Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain - Not a hero, just an old killer

It's the pain you feel from a once-great franchise that isn't there anymore!

Of all the games due to come out this year, none filled me with as potent a mix of excitement and apprehension as Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. The first Metal Gear Solid may be my favorite game of all time, and Snake Eater is not far behind. Even Metal Gear Solid 2, easily the worst among the first four main MGS titles, is a great game in its own right.

The last few years, however, have not been so kind to the franchise. The last good Solid game was MGS4 in 2008, and even that had a trainwreck of a second ending which sullied the whole experience. Since then we've had Peace Walker, the "nice try" of the series, and Ground Zeroes, which was almost universally reviled due to it lasting just under two hours, having no plot and, scandalously for a Metal Gear game, no boss fights. The idea of combining these two games in an open-world setting, which nowadays usually means diluting the narrative in favor of a string of boring, rote sidequests, did not seem like one worth looking forward to.

Sadly, The Phantom Pain does not exceed expectations, nor does it fulfill its creators' stated intention of maturing the series. In its rush to distance itself from its predecessors, it forgot to forge an identity of its own. The result is a game that is not only bad at being Metal Gear Solid, but which also fails to be a particularly interesting version of anything else, driven down by a misguided desire to be edgy and an abundance of corporate greed.

Remember, this is a sneaking mission! Nah, just kidding

The Phantom Pain picks up Big Boss' story 9 years after the events of Ground Zeroes, and it wastes no time getting into it. After the obligatory tutorial scene, you face gas-masked soldiers a la the first Half-Life, a floating, psychic, gas-masked child (there's a lot of gas masks in this game for some reason), and a man made of fire. There's fighting, sneaking, car crashes, a chase on horseback - so exciting! So much action! Man, I can't wait to see everything they've thought up for this game!

And then you sneak into a base to rescue a guy. Then you sneak into another base to kidnap a guy. Sneak into a base to get intel. Sneak into a base to maybe kidnap several guys. Maybe you find out that you can't rescue the guy you wanted to rescue. Maybe you thought you snuck into the base but ah, the big bad knew you were there all along, and know he has a speech prepared to read out to you. It's the same same thing repeated ad nauseam until the game finally decides to throw you a bone and show you a cutscene to break up the monotony. It gets even worse later in the game, when you are forced to literally repeat past missions to unlock further parts of the story.

But this repetition is not only bad for the player, as it also serves to expose The Phantom Pain's broken mechanics. The basics are the same as in Ground Zeroes: you can sneak past guards, or if you prefer, take them out silently, either before or after interrogating them. Non-lethal knockouts are possible, but recovering soldiers will alert their buddies to the fact that something is afoot. As usual for MGS, killing enemies is discouraged mostly through score penalties at the end of the mission, but non-lethal is the more enjoyable way to play the game. Another holdover from GZ is reflex mode, where upon being discovered, you enter what is essentially bullet time, giving you a chance to take out an opponent before he alerts the entire base to your presence. I find that it only serves to further dilute the stealth element of the game, but it's harmless enough, for a very simple reason: the stealth in this game is complete nonsense.

Initially, you might be tempted to be very slow and methodical, riding slowly on horseback, hiding from enemies by clinging to the opposite side of the horse (which, admittedly, is a cool mechanic), scanning the base for the best route in and slowly working your way through, memorizing the guards' patrol patterns as you go. The game can be quite challenging when played this way, especially if, like me, you play MGS without killing, knocking out or alerting anyone, and as such, you might find yourself repeating certain sections quite a few times. That's when you start looking for shortcuts, and upon doing that, you realize the enemies in this game are deaf, dumb and blind (dumb as in stupid - they can talk just fine).

In most cases, you can easily run all the way to a base's outer wall undetected. If you run right next to an enemy, they'll hear you, but otherwise, feel free to run around the desert in plain sight of the guards. The enemies' hearing problems get downright creative at times: I once managed to sneak into a prison cell past a guard, but then couldn't find an opening to sneak back out. Luckily, the game allows you to throw empty magazines to draw guards away from their positions. I meant to throw a magazine far past the guard to make him go investigate, but my angle was bad and the magazine instead hit the ceiling and fell down - prompting the guard to go up one floor, thinking that the noise came from up there. This was shortly after I managed to sneak past a guard who was 15 meters away from me - just under 50 feet - by crawling on the ground in broad daylight. Not that the guard didn't see anything: he looked, said "huh?", moved in to check closer, and then determined that he was just seeing things.

