Death Stranding off to a rough start

Death Stranding PS4 PlayStation 4
The image used by Pushsquare is fitting in many ways.

It should hardly be a surprise that Death Stranding is off to a slow start right out the gate. Its deliberately insane promotional strategy of being as confusing and chocked full of celebrities as possible, its meager premise of delivering packages in an empty post-apocalypse America, and its minuscule range of tone and variety all add up to make it “limited appeal”.

But the bad news gets worse when a certain somebody speaks out…

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My Metal Gear Mondays Podcast Interview!

Their website is beautiful and functional. Check it out there!

Howdy folks! Believe it or not, I was recently invited to be a guest on the hottest Metal Gear podcast in the world, Metal Gear Mondays, and it went fantastically. The whole thing is about The Kojima Code, and we had a blast for several hours and had plenty of laughs. They had great questions, and I felt like they were cut from the same cloth as my dear readers, so I really expect you’ll enjoy it.

Check it out right now, and listen to their special book review episode too! I’m very thankful to them for shining a spotlight on my work, and I was delighted to find out that one of the hosts was a huge fan of my site since he was in high school! Crazy how that works, isn’t it?

Listen to the episodes…

And to the book review episode:

The VR Fact

Despite what you may have heard, it is no longer disputable that the Big Shell chapter of Metal Gear Solid 2‘s story was a computer simulation from beginning to end. The whole scenario of Raiden on the Big Shell was a VR mission. This isn’t a theory, but a fact. It has been a fact since 2002 when Hideo Kojima directly stated in this interview:

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Interview with Alexander Sylazhov

I’ve been lucky to have Alexander Sylazhov as a guest contributor multiple times on this site. His writing reveals a facet of the Metal Gear community otherwise hidden from me, and shows me how other cultures and peoples can approach the subject matter in Metal Gear with a drastically different perspective. Recently I decided to ask Alexander for an interview, so that his fans and the general readership of this site can get to know the man behind these daunting essays a little more personally.

Check out the interview below and learn a bit about this mysterious character.

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Another interview with OJA, this time on MGS4

This was a fun discussion of Metal Gear Solid 4 and the legacy it has today. OJA and I agreed to do a podcast about MGS4 some time in the future, and the release of the “In Defense of MGS4” video I posted a link to recently sparked the timing to come back and have a chat. A lot of things about MGS4 have been forgotten since the game was released, and I wanted to remind people about what made the game’s release complicated.

It’s a pretty casual conversation, we didn’t do a bunch of research or preparation before getting into the talk. Check it out:

Kojima says “Metal Gear Saga” consists of games he personally designed and produced

In the nerdy cloisters of the Metal Gear community there’s always been debate over which of the games in the series are considered “canon”, “main series”, “spinoff”, and so on.  Like religious texts, the games have been given various tiers of dogmatic importance, citing interviews, timelines, box sets, and everything else that might hint at what we’re officially allowed to enjoy.  Or something.  It certainly affected my score of Rising.

Kojima has always been evasive about this, because it’s bad for business to drop a game from the official mythology of the series.  It instantly goes from being gospel doctrine to apocryphal stories, so-to-speak.  But now Kojima is finally being clear, in an interview with IGN:

“I always say ‘this will be my last Metal Gear,'” Kojima said, “but the games in the series that I’ve personally designed and produced — Metal Gear on MSX, MG2, MGS1, 2, 3, 4, Peace Walker, and now MGSV — are what constitute a single ‘Metal Gear Saga.’ With MGSV, I’m finally closing the loop on that saga.  In that sense, this will be the final ‘Metal Gear Solid,'” Kojima continued. “Even if the ‘Metal Gear’ franchise continues, this is the last ‘Metal Gear.'””

Is it arguable that games like Ghost Babel, Portable Ops or Metal Gear Rising don’t have to be part of what Kojima calls “a single ‘Metal Gear Saga'” for them to still be considered “canon”?  He doesn’t use the word canon in the interview, but if you really listen to what he’s saying, if MGSV is going to be “the last Metal Gear” simply because Kojima won’t be designing and producing future games, then by definition this makes any non-Kojima game a non-Metal Gear game.

The debates will surely rage on, but with a specific list of 8 games named by Kojima that constitute the definitive Metal Gear Saga, that debate is pointless.

Kojima: “I think about ways that I can use the game systems to reinforce my story”

This morning The Guardian has posted an interview with Kojima, in which he discusses the themes of MGSV in some new ways.  Some of it is cool, and some of it makes me disappointed.

I develop the design and construction of the environments and I set the theme and topic from the game and work to ensure that it fits with the game systems. That all has to come from me as the vision holder.” 

I didn’t realize Kojima was designing levels still.  Actually, I thought he specifically said that they allowed the artists to create things according to realistic photographs and maps, and then adjusted it and designed things accordingly.

“I love movies but if I was to create a film I’d use different methods,” he says. “I make games. That’s what I do. So I think about ways that I can use the game systems to reinforce my story, or do things that simply aren’t possible in other media.”

So the story isn’t designed to serve the game systems, but the other way around.  This is important if you want to analyze the gameplay or the story, because they should reinforce each other, right?  (Ahem…)

“The player is able to flesh out the detail and background of the game by discovering and listening to cassette tapes,” he says. “It’s a different way to develop story but one that is arguably, more impactful: the player puts it all together in their mind.”

Damn it.  I don’t like collecting cassette tapes, Kojima.  It’s one of the worst aspects of Ground Zeroes, even though I love what Peace Walker did with its Briefing tapes.  You shouldn’t have to collect the story in bits and pieces.  Let me guess, you’ll find a snippet of a private conversation between Dr. Emmerich and Dr. Strangelove before the Ground Zeroes mission sitting in a pile of horse shit in a back alley in Afghanistan?  And the other tape will be miles away during a different mission, in the back pocket of a POW.  What’s the point?  Is this how we’re going to end up with 400+ hours of “gameplay” and a massive online hunt for data?

Honestly, it’s clever of Kojima to force us to discover the story, since games like Dark Souls have proven that people actually try to understand things when you don’t spoon feed it to them (and thus become “preachy”).  But cassette tapes still feels like an uncreative and sloppy way of handling it.

I suggest you read the full interview.

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