All this talk about games Brianna would & would not play got me thinking---we know she recently hopped on the MGS5 bandwagon, & she's referenced the location of Tselinoyarsk from the first Metal Gear Solid (albeit naming a character that), but has she ever actually sat down &
played any of the games?
I was only thinking about this because I totally forgot I had Metal Gear Solid on the old PSP my best friend sent me a while ago, so I started playing it again today for the first time in sixteen years. You know the first part in the game where you have to get to the elevator to go up to the helipad? You know,
the start of the game? I died
five times trying to relearn the controls. It was shameful. Now, if
I'm having trouble---&
@Jaimas can vouch that I'm a gaming veteran---how bad can BWu be? Can she even stealth? Would she ragequit at all the card key nonsense?
Because I think if she actually played the game for an extended period of time, it would be her all-time favorite game due to its diversity & STRONG FEMALE CHARACTERS™. Especially since it was so ~*~*progressive*~*~ for its time---I know someone said earlier that MGS in 1998 looked much better than Rev60 in 2016, but it boasts an even more colorful (if you'll excuse the pun) cast.
In the first half-hour or so of the game, you're introduced to:
- Dr. Naomi Hunter, a geneticist who specializes in nanotechnology-based gene therapy (even though she fucks Snake over with the whole FOXDIE virus thing),
- Mei Ling, a Chinese-American technical genius & inventor,
- Nastasha Romanenko, a Ukranian-born agent of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency and an expert on nuclear weapons,
- Master Miller, who's of Japanese descent despite being blonde,
- DARPA chief Donald Anderson (a black man in a position of authority),
- Gray Fox (who, while voiced by a black VA, is actually revealed to be Vietnamese in the old Metal Gear NES games),
- Meryl Silverburgh, (who annoys the fuck out of me, though she redeems herself in MGS4)
- Sniper Wolf, a top FOXHOUND sniper who is an Iraqi Kurd.
I believe that Wu beat MGS1. A lot of people forget that it had a difficulty selector and if you fucked up often enough or hard enough, it would essentially flat-out tell you how to beat certain bosses (Mantis most notably). If you have
any real persistence, it's easily possible, especially if you took the time to go through training, to beat MGS1 on the lowest difficulty.
Lemme explain.
I've studied Wu a long time. She's roughly my age (little older), and thus Wu was around during the formulative age of Video Gaming as we know it. The difference is that this
isn't when Wu got involved with video gaming. See, Wu has a very basic tell that displays that - yes - she was a gamer at one point. Like a legitimate one. No joking. But it wasn't on NES, contrary to her claims.
See, in every group of friends growing up during the 80s/90s, one difference was Vidya consoles. If you were going to public school, as I did with my proletariat friends, everyone had different consoles. One kid has Colecovision with an Atari Module to play 2600 games. One guy just got an NES. Your other friend has that new Sega Master System, and
holy shit do the games for
that fucking thing look good. Seriously, they looked straight outta the arcades! And then you had weird foreign kid who had a Commodore 64 and good
god the fun that thing could provide. Hell, you could
make your own fucking games.
But in every group, there was
that guy. You know the one. The flash-over-substance kid who had so much fucking disposable income that their parents got them a Neo-Geo (which was like $800 at the time). You were simultaneously envious of the games they had (Metal Slug, Samurai Shodown, et al) and more than a little annoyed by them, because the console they had was a statement of how wealthy and privileged they were. "Oh look, I have this completely faithful port of fucking
Shock Troopers whilst you proles are playing
Contra IV. How droll! Of course, for every one of these guys playing something like the Neo-Geo, you had twice their number who were early adopters for unembellished horse-shit that they
swore was going to be the next big thing, like the 32X, Sega CD, Atari Jaguar, and Panasonic 3DO. They were early video game hipsters, trying new games to see which one would become the trendsetter.
Wu was one of these kids. Of this, I have no doubt.
When it came to the 32-bit era, the investment of some early-adopters paid off: Sony won a majority stake and solidified ground, making a highly successful console in the Playstation. By this point, ludicrously expensive vanity consoles weren't a thing anymore, but you did see these people aggressively get things like the Black Developer PSX (Net Yaroze) or the Blue Importer PSX and try to use these the same way. These, again, were more than twice the price of the basic model.
"Oh, look at these plebians, playing their little games, I, queen of video gaming, have the improved version with no region lock and am enjoying games they cannot. Ha ha, and I say, ha!"
And then people find out Gameshark/Action Replay can disable region locking, and people who pulled this sort of hipsterism looked like idiots.
I know this because I saw it a lot in High School; my old friend Nick and I used to play imports all the dicking time using the Action Replay method. A mutual friend of ours had a Net Yaroze specifically for the purposes of showing off and playing imports, which led to us largely having nothing to do with them by our senior year.
Wu's area of expertise in vidya establishes her firmly as an adopter during the 32-bit era. All of her vidya references are ones from that time period, and it shows because flash over substance is
still her trademark years later. It's why she like FF8 more than every title before it. Like many RPG fans at the time, she was
huge into Squeenix's camp: Wu's made references to
Vagrant Story,
Parasite Eve, and
Final Fantasy Tactics, just to name a few, as well as
Metal Gear Solid. Wu loved these games, but she didn't love them for the game itself, so much as them being shiny and awesome and cool-looking. Nothing wrong with that, but she fundamentally misunderstands what made these games so fucking
good in the first place. So she'll then go and strap her cred to a wall and have it shot when she says something like FFXIII is the best FF game or that
The Third Birthday is the best
Parasite Eve game (this statement is
haram in
Parasite Eve fan communities. If you voice it, prepare to have your shit
punched in).