Luckily, stealth can be safely ignored, and often should be, seeing as its faults can work against you almost as often as they work for you. With your impressive arsenal of weapons, armed combat is a piece of cake. In fact, even without any weapons, you should be OK. I was once detected by four machine gun-toting soldiers who were quite far apart, and I managed to run up to each one and knock him out with my bare hands. A lot of people complain that MGS4 felt too much like a shooter, but I guarantee you that if you run up to a group of enemies with machine guns in that game, you're dead.

That wouldn't be so bad if TPP wasn't an especially mediocre and uninvolved take on the genre. By the penultimate story mission, you will find yourself marking your enemies with your uncanny ability to forever keep track of anyone you have ever seen, instructing your sniper companion to take down wave after wave of enemy tanks and even calling in full-blown airstrikes, wondering what happened to your Metal Gear Solid and why you're wasting your time on this vapid power fantasy when you could just go play Far Cry 3 or Black Ops II and have a much better time.

It's awesome when you get that puppy, though

Speaking of the companions, let me be very clear - they're awesome. Each companion in The Phantom Pain is not only immensely likable, but also useful in its own way. D-Horse is good for getting around quickly undetected, D-Walker is good for a speedy getaway with some serious firepower, and D-Dog - well, D-Dog is just the best. I love D-Dog. My best moments in TPP were spent petting D-Dog and looking at how beautifully rendered his fur is. Other than being cute, he can also detect enemies from some distance and distract them, making him the best way to keep the game enjoyable for those who, like me, insist on playing stealthily.

And then, there's the aforementioned sniper, Quiet. Once she's recruited, the game is basically over, because Quiet can take down an entire base before anyone knows what's up. In fact, she's almost a must if you want to take down one of the bosses non-lethally, and then your role reduces to running around to compensate for the time it takes her to reload. She's also one of the most egregious example of sexual objectification I can recall in any media, walking around in what is essentially a bikini, because - get this - she has to breathe through her skin. It's obviously nothing more than an excuse to have her walk around half-naked, never mind the fact that no one questions why, if she needs to have as much skin exposed as possible to breathe, she doesn't just shave her head. That wouldn't be considered all that sexy, I guess. It's a shame, because a more well-rounded and far less exploitative portrayal could have made her into a great character. Instead, we have moments of attempted drama constantly interrupted by childish attempts at titillation.

This is the conflict at the heart of The Phantom Pain's narrative issues, and while sexism is a large part of it, it is by no means its only manifestation. Putting aside the futility of trying to make a mature game in a series where we fight robot ninjas, giant mechs and photosynthetic old men, TPP's main problem is that it tries to act grown up while still retaining all of its childish prejudice. TPP confronts you with shocking image after shocking image, trying so hard to impress you with its po-faced, brooding facade, just to piss away what little atmosphere it managed to build up by having Quiet literally shove her butt in your face the very next moment.

It doesn't help that both the usually witty and likable Snake as well as the over the top, maniacal Ocelot barely say anything in this game, and what little they say is said with as little emotion as possible, because you know - maturity. Add that to the fact that both, along with Miller, affect the same low-end growling voice in all of the many, many useless codec conversations that they partake in, and you get a cast of characters that is not only impossible to like, but mostly hard to even tell apart, a problem that is compounded by the insane amount of datalogs, which contain most of the game's dialogue (and by the way, no, I don't consider datalogs to be plot).

One of the most cringe-worthy moments in the original Metal Gear Solid is when Snake asks Meryl how she managed to sneak a gun past some guards, and she answers that "women have more hiding places than men". When a similar comment is made during the ending of Ground Zeroes, the silly and stupid sexism of the past graduates to full-blown misogyny. There's nothing more juvenile than a child trying to prove its maturity to the world, and The Phantom Pain's hateful exploitation of women is but the final blow to the plot's credibility.

And of course, microtransactions

Not long after The Phantom Pain was released, we learned that an entire act is missing from the game, presumably due to considerations of development time and budget. Don't worry, though: the game does contain a multiplayer mode that absolutely no one asked for, complete with microtransactions that will allow you to build your base up faster and, in an amazingly shameless act, recover soldiers and equipment that enemies make off with - the closest thing to date to a game trying to squeeze protection money from its players.

The outright theft of a third of the game isn't even the worst effect of the multiplayer mode: it is the way the pretense of running a base interferes with the single-player campaign. It makes you grind to get certain types of equipment, wait around for said equipment to be developed, and in general forces upon you an overly-complicated and annoying base management system that stops the game dead at several points. By the time TPP was drawing to an end, I was hoping someone would destroy Mother Base again just so I could be liberated from this trite, aggravating micro-management.

