The Metal Gear Solid series has always been as much about mining the history of movies as actual world events. There are so many allusions and references embedded in the long-running stealth action series, that the possibilities in terms of recommending further reading and watching are almost endless. The recent release of MGS 5: The Phantom Pain represents the end of Metal Gear under its creator Hideo Kojima s stewardship, and the game bows out with an appropriately rich fusion of twisted history and 80s-influenced action movie madness.

Kojima has often gone on record listing the cinematic influences that have been important to him in as he guided MGS through its various incarnations, including classics like The Deer Hunter, Full Metal Jacket, and Heat. It s clear that the series mastermind has been motivated by big films that take on sweeping and transformative moments in history, accompanied by a deep uneasiness with the direction the modern world is heading in.

With all that in mind, in this edition of If you like... I ve selected films and books that echo Metal Gear Solid s fundamental foundations: visual splendor amidst startling violence, the intersection of technology and the body, and the deadly legacy of the Cold War...

Escape from New York, directed by John Carpenter

John Carpenter s 1981 vision of the Big Apple as a dystopic, maximum security prison shares all the ingredients of a Metal Gear Solid sneaking mission. On the eve of a crucial summit on nuclear weapons, the President of the United States is missing and only one man can save him in time—Snake Plissken. Played with suitable gruffness by Kurt Russell, it s up to the ex-soldier turned heistman to sneak into New York and nab the President plus a crucial audiotape he s carrying.

Beyond providing the obvious inspiration for Snake himself, Carpenter s film also shares a lot in common with another classic fictional world that had a deep influence on Kojima: James Bond. Escape from New York isn t just about a one-eyed, scowling tough guy, it s also about gadgets, ticking time-bomb scenarios, and strange sidekicks picked up along the way. And like Bond, we see that no matter how perilous the problem, it s really all about Snake in the end.

Marvel Comics Presents: Weapon X, written and illustrated by Barry Windsor-Smith

Conceived by Barry Windsor-Smith as a psychologically rich and disturbing origin story for Marvel icon Wolverine, this 1991 arc from Marvel Comics Presents fits neatly into the Metal Gear Solid worldview. It s set in a secret laboratory where scientists are working to create the perfect killing machine out of Logan aka Wolverine. During this process we get insight into the development of not only his fearsome adamantium claws, but also his dark and troubled personality.

In a way that reminds me of The Phantom Pain s vivid and violent introduction, Windsor-Smith s Weapon X presents Wolverine as damaged goods. As with Big Boss, Logan s biggest challenge isn t surviving the medical experimentation so much as rediscovering his humanity and identity. No matter the technology that helped transform him, the biggest question seems to be—is he a man or an animal?

Black Hawk Down, directed by Ridley Scott

A director long known for his arresting and powerful visual style, Ridley Scott s 2001 action/drama film dealing with the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu has long been pointed to as an obvious touchstone for events in the Metal Gear Solid universe (especially those from The Phantom Pain s predecessor, MGS 4: Guns of the Patriots). Based on an original book of the same name by Mark Bowden, Scott s film traces themes that also surface prominently in The Phantom Pain—loyalty, camaraderie among soldiers, and the blurred lines of life lived in a war zone.

Beyond the thematic similarities, Black Hawk Down is simply a brilliant war film packed with great performances by talented actors. Eric Bana s turn as a cynical but clear-eyed Delta Force operative is particularly moving and acts as a kind of mirror to Josh Hartnett s more idealistic Army Ranger. While the film is a fairly one-sided fantasy about the costs of war, it meshes the personal with the political in a way that very few recent war films have been able to do so effectively.

The Gun, by C.J. Chivers

Metal Gear Solid has always ramped up the drama of weapons technology by returning again and again to giant death machines that threaten world peace. In C.J. Chivers s 2009 book, The Gun, we get a social history of the Cold War s actual deadliest weapon—the AK-47. A longtime NY Times war correspondent and former Marine, Chivers walks his readers through the origins of automatic weapons, their proliferation throughout the world, and their impact on warfare to the present day. And he does all this through the lens of perhaps the most famous gun ever developed, the Kalashnikov.

