Scibbe.com

Look, I understand that game publishers need to make money. I get that. I’m not going to write a frothing rant about how DLC and microtransactions are destroying the landscape of gaming. I’m not going to stack up some hippy-dippy malarky about how creativity and capitalism are at odds and any company that “sells out” has lost the plot. I’m not going to howl and rave about season passes or lootboxes or “$39.99 best value!” piles of in-game funny money.

Companies are here to make money. I understand. I don’t need the lecture.

But I like game ideas. I like seeing even very simple ideas in action and going, “Cool!” I like the thought of some poor, faceless game dev grunt signing on with one of these monstrous mobile game companies, being tasked with making Bongo the Bear Taps His Screen (and Then Asks For Your Parents’ Credit Card) or whatever, and actually managing to inject some fun and creativity into it. I like to acknowledge talent wherever I find it, even if it’s in the badly-organized cash-grab hellscape of the Google Play store.

I want to share two mobile games I’ve been playing recently. One I really like, and will probably keep playing, at least for a while. The other I sank about five hours into over the course of a week, then uninstalled in disgust. These games have two very simple things in common:

1. They’re both perfectly fine games, which would be well worth, say, a $4.99 asking price.
2. They both have a major flaw smack in the middle of their gameplay loop, which would not exist if not for their aggressive monetization.

–

Wordscapes

Wordscapes is a find-the-word game. You’re given a group of letters in a circle, and then you have to make all the words you can think of with those letters. I have a soft spot for uncomplicated little word games like this, and I’ve tried a few that are out there, but Wordscapes packages its ideas up in a way I hadn’t seen before. Instead of just listing the words you find, Wordscapes plugs them into a crossword. For me, this makes all the difference.

Other games in this style I’ve tried have a pretty dumb problem: you end up with all but one of the words on your list, some obscure four-letter Scrabble reject you aren’t going to find on your own. Your only recourse, other than brute force, is to use the game’s hint system (which is, of course, backed by microtransactions). Or, if you’re a savvy Internet hero like I am, Google it using one of those online word finders that ruined Words With Friends for everyone.

What sucks is, using a hint system in a game like this isn’t satisfying. It’s not a puzzle, there’s no logic or cleverness to work through, you either know the words or you don’t. You can’t get a nudge. You basically find all but one word on a level, then ask what the last word is, and the game is like “FROE!” and you’re like ok whatev, next level please.

What Wordscapes does, with its crossword layout, is build an unobtrusive hint system right into the base game. As you knock down the obvious words, including the big one that uses all the letters, the crossword gets filled in, giving you a few freebie letters in the words you have trouble with. When you swipe in “ROSE”, and figure out your last word has R as a second letter, well, you probably still wouldn’t guess “FROE” but at least the searching space is a lot smaller. It’s a neat system that keeps you moving through the levels at a relaxing pace.

There’s a minor innovation, too, which I didn’t realize was helping me at first, but which I really came to appreciate: obscure and obscene words don’t go into the crossword, but count as “bonus words” instead. So the game acknowledges that, say, “RAPED” is indeed a word that uses those letters, and gives you credit for them, but doesn’t take up space on your screen. And if you happen to know what a “FROE” is, you get credit for that too, but level completion isn’t locked behind finding it. This is a neat feature that didn’t happen by accident; a smart game designer noticed the issues other word games were having, and solved them elegantly.

There are powerups you can buy with the in-game currency, which uncovers letters on the board for you, if you really get stuck. The more coins you sink in, the more letters you’ll get. I mostly ignore these because the game isn’t super challenging, but I assume most players use them at least part of the time. I like the bullseye powerup that lets you reveal one specific letter of your choosing; I sometimes use this to get a hint for the rare disconnected words that show up on the edges of puzzles. The game dumps coins in your lap to buy these with, if you need them.

And, of course, you can buy as many coins as you want with real money.

Reviews of Wordscapes complain that the game has too many ads. And, ah, the game does have a lot of ads. Every two levels or so, you have to watch a video shilling Texas Toast or find the hidden “close this ad” button on whatever Bejeweled clone is being pooped out this week. I mostly don’t mind the ads, and they’re not what ruins the game for me.

What ruins the game are the bees.

I’m not totally sure how the bees work. The game gave me a bunch of free ones early on, and when I ran out, it helpfully explained I could buy more anytime. I think the bees get placed on the crossword grid, sometimes revealing letters for you, and awarding you with extra coins as you go.

But you can’t earn more bees, ever. You can only buy them. They’re for premium players only. If you don’t pay, you don’t get any bees.

