Games

Return to Metal Gear Solid

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One upside of it being the weekend and not spending all of it working on computer shit, is I finally get to dip my hands in the new Steam releases that just dropped early this week.

Metal Gear Solid is a game that I greatly enjoyed, but never really got all the way through since I had to borrow my brother’s copy. I haven’t played the original ‘Solid in about twenty years.

Breezing through the really short VR training pre-amble to see just how rusty I am, was a great feeling. Nailed most on the first go, just had to remember the speed difference between crawl and run. making it through the docks in the beginning in complete stealth was certainly better than I ever did as a kid when the game came out in 1999.

I really got into Metal Gear Solid after the dedicated VR Training missions disc was released. Out of 300 training missions, I think I had completed somewhere into the upper two hundreds. Basically everything except for the more challenging time attacks. In particular, I was fond of the simulations where you’re given a handful of weapons and get very creative in eliminating enemies that far out numbered the ammunition provided. Those were always the more fun “Who dares, wins!” simulations that left you breathing hard and finding unique ways to make the most of things. I guess, it would prepare me for how many times I’ve been jokingly told I have a roll of duct tape and a aluminum foil, only to have to make a satellite dish in twenty minutes 😋.

Curious about how well my memory has held up after twenty years. Good enough to be wandering around B2 thinking m “Hey, aren’t there claymores or C4 to kill you if you’re careless here? Ahh, it was pit traps. C4s for the walls.” Someways after the tank battle is where my recollections of the first game becomes more derivatives from reading the strategy guide twenty years ago rather than how far I got.

Metal Gear Solid 2 was the first in the series that I completed, and aside from the fun times mugging sentries for their dog tags aside, was enough of a trek that I don’t have as much interest in revisiting it as the first. Particularly due to some of the more annoying boss battles like chasing a fat man on roller skates around as he plays mad bomber.

Metal Gear Solid 3 is the one that truly impacted me, and thus, I’m very much looking forward to the upcoming remake. If they basically made the game the same thing but in the engine from MGS 5 and modern textures, I’d be happy.

In the mean time I’m enjoying the trip back to 1999s original entry in the Solid series of Metal Gear games. As such a fan of Big Boss, it’s especially a nice contrast revisiting it with Solid Snake and Meryl at the focal point.

In MGS, Snake is already the legend who defeated Big Boss twice and lived. We all know his attitudes and that reality always kills your expectations, if they’re not driven by the results. Meryl makes quite the foil, as the naive rookie yet to find her own path. It’s a dramatic contrast from Big Boss, whose naïveté paints the story of how his innocence is lost in MGS 3: Snake Eater, as he’s forced to define his own meaning to what it means to be loyal to the end. Becoming both the hero and the villain of future Metal Gear games.

A good first

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Today’s the first time outside of gaming contexts that I’ve encountered someone familiar with Metal Gear Solid. Wow, it’s only taken about 20 to 25 years….lol

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apple.news/AVAP-6DioT_6a-0AxiaDpyA

For some reason this just makes me remember an old post I read a zillion years ago, about you know your game is in trouble when X. In many cases, it was when some department came back asking are you sure the product is in 3D? — yeah, it was that long ago.

But the part that stuck was one quip, where people were standing around testing and noticed the face of Jesus Christ when looking at the wall textures. And no one had intentionally done it, it just kind of happened. Out of perhaps a few hundred posts (tweets wouldn’t exist for many years yet 😜), that one was kind of hard to top.

MicroSD cards

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When I decided to grab a Steam Deck during the last sale, I opted to take advantage of the opportunity to get the 512 GB model rather than my default choice of the 256 GB. Overall this has worked out pretty well, since most of the games I’m more inclined to play laying in bed or sacrifice the power of 4 pounds of RTX for portability’s sake, on the whole tend to be on the smaller side. That is to say under 35 GB and often closer to under 10 GB.

On my Xbox One, aka Deathstar One, I’m used to the peasy 500 GB of storage being augmented by 3 to 4 TB of platter drives. Which made things a lot more roomy over the years as typical game sizes started to spring past 60 GB and toward 90 GB and beyond.