Exhaustively researched and highly readable, Chivers s book resists tidy conclusions. It works to explain the significance of a weapons technology that has impacted nearly every dimension of contemporary world conflict, from gang warfare to the battlefields of Afghanistan.

Patrick currently works as web editor for Hinterland Studios, which is making The Long Dark. For more installments of If you like... , check out his recommendations for Dead Space, The Witcher, Dishonored, Mass Effect,Skyrim, Fallout 3, Deus Ex, Company of Heroes, STALKER and Her Story fans.

As Tom Francis pointed out last weekend, one of the reasons The Phantom Pain is an enjoyable stealth game is that it's very forgiving of slip-ups. If you're a little careless and draw the attention of a guard, you're given a number of opportunities to wriggle your way out of your mistake.

On the other hand, not everyone is looking for a game that bends over backwards to forgive screw-ups, and I know a lot of people play with reflex mode off, simply because they feel it's too easy. If you're someone looking for more of a challenge in MGS 5, modder JRavens has you covered. The Phantom Pain Hardcore mod turns up the difficulty with a number of tweaks.

First and foremost, enemy hearing and vision has been improve by around 50%, meaning they can detect you at much greater ranges now. I tested this, and it definitely feels like a big change. While creeping up on an enemy checkpoint, I raised the suspicions of a guard while I was crawling, still a good distance off, and partially concealed by a boulder. The distance at which you can be detected is also randomized, meaning you'll never be quite sure how many meters away you need to stay to completely avoid being spotted. Soldiers are now also better at detecting when you've Fulton extracted one of their buddies.

 Enemy knockout time has been decreased as well. I didn't really test this one for myself, because after tranquilizing a guard I got bored waiting to see how long it would take him to wake up. Bullet damage, however, I did test, and it does appear bullets hurt a heck of a lot more. I feel like Snake is typically pretty durable, and things only get really dire after long, extended bouts of being shot, but I entered the danger-of-dying zone pretty quickly when some soldiers opened up on me.

You're not the only one more susceptible to bullets. If you call in air support, you best be ready to help your chopper take down enemy soldiers, because it is now highly vulnerable to small arms fire. Can confirm: I called in my chopper (blasting Weird Science, of course) and it immediately began to take damage from a handful of soldiers who weren't even using antiaircraft weapons. Then it blew up.

Soldiers, meanwhile, have had their limb health improved, so don't expect them to fall down unless you put a couple extra rounds in their legs. Speaking of Snake's ammo supply, it's been punished as well, and he can now only carry about half as much as he normally does. And that empty magazine he could throw around to distract guards? It's no longer infinite. You can use it six times and then you'll need to call in a supply drop if you want more.

All of this should provide a more hazardous environment for those of you who want to put your skills to the test, or who at least want to put poor Snake through the wringer. You can find the mod here at Nexus,—keep in mind JRavens is still testing and tweaking it—and there are installation instructions in the description and the download.

Tom Francis is a former writer for PC Gamer and current game developer. He's been playing Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain and writing up his thoughts on his personal website. We've been enjoying his musings and he agreed to let us share them with you here. You can follow the development of Tom's next game, Heat Signature, at its official site.

If you have keen eyesight, you might have noticed that the person in my screenshots is not straggly-bearded horned male Venom Boss Big Punished Ahab Snake. She s Amber Fox, a low level support officer I think I extracted on an early mission [update: Andy tells me you get her by importing your Ground Zeroes save], along with another Fox with the same tattoo who might be her brother. She s not a story character, just one of hundreds of recruits I have milling around my base.

Once you unlock the combat bit of your base, you can choose to play as anyone you station there instead of Big Venom Punished Ahab. This is bizarre for many reasons.

1. It must have been a huge amount of work to support something that there is little practical reason to do. The recruits mostly differ from Ahab Venom by lacking some of his abilities, and their own special traits often just restore one of them. Only two of my hundreds of recruits are women, and yet they ve modeled a female-tailored version of every outfit Punished Big can wear. She has her own voice acting for common commands interactions like interrogating guards, and presumably the male recruits do too.