Are bees a fun and interesting aspect of Wordscapes? If so, then I’m missing out on a fun and interesting feature because it’s been locked up behind a paywall. If not, then they shouldn’t be in the game at all. As far as I can tell they only help reveal letters (which the hint powerups already do) and reward you with coins (which you can already buy). If you need hints, you’re covered. If you want to spend money to buy more hints, you’re covered there too. I don’t see what the point of the bees are, from a gameplay perspective.

It looks like what happened was the Wordscapes guys made a fully-functional, reasonably addictive word game, showed it to their boss, and their boss’s boss’s boss sent word back that it needs bees and this is how bees should work and this is how much they should cost. It’s a totally tacked-on feature that feels like it doesn’t belong at all.

These bees are vocabulary tumors.

Obviously the bees didn’t make me quit Wordscapes. I used the game this past week to unwind a bit after all the Thanksgiving activity. I still like making words and watching coins fly into my giant pile. But it bugs me that every level I play has this annoying “buy more bees” button on it, and always will, for as long as I enjoy the game.

–

Toon Blast

I played about eighty levels of Toon Blast before uninstalling it.

This is your basic color-matching game. You tap blocks of a particular color, and if there are enough of them clumped together, they explode and new blocks fall in from the top of the screen. Destroying enough blocks at once condenses the exploded blocks down into powerups, which in turn let you clear more blocks. You’ve played a million games like this.

Toon Blast doesn’t lock any of the powerups behind a paywall. In fact, you unlock usable powerups at a pretty steady clip, and they line up on the bottom of your screen. These are like your “emergency powerups”, for when you need to clear a particular block in order to set up an impressive looking combo, or when you’re two moves away from winning a level with one move left.

The final piece of the Toon Blast puzzle is the large amount of types of blocks in the game. There are actually more different block types than there are standard block colors, each with their own behaviors and interactions. When you combine all the different block types with the powerups you can make while playing, and sprinkle the emergency powerups on top of that, there’s actually a surprising amount of strategy involved in clearing each level. There’s no time limit ticking away forcing fast, stupid play (which is the case in a lot of block-matching games), so the Toon Blast experience ends up being thoughtful and liesurely.

And there isn’t an ad break every two levels. So that’s nice.

Without a time limit, and with all these powerups laying around, where then does the challenge come from. Well, Toon Blast limits the number of moves you can take in a given level. A “move” is defined as “tapping a block on the screen”, and if you can’t clear all your objectives in, say, 44 taps, you fail the level. Then Sad Bear pops up and asks if you want to pay 100 coins for five more moves, or if you want to give up. If you elect to give up, Sad Bear points out that means you have to also “give up your crown”, and I have no idea what wearing a crown does in the context of the game, but who would want to give up a crown? And anyway, the game basically poops coins on you constantly, so if you’re faced with Sad Bear and you can see you’re only a few moves away from completing the level, this looks like a pretty good deal.

However, if you’ve misjudged your win state by just a smidge, you might run out of extra moves, and cause Sad Bear to pop up again. This time, five more bonus moves is going to run you 200 coins. And, if you misjudge twice, 300 on his next visit. All the while you’re being warned that your crown (??) is in jeopardy. And you figure, well, I’ve already sank 600 coins into this, I might as well sink another 400 to beat this one stupid level, and wow, now 50+ levels’ worth of coins is wiped out in a blink.

If you’re like me, you might just throw the crown away and retry the level. The game has thought of this too, and Sad Bear works very hard to prevent it. First, the “+5 Moves” button is way bigger than the “Give Up” button, and Sad Bear gives you like three chances to mix them up with his “Are you REALLY sure you’re a stupid loser who gives up?” prompts. But okay, you push through all that, and restart the level. But then you lose a life, of which you only have five, and they only grow back at a rate of once per 30 minutes.

This all sounds pretty insidious: if you’re stuck on a level, you only get to try it a few times per sitting before you run out of lives and can’t play anymore. (Sad Bear will helpfully text message you when you have more lives to play with, of course.) This system immediately sucks all the fun out of the game, because you don’t get to actually go in and try new strategies or combinations of powerups. You don’t get to try playing with all the fun block types in new ways, or set up new combos, or really much of anything. The game discourages experimenting with its systems — which are fun and colorful and combine in interesting ways — because experimenting actively hurts you.

This is all designed to funnel you into what I imagine is a very common screen for the most active Toon Blast players: the big attractive button that gives you more lives for real cash.

I was willing to deal with all of this, because I enjoyed the core gameplay enough. (Well, not all of it. I blocked Sad Bear the first time he texted me, because eff that ess in the bee.) What really nailed the game for me was the inclusion of BS levels.