So much in the same way, the Steam Deck’s 512 GB of storage is rather small one you start loading larger games in the over 60 GB club. With about 200 GB of the 460-something GB capacity filled, I think this is a fair trade off between capacity and affordability. The 256 GB model, I suspect would feel pretty tight once you load modern “Big assed” video games on the device.

Effectively, I’m straddling the line between not having to care and needing to pay attention to what I install. For example a few more recent games the size of dual and quad layer Blu-ray discs, and I’d have cause to manage storage but for games measured in terms of CD-ROM or a few single or dual layer DVD, there’s enough capacity to be well stocked for a nice vacation.

I’ve been meaning to take a look at the cost of larger MicroSD cards since getting the ‘Deck. When I came across yet-another Best microSD Cards for Steam Deck article, I decided to take a gander since it would likely recommend larger cards. Then I realized a nice 512 GB microSD card cost about as much as the handful of 64 GB cards I bought a year or two ago, as a mixture of refitting vintage computers with non vintage SCSI/IDE drives and restocking my pool of memory cards for random Raspberries.

Racking up pretty nice results in Amorphous Disk Mark, I can’t help but think if SD slots weren’t as rare as they are, at these prices I’d start using the smaller sizes as modern floppy disks for those times I don’t feel like busting out my external NVMe to USB-C drive :D.

SIGNALIS – Survival Horror Done Awesomely

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It’s relatively rare that a contemporary game invokes so much feeling of games like Resident Evil or Dino Crisis, yet don’t become overly difficult or annoying. Much less, one that tends to have a more entailing story than DooM or Zombie Master.

SIGNALIS on the other hand….wow. Not really into the pixel art inspired style, but I love the choice of a quasi top down twin stick approach (and tank controls for you gluttons out there). It even tickles my inner wonders for how much our future has in common with Blade Runner.

By and large though, I think SIGNALIS is the closest I’ve experienced to the original Resident Evil since the original Resident Evil and its Director’s Cut on the original PlayStation. One thing I also love, is that it draws a similar balance: there is plenty of opportunity to prefer running past and dodging the monsters out to eat^H^H^H slice your face off, and a fair enough supply of ammunition to shoot your way out of hostile situations. But both talents are advised given the ratio of enemies and ammunition. You can run past or blast most enemies, but certainly not all the enemies.

While the door animations thing in RE was somewhere between dull after its zillionth door more than suspenseful, the occasional first personification of puzzles and certain environments are neat. Somehow it manages to invoke both that classic survival horror genre “What the fuck am I supposed to do with this?” along with keeping it simple enough that the back tracking is not extreme, and like good ol’ RE, often if you explore everywhere it’s likely that some clue or solution will eventually present itself.

Being a fan of Metal Gear Solid, I also rather loved the radio frequencies bit :).

Since the games use of German exceeds my limited ability at reading it, and I’m unable to read the occasional Chinese characters that pop up; I’m also quite happy that the game manages to be quite friendly to those of us who can’t read All The Things ™ in the art language and need translation; or at least, with some effort there is usually enough English available that it isn’t a problem. More often you’ll be asking yourself what can you do in a puzzle than needing to worry about translation.

Also, did I mention it was great fun? Well, at least if you enjoyed some of the survival horror games around the turn of the millennium.

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Even with the M2 Pro, Mac gaming is as bad as it’s ever been – MacWorld

An interesting subject, and one that I find amusing in some ways.

You see, there is exactly one reason I maintain a Windows machine at home. DirectX based video games that are only released for Windows. Otherwise, I would have switched to BSD and Linux based machines eons ago. By now, I’d also have dropped the desktop form factor if it wasn’t for the ten pounds of GTX problem.

With Rimuru’s recent motherboard replacement, I was left without my gaming desktop. Fortunately the games I was most playing at the time (Subnautica: Below Zero and Subnautica) have 64-bit Intel versions that my Air can play under Rosetta 2. In Below Zero’s case, it’s even a really good experience.

But there’s a reason why I consider the Macintosh a joke of a gaming platform, and this article nailed the crux of it: there’s just a few games! This problem until recent years, was also shared by GNU/Linux and even that is still an on going concern IMHO.

