Holy Shit Death Stranding is beautiful nonsense

[thisismyusername]

https://twitter.com/Andr92226211/status/1200052020293582848

[Svejk]

Finally finished chapter 3!  . Can't wait to play more tonight!  .  Loving this game even more.

[chronovore]

pls don't terminate me

You and me? We're fine, chap! 

[chronovore]

TFW your bullshit is called out by a manager at Der Wienerschnitzel.

[Raist]

pls don't terminate me

You and me? We're fine, chap! 

 

spoiler (click to show/hide)

Now where's my goddam pocket money

[close]

[Let's Cyber]

Despite enjoying aspects of Death Stranding, I'm really grateful Silent Hills didn't happen in retrospect. Man what a fucking incoherent mess that would have been and the tone would have been nothing like the  Team Silent games.

[thisismyusername]

I mean, compared to post-Team Silent titles would that have been a bad thing?

AKA: Compare Downpour/et. al. past 4 to it/PT.

[Don Rumata]

Silent Hills had to die.
Kojima pimping his famous buddies over fucking Team Silent members (who have been put on janitorial duties in Konami's basements) to make the big comeback, was a cunt move through and through.
I mean he went on and got fucking Junji Ito for the monster design, when Masahiro Ito, who basically created the visual design of the series, has been begging to come back to it for years. 

BTW you should follow Ito on Twitter, he posted a lot of interesting behind the scene on the series.

[Let's Cyber]

I mean, compared to post-Team Silent titles would that have been a bad thing?

AKA: Compare Downpour/et. al. past 4 to it/PT.

You're right, It would have been a better game than those post-SH4 games for sure.

It also would have been a narrative mess and not much to do with Silent Hill. Even PT didn't feel like SH at all. He needed a new IP for his ideas. I have a feeling he just would have tried to glob some of these DS concepts on to SH rather than make a SH game with a Kojima twist. Some of the core concepts in DS aren't that different from Metal Gear Survive, TBH, which his old team just ran with. I think he's had a lot of these ideas rolling around in his head for a while even before shit went south with Konami.

[Spieler1]

The martyrdom around PT is idiotic and I can only imagine most Kojima sluts haven't actually played Silent Hill 1/2. Game would've been an absolutely terrible SH title under Kojima.

[thetylerrob]

The martyrdom around PT is idiotic and I can only imagine most Kojima sluts haven't actually played Silent Hill 1/2. Game would've been an absolutely terrible SH title under Kojima.

It's not even just Kojima sluts though, PT became a huge meme on reddit and youtube because of its rarity. I think Abby from Giantbomb said it's her favorite survival horror game ever which is  considering she did her first playthrough live on the internet and had the chat room giving her the answers to all of the "puzzles."

It's still funny to me that people think we missed out on something when the additional concept demo Kojima had made for Silent Hills was literally just hallways full of "boo! spooky monster!" It would have been interesting and unique, but it wouldn't have been a worthy follow-up to the original SH series.

[Rahxephon91]

I mean I think with Silent Hills people were excited more so at the fact that Kojima was making something not MGS, it was a seemingly AAA Silent Hill thing, it as a AAA console Japanese game, it was a Japanese Silent Hill, and the demo and people involved were liked. Not so much that it would have been inline with other SH games.

[Spieler1]

PT also had the luck of coming out at the right time. Shadow drops like that, particularly during bigger conferences, blow up much easier early in a gen, when there's no big selection of proper titles yet.

[kingv]

I always felt like PT would have been destined to be bigger than whatever Silent Hills would have ended up as. The gimmicks in that game played perfectly to the then peaking streaming and reacting culture of the internet that celebrated creepypasta. Most would have probably dropped it cause it wasn't PT.

I'm in the camp of being very glad Kojima never got to make Silent Hills cause goddamn are people throwing Team Silent and their incredible work under the bus crying over Norman Reedus, who btw is the weakest part of Death Stranding outside of a japanese IG thot. Kojima getting to make Death Stranding, a glorious mess story wise but fun as fuck videogame, instead of Silent Hills where his skillset would have been detrimental, is the best that could have came out of this situation. If dude wants to make a horror game still cool, do that without calling it Silent Hill and we're golden.

