Moose tries to play Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

The game's about to get really good.

10 full minutes was a stupidly long amount of time to get where I needed to go. Not sure if that's because I'm playing on Easy or because there was a lot of cool shit I could have done before getting there.

The virus didn't work properly and Emma died. Great result huh? But Otacon dropped a fucking bomb. The reason he left after Emma's accident was because he had been having a relationship with Emma's mother. She seduced him. And his father didn't accidentally drown, it was suicide. The fact that Emma almost drowned with him makes me think he wanted to kill her. I should clarify that's it not completely fucked up because Otacon and Emma were just step siblings through their parent's second marriages. But still, crazy shit.

Emma was dead by the time he admitted all this, which is probably for the best.

Since the virus didn't work Arsenal Gear is launching and the upper levels of Big Shell are going to sink. Since destroying Arsenal Gear is impossible Snake and Raiden are going to try to kill Solidus and his men, while Otacon rescues the hostages. Snake and Otacon part ways with a secret bro handshake and a big manly hug. Otacon is carrying Emma's parrot with him, and all it does is repeat the words "Hal... I miss you..." in Emma's voice. Which is just rubbing salt in the wound. I hate parrots.

After Otacon left Gray Fox showed up, but Snake knew about him. They were working together. And it's not Gray Fox, it's... Olga? She knocked Raiden out, and the Big Shell collapsed.

What the fuck?

Raiden woke up naked on one of those torture bed things Ocelot used in MGS1. Ocelot and Solidus were there, and Solidus has got some groovy mechanical tentacles now. He called Raiden Jack the Ripper. He also called him his son, although he's only his godfather. Jack was a super killer child soldier in some civil war, but he disappeared after it ended.

Well... Fair enough. That goes a long to explaining Raiden's character. I guess he's not just a dickhead after all. Especially since he remembers it, kind of. His memory was messed about with to make him forget but he remembers anyway because of his nightmares.

Ocelot mentioned that Olga brought Raiden in, but he didn't seem to think Snake was there too. He only guessed because he was having trouble with his arm again. So Olga's been working both sides on her own. Dressed as Gray Fox. This is weird.

Ocelot left and Olga came in and explained herself. Via nanocommunication of course, so no one could hear. She has been secretly working for the Patriots because they are holding her child hostage. They have been ever since it was born. She was ordered to help Raiden with his mission. She decided to help Snake too because she found out he saved her life on the sinking tanker. She also said that her and Raiden were just pawns for something called the S3 Plan, but she didn't say what that was.

Rose called for the big break up scene. Sooo much drama.

Oh lord...

Spoiler:

I could not resist.

Spoiler:

A_Nonny_Moose wrote:

Going round the edge of Strut L I kept getting spotted and I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong. In the end I just got fed up and shot all the guards and drones. Still fell off the pipes a few times because the controls are a bit messy in tight spaces. Couldn't get inside Strut L or Strut K so I went straight to Shell Core 2.

From what i remember there is either a guy on top of one of the towers or there's one inside the window.

Wow, things just turned really creepy. I had to sneak through a hangar full of guards completely nude and the Colonel kept calling me and acting all weird. Spouting random gibberish, telling me to turn off the game. At one point my radar was replaced with a picture of a sleeping girl. The music was different than it had been up to that point too. It was quite unsettling.

Then Rose called and confessed that she had been a spy for the Patriots all along, keeping an eye on Raiden. Although she says she really does love him. She also said he was pregnant, but the call ended.

Met up with Snake and got my gear back, and got a new piece of equipment courtesy of Olga. The High Frequency Blade. Wasn't expecting that. After that Snake and I had to blast through the hangar together taking out all the guards.

Otacon called. He managed to get the hostages out. Raiden told him about the Colonel's strange behaviour, and also that he'd never met the Colonel in person before. Otacon said he'd look into it, and called back a few minutes later to say that the Colonel's transmissions were coming from inside Arsenal Gear. Not only that, but the Colonel isn't even real. He's an AI created by GW using Raiden's own expectations of who he should be taking orders from.

So Raiden is understandably on edge at the moment.

A_Nonny_Moose wrote:

Then Rose called and confessed that she had been a spy for the Patriots all along, keeping an eye on Raiden. Although she says she really does love him. She also said he was pregnant, but the call ended.

Apparently the president wasn't thorough enough with his package check.

Hooooly crap.

So Snake and Raiden ended up in this room and had to kill a lot more soldiers. Then a thing came up saying Fission Mailed but the game kept going. Not sure what that was about.

