supposedly excellent behind-closed-doors trial, and a beta assured for sometime next year. The video game’s scope looks outstanding, but that’s only an obstacle when it comes to advancement time.

Kingdom Hearts III, 2013-2019 Technically, we’ve only found out about Kingdom Hearts III considering that its intro trailer in 2013. Nonetheless, considered that the previous entrance in the mainline collection came out in 2005, it really feels like we’ve been waiting a lot longer. Series director Tetsuya Nomura hinted at an early stage that he wouldn’t have the ability to concentrate on Kingdom Hearts before the completion of his current job. That job? Final Fantasy XIII Versus, which didn’t get to completion swiftly. Nomura actually left before Versus-turned-XV was completed. Currently he’s continuouslying guide Kingdom Hearts III while also servicing one more title: a remake of Final Fantasy VII. A remake that we’ve heard basically nothing regarding since its statement in 2015.

Kingdom Hearts III will launch very early next year. Probably.

Star Citizen, 2012 -??? Recently current for providing a pack of online spacecrafs for$27,000, Star Citizen is rapidly becoming a lesson in the dangers of crowdfunding. Climbing to fame through a wildly successful 2012 kickstarter, Star Citizen was originally pitched as a space-faring experience with dogfighting and trading. This summary has ballooned to consist of first-person shooting, procedurally created planets, and a single-player campaign with Mark Hamill.

Throughout advancement, Star Citizen has missed basically every deadline its set for itself. It moved from CryEngine to Amazon’s Lumberyard Engine, which led to a claim from Crytek. The game has actually launched numerous betas, components, and also demonstrations of its various systems (all of which are undoubtedly impressive). It’s additionally released consistent ways to remain to spend loan on it. Not only can players acquire various models of spacecrafs with genuine cash, they can additionally acquire systems of land on non-existent worlds, or most likely just mail briefcases of money to Chris Roberts.

Celebrity Citizen has elevated $ 188,000,000 so far, without signs of decreasing. Perhaps it does not even matter if it ever before comes out.