Mired in myopic cynicism and utterly contemptuous of its fan base and legacy, The Phantom Pain feels like a game that knows all too well that it will never have a sequel. It may be popular now, and of course, I am more than happy for the people who enjoy it. However, I do not expect history to see it in quite as positive a light.

Score Calculation: In its own right, The Phantom Pain is a slightly above-average third-person open-world shooter, earning it a score of 6 for being a well-executed version of an extremely worn-out idea. However, with an entire act missing, it is in reality only two-thirds of a game, taking the score down to 4. It gets a point for having the best dog in any video game ever, but I'm gonna have to knock two points for its abuse of the Metal Gear Solid name and for Quiet's starting outfit, leaving us with

Final Score: 3

Verdict: Like Silent Hill 4, the fourth season of Community and the prequel trilogy before it, we sentence The Phantom Pain to be that part of the series that we skip over during marathons. Its name forever to follow the word "except" when mentioning one's love for the franchise during a discussion of favorite video games, TPP typifies what happens when talent fails to match ambition and natural evolution is substituted with caprice, all topped off with healthy dose of AAA-developer cynicism.

Game Review: Gone Home

Gone Home is one of those games that was bound to be divisive. In a gaming world populated almost entirely by open-world shooters - seriously, go check on Wikipedia how many of the best-rated games of recent years are "open world action-adventure" - it's a highly non-standard gaming experience, and the themes (or rather, theme) that it explores are none too popular among mainstream gamers. Despite that, Gone Home seems to have gotten a lot of praise from major gaming websites, which is when you should start getting suspicious.

Before I start the review, let me tell you that I was pretty heavily biased when I started playing this game, although in two different directions. On the one hand, I really wanted to like this game. I want games to be innovative; I want them to help loosen patriarchy's grip on gaming; most of all, I have nothing but the deepest respect for the Fullbright Company, GH's developers, for coming out publicly against some particularly disgusting sexism on the side of the organizers of PAX. On the other hand, I always knew I would end up hating this game. Every single review I've read of it made it clear that you basically do nothing in this game but go around a house and read things, and I hate nothing more than a low-budget movie pretending to be a game.

Gone Home puts you in the role of Katie, a woman who comes back to her parents' home from a year in Europe and finds the house completely empty. Instead of doing what every other 20-something year-old would do at this point and invite everyone you know for a keg party, Katie decides to explore the house and uncover what happened, reading notes and listening to audio logs (somehow) left by Katie's sister Sam in order to piece together what happened. Basically, take Bioshock Infinite with nothing but voxophones and way worse graphics and you get Gone Home.

I'm not going to have any spoilers in this review, but it already says a lot that there really isn't all that much to spoil. The plot is so unoriginal and predictable that I could call the whole story from 5 minutes into the game. Seriously, after the first 2-3 audio logs, anyone with even the most cursory knowledge of 90s pop culture should immediately know pretty much what the ending is going to be, and this game almsot prides itself on its abuse of 90s pop culture icons, complete with whole cassettes of crappy 90s music spread throughout the house. The predictability of the plot makes trudging around for clues all the more unmotivated, and if I were Katie, I'd seriously be working on that keg party by now.

But seriously, that's it - you go around, reading notes, listening to audio logs and - if you're into that insuffarable alt-rock or wannabe-punk of yesteryear - play cassettes. There's no gameplay and no sophistication. Then I realized that I used to play games like this all the time - back in the 90s, there was a deluge of point-and-click adventure games, and everyone dug the hell out of them. Sure, they were nothing to write home about (get it?), but they were a fun distraction for a few hours, had some cool puzzles and often some very intelligent and funny dialogue and characters. Gone Home is basically a modernization of that genre, except it has no characters, boring as hell dialogue, and 3 of the world's most trivial puzzles. It is a point-and-click in the spirit of the worst, laziest representatives of the genre, which had you basically clicking on everything in sight until somethign happened (e.g. Phantasmagoria 2).

Gone Home received a lot of praise for its attention to detail, and yes, you can pick up and examine almost every item in the house, and it's clear that the developers put a lot of time and effort into making sure that the items you look feel real and distinct. But if anything, I'd say there's way too much attention to detail. It's never clear what's important and what isn't, and when you can pick up and look at every pen, eraser and book in the house, it's just too much. It's a classic rookie mistake in basically every form of art that it's amazing to me that no one has called the game out on this. When you make everything stick out, nothing sticks out, and the whole games becomes a big pile of nothing.

