Tag: 80s

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Review: Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain: a man with a knife in his mouth
It’s a dark and violent game, but…

‘Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain’ is an insane open-world stealth game and much more. It’s also incredible that despite its flaws it’s still such a great game. A weird combination of 80s action movie, bad writing and utter madness, enhanced by something that is either a great sense of humor or me being ignorant of Japanese culture. It’s also a very impractical game if you want to write a blog about video games because even by concentrating solely on the story missions it took me about 35 hours to finish it.

In ‘Metal Gear Solid V’ you play as Punished “Venom” Snake aka Big Boss. Most of the time you ride a horse called D-Horse through some versions of 1980s Afghanistan and Central Africa. You are the leader of the adorably named ‘Diamond Dogs’ band of mercenaries and besides managing your off-shore private army base, you mainly visit afore mentioned conflict zones and decide whether you sneakily sedate and extract or less sneakily shoot and kill everyone and anything you meet. Wild animals hate you. Continue reading “Review: Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain”

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Impression: 2064 Read Only Memories

2064 Read Only Memories: A flat containing a robot
It’s like Blade Runner, but more dense.

I don’t know anything about this game, apart from it being an adventure game with a cyberpunk theme. After a decent pixel-art intro and some 80s synths, I end up looking at a bedroom, that reminds me very much of Zack McKracken’s, one of the first point and click adventures I ever played. This kind of thing is so overdone in indie games. While I understand that it’s convenient for developers to go with this art-style, nowadays it just feels lazy and boring to me. I’m done wallowing in nostalgia all the time – and that’s coming from a guy who is very much into 80s stuff.

After accidentally clicking on a newspaper article on my in-game laptop (‘lappy’), I end up reading a much too long chunk of text via an interface that’s not suited for long chunks of text. I can feel boredom creeping in immediately. I’m supposed to write an article on a pair of headphones (boy, this is getting exciting). I play some music on them and after I try to use them on ‘lappy’ with cyberpunk-youtube, the whole game crashes to my desktop. I’m not sure I’ll give this another try.

I gave it another try and it crashed again. So far this journey is much worse than I imagined. I found some workaround in the steam forums. Last try.

OK, so I got around the bug and I realized that this is not a point and click adventure. It’s an interactive story. So far the story goes like this: I’m a failing writer in a crappy apartment. One night a condescending robot with a child’s voice (ugh) breaks into my flat and bores me with never ending dialog. I feel a definitive vibe of preachiness and pseudo-philosophical twaddle. Put this on top of the overdone cyberpunk theme of ‘what’s consciousness?’ and you got something that I don’t want to spent any time with.

After the prologue the informs me doesn’t have an auto-save function and that I should save frequently. Why doesn’t it have an auto-save feature? Could I at least have the nostalgia wallowing without the inconvenience of yore?

This is not for me. I can safely mark ‘2064 Read Only Memories’ as ‘done’.