Is the ig thot the chiral artists daughter? Because she was awful.

The dude that you bring her to, I legit thought she was going to end up being his special needs daughter until the mission where you bring her.

spoiler (click to show/hide)

other than the bad acting I thought having them get divorced via emails later was really dumb. Sort of goes against the theme of the game, but didn’t really have any reason to have it be that way because they never seemed to do anything with that. The “oh this woman is driving me crazy” thing was fine enough until he’s like “oh we got divorced and she moved back to her moms. How did she even get there?!

[close]

I’m super close to the end of this and honestly, it’s one of my favorite games this gen. I acknowledge it’s flaws, but it’s better than the sum of its parts for me. The story is fairly dumb, but it has had some twists I didn’t see a mile away, and it’s engaging. And honestly... it’s more coherent than a lot of kojima’s games. I love metal gear solid but still couldn’t really explain the entire story to you. Because there’s so much confusing bullshit, and overlapping conspiracies, and this guy got mind controlled by this guy, and so on.

[kingv]

I think the visual design is pretty good, it’s interesting conceptually, and the general idea of the plot is not bad.

Honestly, many of the individual characters and their quirks are not bad either. They are just all written really poorly. I feel like if Kojima has a talented collaborator that wrote all of the dialogue and helped temper some of his worse ideas, the story could have been a lot better. After reading about his trials tribulations on the translation of MGS, I’m not sure he’d ever be interested in that though.

Still, video game stories in general are graded on a curve because very few of them are more than a perfunctory reason to go from point a to point b so any game that even tries is going to seem better than average.

I could see myself messing around with the game afterwards for a few more hours to see what the side content unlocks and complete some roads or zip line networks for fun... but I agree there’s not much reason to replay it. It’s not really that type of game.

Like, I can say I don’t necessarily ever need or want to play a game exactly like it again, even though I enjoyed it.

[Rahxephon91]

I'm nearing the end now and honestly, I'd rate this game pretty high.

It really comes into it's own after chapter 3.

[Nintex]

 

[bluemax]

PT is like one of those bands that gets popular due to good timing and not actual talent or whatever and then the lead singer ODs and dies so we don't get to see them flame out.

[chronovore]

 

spoiler (click to show/hide)

[close]

[Don Rumata]

PT is like one of those bands that gets popular due to good timing and not actual talent or whatever and then the lead singer ODs and dies so we don't get to see them flame out.

I mean it genuinely has some good ideas and some great scares, for what it is.
It's just not this revolutionary achievement outside of its marketing exploits.
And it's a bit sad that a lot of zoomers will associate Silent Hill more with it and Kojima, than any of the original games, but that is Konami's fault for making them almost impossible to obtain and run in 2019.

[Svejk]

Got to..

spoiler (click to show/hide)

the boss fight that initiates as soon as you start transporting Mama.  The difficulty for these bosses has certainly started to increase.  It got me and/or Mama a few times.  Kinda stupid that you have to put her down just to pick up anything else.   Finally defeated it with her being 96% damaged.     Came to find out that you can heal her at a hot spring.  Got to one and shared a hot tub scene with Mama...     Come to show Sam and Mama facing away from each other, 20 feet apart...  Mama does nothing to tease or anything... Very un-Kojima like...  Disappointing.      

[close]

Anywho, still enjoying this game...  It seems to be blooming into something that's definitely unique.

[kingv]

Damn, I never thought to do that with that. One thing I like about kojima is he takes the time to think about a whole lot of little touches like that.

[HardcoreRetro]

I just walked away. I did hurt her on purpose cause she's an awful character.

[Svejk]

I had to look it up, because I wasn't about to spend 45 minutes crossing country only to trip on a rock, kill her, and start over.  Fuck that.

[kingv]

I just walked away. I did hurt her on purpose cause she's an awful character.

Well, duh, Kojima-Sama did a brilliance and made her suck because she is only half a character.

Like all of us, she is incomplete without the strands connecting her to other people in her life.