All puzzle-y games with random elements have these kinds of levels. I’m sure you remember trying to forge new spells or whatever in Puzzle Quest, or clear a particular section of overlapping track in Zuma, and just not getting the pieces you need. Every Tetris player learns immediately to build up their stack with one empty vertical slice against a wall, only to lose it all because the game went 30 moves without coughing up an I-piece. This is just an element of the colored-block-puzzle genre.

But Toon Blast is so slick and so polished, so very purposely designed, that I couldn’t shake the feeling that a boss in a suit somewhere said, “Okay, once every 20 levels or so, make sure there’s one that’s just complete BS. Tweak it just perfectly so there’s always just two or three fewer moves than the player needs.”

I can swallow a lot of BS in games, because their emergent properties sometimes lend themselves to BS. Sometimes Shadow Man slides when it looks like he’s going to fire, sometimes Zeromus’s ATB just happens to line up so you get Virus’d immediately after getting Big Bang’d. It happens. You get screwed, you reset, you win next time.

But specifically designing your gameplay to have this property, for the explicit purpose of having Sad Bear pop up and ask for cash… wow. It made the whole game incredibly sour. When I cleared a fun level in a satisfying way, the sense of achievement was sapped because I knew the next level might be BS. The rewards for clearing that level didn’t matter either, because I knew the next BS level would just flush all those coins and powerups, leaving me destitute of in-game funny money. And that’s if I was lucky.

I don’t want to pay Toon Blast a dollar every time I get slapped with a level that is purposely designed to be impossible within the boundaries of the game’s rules. I’d much rather pay Toon Blast $4.99, once, and then just enjoy playing it.

–

Again, I’m not here to rail against games that monetize their features. I can appreciate that the old quarter-munching arcades were a viable business model, and that a lot of these modern mobile games are just an extension of that.

But even in 1985, even in those old dingy arcades, there was a difference between designing a game to be fun, challenging, and rewarding, versus designing a game to just eat quarters. Pac-Man got your quarters by being fun and addictive, with simple gameplay and a steady drip-feed of minor in-game rewards. When the ghosts caught you, they didn’t apologize and offer to let you go for a dollar (and two dollars, next time).

Thank you for reading this post about mobile games nobody cares about!

I wish I had seen this video back when it was first uploaded, which was around the time I was compiling questions for my own smart-aleck-y list of answers to “Unanswered” Questions in Metal Gear. Alas, the timelines just didn’t work out that way. It wasn’t until a few weeks ago the video butted into my Related Videos feed, and now that I’ve seen it, I feel like addressing it. (Or, at least, address the parts I haven’t already, in my previous post.)

I invited folks to leave new questions in the comments for the previous post, but I don’t have the most popular blog in the world, so I don’t even know how many people saw it. (Most of the feedback I get for blog posts comes from my Discord channel, and most of that was “Brick please stop talking about Metal Gear, we are begging you”.) The only actual question I ended up getting there is the first one I’d like to tackle now, because it’s an example of another eye-rolling class of question that’s kind of unfair to even ask. To wit:

How did the Cyborg Ninja get to Shadow Moses Island?

The for-real answer to this question is, “Somehow.” He got there somehow. Solid Snake arrives by submarine, Liquid Snake arrives by Hind D, Otacon flies there a decade later in the Nomad. The point is, people get there. The island is reachable. The actual logistics of each individual character’s journey — including scientists, soldiers, terrorists, FOXHOUND members, intruders, spaghetti western-loving quadruple agents, and Cyborg Ninjas — just don’t matter much.

To me, this is a disingenuous question. Someone seeking to untangle the plot isn’t going to get bogged down with minutiae like this, for the same reason we don’t wonder who does Rey’s laundry, what restaurant Cipher and Agent Smith are eating at, how many different sorts of carrots Farmer Maggot grows, or what the thread count is at the Galdin Quay hotel. Someone seeking answers in good faith will wonder why the Cyborg Ninja went there, or who the Cyborg Ninja is, or what the Cyborg Ninja did upon arrival. And we know all those answers, because they’re a part of the story.

But why care how he got there? He got there somehow, is what’s important.

–

And now, on to the clickbait listicle video! A few of the questions therein were addressed in my first post, so I’ll just skip over those.

–

Why didn’t Solid Snake or any of the hostages ever recognize George Sears?

Big Boss and Solidus Snake aren’t actually identical.

During Metal Gear Solid, George Sears is president of the United States. He is forced to resign after the Shadow Moses Incident. A few years later, during Sons of Liberty, it is revealed that George Sears is really Solidus Snake — third clone of Big Boss. However, Solid Snake doesn’t seem to notice the resemblance at all. Is that weird?