Then Fortune turned up and Snake elected to stay behind and fight her so Raiden could carry on. Raiden ended up in some weird open space and Solidus started talking about the S3 Plan. It stands for Solid Snake Simulation, and point was to build soldiers as good as Solid Snake. Raiden's the guinea pig for the plan, going through VR training of Snake's missions so the Patriots can recreate Snake somehow. I don't fully get it. Since Solidus said he had no more use for Raiden he decided to kill him.

Then an infinite army of RAY's turned up and I had to fight them three at a time, which was surprisingly easy (but then I am playing on Easy). After about 10 had died Raiden just gave up, but Olga jumped in to protect him (to protect her child). Solidus killed her and was about to continue with the RAY assault when they all started acting weird.

The virus was beginning to kick. GW was out of control and so were the RAYs. Arsenal was ascending on it's own. This seemed to change things and Solidus decided to keep Raiden alive.

Then it cut to the outside, on top of Arsenal, where everyone was gathered for all the big speeches. Fortune had captured Snake and brought him along. Solidus was torturing Raiden for information.

Fortune was about to try to take Arsenal from Solidus when he revealed he was planning to give it Dead Cell anyway. Arsenal on it's own is pretty useless since it's just a big flying building. All Solidus really wanted was to gain access to GW and information on the Patriots contained within it, mainly the names of the top 12 members, so he could kill them. But since the virus was crewing things up that was no longer possible, and it seemed like he thought he could get the information out of Raiden instead.

Then Ocelot stepped forward to explain everything.

Solidus didn't know the all the facts when it came to the S3 Plan. It is an attempt by the Patriots to create soldiers as awesome and cool and Solid Snake, but they didn't just do it through VR training. Oh no. They needed real field data. So what's the solution?

A ridiculously elaborate orchestrated reconstruction of the Shadow Moses incident.

Yep. The Patriots planned out all the events of the game so far to mimic of the events of MGS1 with Raiden in Snake's role so they could collect enough field data to tell them how to create perfect soldiers. They used Dead Cell to take the place of the FOXHOUND squad without them knowing, setting them up over time and giving them a reason to hate the Patriots and get them on Big Shell. They used Solidus because his relationship with Raiden was similar to Big Boss and Snake. And of course they used Olga to replace Gray Fox.

They created the computer virus as a counterpart to FOXDIE, and Ames FOXDIE-ish death was triggered by his own nanomachines stopping his pacemaker. But the virus had been altered by the Patriots to remove all information regarding them from GW when it activated.

All through the game I was thinking "Hey, this is a bit like MGS1". There were big similarities that were obviously going to be relevant to plot of course, such as the Gray Fox-alike, but there were a lot of smaller elements too that I figured were just little nods for the fans to appreciate. But actually it was all relevant, all on purpose.

That's kind of brilliant.

The only thing the Patriots hadn't planned was the real Snake showing up. So that's why the Colonel kept telling me to stay away from him, and that he "wasn't part of the simulation".

Ocelot also revealed that Fortune's weird powers were just part of a magnetic defense system that she somehow didn't know she had on her. And which I guess the Patriots can deactivate at any time because Ocelot shot her. He had his own as well, so no one could shoot him. Since he had all the data, he jumped into the last RAY and was about to piss off.

He emptied the RAY's entire missile payload at Raiden, Snake and Solidus to kill them. But Fortune wasn't dead and she lept up and this time she did deflect all the missiles herself. Somehow.

This is one thing I'm totally lost on. Ocelot said there was no such thing as the supernatural, only technology. That Fortune didn't have anything that the Patriots hadn't given her. But what the hell counts as supernatural in the MGS world? He worked with a powerful psychic who could read minds and levitate in MGS1. Was that supernatural, or is there a natural explantion, or was it nanomachines, or what? There's a damn vampire in this game. He can run on water, run up walls, get shot in the head and live, drown and come back... What's the explanation there? And then there's what comes next. No such thing as supernatural my arse...

Just as Ocelot was about to run off, Liquid showed himself again, taking over Ocelot's body. He'd been in the arm all along, waiting for the right time to take control. He still had a grudge against the Patriots, and "chose" (I don't know) Ocelot as his host because he was the perfect way to get information on them. But he also wants to kill Solidus and Solid Snake obviously, because he's still hung up on the whole "there can be only one" thing.

But since the RAY is out of ammo I guess he just plans to crash Arsenal to kill everyone. He dives off into the ocean inside the RAY, but Solid Snake breaks his handcuffs through sheer physical strength and dives after him, leaving Solidus and Raiden on top of Arsenal.

Jesus fucking Christ as if all that wasn't enough.

Arsenal crashed into Federal Hall, but Solidus and Raiden survived. Raiden got a call from the Colonel.