 

[BIONIC]

I just drove her in my truck since I already rebuilt all the roads like a proper gentleman

[bluemax]

PT is like one of those bands that gets popular due to good timing and not actual talent or whatever and then the lead singer ODs and dies so we don't get to see them flame out.

I mean it genuinely has some good ideas and some great scares, for what it is.
It's just not this revolutionary achievement outside of its marketing exploits.
And it's a bit sad that a lot of zoomers will associate Silent Hill more with it and Kojima, than any of the original games, but that is Konami's fault for making them almost impossible to obtain and run in 2019.

That's fair I guess. I never got to play it and I never watched any video of it. Survival Horror games have always felt like someone took all those terrible PC point and click adventure games and decided what they needed were bad controls, inventory management, abusive save systems and zombies. I don't need Gabriel Knight with tank controls in my life.

[HardcoreRetro]

If you've played Amnesia: The Dark Descent you've basically played 95% of modern horror games. PT basically used that template but with obtuse puzzles cause he enjoys the idea of gamers coming together to solve stuff.

[Don Rumata]

PT is like one of those bands that gets popular due to good timing and not actual talent or whatever and then the lead singer ODs and dies so we don't get to see them flame out.

I mean it genuinely has some good ideas and some great scares, for what it is.
It's just not this revolutionary achievement outside of its marketing exploits.
And it's a bit sad that a lot of zoomers will associate Silent Hill more with it and Kojima, than any of the original games, but that is Konami's fault for making them almost impossible to obtain and run in 2019.

That's fair I guess. I never got to play it and I never watched any video of it. Survival Horror games have always felt like someone took all those terrible PC point and click adventure games and decided what they needed were bad controls, inventory management, abusive save systems and zombies. I don't need Gabriel Knight with tank controls in my life.

PT isn't even a survival horror game, it's basically a rollercoaster ride type game, like Layers of Fear or whatever, where essentially you do nothing but look around, minimal interaction and usually can't even die.
It's set piece after set piece, some of them are cool, but then they tend to get boring and predictable, which is why PT mostly works (being, like, 30 minutes).

Survival Horror as a genre has more evolved into the likes of RE2 Remake, or even Evil Within or Last of Us.

[kingv]

PT stopped being scary when my friend and I sat there whispering Jareth into the microphone for 30 minutes trying to get the final event to trigger.

[Don Rumata]

PT stopped being scary when my friend and I sat there whispering Jareth into the microphone for 30 minutes trying to get the final event to trigger.

Thankfully that's the very end of the demo. 

[bork]

Death Stranding


Man Standing


https://store.steampowered.com/app/1201840/MAN_STANDING/?fbclid=IwAR0lH40bzQXCdh-2KPBZrHdLOge_k-SwcngvzNlGLVFKvjxVyyIljTdOWNk

It may seem that the game borrows many mechanics from another game - we, of course, are talking about Hevy Reyn. But do not rush to judge! Hevy Reyn has a completely different story - there was a detective maniac (sorry for the spoiler!) And the main character was looking for his children. And there it was necessary to pass all kinds of tests and all that. But we do not have such tests, and there are no maniacs either! And we don’t have qte either. And we have a completely different setting - in Hevy Reyn it’s not a post apocalypse, but we have a post apocalypse (when the world is after the apocalypse!) !. Do you remember the moment in Hevy Reyn when you had to drive in an oncoming car to find your son (Sean)? So there you go! We do not have this moment either! Therefore, please do not say that this game is similar to Hevy Reyn - this is not at all!

[benjipwns]

System Requirements
MINIMUM:
OS: Windows 10
Processor: Intel Core i9
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: Nvidia RTX 2080 TI
DirectX: Version 12
Network: Broadband Internet connection
Storage: 1 GB available space
Sound Card: Any
Additional Notes: *it is uncertain

RECOMMENDED:
OS: Windows 10
Processor: AMD Ryzen 3600
Memory: 16 GB RAM
Graphics: AMD Radeon Vega 64
DirectX: Version 12
Network: Broadband Internet connection
Storage: 1 GB available space
Sound Card: Any
Additional Notes: AMD Radeon Vega 64 is out of stock

[Don Rumata]

1GB storage? Revolutionary compression technology!
Oh i see, it just saves the game into the VRAM.

