Meanwhile, Back In Afghanistan

Today's zoological oddity is neither a cuttlefish (although it might be one in camouflage - you never know) or a bunyip (whatever they might actually look like) but a pangolin, also known as a scaly anteater, a sort of relative to the American armadillo.  

But this post isn't about pangolins (or cuttlefish or bunyips, for that matter).  This is a Games Desk post, and the Games Desk is happy to announce that it's finally starting to enjoy playing Metal Gears Solid V: The Phantom Pain.

As we posted before, we initially found the game confusing, repetitive, and unnecessarily grim.  All that might have been true for the opening sequence and the first couple of missions.  But since posting our complaints, we figured out that we don't constantly have to be "on mission" and that we can wander around the game's open-world environment of Soviet-occupied Afghanistan at our leisure and own pace, either avoiding or taking out random outposts to tone up on our skills, and harvesting medicinal plants and gathering random diamonds that are strewn across the desert floor for some reason to build up our base.  And it's not always nighttime, too!  

After some wandering and capturing of random outposts (still without killing any enemy combatants), our confidence improved and we took on some side-missions, which just increased our skill set and confidence still more.  Finally, we were ready to return to some main missions, and found it far less stressful because we now understood what it was we were supposed to be doing and also how to do it, and therefore experienced fewer repetitive, trial-and-error do-overs of each segment of each mission.   In other words, we finally figured out how to actually play the game, and are now finding it a pleasant diversion that alternates between creative problem-solving and action/adventure.  Fun! The game no longer feels like a chore, but is now something that we actually look forward to, which is what we want from our entertainment and diversions, innit?

So, we're still very, very early into the game, but we wanted to set the record straight and "take back" the negative review of MGS V we posted last week.  It just turns out that going from Assassin's Creed: Odyssey's Greek mercenary to The Phantom Pain's 1980s soldier of fortune was more of a transition that we had thought, but we've finally made it.

Now, to get back out there and take on some Rooskies . . . .