Here are the best visuals we have for what Solidus and Big Boss look like when they get old:

To my knowledge these are the most recent graphical renders of each of these characters, at an age where Solid Snake would know them. (Big Boss has newer renders, but of a younger version of himself, which Solid Snake wouldn’t be familiar with.)

The first thing to address is… ah… these men don’t look exactly alike! Despite having the same genetics, Solidus only sorta resembles Big Boss; their features are different enough that they could be different people. So the easy answer to why Snake didn’t see George Sears on CNN or whatever and be all “Hey that looks like Big Boss!” is the guy on CNN didn’t look enough like Big Boss for Snake to jump to conclusions. If you’re in line behind a guy who kinda looks like Joe Pesci, you don’t later tell the story about how you met Joe Pesci at the gas station. The reaction would be more like, “Hey that looks kinda like Big Boss, if he were ten years younger, and clean shaven, and had both eyes!”

There’s also the fact that Snake spent most of George Sears’s presidency hiding off the grid in the Alaskan bush, probably not watching much CNN.

But okay, why doesn’t Solidus look like Big Boss, if they’re supposed to be a perfect genetic match? And the answer is, Solidus is not Big Boss’s perfect genetic match. Big Boss was a human man who aged naturally over many years. Solidus was genetically engineered to age rapidly. (In the shot above, Solidus is only 37… about my age!) This, combined with any physical alterations they added to the mix, plus whatever effect you get from cleaning him up and putting him in a nice suit, produces two men who look similar but not identical.

As for why the hostages in Big Shell don’t recognize him… they’re hostages. They’re wearing blindfolds and Solidus doesn’t interact with them directly at any point. Even if one of them happened to catch a glimpse, they have Snake’s problem from the other direction; there’s no indication an average citizen in 2009, however-many years into the Patriots’ lockdown on information, knows who Big Boss is or what he looked like.

—

Where was Solidus during The Phantom Pain?

The Patriots had him.

The video’s next question after this is “where was Grey Fox?” which I covered in my 30 Questions post, but these “where was so-and-so” questions all have the same answer: they were wherever they were, and where they were wasn’t here.

The video’s Grey Fox question gives the game away: people wonder where Grey Fox was, not because there’s some burning hole in the story that needs addressing, but because Grey Fox was cool and influential in that one chapter. So why oh why isn’t he in this other chapter? It’s a Pure Fanboy question (and, of course, I have deep respect and sympathy for other Metal Gear fanboys). It’s not a stupid thing to ask, it’s just that there’s not an answer and isn’t going to be, because the answer wouldn’t affect anything.

The wording in the video is something like, “Grey Fox did important stuff in this story, so it would make perfect sense for him to do important stuff in this other story.” Yeah, okay, but it also makes perfect sense that maybe he didn’t do important stuff in that other story. Kojima can only write it one way. It’s fine to wish it was written another way because you dig on some Grey Fox, but that’s not the way it went.

You can see the silliness of this question by asking a reverse version of it. Where was Quiet during Metal Gear Solid? She doesn’t die onscreen, she isn’t mentioned later in the chronology… what happened to her? We know the answer is something like “Phantom Pain was a prequel, and Quiet hadn’t been invented yet.” And we leave it at that. We don’t trouble ourselves with an in-universe version of the question because one simply isn’t necessary to make the story work.

We can of course speculate. It’s possible Quiet retired from military life and opened a flower shop in Bruges, and nobody bothered her ever again. Or maybe she slipped on a banana peel and fell into the ocean and dissolved, and Venom wiped the resulting sludge all over his face in a dramatic cutscene. Point is, she wasn’t at Shadow Moses. And Solidus wasn’t on Mother Base.

As with any absent character, we can infer what Solidus was likely up to in the early 1980s. He’s younger than his brothers, but aging faster, and we know from Sons of Liberty that by the late ’80s he was “old” enough to be a twisted father figure to Raiden on a battlefield in Liberia. The whole point of Solidus’s existence is to be a military and political tool for the Patriots, and we know he eventually fills that intended role, at least for a time. During the early ’80s his apparent age is probably in the mid-to-late teens, and he’s probably spending his days receiving the harsh training that would eventually carry him to Liberia, the presidency, and Dead Cell.

–

What happened to Diamond Dogs after The Phantom Pain?

They died, disbanded, and rebranded themselves, in some combination.

From our perspective, because our protagonists were the dudes in charge of Mother Base — and it certainly does look super impressive — the Diamond Dogs were a special and influential player in world events during the 1980s. Our perspective is biased, though. In reality, Diamond Dogs was just one of many mercenary armies dotting the globe. They were a blip on the map.

