Giant Bomb Video Game News

So Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots has been out for a full day now, and I’m close to five hours into the game, somewhere in the middle of act two. This is significant for me, as I’ve probably played all of the previous Metal Gear Solid games for a collective total of about two hours. As little Metal Gear Solid as I’ve played before this, I’m finding the meaningful gaps in my knowledge about the Solid Snake character and the franchise in general to be few and far between–in a way, this stuff is like video-game folklore. With enough long-term exposure to video-game culture, you just pick this stuff up through osmosis.

Part of what has prevented me from really digging into past MGS games has been what I perceived to be an unforgiving stealth-action rule set that the game’s mechanics just couldn’t back up. It always seemed like you needed to hold down two or three more buttons than you should to perform some of Snake’s basic maneuvers. MGS4 still has some of those holdovers, such as Snake’s inability to hoist himself up and over some chest-level obstacles, and it’s awkward how enemy troops will go into security-alert mode when they spot you in the middle of a battlefield thick with firefights. I dunno, maybe they’re just not big Tom Skerritt fans.

Still, based on my limited experience with the series, MGS4 is simply much more playable than its predecessors. It adopts a more standard action-game control scheme, though I’ve also noticed that a lot of the stuff that was unique to Metal Gear Solid when it first came out has since bled into other, ostensibly non-stealth-related games. Both of these things factor in to make MGS4 just feel less alien.

So I’m actually enjoying the gameplay in MGS4, which is a bit of a surprise to me, though really it’s the other bits that I find fascinating. MGS4 is an uncompromising game, a game defined by internal contradictions and willful anachronisms. It’s an action game that would rather be a movie. It’s incredibly cinematic, yet it leans heavily on long, expository monologues. The dialogue alternates between heavy-handed preachiness and cryptic nonsense. If you want to go blind drunk in a matter of minutes, play an MGS4 drinking game where you take a shot every time a character says the word “system.” If you’re looking to end up in the emergency room, do it for “control” as well.

Playing MGS4 almost makes me feel like I’m watching a David Lynch movie–scenes are jammed with symbolism that may be symbolic of nothing, and characters that should be dead are walking around like nothing’s happened. But for whatever choices that were made in the development of MGS4, good or bad, I feel like they were all completely deliberate. It’s very rare for a game designer to create something with such a specific vision, and not have some of it lost or compromised in the process. I truly believe that this is exactly the game that Hideo Kojima wanted to make.

You can look forward to the Giant Bomb review of Metal Gear Solid 4 sometime next week, courtesy of Brad Shoemaker, who, unlike myself, has been simmering in the tasty juices of Metal Gear Solid with a certain heady lust for a long time now.