Fun And Games

We are legion, and the part of us we call The Gaming Desk hasn't been on a very good run as of late.

The Gaming Desk started the year playing the problematic and ultimately boring game Fallout 76.  After we got good and sick of that, we spent a long, long time on the highly enjoyable Assassin's Creed: Odyssey.  That was good, but it was also as good as it got so far this year.

We did dabble for a day or two with the Life Is Strange franchise, playing The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit, a sort-of prequel to Life Is Strange 2, but before we got to the main game, Notre Dame cathedral burned down in Paris and in response Ubisoft made AC: Unity, set in Paris during the French Revolution, available for free.

Maybe it was too many AC games back to back (before Odyssey, we played the equally enjoyable Origins last year).  Maybe we're too spoiled by the 2019 state of video games to enjoy a 2014 game.  But the game seemed tedious almost from the beginning, we couldn't identify with or become interested in any of the characters, and the game mechanics were frustratingly inconsistent.  Sometimes, when our character was trying to scale a wall, he would get stuck midway - couldn't proceed any further up and couldn't back down either - and would just hang there mid-wall like an idiot until the guards came along and shot him dead.  Other times, while running down the crowded streets of Paris, if he got too close to a wall, the game mechanics would automatically have him start climbing, with maybe a 50-50 chance of getting stuck.  On top of all that, our so-called "comrades" in the game weren't very friendly, constantly barking orders at us and calling us "piss pot" all the time.  Hey, if we wanted to be treated like that, we'd go to the office!

We hadn't formally decided to quit Unity but found that we were constantly making excuses not to play. Finally, after a week or so of procrastination, we decided that it was time to move on.  We didn't pay anything for the game, so no great loss.

Sometime after that we saw as online forum on Reddit answering someone's question about what game they should play next.  The inquiry sounded much like something we would ask: what's a good open-world role-playing game for a single player?  The person mentioned that, like us, he/she enjoyed the "good" AC games and the Elder Scrolls games.  In response, everyone seemed to agree that Metal Gears Solid V was a really fun game, a blast, a great experience from start to finish. It got a unanimous thumbs-up.

We hadn't played any of the MGS games and hadn't really heard too much about them, but we figured what did we have to lose?  At only $19.99, it wasn't a big investment, and the other on-line reviews were all equally positive.  So we purchased MGS V: The Phantom Pain, downloaded the game, and jumped in.

We immediately realized we had no idea what we were doing.  The makers of the MGS V apparently assume you've played MGS I through IV and didn't offer much in the way of a tutorial or explanation of the back story.  However, the start of the game is pretty grim, with your character awakening in a hospital bed from a 9-year coma.  It gets worse - you've apparently lost your left arm, and you are suffering catastrophic organ failure.  Oh, and a bunch of bad guys are storming the wing of your hospital trying to kill you, and one of them is apparently some sort of fire demon that for some reason can fly and is impervious to bullets.    

As you try to get up to defend yourself, you discover your legs aren't working after nine years in a coma, and you can only crawl around.  And it's one of those games where just as soon as you've completed some little accomplishment, say, crawling on your belly beneath an operating table to hide from the baddies, something worse immediately happens, like more baddies with bigger guns suddenly show up, or a tank plows through the wall, and did we mention the fire demon?  All this without even understanding the basic functions of the game, like how to fire your gun, how to crawl (we guess we'll learn to walk later), and just where in the hell you're supposed to be going.

We imagine it might be a pretty exciting start to a game for someone well experienced in MGS lore and gameplay, but it was a pretty frustrating and disorienting start for us newbies.

Eventually, we had to go on line and find a walk-through guide to help.  One tidbit of advice that we received was that if you're new to the game like us, it's recommended to at least play MGS V: Ground Zeroes, a sort of prequel to The Phantom Pain, first.   That made sense - Phantom Pain was pretty perplexing and confusing to us - so we plunked down another $19.99 and bought Ground Zeroes.  

It was a bit more accessible than its successor, and at least didn't start with a sequential series of life-or-death challenges.  But the game was pretty obviously designed for the Playstation platform, and it's apparently assumed that if you are playing on PC, you're using a game controller (we play with just the keyboard).  Sure, if you dig down deep enough into the documentation, you'll find the instructions on which key does what, but the on-screen suggestions during gameplay are all for game controllers, and unhelpfully advise you to, say, use the right paddle or the  + button or some such thing.  Annoying, but not anything we can't overcome.

And the back story!  There's a series of a dozen of so screens that attempt to catch you up on the events of MGS I through IV, but good god is it ever convoluted!   You're character is known as "Snake," but sometimes is called "Boss." However, it seems like at least half of the other characters were named "Snake" or "Naked Snake" or "Snake Killer," or were called "The Boss" or "Big Boss" or some such appellation.   And the outfit you fight for is called "FOX," but your opponents are called "XOF."  And we lost count of how many times over the course of the previous four games FOX rose to power, and then were defeated, and then rose back to power, only to be defeated again.

Whatever.  We don't care.  Our first mission in Ground Zeroes is to rescue somebody named "Chico" (at least it's not "Snake" or "Boss") held captive in Guantanamo Bay, and it doesn't matter how we know him or who he is.  Just explain the mission and give us some recon intel and we'll get the job done.  We don't need a whole biography here; it's not like we're writing Chico's Wikipedia page. Running like that through the missions of Ground Zeroes, we did learn the basic functions of the game and developed at least a modicum of confidence, and eventually we rejoined The Phantom  Pain where we left off, apparently in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan in 1980 (oh, the MGS games are loosely based on 20th Century geopolitics).

What we like about the game is even though it's basically about paramilitary guerillas, it's a stealth game and the goal is to complete each mission undetected.  Your score at the end of each mission actually deducts points if you fire a gun and deducts a whole lot of points if you actually kill someone, so that's cool.  This isn't Gears of War or Grand Theft Auto, folks.  But because you have to complete assigned missions and each mission needs to be completed quickly (say, before the sun rises and you lose the cover of darkness, or before the person you're trying to rescue dies in interrogation), there's little time to wander around and explore, so it hardly seems like an "open-world" game.  

And without consulting an on-line walkthrough, you only discover the hazards of your mission through trial-and-error - you wander into the "wrong" room of the HQ you're infiltrating only to discover it's full of KGB agents who immediately shoot you dead, and then you have to replay the mission from the start, but this time avoiding that room. You cross the grounds between your position and an enemy watch tower only to find out it's a minefield, so you start the mission over yet again, this time avoiding that room and also walking around rather than through the minefield.  In other words, you wind up doing the same thing over and over and over again, until you finally figure out how to do it right.  

We've completed two missions so far (technically three if we include a quick tutorial session on what tools and weapons were newly created for MGS V that weren't available in IV).  The missions have been pretty grim and joyless - they're usually at night, sometimes in the rain, and you spend almost as much  time hiding in a corner waiting for a guard to pass as you actually do, well, anything other than cowering in the corner.  We'll still give it a go, but we hope the gameplay  improves - not to second guess the good people at Reddit, but so far, the game hasn't exactly been "fun" or a "real blast" to play.    

We're ranting, we know.  Sorry.  Our point is that outside of AC Odyssey, which was "a blast" and "fun to play,"  we haven't been enjoying our video game experience all that much.  Perhaps MGS will live up to its hype and become more fun in later missions.  Perhaps not.  Perhaps Cyberpunk 2077 will come out this year, or Red Dead Redemption 2 will become available on PC.  In any event, we'll keep playing, at least for now, and see where it all goes.