This is the in-universe reason for The Phantom Pain‘s PvP element. When you infiltrate another player’s Mother Base, what you’re actually doing is attacking a rival PMC in order to steal their soldiers and intel, disassemble their nukes, and piss in all their flower pots. We don’t know how many such groups there are. Probably lots and lots.

We also get a very grim depiction of what life is like for the men of these PMCs, both from Big Boss himself (especially during his various speeches in Peace Walker), and eventually from the creation and manipulation of the War Economy in Guns of the Patriots. These men drift from battlefield to battlefield mostly in a haze. When one group breaks up — as Diamond Dogs inevitably must — the component parts end up somewhere else. They join other PMCs, to fight in other battles, and that is the story of them. EVA has quite a lot to say about this during her big “war is bad” exposition during Guns.

In practice, most of the Diamond Dogs hardware and personnel probably ended up at Outer Heaven, which is where Venom Snake eventually plants his flag on soil. Outer Heaven wasn’t just another PMC, it was a new nation, which is why the US government took such an interest in it. But that’s a story for another time.

–

What is the VOL2 tape? Is there a VOL1 tape?

It’s an easter egg.

The tape in question is collected during a non-canon side op in Ground Zeroes called “Classified Intel Acquisition”. Once collected it appears on the menu as “Classified Intel Data”. There’s only one track: “Data Cassette (Do not use in music players)”. Of course, inside Ground Zeroes the only thing you can do with tapes is listen to them in your music player, which just results in about five seconds of static.

Now, the first couple Metal Gear games were released for an 8-bit computer called the MSX, which was able to read data from cassette tapes. Some cheaper games came on cassette, but Metal Gear and its sequel came on sturdier, more expensive cartridges. In fact, Metal Gear 2 uses MSX cartridges as a plot element, when some important data winds up encoded on one. There being precident for this kind of chicanery, some enterprising hackers figured out how to boot the static from Ground Zeroes in an MSX emulator. The result is the phrase “VOL2” followed by a bunch of garbage code.

In one of The Phantom Pain‘s thirty endings, we get to see what might be VOL1: the cassette Venom Snake has that’s labeled “Operation Intrude N313”. That’s the code name for sending Solid Snake into Outer Heaven. The implication here is that Venom’s tape is the mission data for the first Metal Gear game, and the tape Big Boss recovers in Ground Zeroes, VOL2, is the data for Metal Gear 2.

But it can’t possibly be, because there’s no way the planning for Zanzibar Land could have ended up at a Cuban black site in the 1970s, ten years before a computer that can read it even makes it to market. Metal Gear is crazy, but it’s never dipped into time travel.

The VOL2 tape is just a macguffin. It only exists to justify your running around in that one side op. It was just a neat place for Kojima to hide a little wink for fanatical players to discover.

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that the “VOL2” thing may not even be true. I haven’t verified it myself, others have reported not being able to boot the data at all, there doesn’t seem to be any video of the data being booted, and the only reference to VOL2 I can even find on the internet outside of the listicle video are some reddit posts discussing it. (The video doesn’t even seem to know why it’s called the VOL2 tape, or at least, doesn’t mention it.) Reports indicate that the “VOL2” text is followed by lots of garbage data, so it could even be coincidence that the static, when converted to MSX data, just happens to output something legible for the first four characters. The whole thing might just be an urban legend. Either way, it doesn’t need an in-universe explanation.

–

How do we know the Ground Zeroes side ops aren’t canonical?

Big Boss only visits Camp Omega once: the Ground Zeroes main op.

In the side ops, Big Boss visits Camp Omega again and again, to accomplish various tasks. In one he sits in his helicopter and sprays the whole base with a machinegun. In another he erases a bunch of Metal Gear game logos. In another he extracts Hideo Kojima himself, who is held in the base as a prisoner. Some, like Classified Intel Acquisition, are plausible in-universe adventures; others clearly aren’t.

The crucial tell here is, at the beginning of the main op, it’s Big Boss’s first visit to Camp Omega. Kaz’s briefing as Big Boss climbs the cliffs up to the site make it pretty clear neither of them have been there before in person. So we know he didn’t complete Classified Intel Acquisition before now.

As soon as Big Boss leaves with Paz and Chico, he arrives back at Mother Base during Skull Face’s attack. During the commotion Big Boss is wounded, and enters his nine-year coma. So we know he doesn’t complete Classified Intel Acquisition later, either.