[bluemax]

PT is like one of those bands that gets popular due to good timing and not actual talent or whatever and then the lead singer ODs and dies so we don't get to see them flame out.

I mean it genuinely has some good ideas and some great scares, for what it is.
It's just not this revolutionary achievement outside of its marketing exploits.
And it's a bit sad that a lot of zoomers will associate Silent Hill more with it and Kojima, than any of the original games, but that is Konami's fault for making them almost impossible to obtain and run in 2019.

That's fair I guess. I never got to play it and I never watched any video of it. Survival Horror games have always felt like someone took all those terrible PC point and click adventure games and decided what they needed were bad controls, inventory management, abusive save systems and zombies. I don't need Gabriel Knight with tank controls in my life.

PT isn't even a survival horror game, it's basically a rollercoaster ride type game, like Layers of Fear or whatever, where essentially you do nothing but look around, minimal interaction and usually can't even die.
It's set piece after set piece, some of them are cool, but then they tend to get boring and predictable, which is why PT mostly works (being, like, 30 minutes).

Survival Horror as a genre has more evolved into the likes of RE2 Remake, or even Evil Within or Last of Us.

So it's basically an early VR game but not in VR.

[kingv]

Beat this last night, and it’s the most kojima-ass kojima story ever, but honestly, I liked it. It’s ridiculous, with some really awful dialogue in places, but it also has some beautiful scenes and interesting twists that are pretty decent fun if you haven’t spoiled them for yourself. I still have some questions though:

spoiler (click to show/hide)

It seems sort of implied that bringing Sam back accelerated or started the death stranding. Like, Amelie made it worse by trying to prevent it. They said something about when Sam came back is when the death stranding started.... but there was also a void out before in New York, but it seems like only one.

- i didn’t quite get the significance of the mask... “it does more than hide my face? Uh, ok, what else does it do? Why does the gold one let Higgs control amelie?
- Amelie’s motivations don’t really make sense. I think if she was better written, she could have been a better character.
- how did Sam not notice Lou didn’t have a hang down? Who the fuck is Lou? I guess he’s just a random BB unit, and not otherwise important.
- I thought Sam might be a BB because there were clues about that (especially in the trailers) but didn’t think that he would be the Clifford Unger BB. That was good twist, and Mads was by far the best actor in this, so that part was pretty good.

Corny shit:
- the whole Lockne Maligne thing was lol. So kojima. Needed more gratuitous titty though for no reason.
- the line “I’m fra-JILE but I’m not that fra-zheel” is hilarious, and I will quote it a lot to my gaming friends. Also, “you’re damaged goods!”
- the part where dead man looks like he’s going to force himself on Sam in the shower.

[close]

At the end, I really enjoyed it and am glad I didn’t pass on it. I really appreciate that it has a 100% complete story with no sequel baiting. That is so unusual in video games nowadays that aren’t RPG’s.

I don’t think the story is as bad as some are saying, but the plotting and especially the dialogue is kind of bad. Imo the game could have been a lot better if they had a better writer tightening up the general idea of the game. The broad story arc and theme I think are fine and interesting, but a lot of element landed kind of flat because the execution was not great or the dialogue was weak.

[riotous]

Nice...story review.

[Svejk]

I just got to Chapter 6 last night.. Kinda relying on delivery bots more... Fuckit, I'll take B or C ranks... Want to stick with main quests mostly to see where this is heading.

[kingv]

I just got to Chapter 6 last night.. Kinda relying on delivery bots more... Fuckit, I'll take B or C ranks... Want to stick with main quests mostly to see where this is heading.

The delivery bots give you fuck all for the advancing of the connection meter. It seems like way way lower tot he point where I’m not really sure the bots are even worth using.

[Svejk]

Yeah, they don't.. I should just let the side missions just sit there in case I decide to do then later... But I figure I won't, so just send them... And listen to them start singing. Lol

[Svejk]

Trucking along to Chapter 8.  Chapter 7 was some MGS combat goodness.. albeit shallow, still fun and action packed.  The change of pace has been welcome.  This game is good.