2. And yet, it s also a little shoddy. Not in any ways that matter at all to me, but it creates all these little contradictions and narrative bugs that you would think a highly polished game like this would hate to ship. Everyone keeps calling you by the wrong name, some cut-scenes show your character but people treat you like Boss, others replace you with Boss, others won t trigger unless you switch back to Boss. None of that is a problem for me, I m just really surprised they were OK with it.

3. And it seems totally at odds with a game that often seems determined to tell a very specific character-driven story. It has a long and expensively produced intro to set up who you are in this world, and why you re doing this, then also puts in loads of work to let you not be that person.

Anyway, I m absolutely delighted that they did it despite all of this. I hate playing as grizzled old men in general, and the ridiculous miscellany of costume-shop accessories on Snake Boss s face made it hard to forget: You re playing Hideo Kojima s alternatingly extremely silly and extremely self-serious fantasy.

Amber Fox just looks cool. It s nice to be a woman in what is not only typically a man s role, but in this case actually is a specific man s role. I like when people call her Boss. I ret-con that she really was just some random recruit, given one field op to test out the new combat unit idea, and pulled it off so spectacularly that she became the organisation s primary operative, and now everyone s just kind of in awe of this very sensible, very practical, mysterious woman who just showed up and killed it. It made stories like this one all the more exciting for me, because I wasn t playing as some superhuman legend, I was just a new recruit who had to nearly break herself to get the job done, and came out bleeding and gasping but triumphant.

This was the last game I expected to let me write my own story.

This article was originally posted on pentadact.com.

It's never mentioned in the game, but Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain has a hidden 'karma' system that, over time, alters Venom Snake's appearance. Your Demon Level is determined by your play style, with negative actions—killing people, harming animals, developing nuclear weapons, generally being a jerk—earning you Demon Points, which increase the size of the shrapnel 'horn' on Snake's head.

There are three Demon levels. There's the regular horn (pictured) that Snake starts out with. Then there's a longer one that grows in a cut-scene after earning 20,000 Demon Points. Then, if you manage to reach 50,000 Demon Points, the horn will grow even longer, and Snake will be permanently covered in blood.

Don't worry, though: you can lower your Demon level through positive actions like extracting animals, earning certain achievements, extracting child soldiers, or visiting Mother Base's zoo. Do enough nice things and Snake's horn will shrink again, and the blood will be washed away. You can raise or lower your Demon level as many times as you like, but it's purely aesthetic. You can't stab people with the horn, sadly.

For a comprehensive list of positive and negative Demon Point actions, and more details about the system, check out AlxCj's guide on GameFAQs.

Tom Francis is a former writer for PC Gamer and current game developer. He's been playing Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain and writing up his thoughts on his personal website. We've been enjoying his musings and he agreed to let us share them with you here. You can follow the development of Tom's next game, Heat Signature, at its official site.

Being an outsider to the Metal Gear series, I was only cautiously optimistic about V. All I heard about the last one was that it had 90-minute cut-scenes. I watched enough of one of them on YouTube to determine that it was… not my cup of tea. Of V, I d seen some fun stuff in videos, but I was half-assuming the story would barge in and ruin it.

Well, the story does barge in. But only for the intro and a few brief intrusions, spread out over the vast, ridiculous amount of time I ve played the game for so far—at least thirty hours, I think. That s a ridiculously tiny fraction, and the rest is extraordinarily good.

So many things about it are surprising or different or interesting and I want to write about all of them. So I think I ll do that, one post at a time, starting with this:

MGS is extremely forgiving

Outside of those few scripted intrusions, I ve only actually died a handful of times in those thirty hours. The game has an enormous failure spectrum—I mentioned these in respect to Invisible Inc, but here s the gist:

When you can fail at something but still carry on playing, I call the range of states between perfect success and total failure a failure spectrum .