The only other read, if you’re willing to really stretch, is that Big Boss went back to Camp Omega at some point in the 1980s to complete these side ops during or after the events of The Phantom Pain. The problem with this read is it would have to be Big Boss, and not Venom Snake, since the man doing the infiltration doesn’t have any forehead shrapnel. But it couldn’t be Big Boss, because Kaz doesn’t work with Big Boss any more after Mother Base is destroyed.

The side ops are fun little missions, and some of them even make sense as canon if you take Ground Zeroes in isolation, but they’re not a part of the series chronology.

–

Are all easter eggs non-canonical?

This gets real muddy real quick, but basically no.

Some easter eggs are clearly just for fun: Snake demonstrably did not run around Shadow Moses in a tuxedo. Others are fun, but also fit in-universe: EVA probably did have breast augmentation done as part of “charm school”.

Metal Gear likes to dabble in magical realism, so when Snake tells Raiden his bandana gives him infinite ammo, and then fires thirty thousand rounds at ninja attackers in the following scene, I’m willing to take his word. When something like this happens during the course of natural gameplay, or is directly called attention to by one of the characters in-universe, we can probably put it down as having happened, even if what happened was weird.

On the other hand, it’s really hard to believe that Snake has a “Making of Metal Gear Solid 4” podcast on his iPod. I mean, who carried an iPod around in 2014!?

There’s this intuitive understanding of video game storytelling where it’s not necessarily true that every bit of gameplay “actually happened”. If you spend an hour punching Emma in the face, you wouldn’t consider that part of the story’s canon. It’s just Some Dumb Thing You Did. Kojima is really, really good at finding those spots and acknowledging them, though; if you do punch Emma in the face, your codec team knows you did it, and will yell at you for it. The codec team reacting makes it “more real” than if they hadn’t, and it becomes part of “your” Sons of Liberty story, but it’s still not part of the shared canon across all players. (E.g., when you boot up Guns of the Patriots, Otacon won’t be like, “Hey Raiden, remember that time you spent an hour punching my sister in the face?”)

So maybe, when you point a camera at one of the Beauties and she wiggles her butt at you, it’s because the Beauties canonically wiggled their butts. Or maybe it was just Kojima winking and saying, “I knew you’d try that, you perv.”

–

How did the Philosopher’s Legacy end up with Ocelot?

He took it.

The Philosopher’s Legacy is a colossal amount of money in Colonel Volgin’s possession during Snake Eater. Anybody who’s anybody in Groznyj Grad is there to get their grubby mitts on the Legacy, in the form of a microfilm containing its location, and turn it over to their respective government. Lots of stuff happens, but it all shakes out with Ocelot telling his boss, the director of the CIA, that the Legacy is “safely with us, in America’s hands.” In that same conversation, he says only about half the Legacy made it back, and speculates that the rest must still be in the USSR, with the KGB.

Every reference to the Legacy after this point involves it coming to Major Zero, and being used to establish the Patriots. The nuts and bolts of where the money actually went requires delving into Portable Ops, which many players (including me) do not consider canon. In that game, Ocelot explicitly recovers both the KGB and CIA halves of the Legacy, and turns it all over to Zero.

While Portable Ops isn’t canon, I think we can safely assume those particular events played out more or less as they were depicted. This sort of duplicity is exactly the kind of work Ocelot is suited for, and he was well-placed in both the KGB and CIA at the time. Betraying both for a new organization that benefits himself and Big Boss sounds right up his alley.

–

Do Ocelot and The Boss know they’re related?

No.

The Boss is Ocelot’s mother. In The Boss’s long sad story about giving birth during the landing at Normandy, the baby she lost to the Philosophers grew up to become Ocelot. During Snake Eater neither character gives any indication they know about their connection, and while The Boss is mentioned quite a lot by other characters later in the chronology, never by Ocelot himself. So that’s the answer: no, they don’t. (Or, the more complete answer: no, probably not.)

The more interesting aspect of this question is, to me, that neither of these characters are the type to have behaved any differently if they had known. The Boss wasn’t going to jeopardize her mission in Groznyj Grad because she happened to be reunited with dear old Sonny Boy, and Ocelot just flat out doesn’t respect authority. Most likely there’s no family reunion scene because neither of them knew, but it’s possible one or both of them knew, and didn’t act.

–

Where was EVA between Snake Eater and Guns of the Patriots?

Wherever she was.

–

No, Brick, come on, this one is actually important!

Okay, fair enough. We actually know quite a lot about EVA’s timeline between the two games she appears in, but we have to put it together from several different sources. The only direct evidence we get about her fate following Snake Eater is from the ending crawl. In 1968, she “disappeared without a trace in Hanoi”. A few lines later, in 1972, “the sons of Big Boss are born.”

