Part 38: Episode XXVIII: Padding Penguin

The Underground Base


"Metal Gear should be further below. Hurry!"

Yeah, yeah. Hold yer horses, Colonel. No Metal Gear is allowed to properly function without first throwing down with a Snake. Anyhow, welcome to the final proper level of Metal Gear: Ghost Babel. There are still two stages after this. But they are both exclusively boss battles and cutscenes. So, before we begin the trek across the final area, let's hear from the support staff. We'll skip Campbell since we've already heard his spiel.

Snake pounds in Mei Ling's digits...


"'Revenge is a kind of wild justice'... But revenge isn't very productive, is it Snake?"
"It's pretty good at making people dead."
"...That isn't really the productivity I'm talking about."
"Yeah, that's great. I've got a vengeance seeking couple of mercenary freaks to still deal with. I'll tell them you said hi."

Solid Snake sees how Ronard is hangin'...


"I killed him. McBride said so, don't you remember?"
"But that's not true, is it?"
"Why d'you think that?"
"I just have a feeling that wasn't quite how it happened. ...There's a patch of hell reserved just for killers who turn against their own flesh and blood. I know something about that..."
"Great. I won't have to worry about reservations then."
"You're..."
"....."
"...There's no getting around you, huh."
"Sheesh. Don't you get enough sob story monologues from the people you kill? What's with you anyway? You always leave the people you fight with enough juice to verbalize a damn novella before they croak. You need to get with the program, guy. Two in the chest. One in the head. Ain't nobody weeping about how mermen raped their mother or their puppy was run over by an American diplomat as a child they were cursed by Poseidon when they get a good old fashion Mozambique Drill."
"....."
"You ain't gonna hang up until I spill, huh?"
"I just fought an attack chopper. I can use a breather."
"Tch... Christ. Fine."
"...My brother -- he was a dumb kid. He didn't have the talent for it, but he became a mercenary anyway. Always copying me. During this one conflict, I was hired by one side, and he by the other side -- the side that was going to lose. Just like I thought, his side got pushed further into the corner every day... One day, I was told that we were going in final kill with everything we had. I could have warned him. ...But I didn't."
"....."
"The next day, his entire force was wiped out... and he was dead."
"...It was war. Not something for you to..."
"Maybe that's true. But I know he died blaming me. When I found his body, he had the lucky pendant I'd given him half bitten through between his teeth, the chain ripped to pieces... "
"Feh. This is dumb. Don't you have a giant nuclear walking tank to stop or something. Later."

And there's the first half of Weasel's backstory. It's pretty easy to miss, since you've got to call him early in the beginning of this stage or it will skip on to new dialogue. There's a second half to his backstory, but that only triggers a bit later into the level.

Brian McBride with Gindra wiki articles all day, every day...


"...century by French explorers and became a French territory. Even back then, the repeated outbreaks of violence resulting from forced labor in farms run by French businesses made Gindra a frequent topic of discussion in the legislature."

Neat. There is actually a FUCK LOAD more Gindra blurbs from McBride across the game. But, I think a few sprinkled throughout is enough because fuck transcribing all of that for a bit of world building fluff.


And as always, Chris is out of commission. Just once I'd like someone to drop out of radio contact suddenly and not turn out to be captured or really evil. Maybe they just had a big lunch and had to pass a huge dump so that's why they weren't at the radio. Since nobody wants to talk on the phone to someone currently shitting. That's just plain gross.


Alright then. Let's get down to business. In this update we'll be just dealing with the first floor and the first floor of the basement. Doesn't look like too much ground to cover, right? Hahaha... Yeah, they are padding this map to hell and back.


North of the opening area is a large central region which splits toward the east and west. Snake has to slide between crates to get to each half of the area. Plus evade a camera. We'll call this room the "Split" for conversation sake. There is a guard patrolling a door to the eastern and western ends of the split.


Both of these doors lead to different halves of B1. First we'll be heading to the western part.




B1 is a clusterfuck of electrified floors and about a half dozen panels. The goal of the first half of Stage 11 is basically to deactivate all the panels in B1. The trouble is, the panels we can actually destroy are universally for the floors on the other fucking end of the basement.




For instance, that first panel we destroy with a Nikita is for the floor accessible by going west from the entrance lobby. There is a third entrance to B1 down there as well. So, we've got to backtrack to the Split, go south to the beginning, then west through a couple guard filled rooms back to B1.




From here we can eventually make it to a chasm with another electric power panel past it. There is also a long corridor past that which leads back to the first floor and an elevator. But that's locked with a higher security clearance than Snake currently possesses.


So anyway, remember how I said controlling Nikita rockets kind of sucks and Gun Cameras REALLY suck. Well here's a new challenge! There is a room filled with Gun Cameras on all sides. If a rocket is not moving at full speed, it will instantly be shot down.


So with basically about three pixels worth of a margin of error and nearly firing blind, Snake must direct the missile diagonally past all these Gun Cameras in order to actually reach the panel. This. Took. A... While...


The best part is, after doing the diagonal trick shot, it's very possible to fuck hitting the panel anyway since there is a very tiny bit of wiggle room to maneuver the floaty ass Nikita missile and the panel must be precisely hit dead on as missiles have no splash damage where electric panels are concerned.




So of course, that last panel we destroyed turned off the juice to a floor all the way on eastern side of B1. So backtracking to the Split again and heading east.


This next part is very dickish. We now find ourselves over by that Gun Camera clusterfuck we just dealt with earlier. There is a door north of it that can be opened with a keycard.


But it leads to a dead end. Remember how the last (and only) time we had to bomb a wall with C4 was to rescue Jimmy half a game ago? No?


Well fuck you, this is the last level and it's time to re-use everything that you've learned. That includes bombing random walls and hoping for the best. The only indicator a walls is weak to explosives is pretty much planting 'em and hoping for the best.


Behind this random blown out wall is the penultimate ID Card of Ghost Babel. Since this is as good a place as any to stash one.






Now, with the Lv. 5 Keycard, Snake is free to backtrack all the way to the entrance and back around to that to that elevator behind the locked door I mentioned earlier.


And down we descend into the bowels of Outer Heaven. And that was the less tedious half of the stage.


Did I mention we're going down...?


Really far down...?


Really, really far down...? And the elevator goes through every floor for about 45+ seconds...


Unfortunately, despite the extended elevator ride, this lift only goes down to Basement 50 of 100. I'm not even going to get into why the hell you'd need one hundred floors worth of underground storage space. But why would you build an elevator that only travels through half of them?!

...

I hope the final boss of Ghost Babel is Galuade's architect so Snake can repeatedly toss grenades at his jerk face until the splattered gore resembles the average layout of one of these fucking levels.