The Colonel tried to explain what he was, or what the GW was, or what the Patriots are... I'm not sure. But whatever he was talking about is some kind of collective digital consciousness that's been brewing in the White House like some primordial soup. After mapping the human genome the Patriots succeeded in digitising life itself, and that's their current form as far as I understand it.

But there's more. S3 does not stand for Solid Snake Simulation, but rather Selection for Societal Sanity. The way history has been recorded up to know has been a very selective process, just like genes in evolution. A lot of genetic information is generated, but only a select amount is passed on and the rest is deleted when we die. Same for recorded history.

Except with the acceleration of digital information that process isn't happening. Everyone can generate their own data in the way they see fit. Everyone can hunker down in their own little space and generate their own truth and have it permanently recorded, contributing to the stagnation of the species in a mire of irrelevent and trivial information. The end of evolution.

That's how the Patriots see it anyway. GW's purpose is filter out the trash and record history the proper way. Selectively. However it's purpose isn't just to handle the output if digital information, but to control the generation of it too, by controlling human thought and behaviour.

That was the true purpose of the Big Shell excercise. To recreate the incredibly extreme and unpredictable circumstances of Shadow Moses, and see if GW could control it all and create the outcome it wanted. And it did. Raiden did exactly as he was told.

The final test before the excercise ends is for Raiden to kill Solidus. Having been told all this Raiden's first reaction is obviously to not do what he's told, but Olga's child is still at risk if he dies, and now so is Rose. Plus Solidus wants to kill Raiden anyway to get the information about the Patriots from his nanomachines.

So I guess this is the final battle.

A_Nonny_Moose wrote:

Solid Snake breaks his handcuffs through sheer physical strength and dives after him

People often don't like it when games or movies (or books (Les Misérables)) do this, but I love it.

The boss battle with Solidus was decent. Best boss battle in the game, but it feels like the gameplay just doesn't lend itself to extended one-on-one confrontations. They're always slightly awkward.

Solidus dies, Snake is going to search for the Patriots using the information on the virus disc, and Raiden is going to start over with Rose and figure out who he is. Strangely anti-climactic, but after the constant ramping up during the last hour or so of the game there's no way it could all be resolved with one boss battle and a cutscene.

There's a little conversation after the credits again, this time between Snake and Otacon. Otacon analysed the disc and found the information on the twelve highest members of the Patriots. But they're all dead. They died 100 years ago...

So that's Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. I liked it. Not overly fond of the gameplay but it works, and I liked the utterly mental story and the themes.

Firstly Solid Snake he can do everything better then you because he is better than you.

Secondly I hope you are keeping in mind this is a 12 year old game, compare that to what gameplay was available back in those days and its a freaking masterpiece. A lot of people think 3 is best in the series, but honestly I think 1 then 2, mainly because of the sheer leaps in gameplay pretty much showing what games can be capable of.

Plus the wtf moments are much bigger in MGS1 solely because we hadn't seen anything like it before.

EDIT: I miss how awesome the codec was in MGS1, its ok in 2 and 3 but in 1 it was amazing.

The gameplay is fine for the general stealthing about, the only reason I have problems with it there is because I'm not a big fan of stealth. But it doesn't work as well for traditional boss battles.

A_Nonny_Moose wrote:

The gameplay is fine for the general stealthing about, the only reason I have problems with it there is because I'm not a big fan of stealth. But it doesn't work as well for traditional boss battles.

The controls are shitty in retrospect, but honestly if you played MGS 1, you'd have been right at home.

Honestly though thats also the point of the VR missions they pretty much force you to be good with the controls.

Are you going to do MGS3 now?

Even MGS4's controls feel a bit clumsy at times. Between MGS and MGS4 there were ten years of technologic advancement yet all the Solid games control very similarly; most changes were refinements rather than any meaningful evolution.

I will start MGS3 soon. Tomorrow or the day after.

Well as someone who hasn't played MGS2 I found this entertaining.

I highly recommend Chip Cheezum's MGS LPs on the Let's Play Archive. The games are so dense with cool shit to see and do and I probably missed 100% of it.

Did you find Vamp in the ending?

I'm tempted to play through it again with a guide to find all the easter eggs.

Actually I won't do that, but there's a bunch of cool ones. You can spot Snake shuffling around in a box if you're fast enough, there's a guy who pisses on you, you can peek up the skirt of one of the hostages, listen to a guy on the toilet with the directional microphone, all kinds of crap. And there's usually a silly Codec call afterwards too.

It's like they thought of all the crazy shit the player might try to do and then built a response to it into the game.

I'll end the topic with this screenshot:



That's a crew you don't want to mess with. Parrots can bite pretty hard.