Sam's voice acting is pretty good, though not without its weak moments - at some point, Sam tells about a kiss she had, and then proceeds to unleash the most stereotypically girly giggle I ever heard in my life. It is such a weak moment, especially given how it clashes with Sam's portrayal as a brave girl who, from early on, resisted attempts to peg her into a traditional gender role. Most of all, I am seriously bothered by how meta the concept of the audio logs is. Unlike other games that employ them, there are no physical devices that contain the logs, so all you can conclude is that these are just diary entries by Sam that are being read out. But if Sam is so desperate to hide the full story from Katie -  as the game clearly tells you she is several times - why the hell did she go to such lengths to record it for her and leave clues as to the location of the records? Why make Katie go through all of this reading and exploring? The whole basic concept of the game just smacks of lazy design.

I mentioned that there are a few puzzles in the game. Actually, only one really deserves to be called a puzzle, and even that one only reveals the ending to a subplot - you don't need it to beat the game. The first one was particularly disappointing - you need to find a combination to a drawer lock, and I was looking around for clues, looking for combinations that were mentioned often, and I was so excited to try it on the lock. It didn't work. I decided to go back for it, only to go a bit further and see a combination clearly written on one of the items in the next room - a combination which had nothing to do with anything in the game. And this is one of your three puzzles, mind you - the only times in the game where you, the player, are actually needed.

Also, this is a minor point, but I have to mention this - why are there so many things in the game written in cursive? I mean, I know a lot of native English speakers can read and write in cursive pretty fluently, but even then it's not everyone. Why the hell would you force me to read so much cursive? It's so painful, so straining. The Last of Us had a lot of stuff in cursive, but guess what? You could push a button and get a typed version of the same text, which makes sense given that your character probably knows how to read cursive. Gone Home even does this at one point, but then, for some inexplicable reason, some of the most important documents in the game are this huge page of cursive with no typed version. Seriously, Fullbright, I love you people and all, but screw you with all this cursive.

Don't get me wrong, there are some very nice moments in this game. I really cracked a smile in the part where Sam talks about this kid she hated, but was friends with because "he always had the best Nintendo games". Another good one is when you see Katie and Sam's answers to a school assignment, in which students were given a list of sentences describing menstruation and had to rearrange them in the correct order. Katie just followed the instructions; Sam interspersed them with a story about a woman who rebels against oppressive societal norms and becomes a leader in the Polish in WWII. It really does a great job of building up Sam's character, though like I said, this portrayal is hardly consistent.

Lastly, I can't finish this review without saying anything about the game's price. This game takes at most two and a half hours to finish, and that's if you read everything, do everything, and examine everything. You can probably finish it in under an hour if you power through it. And yet, the developers had the nerve, the outright gall, to ask 20$ for this game. 20$! Do you have any idea what PC games you could get for 20$? You could get both Deus Ex and System Shock 2 on Steam for less than that, and have 30-40 of the best gaming hours of your life (both games, by the way, have better graphics than Gone Home). Hell, you can probably get some of the most awesome 3DS games for 20$, and you'd have a ball without having to get out of bed. 20$ for this non-game with zero replay value? Shame. Shame!

So, bottom line: don't get this game. It's so not worth your money. It is borderline offensive in asking for so much money for so little game. Just watch the Let's Play on YouTube - you'll get the same experience without getting ripped off. The only possible reason I could think of to buy this game would be to have Fullbright's back given their stand on PAX, but I'd like to believe you can be a progressive and still give people a product worth their money. But that's just me.

Tarantino and Israeli Movies

I'm working on the post I promised to write, but I have to take a break to comment on a story that's probably not going to interest a lot of people, but I feel like I can't just ignore it. I'm talking about Quentin Tarantino endorsing an Israeli movie by the name of Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf (מי מפחד מהזאב הרע), which is one of the worst movies I've ever seen.

First of all, let me get this out of the way: I despise Tarantino and his movies. I didn't use to have anything against Tarantino himself: honestly, I found Pulp Fiction to be passable at best, and I seriously think that any attempt to make movies like Kill Bill out to be anything other than dimwitted exploitation is just people kidding themselves. But up to that point, it wasn't personal. Everyone is free to like bad movies. Hell, I love How High and the Friday trilogy, so who am I to say anything.