MGS V has most of the stealth genre s most generous failsafes, plus an incredibly generous one of its own inserted at the crucial moment—Reflex Mode. The result is something like this:

 If a guard sees you, you get an awareness indicator showing you where they are. If you reduce your visibility, that goes away completely and the guard won t even investigate.

 If you stay in sight and/or make yourself more visible, the guard will very, very slowly come over to investigate. Even then, this alerts no-one else and doesn t count against you in any score or performance metrics, and you don t even have to move: going prone and using a hide button makes you damn nearly invisible—I ve had a guard stood 2 feet from me shining a torch directly on my body without spotting me in that mode.

 If they DO definitively see you and recognise you as an intruder, Reflex Mode puts the world in slowmo and you get a huuuuuuuuge amount of time to do something about it. Your view is snapped to the person who saw you, the yelp of recognition they make seems to be inaudible to other guards, and if you shoot them in the head with a quiet weapon (you start with two) in this ample time, no alert is triggered.

 If you fail to take them out in this time, or someone else sees them die, the surviving guard will yell. Others in earshot will be alerted, but no-one beyond that at this stage. Your default weapon is rapid fire, accurate and silenced, and if you can take out everyone who heard before they have a chance to radio, the alert is contained.

 Even if you do give them time to radio, it will do nothing if you ve already taken out their communications equipment.

 Even if they manage to radio for reinforcements, it s easy to run away and they won t give chase.

 Even if you don t run away, it s quite possible to kill everyone without taking a hit.

 Even if you take a hit, your health regenerates for free.

 Even if you get hit a LOT—even if you get hit by a mortar—you only go into a wounded state that restricts your movement but still gives you a chance to take everyone out.

 If you fuck that up, yeah, you re dead.

Listing it like that makes it sound absurd, but I really think this is one of the main reasons I and so many people end up having such a great time. Moving to these messier states creates stories of panic and improvisation, instead of frustrating game-overs. It s the same reason it works in Invisible Inc [the following is a quote from Tom's Invisible Inc. piece]:

A big failure spectrum is good because a lot of the most emotional moments in a game happen on the cusp of failure. If you were this close to being seen, your escape is exhilarating. But if failure is a game over screen, spending a lot of time on the cusp of failure means a lot of game over screens. Each one interrupts your immersion and ends your investment in this current run. It pulls you out of the game, and you find yourself in a menu, then at a checkpoint or a savegame. Mentally acclimatising to how much of your story has been lost forces you to disengage from it, and you have to build up all that immersion again from scratch.

If failure isn t game over, it s still nail-biting when to come close to it. And when you do slip over the threshold, it s just another development in the story you re creating and living through.

This article was originally posted on pentadact.com.

Could Metal Gear Solid 5 be Konami's final big-budget game? Eurogamer reports that the publisher is stripping back AAA development on everything except Pro Evolution Soccer. 

Meanwhile French site Gameblog mentions that worldwide technology director Julien Merceron has left the company over rumoured unhappiness at Konami's move toward mobile games. 

Though Konami insisted months ago that it wants to pursue multi-platform development, Metal Gear Solid 5 composer Rika Muranaka has since tweeted about the report saying "Yes....it's pretty sad...now, I can't write music to any of AAA games..well, I need to find another AAA game company".

Earlier this year Kojima and Del Toro's Silent Hills game was cancelled, and the PT prototype pulled from the PS4 online store. Kojima's name vanished from Metal Gear Solid 5 marketing materials and box art.

While rumours of a rift between Konami and Kojima remain purely speculative, it's been a bumpy year for the company. If Konami choose to bow out of big-budget game development now, Metal Gear Solid 5 serves as a resounding mic drop. It's one of the best games of the year, and probably one of the best stealth games ever. If the reports are true, what will happen to Metal Gear and Silent Hill?

It was inevitable Metal Gear Solid V would contain secrets, but unlike previous instalments we can readily datamine them with our trusty PCs. I feel like that's ruining the fun a bit, but this particular secret seems otherwise impossible to access if the theories are true. That's a shame, because it's massive and oddly beautiful. If you want to avoid spoilers, do not continue reading. 

