Brandon's clarifications help a great deal, at least insofar as I now choose to believe that the events of the first hour will be explained at some point. I thought maybe Amazon sent me a mislabeled disc, like instead of The Phantom Pain I'd received an unpublished prototype superhero/horror/Brokeback Mountain/1980s hair metal album cover mashup.

I'm still mad at Snake's hospital roommate. While playing last night I invented several compound words to berate him with. We passed like a dozen wheelchairs during our escape. I could have sat in any one of them and he could have pushed me and we'd have been out in minutes and I wouldn't have had to see all those awkward hospital-gown-ass-closeups or crawled like a worm through the burning building because my elbow and knee were both dislocated and HE KNEW THAT AND STILL NEVER SAID HEY DUDE SIT IN THIS WHEELCHAIR I'LL PUSH YOU BECAUSE I CAN FUCKING WALK

Ocelot is a hoot. The YouTube summary video I watched did describe him as a semi-villain in other MGS games, so that was confusing, but as WTF moments go it's way down on the list. In a world where I've seen a helicopter gunship getting eaten by a fiery Dune sandworm under the supervision of a flying BDSM redhead in a latex straightjacket and purple garter stockings, being uncertain about Revolver Ocelot's loyalties is hardly a blip.

Weird as it all is, I'm 1% into the game and I already see why the rave reviews. Hell, the flares fired by the Soviets when they're looking for you at night are worth a high score on their own.

As for you, Botch: get with it, man! Live in the now! MGS3? There's no fire-whale in MGS3. I don't play games unless they have fire-whales in them. New rule.

While I could see myself turning against the Phantom Pain simply because it is so huge, I don't anticipate it. This game is, so far, really really good. It manages to dodge my usual complaint about open worlds thanks to its mission structure, and the "other parts" like base management are games unto themselves. 

Controls frustrate me from time to time but it's rare; I'm sometimes turned off by the silliness - maybe I just wasn't expecting it - in what I'd thought was an extra capital Serious military thing. But for its occasional faults it's an amazing and incredibly huge experience. And those cassette tapes do sum up everything you need to know, so noobs like me are okay. 

PS4. It's always seemed like it belongs on the console and the gamepad controls are definitely comfortable -- though you could play pretty well with a good mouse. You'd just need a few extra buttons to keep things orderly.

It looks great with the exception of a few shadow problems here and there. The lighting effects are very subtle and often very powerful, and Afghanistan looks as nice as Afghanistan realistically could. Even the HUD clutter that's so bothersome in many games (all the objective markers, the enemy callouts, plants you need to harvest, etc) is done nicely, so it's not ugly or overwhelming even when the screen is wall to wall carrots and gerbils.

I just finished the Honeybee mission (Dix'll know the one I mean) and the depth is still showing itself. My job was to recover a piece of US military tech the Soviets had stolen. Pre-planning and setup for the smash-and-grab took up a good three hours of the four hour mission and involved several whole installations that I could have ignored completely if I wanted to. While I wouldn't go so far as to say you have total freedom in how you execute your missions, you have a lot of freedom in how you execute your missions.

Also, enemy troops aren't prescient. They don't see you as often as in other games, because guard duty is boring and it's not a peach assignment so the best and brightest probably aren't assigned to it. Instead, when they do get suspicious, they will investigate to the ends of the earth, sometimes stopping to tell comrades that they think they saw something and are checking it out. Which is neat, and lets you set up delightful ambushes to knock their teeth out.

The game opens not just with David Bowie, but with David Bowie's best song. That's a huge leg up in my book.

It's worth playing Ground Zeroes, especially if you're new to the franchise. Some of the scenes -- though they made no sense to me at the time -- wind up clarifying characters later on in Phantom Pain. Even if it's something simple, like the reason a major character is so very angry when he first turns up in Phantom Pain. It also explains why there's teeth in Snake's brain.

Had my first moments of must-kill-Hideo-Kojima last night. In general I'm pretty content with D-Horse, but there's a mission where you must use him and suddenly it seemed like all the controls changed. He loved coming to dead stops at a whim and refusing to turn in the direction I wanted. I now hate D-Horse because D-Horse sucks and I'm making him into D-Glue ASAP.

D-Dog is adorable and useful, but I fear taking him into combat because I worry he'll be shot. I need D-Thong to make herself available so I can have a tactical buddy that's both useful and expendable.

I'd like clearer explanations and better menus. I wasn't very discriminating in who I extracted so I have a base full of Es... are they ever going to improve? Is there a way to accelerate this? Should I just fire them? Also don't tell me to build more FOBs and then not tell me how to build a FOB. And for fuck's sake, let me decide what attachments go on my weapons. You force me to make every other decision in this base. An unsilenced tranq sniper rifle is as useful as D-Horse on a truck-chasing mission. I have silencers coming out my ears. Put one on the god damned rifle.

On the good side, Phantom Pain claims regular foes and soldiers will get used to your tactics and dramatically change theirs to combat them, so don't get lazy. I rolled my eyes because all games say that, but here it's true. My standard approach stopped being reliable a while ago and fails almost every time now. Unfortunately I have no "alternative" approach, because I'm not very good at this game.

I wonder if there's a way to get a whole pack of D-Dogs, and just send them on missions...