[kingv]

You’ll probably fly through the last couple of chapters. The game picks up a ton after chapter 3 and just keeps picking up pace.

[Svejk]

Looking forward to it 

[HardcoreRetro]

This game is good.

[Svejk]

Been trying to figure out how to change Sam's suit color for the longest time... Gave up and decided to look it up...  You have to beat the game before you can do that..   
Really??  Good or not, I'm not planning on playing through this again, Kojima.   

[MMaRsu]

[kingv]

Been trying to figure out how to change Sam's suit color for the longest time... Gave up and decided to look it up...  You have to beat the game before you can do that..   
Really??  Good or not, I'm not planning on playing through this again, Kojima.   

After you beat the game you can just keep playing, like if you want to close out sub quests or complete roads or whatever while stunting on em in head to toe pink.

[Svejk]

Finished Chapter 11 last night.  Can't believe how the pacing in the game has ramped up.  Really starting to get those good ol' Kojima vibes...

And boss battle after boss battle... Shits kinda crazy.
  

[bluemax]

https://twitter.com/EGMNOW/status/1207033798501601282

[Svejk]

Got to "Episode 15" at 4:45am.  Looks like Monster Energy contract ran up, cuz now the drank is Porter brew.  Not sure if that was part of the latest update or if that's an endgame change.
So I technically beat it, but there's still some epilogue it seems? 

[HardcoreRetro]

It becomes porter brew after one of the missions.

[kingv]

The epilogue is just basically like... new game plus, sort of. You can just continue to play the game and deliver packages, but there is no more story in chapter 15 afaik.

[Svejk]

Ah, ok so..

spoiler (click to show/hide)

"the Inauguration mission" is basically a free mode so to speak?  There's no real ending to said mission?
Just curious for trophy purposes.

[close]

[thetylerrob]

I’ll have the soundtrack in my playlists for awhile. It’s still a really great game if you can enjoy the gameplay and story. I don’t think most will be comfortable talking about it in a goty conversation.

[Svejk]

Overall I thought it was a pretty good, unique experience.  I enjoyed my time with it all the way to the end; flaws, missteps and all.. However, it's certainly a game of have no interest in going back to.  I'm done with it.  It's certainly no Grandmasterpiece like Snatcher or MGS1, but still a good Kojima title imo.

[HardcoreRetro]

The point where people said it was supposed to get more enjoyable actively ruined most of the fun I had with the game. Should've leaned way harder on that traversing is a struggle shit.

Once you get the powerlegs any semblance of challenge goes out of the window. Just holding the two trigger buttons while pressing forward already ruined most of the challenge before you even got to that point.

Papers, Please did the "turning mundane thing into videogame concept" a lot better.

[Piss Benoit]

I think the names alone make the game good 

Samantha America Strand 

Kojima must’ve hit himself in the head with a hammer before coming up with them 

[Nintex]

https://twitter.com/HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN/status/1209684233700048896
 

[kingv]

The point where people said it was supposed to get more enjoyable actively ruined most of the fun I had with the game. Should've leaned way harder on that traversing is a struggle shit.

Once you get the powerlegs any semblance of challenge goes out of the window. Just holding the two trigger buttons while pressing forward already ruined most of the challenge before you even got to that point.

Papers, Please did the "turning mundane thing into videogame concept" a lot better.

I kind of agree with that, though if you haven’t gotten to the really snowy parts, traversing there is notably harder.

But overall, I felt like the most compelling gameplay was just straight up traversing and building/finding stuff to make it easier to traverse. Any time you are forced into interacting with BTs or mules kind of just ends up sucking

Ultimately, I feel like kojima was scared the game without the conflict from enemies would be too boring so he shoehorned in some combat scenarios. I wish he had the confidence to just go full out into the logistics thing, it was unique

[Svejk]

One of the big things I liked about it was that it felt like it had proper closure... No need for a follow up.  (Please don't, Kojima). It left me satisfied enough that I look equally forward to his next project, assuming it's another new IP.  Which based off his recent tweets, seems to be the case.