The comparison between a beefy Mac mini and a comparably priced gaming PC, is about what you would expect. Dollar to the pound, as nice as Apple Silicon is, it can’t out perform a dedicated Windows gaming machine — which will have both the games, and be at the forefront of developer’s optimization and quality assurance (lol) processes. I think it’s kind of awesome how capable Apple’s GPUs are, and let’s be fair, if you really do prefer a Mac, the price difference may be worth it to you versus a PC. Good financial sense, not likely, but to each their own tastes in technology.

What really doesn’t have a solution is the games. Using my own Steam library as an example, about 1/5th support macOS — and most are simply not possible to run because they require support for 32-bit Intel apps. Ones I’ve tried on my M2 MacBook Air, have left me impressed with the performance of Rosetta 2 for running 64-bit Intel apps. 

This is about the same amount of my Steam library that is Verified compatible with Valve’s Steam Deck. If we expand the criteria to “Verified and Playable”, Steam Deck is compatible with half my library. Include those that are simply untested, and the search selector suggests that 80% of my collection can at least “Attempt” being run on a Steam Deck. Those numbers are likely skewed a bit thanks to Renpy and various indy things that are more inclined to offer Linux binaries for 64-bit Intel.

That doesn’t even consider that Steam’s own app has superb quality on Windows, is meant to be the focal point of SteamDeck’s UI, and that on macOS it really has an “Valve also ran” grade of hit and miss quality issues. You won’t love Steam on macOS unless Valve makes it a significantly higher priority, and there is little reason they should when it’s most useful on Mac for streaming games from a PC!

MacWorld on the other hand makes an interesting case for investment. Apple has a lot of money at present; for years, they’ve fit the demographic I dub “More money than GOD”. I’m not sure if Apple simply bribing publishers and developers to support macOS is legally wise, but boy, that would be an interesting idea.

Sadly, I don’t think Macintosh has offered a lot for games since floppy diskette was the prime distribution media. And even then, I would probably have been inclined to explore CP/M and MS-DOS coprocessor options if such things weren’t comically out of our price range back then. Actually, I still have no idea how my mother afforded a Tandy 1000 series PC in the first place :^o.

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One of the things I rather like about Subnautica: Below Zero is that it’s a fairly safe environment to explore but not devoid of dangers. Mostly though, its predators are more a nuisance to navigation than a major threat once you’ve crafted a knife or a sea glide. The crocodile like things in warmer waters, for example, will mostly flee if you bop them with the blade and largely stick to their personal territory. After building the drill arm for my P.R.A.W.N. mech suit, I figured out that you can actually eliminate these.

And then there’s the leviathan class predators. Mostly those are classified as apex predators, those I typically choose to avoid. But some are more pragmatic than others.

The ~40 meter or so Chelicerate are large enough to tell from squid sharks by the time time you want to mossy along. Avoiding becoming a snack is always a good plan. An initial attempt at neutralizing one of these that proved too aggressive did not go very well. Attempting to rope it with the grappling arm and drill the sucker while avoiding its teeth, ended with nearly being chucked into a cave near the edge of the tree spires. Round two was more like being dragged into open ocean and ended in a draw. Glaring at each other while repairing my equipment on the other side of a vent garden.

Mostly though, I’ve managed to avoid those. But then the search for story items sent me to the purple crystal caves, where I previous decided to return to base after the heads up of a particularly large leviathan class predator in the area. Joy.

Well, good old “Claw Face” is a very aggressive bastard about ~60 meters long. The Shadow leviathan is like some kind of cockroach slash snake from hell with all the peaceful happy feelings of Darth Vader. Attempt to explore the caves and it will try to eat you. Drive it off for a moment’s reprieve and it will quickly circle back for another attack run. Since the area isn’t conductive to swimming and just about any kind of noise and activity will attract it, it’s less a nuisance and more of an obstacle!

Acquiring the Torpedo Arm for my P.R.A.W.N. and the docking module to haul it by Sea Truck, I decided on an experiment to see if these things can die. Unloading over a dozen poison gas torpedoes did little more than piss it off, and I was forced to retreat and rebuild. For round two, thanks to a big of foraging and the assistance of the Sea Monkey Army, I returned with nearly twenty poison gas torpedoes and over half a magazine of gravity vortex torpedoes.