But then Tarantino made two movies that were so offensive to me, I just couldn't take it anymore. I'm talking about Inglorious Bastards and Django Unchained. To be honest with you, I haven't watched either one all the way through: I tried watching IB about 4 times, and could never get through the halfway point, because this movie is SO GODDAMN BORING. Say what you will about Friday, at least you wanted to see how Craig and Smokey are going to get out of trouble. Who could possibly care about Tarantino's cartoon characters?

But that's not the worst part of it. The worst part is that Tarantino, in both cases, was seeking to exploit some of the worst human tragedies in history to make another stupid gore-fest. Like Spike Lee said, Tarantino was trying to make out slavery to be a Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. He tried to do basically the same thing to the holocaust in IB.

The thing is, I seriously believe Tarantino is actively trying to offend people at this point. After Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs, I guess he realized that critics and pretentious movie snobs will praise basically any movie he puts out, and that's when he started basing all his movies on splattering blood. After a while, he thought "you know, I bet I could poke fun at the holocaust and get away with it too". And how right was he - Israeli Jews were actually stupid enough to invite him over so they could personally kiss his ass. "OK guys", he then said, "I know what I'll do next - make light of slavery!" "Oh no, Quentin, you'll never get away with that." "Oh you just watch me." And the crazy thing? Yeah, he got away with it for the most part.

My dislike of all things Tarantino aside, I hated Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf from the day I watched it, which was probably less than two weeks after it was released here. Israeli film critics were heaping praise on it, claiming that "it doesn't look like an Israeli movie", and they're right, insofar as the production values are actually pretty good for the most part. But that alone doesn't make a good movie. A good movie has to tell a story, has to be somewhat interesting, and it doesn't hurt if it's brave enough to discuss an issue that's somewhat taboo. Unfortunately, Bad Wolf is a cowardly and pointless movie.

Spoilers for the movie follow, although honestly, you're not going to watch it. The movie is about a middle-aged man by the name of Gidi (Tzahi Grad), kidnapping and torturing Dror (Rotem Keinan), who is under suspicion for kidnapping and murdering Gidi's daughter - based, by the way, on a rather ambiguous testimony by one other girl - to get him to confess and tell him where he buried parts of his daughter that were never found (I won't go into the specifics). Now, torture is a rather taboo subject in Israel, much more so than even in the US. Both the army as well as the secret service employ it regularly, and anyone who opposes that practice is widely considered to be a self-hating traitor. I'm actually bound to get a lot of hate mail just for pointing that out, but what the hell, right?

This means that the movie could really have done something brave and interesting by tackling the issue of torture, because Dror spends the entire movie denying he had anything to do with the girl's murder, up to the point where Gidi eventually kills him. But no. No one ever says anything about torture being wrong or ineffective in principle. The only thing that's in question is Dror's guilt, and the movie even manages to demolish that tiny bit of interest by showing us in the last scene that yeah, Dror actually did it. It's as if the directors were such blatant cowards that they had to say "hey, we know those torture scenes were gnarly, but don't worry- the guy deserved it!"

Another factor which makes this movie impossible to like is the presence of Lior Ashkenazi. Now, I have been bashing the movie a lot, but Grad and Keinan actually manage to turn in great performances. They're great actors who do the best that can be done with the god-awful writing (which often feels like someone tried to write something for an American cop show and then used Google translate to put it into this movie), and are unfortunately wasted here. Ashkenazi, on the other hand, is just a terrible actor. Throughout the movie, he has exactly one facial expression - a combination of "I'm a tough guy" and "I'm worried", which is probably an attempt to make it clear to us that his character is some tragic hero. It doesn't work, and for a hero, he sure acts like a scumbag vigilante for most of the movie, who basically leaves Dror to die at the hand of a maniacal torturer.

The funny thing is, the creators seem to be somewhat conscious of what enormous cowards they are, so they have a Palestinian character on screen for a grand total of about 30 seconds, as if to say "hey look, an Arab. You know, because this is a movie about torture." I am willing to bet good money that in one of the earlier drafts, the guy had a much bigger role, and was only left in the movie so that there would be an argument for it not being a complete cop out. 'Cause otherwise, the guy is completely redundant as far as the plot goes.

I could go on about how much this movie sucks and all the ridiculous, pointless things about it. I think you get the message, though. I'll finish with this thought: there's a saying in academia that first-rate people hire first-rate people, while second-rate people hire third-rate people, and third-rate people hire fifth-rate people. Tarantino is a second-rate movie director praising a third-rate movie, and I dread to think what garbage will start receiving praise next.