At the time Snake Eater came out these looked like two disconnected events, but as of Guns of the Patriots we know that EVA is the mother of Big Boss’s sons. So it follows: when she disappeared in Hanoi, she disappeared into Patriots custody, for use in Les Enfants Terribles. This project caused a schism in the Patriots; it was the event that caused Big Boss to break away. EVA was conflicted; she didn’t want to work against Big Boss, but she also cared about her sons. (She tells Snake, “Your father never wanted you… but I wanted you.”)

From here the games lose track of EVA until she turns up again in Guns, as the leader of the Paradise Lost Army, working against the Patriots.

EVA never worked directly with Big Boss during his private army years. There was some contact — she sends him a bunch of tapes about The Boss in Peace Walker — but as far as we can tell they never met again face to face. However, Ocelot also wasn’t working directly with Big Boss during this time; he was still ostensibly a loyal Patriots agent. It’s not until Skull Face blows up Mother Base and draws Zero out of hiding that there’s any indication these characters still share a personal connection. It’s at Zero’s behest that Ocelot look after Big Boss’s double, as an extra security measure.

One more important clue: when EVA lay dying on the Volta, she makes one final emotional appeal to Liquid Ocelot by using the first code name she knew him by: ADAM. She even gives him an apple, just to drive home the ham-handed imagery. This is the only time during Guns when a character addresses Liquid Ocelot as Ocelot instead of Liquid. She’s asking, is the Ocelot I knew still in there? And she dies before she gets the answer.

Remember, the man Ocelot is masquereding as at this point is her other son, who she wanted. That she’d try to appeal to Ocelot, rather than her own son, is very telling. She had a connection with Ocelot, before he disappeared into Liquid.

From all of this we can extrapolate EVA’s timeline. She was working closely with Ocelot for many years, though covertly. Ocelot was still inside the Patriots; EVA at some point breaks away. They kept working together to get hold of Big Boss’s remains and bring down Cipher. You can picture EVA receiving a secret tape (well, probably a CD or a thumb drive by this point) with Ocelot saying, “Hey, this Big Shell nonsense is going to be a real cluster. Don’t get close, I got this.”

At some point, she forms Paradise Lost.

I don’t think it’s really important to pin down when this happens. A secret covert organization devoted to fighting another secret covert organization nobody knows exists? Makes sense there are no breadcrumbs. Cipher and the Patriots have lots of fingers in lots of pies. While Ocelot was working the direct military conflicts — the sort of thing Solid Snake and therefore the player would be involved in — Paradise Lost was doing different sorts of work. Rescuing VIPs, shuffling and hiding finances, planting and acquiring secret intel, maybe keeping tabs on Huey Emmerich’s kids.

Eventually Ocelot is “lost” from EVA’s perspective, and at that point she’s the last one left still fighting the Patriots. It’s not until now, maybe 2010 or so, she needs to become more involved militarily. She recruits Raiden and, eventually, makes contact with Solid Snake.

So, where was she between Snake Eater and Guns of the Patriots? She was wherever she was, doing whatever she could.

–

Why was Shadow Moses left unattended for so long?

This is a very, very interesting question that gets right to the heart of a lot of the themes of information control the series likes to drone on about. I’m actually surprised — and a little impressed! — that it showed up in someone’s clickbait video.

After the events of Metal Gear Solid, Nastasha Romanenko, a loose end the Patriots failed to tie up, published a tell-all book entitled In the Darkness of Shadow Moses: The Unofficial Truth. This is an accurate recounting of the Shadow Moses Incident. You can read the full text off the main menu in Sons of Liberty, where it serves as a story recap. When it comes to Shadow Moses, the truth is out there.

So tell me, what did you just think of when I said, “the truth is out there”?

One important distinction between the Metal Gear universe and our own is, over there, there exists a shadowy illuminati organization that controls everything the citizens think and feel. It’s rare that the Patriots goof enough that the public gets any wind of their machinations. (Indeed, these incidents tend to be the scenarios we play through!) But even events that are too big to cover up can be spun, and nobody is better at doing that than Cipher. Remember: the Patriots’ goal isn’t to suppress information, but rather to control it. They don’t need to erase Shadow Moses, they just need the citizenry to not believe it. As long as they paint Romanenko’s tell-all as sensationalist conspiracy claptrap, well, job done.

How would you feel about a movie called Obama’s Birth Certificate: The Unofficial Truth? (That movie kind of exists, by the way.)

Shadow Moses was left unattended because the only public account of what happened there wasn’t credible. And besides, we don’t actually know it was left unattended. Maybe Cipher had a dude out there in a yurt whose job it was to catalog all the comings and goings. Maybe black helicopters showed up in 2013 to disappear the film crew of the In the Darkness Netflix documentary series.