Found a nice little nook where it’s possible to retreat and repair, while hoping not to be snatched and ate hole. Attracted its attention with the drill arm and jets and made for a second bout. Unloaded all the torpedoes. More than a few of them down its gullet along side the drill arm. Again, and again, and again it shrugged this off. I probably would have withdrawn and declared it mission failure, if ol’ Claw Face didn’t tend to cycle back and try to EAT me while repair tooling my mech suit.

In the end, I was standing on the edge of my nook, waiting for Claw Face to swoop in for the kill and using a mixture of drill arm and mech-punches. Eventually, I switched to punching with both standard arms as this seemed to drive it off much faster. One attack run would do about 30% damage to my P.R.A.W.N, and it might return before repairs were completed. It took about a battery and a half of this, punching the crap out of it after unloading two dozen torpedoes. 30-40 minutes, but finally the thing died. I wonder if it healed from the first wave.

In any case, when the player has 100 HP and the leviathans have 5000 HP, it takes quite a lot of punches in the face to kill something that orny with fifty times your health!

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Dusting off DooM ’93 for a refreshing break, I managed to leisurely make it through most of episode 2 before my watch reminded me that I should in fact, get off my fat butt and walk around a bit.

I’m well reminded of how the map designers were often out to get the player. E2M6: Halls of the damned has a rather obtuse layout by modern norms but really good flow for a DooM map. Magic closets unleashing enemies are kind of overused, but it’s a pretty nice map.

On DoomMaps: we can see a fair look at the various curves and bends that funnel you towards monsters.

Having survived the dance of shotguns between mobs, painted the halls in plasma and exploding lost souls, and said screw it and chainsawed through hordes of Pinkies, I eventually came across a second exit door guarded by the yellow skull key. It’s been long enough since I’ve played episode 2 that I had no real recollection of this, but of course by that point in the map I was really not surprised when this turns out to be a fake exit door leading to Cacodemons, shotgun guys, lost souls, and other things making the back of my mind shout, “PLASMA, PLASMA!!!”

Confession: when the closet full of demons opened up on the way back to the real exit door, I opted to whip out the chainsaw in order to conserve my plasma cells and chaingun bullets for E2M7.

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One of the reasons that I love choice-based adventure games is that it offers opportunities for both introspection and escape. Will you put yourself into context, or will you role-play a part? Games like Detroit: Become Human and House of Ashes offer much opportunity for both.

In my experience, choices in games tend to reflect me. Not purely the role of the character or an artificial mentality. Actually, I think it would be neat to see statistics about how players respond to such games.
Become Human is even more thoughtful than most because of the issue of Android rights and revolution. I love that the story keeps making you evaluate this. Do you thrash the square, or do you send a message of civil disobedience? Do you respond to violence and injustice with justice and violence, or do you believe an eye for an eye is how the world goes blind? When things heat up will you stick to what you believe or evaluate. Where will you draw the point of no return? I found the point following the fall of Jericho especially pointed.
Thinking about my play through, I do think that as I get older that I am becoming more of a pacifist at heart. I believe that conflict will exist as long as humanity does, but I also see there is so much protentional in our species. Hopefully, if someday our creations become alive as we are, they will learn the right things from us.
Note: Spoilers below.
An earlier version of myself would likely have opted for revolution after the fall of Jericho. On the notion of social justice, it’s certainly a difficult point where you need to decide which side of the line you’ll land on. Even for peaceful people, turning it into an android revolution may be a valid response to the situation. Of all the choices in the game, I found that probably the hardest to make.
Choosing to march the Androids down to the recall camps and sit, demanding freedom wasn’t something that I would have imagined. Choosing to sing at the Android’s last stand as execution closes in lead to a beautiful ending. I love that the game doesn’t necessarily turn it into a brutal moment rather than one of hope and humanity. A path that says much about both mankind and the androids.
On the prospect that someday our machines could one day become alive rather than simply automatons, I kind of hope whatever our creations learn from mankind: it’ll be a lesson of hope. That, and for us humans to be wise enough not to repeat our own mistakes instead of rise above them.