The video embedded below was uploaded to YouTube by . Watch, and you'll witness a ceremony at the Mother Base celebrating worldwide nuclear disarmament. You see, players can build nukes in Metal Gear Solid, provided they've progressed far enough and have the right materials. They're mainly used against other players, and they're quite sought after.

Theory has it that the below cutscene can only be triggered when there are no more nukes left in the game. That means every single player needs to dispose of their nukes. In other words: total nuclear disarmament.

So assuming the theories are true, it will take every single player in the world to agree that nuclear war is not the answer. Let's see how that works out.

Thanks, Kotaku.

With 15 hours spent on Metal Gear Solid: The Phantom Pain, I'm sitting at a whopping 6% complete, which tells me I'd need a Fulton balloon the size of the Hindenburg to lift all the content out of this game. Naturally, I'm forced to ask the obvious question: besides a couple hundred hours of stealth, combat, base management, and story beats I can't even begin to understand, what else is there to do?

I consider myself something of an expert in playing games without really playing them. Ignoring all the stuff you're supposed to be doing in favor of finding something else is my jam. I spent ten weeks avoiding adventure in Skyrim (and one year, played Santa), I hitchhiked through GTA 5 Online, and I built a metropolis in Cities: Skylines but only left room for a single house so I could spy on the family. With its huge open world, I figured I could easily spend an evening playing Phantom Pain, not do anything useful or mission-related, and still have fun.

After my chopper dropped me off to the usual strains of "Weird Science," I set a distant waypoint and headed toward it. Getting to any given spot on the map is hard, of course: if you've played you know how the mountains restrict most of your travel to keep you on or near the road, and to avoid outposts you usually have to de-horse and stealth past. Apart from encountering a single truck, however, nothing else happened on the road in over an hour of riding and walking. Considering I recently played Mad Max, where you can't drive a few yards without running into random drivers, friendly wastelanders, or glimpses of something potentially interesting on the horizon, Phantom Pain's open world was already feeling a little empty.

I left the road whenever I could to scour the landscape for something else to do. I collected the flowers I saw, which is fun in that it makes a cool 'schweep' noise but not super-cool because I don't personally get to do any crafting with them. I found one or two diamonds. I tested my horse to see if he could hear me tell him to poop from really far away, and learned that he can. What a good horse! I chased down some donkeys, as part of the effort to remove animals from the warzone, despite the fact that there only seems to be war in the zone when I'm around. Rather than use my dart gun, which feels like the typical misson-based tool for animal capture, I instead tried riding over them with my horse to stun them. It's harder, but it works, though I wouldn't really call it a fun activity. I'd call it 'unnecessarily being a jerk to donkeys'.

I found almost no buildings or houses on the map that aren't part of an enemy camp or outpost, which is disappointing. What's more enjoyable than rooting around in dwellings and homes and stealing everything you can carry and smashing everything else? I found one little hut a good distance from anything else, so I popped in to investigate. Inside the tiny hut was a chair and a wooden box. A mystery box in an abandoned house? Score! Wait. Deduct that score. The box wouldn't open. I even shot the clasp. In my frustration, I emptied a clip into the chair. It didn't break or splinter. Come on, video game! You can't even give me the satisfaction of furniture destruction?

We're not looking so great on environmental storytelling, either. When there aren't big, exciting things happening, a little something in the scenery can give a glimpse of a larger world, the history of a place. During a couple hours of exploring I came upon one downed helicopter, four or five burned out trucks, and a single tire in the road.

It doesn't really paint a picture. Maybe throw in some vultures dining on a charred corpse or a skeletal hand clutching a locket. I'd even settle for some of video games' finest heavy-handed graffiti at this point. This is a country so supposedly warn-torn that every single non-combatant has fled and donkeys need to be trampled into unconsciousness and airlifted out... but I'm just not feeling it.

Speaking of which, I think it's disappointing that there seem to be no civilians at all. Nobody stayed behind? Not even one farmer who refused to leave behind his mystery box and his invulnerable chair? I guess there are only two kinds of NPCs in Phantom Pain: those who will kill you on sight and those who love you so much they're thrilled to be choked unconscious and wedgied into the heavens. I'm not asking for much, I just want someone besides donkeys to run over with my horse.

