Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

SPOILER ALERT: Ishamel's face without bandages. Essentially, what Big Boss would look like if he decided to get a shave.

edited 13th Oct '15 5:58:31 AM by SgtRicko

Well, duh. He's coma in a hospital for nine years. At some point, the nurse should decide that, yes, he could live without those damned, messy, unhygienic facial hair.

Also, fun fact: This is eerily very similar with that so-called "Vocal Chord Parasite".

Another fun fact: Despite most of the characters has leaning on capitalism, liberal freedom, and other things associated with Western Bloc, in the end, most successful technology employed are based on Eastern Bloc/ S Oviet design.

• The Metal Gear basic idea was coined by Granin.
• In Metal Gear universe, cybernetics was first developed by scientist in Eastern Bloc, that become basis for later cyborg technology.
• Code Talker's treatment to stop the effect of vocal chord parasite is very similar in basic idea with phage treatment, that extensively developed in, you guessed it, Soviet Russia.

But then he Magically grows it fully back a few hours later with the bromeet with Ocelot.

On Ishmael. Maybe they're not bandages, but a mask, not unlike the one "Joakim Mogren" wore. Hell, we had the Raikov mask in Snake Eater.

That's what I'm going with.

It's really interesting how they tied together the vocal cord parasites and FOXDIE.

If the latter is a precise scalpel, the former is more akin to carpet bombing.

Heh. Nicely put.

Fuck Skull Face.

Wait....is that where they are going?!?

foxdies parasites?

Uncertain. While at first I certainly thought the game was implying that the parasites were the precursors to the nanomachines, the game never confirms it. One of Kojima's behind the scenes commentaries mentioned that one of the reasons he chose parasites to be capable of superpowers was because he thought it might be implausible to have nanotech during the 80s, and figured that they could also explain the superpowers of the Cobra unit too.

Even though there is literally no need to explain Cobra Unit's abilities, and doing so makes Fortune, Vamp, and even nanomachines somewhat pointless.

Getting the Leopard Tortoise is harder than the Tsuchinoko.

That's kinda weird.

Kojima is just trolling us again. More plausible than Nanomachines... It's just freaking magic, OK! The parasites, at least the ones the Cobras had, were magic. Vocal Cord Parasites, depending on my mood that day, are either bordering on the edges of plausibility or tipping over into the abyss. I think most people believe the latter. My headcannon is that after Skull Face got his skeletoning, his last loyal people in XOF destroyed all traces of the parasites to prevent Cipher and the Patriots getting a hold of them.

While parasites could be the precursor for nanotech (this is also my headcanon, BTW), vocal chord parasites are too much different with FOXDIE to consider them similar entity. FOXDIE works by specifically inducing cardiac arrest, while parasites killing you by basically being super TBC. FOXDIE identifying victim based on their DNA, while parasite works by identify vocal chord movement. Their only practical similarity is that they are both airborne agents.

That makes way too much sense!

Yeah, but how do Chemical Additives work?

I mean.

The purpose of the vocal cord parasites is to target specific cultural groups based on the language they speak. The purpose of FOXDIE is to target specific individuals based on their DNA.

...I'm not even sure which of those is more bullshit at this point.

But anyway. I mean.

As weapons go, the two don't seem dissimilar, even if the mechanism is different.

One is more precise, one is more broad, but both are focused on affecting targets based on certain criteria. And not affect targets who don't meet those criteria.

edited 13th Oct '15 6:22:28 PM by unnoun

Isolating and targeting specific DNA is how people think we will cure cancer and be the new vaccine, Foxdie at least has that to stand on.

there are actually parasites that do kinda what the game's parasites do like take the place of some biological functions, but nowhere close to the amount of BS stuff the game throws at you. They forget that parasites well are a parasite and feed off the host, if snake had em there would be a huge decrease in lung function just from them being there in addition to a host of other things..

edited 13th Oct '15 6:26:37 PM by Memers

I mean, the main barrier to that is that it's somewhat difficult and impractical.

We're improving, but.

I mean.

As an assassination tool I think it would still be somewhat overcomplicated.

It's not that FOXDIE or even the parasites are impossible, it's that they're absurdly implausible. That, even if they could exist, the things they're used for are asinine.

This is a series where gene therapy is a pretty normal thing though, FOXDIE is one thing but other elements of it are already in nominal use as of MGS 1.

edited 13th Oct '15 6:31:49 PM by Memers

...I mean, yeah, advanced and self-aware A.I. in the 70s.

...Human cloning in the 70s.

...Working nanotechnology by the year 2005.

Scientific progress in the world of Metal Gear is.

I mean, I wish I could have the budget they apparently have.

edited 13th Oct '15 6:34:22 PM by unnoun

It was the Cold War and CIA, we probably gave them enough in real life and they squandered it on actual spying.

edited 13th Oct '15 6:35:34 PM by Memers

Re: FOXDIE/ Vocal cord parasites

I was referring to one of the last unlockable cassette tapes. There is a recording of a conversation between Zero and Skull Face where the former points out that using Vocal Cord Parasites as an "ethnic cleanser" is no longer necessary as new discoveries in genome sequencing allows them to now create viruses that target specific individuals. They never ouright mention FOXDIE but the implications seemed obvious. I took it as meaning that FOXDIE is the successor of the Vocal Cord parasites as a weapon\means to exert control on a population.

Posted by: Unnoun

I'd imagine that a bioweapon such as FOXDIE would be an intelligence agency's wet dream.

Wanna kill a world leader and make it look like a natural death, or give the assassin time to escape? Just get close enough to him, such as shaking hands or touching a part of them, maybe just putting it in a glass they'll drink out of during a conference, and that's it - they'll be dead within less than 30 minutes. Same goes for anyone whose DNA records on file; just find a way to get a sample of FOXDIE close enough to your target, possibly by infecting a known associate to them, and just sit back and wait until the infectee reaches and eventually inadvertently kills the target.

Best of all it'll be extremely had to pinpoint whom or what the infection vector was, and if it fails to work absolutely no one would be the wiser.

Well there is that nasty business of FOXDIE mutating and possibly killing people at random

Was it ever explained how a new strain of FOXDIE could overwrite the previous strain? Of course, one wonders if the only way of preventing it then would be inject the carrier every few years with a strain of FOXDIE targeting someone already deceased.