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Comment by kayge | Hacker News Reader

Hah, you beat me to it; Hideo Kojima would be proud. Sounds like DARPA needs to start feeding old stealth video games into their robot's training data :)

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Hilariously enough, Kojima is enough of a technothriller fabulist that DARPA is explicitly part of that franchise's lore - too bad they didn't live up to his depiction.

https://metalgear.fandom.com/wiki/Research_and_development_a...

But the AI in stealth games is literally trained to go out of its way to not detect you.

The cardboard box trick doesn't actually work in Metal Gear Solid 2, at least not any better than you'd expect it to work in the real world

You have to throw a dirty magazine down to distract them first.

And have no one question why a produce box is near a nuclear engine/tank/ship/mcguffin.

All it takes is one guard to say "that's how it's always been" and nobody will ever ask questions again.

I remember MGS2 having different kinds of cardboard boxes for exactly the reason you said

Just put a poster of a saluting soldier on the box. That'll fool them.

Back in the day I beat MGS2 and MGS3 on Extreme. The box shouldn’t be your plan for sneaking past any guards. It’s for situations where you are caught out without any cover and you need to hide. Pop in to it right as they are about to round the corner. Pop out and move on once they are out of sight. The box is a crutch. You can really abuse it in MGS1, but it’s usually easier and faster to just run around the guards.

Your mention of "Extreme" reminded me there's a "European Extreme" difficulty level, I only made it halfway through MGS3 on that (attempting no kills at the same time)

The only strategy that somewhat worked for me was perfect accuracy tranquilizer shots, to knock them out instantly. That's probably the hardest game mode I've ever played.

Oh, the tons of hours spent lying immobile in grass in that game attempting the same..

Spending hours crawling around in grass only to get spotted, and then there's this guy:

https://youtu.be/t4e7ibdS7xU

Oh the tons of hours waiting for menus to load to swap your camouflage pattern after crawling onto slightly different terrain…

> That's probably the hardest game mode I've ever played.

Halo 2 on Legendary difficulty was ludicrously hard too

Those old vidmaster challenges. woof

I also completed MGS3 on euro extreme, and was about an hour from the end of MGS2 on euro extreme (the action sequence right before the MG Ray fight). I was playing the PC port, and let me tell you: aiming the automatic weapons without pressure sensitive buttons is nearly impossible. I gave up eventually and decided that my prior run on Extreme had earned me enough gamer cred. Finishing euro extreme wasn’t worth it.

On the other hand, I loved MGS3 on euro extreme! It really required mastering every trick in the game. Every little advantage you could squeeze into a boss fight was essential. Escape from Groznygrad was hell, though. By far the single hardest part of the game.

I just learned you can use the different boxes to fast travel on the conveyor belts in Big Shell

There’s even a scene where Snake tries “hiding” in a box and you can find and shoot him

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