–

How did the Patriots AI give orders to people?

Agents. Until nanomachines were invented, anyway. Then, nanomachines. Except those people that don’t have nanomachines. For those, the AI uses agents.

–

How do nanomachines get installed?

A needle goes into your skin, and the nanomachines are injected, and now you have nanomachines.

These two questions, taken together, fall into the category of “So wait,” for me. “So wait, the Patriots really have basically infinite resources?” Yeah, that’s really what’s up. If the Patriots want you to do a thing, you’ll get your orders somehow. If they want you to have nanos, you’ll get nanos.

There are numerous examples of the Patriots AI establishing control over people without them ever knowing it. Meryl Silverburgh spends an entire game doing their bidding, and she doesn’t even know they exist. Raiden goes into live fire on an anti-terrorist infiltration op because a voice in his head tells him to. Solid Snake lets a doctor give him an injection of what he thinks is an anti-freezing agent, but is actually a revenge-fueled nanovirus.

The Patriots AI is an infinite computer brain that lives in space, has been in constant development for 40 years, backed by an all-powerful world-spanning organization with unlimited funds, whose very mission statement is to control everything. Eventually it’s not even possible to fire a gun unless the AI says it’s okay. The logistics of these day-to-day tasks are just trifling details.

The AI is imperfect, and by Sons of Liberty it has also gone crazy, but it’s still functionally all-powerful.

–

Why does the Patriots AI allow Liquid Ocelot to rise to power?

Because it can’t not.

The AI isn’t equipped to deal with Liquid as he’s amassing wealth and power. Imagine coming home to find your kitchen burned down, and asking your goldfish why it didn’t put the fire out even though it had all that water right there.

The Patriots AI is infinite in resources and global reach, but it is stupid. At the end of Guns Big Boss describes the AI as being an “oppressivly uniform system”. It’s capable of doing only what it was designed to do: control information. That’s an incredibly powerful tool, but as of SIGINT’s death in Metal Gear Solid, nobody is weilding it anymore. The AI is left unsupervized, and its code eventually mutates into what we see in Sons of Liberty and Guns of the Patriots.

Liquid Ocelot takes advantage of the situation, but he didn’t create the War Economy. The War Economy is an abberation, a mutation in the Patriots AI that allows it to propogate itself and bring people under its control faster and more efficiently than the old method of controlling information.

The AI can’t take action against Liquid without damaging its own plots and systems. And the AI can’t — literally is unable to — take action that would damage its own plots and systems. So it’s stuck, if it even sees what’s happening.

However, buried somewhere deep in the AI is a vestigial line of code left over from Shadow Moses, that looks something like:

if Liquid.uppity
  deploy(solidSnake);

Which is exactly what happens. The AI starts turning a wheel somewhere, and before you know it Roy Campbell is touching down in a helicopter with an assassination job on offer. And that wheel touches another wheel which touches another wheel which ensures Drebin and Meryl just happen to be in the area to offer valuable support.

The AI can’t prevent Liquid’s rise to power because last time Liquid rose to power, nobody prevented it. It has no frame of reference. But someone did stop Liquid once he attained power, and so the AI just does the same thing that worked last time: it sends in Solid Snake.

–

How is the Arsenal Gear crash covered up?

The clickbait video lists this as the #1 question Metal Gear doesn’t answer, but I can’t really figure out why, since to my knowledge this doesn’t actually happen. The cover-up, I mean. The crash definitely happens.

It’s true we don’t know what the public’s reaction to the Arsenal crash is. But then, we generally don’t know a lot about what the public is up to in the Metal Gear universe at all. We are told repeatedly that the events of the games — even the big, flashy public ones — get swept away by some “official story” that everybody buys, and that’s really enough of an explanation. The public believed whatever the Patriots AI wanted them to believe re: Arsenal, because that’s something the Patriots AI is able to do.

In Sons of Liberty, Otacon explains that Ocelot sold the technical specs for REX on the black market, and now every “state, group and dotcom” has their own Metal Gear. In such a climate, it would be shockingly easy for the US government to sell its citizens on the idea that, yes, we really do need something like Arsenal to protect us, and yes, terrorists stole it and crashed it into New York, so yes, now we need even bigger and badder Metal Gears to combat this new threat. This is, in fact, almost exactly how the War Economy ends up operating in Guns of the Patriots.

–

That’s the end of the Metal Gear questions, for now.

If you have a burning question of your own, or even better, if you have another dumb clickbait video for me to dissect, point me in that direction. And as always, thanks for reading!