I even started disliking one of the few dynamic events the game has. Sandstorms that randomly arrive during an infiltration are great, sometimes blowing in just in time to cover an escape, sometimes screwing up a well-planned attack. Sandstorms that arrive while you're riding around doing nothing are not fun at all, since you basically just have to wait for them to pass before you can resume doing nothing. Also, don't try to extract stunned donkeys during a sandstorm. They don't make it.

Later, I came across a massive area filled with ruins. After exploring and climbing everything, and finding absolutely nothing, I figured it was probably a stage for a story encounter I haven't reached yet (this has been confirmed for me). I also realized it probably wouldn't have been that hard for the developers to put a diamond or a skeleton or a bullet-proof chair or something up on those damn ruins, just to reward any proactive snoops for exploring the map ahead of schedule.

After spending a good while fruitlessly Lara Crofting around the ruins, I decided to call it quits. There's just nothing to do in this game besides enjoying dozens and dozens of hours of missions, side-ops, stealth, combat, tension, destruction, base-building, resource management, and mystery.

Not a damn thing.

Metal Gear Solid 5's competitive online mode won't reach PC until January next year. This is a shame, because Metal Gear Online looks great. 

The 11-minute narrated in-game footage from Tokyo Game Show covers classes, game modes and tactics. You can salute fellow team mates to form a buddy link; you can paralyse snipers with puppy plushies; you can use the fulton extraction device to steal enemy team members and redeem their kill total as tickets for your own team. It's good to see the trademark blend of military seriousness and slapstick silliness make it into multiplayer.

Snake and Ocelot have also made the leap online. Ocelot can dual-wield revolvers and ping bullets round corners. Snake can deploy his rocket fist for some tactical espionage punching. It's not clear if fultoning a hero character will grant you extra rewards, but bragging rights should suffice. We love the fulton extraction system so much we wish every game had it.

There s a lot to love in Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain, but primarily its Fulton recovery system. You can attach a balloon to enemy soldiers you ve incapacitated and send them back to your base, converting them to your mercenary army. Or you can attach them to animals to populate your private zoo. Attaching balloons to things and stealing them has become an obsession, and I m still not bored of it, 40 hours in. But MGS isn t enough. I want to Fulton things in every game. ALL OF THEM.

Tired of being murdered by Amnesia: The Dark Descent s eerie, flappy-faced monster? Fulton the weirdo and rid Brennenburg Castle of its dark presence one and for all. Morale back at Mother Base would plummet, though, and you might have a hard time convincing it to join you. But if you do, it has an A++ rank in being utterly horrible.

Or say you re playing a game of FIFA. The clock is ticking down, you re losing 5-0 to someone online. You could rage quit, but you re above that sort of behaviour. Instead, Fulton the ball—then no one wins! Or, alternatively, form your own Mother Base five-a-side team by extracting the best players for the opposing side.

If you re playing Team Fortress 2 and an enemy sniper is making a mockery of you with repeated headshots, extract the coward and convert him to your own team. Same goes for the enemy s turrets and teleporters. The more I think about it, Team Fortress 2 with Fulton balloons sounds like the best thing ever. If only I could mod.

Forget driving halfway across Europe to deliver that shipping container full of beans, or sugar, or whatever the hell it is. Just Fulton your cargo, sit back, relax, and wait for it to arrive at its destination. Of course, this would defeat the entire point of playing Euro Truck Simulator 2 in the first place.

If you re trying to enjoy the compulsive shooting-and-looting in Borderlands 2, but find the incessant, unfunny banter of regular series annoyance Claptrap intolerable, Fulton him! Then slip your helicopter pilot some money to accidentally drop him in the sea before returning to Mother Base. Aaaah, much better.

Or why not make your opponent in StarCraft s life that bit harder by extracting all of their precious minerals? Then extract their gas refineries. Then all their SCVs. Then their entire base. Then all their units. FULTON EVERYTHING.