E3 2015 has come and gone, and with the excitement building for upcoming releases such as Fallout 4, Dishonored 2, and Metal Gear Sold V: The Phantom Pain, I've been revisiting prior games in those series. I wrote before about playing the Lonesome Road DLC for Fallout: New Vegas, which I did go on to complete (it was alright; more might have been done to spell out Ulysses' actual motivations, as I felt he was just kind of crazy).
I've also been revisiting Dishonored, beginning at first a high-action, high-chaos playthrough before noticing myself falling back to my natural stealth style of playing, and restarting the game with an eye toward attaining non-lethal/ghost ratings on every mission. It turns out I already did that on a few during my first run through the game, at least with Corvo. With Daud I ended up killing practically everyone in every level. This'll be a fun challenge if I get back to it.
The exceptional trailers for The Phantom Pain got me ruminating on the events of the series plot post Snake Eater, as well as the character and motivations of Big Boss and Miller (who is featured prominently in TPP trailers), so to refresh myself on the series I took to YouTube for cut-scene extracts of Portable Ops and Peace Walker. The former is largely irrelevant with regard to TPP, but does have some events of overall series import, such as the introductions of Colonel Campbell and Frank Jaeger, and the jumping-off point of Zero and Ocelot recruiting Big Boss to begin The Patriots with the fortune known as The Philosophers' Legacy. This is all in 1970 in the series' timeline.
Peace Walker is actually more relevant to Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain than I had recalled, as it is the events there in Costa Rica and Nicaragua that put MSF (Militaires Sans Frontiers) and Mother Base on the world stage as a nuclear power, teeing-up the 1975 "IAEA" (International Atomic Energy Agency) inspection happening as Snake infiltrates the US military prison base in Ground Zeroes, which turns out to be a front for an attack on Mother Base, presumably by Cipher, Zero's cronies post Patriots falling out, namely Sigint and Para-Medic, Paz, Skull Face, presumably, and others. The other Patriots, Big Boss, Ocelot, and Eva, seemed to have all went separate ways before 1974, when Peace Walker is set. Pease Walker also apparently cement's Snake's identity as Big Boss, and his determination to be loyal to neither country nor mentor, but to himself, and that his mission will be determined by the times and to resist attacks from the existing world order to destroy his "army without borders".
Then, replaying Ground Zeroes for more on Skull Face, Paz, Chico, and all that, I got hung up on how well the game plays and have begun doing some more side missions therein. All this is in addition to reviewing all of the promo material, trailers and demos, available for The Phantom Pain. At this point I am as excited for its release as I have been a game in a long while. It looks great, both from a lorehound perspective and a fan of open world and stealth games.
I've made some good progress in The Witcher 3, doing the Crones of Crookback Bog quest as well as another where I ran into Letho from the second game. That was a pretty great bit of fan service. I wonder what would have happened there for someone who had killed Letho, or at least indicated as much in the shave scene toward the start of this game. I told him he was welcome to go stay at Kaer Mohren, so perhaps I'll see him again later in the game.
Last and least, I played an F game, Fish Fillets 2, which was a painfully CD-ROM era looking puzzle game and X-Files homage/parody. I also played a G game, Gish, a hyper-difficult physics platform game where you play as a 12-pound ball of tar trying to hurl and cling and slide and push your way through contrived maze levels with unintuitive and difficult-to-grasp controls. I did not particularly like either of these.
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