super short post

Bayonetta is a really awesome game (so far). I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt right now and assume it'll continue to kick ass and take names until its very end. It is a super stylish affair with fun, but not mindless, game mechanics. It's really not trying to do anything new, but it is so good at what it does. A full length review will likely be following in the coming weeks.

Metal Gear Solid 4 (**1/2)

A video game “review”

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriot

developed by Kojima Productions

published by Konami

score: **1/2 out of ****

I used to refer to myself as a fan of video games with somewhat of a disturbing trust in my hobby. They were, essentially, what I enjoyed doing more than anything else. Now, years removed from an outright obsession with them, Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid 4 has come and gone; finally I received the chance to play it. I'm left with a lurking apprehension to call it something I actually enjoyed, despite the relatively high score awarded to it. There were moments within it where the world faded away so that I could bask in the glow of possibly some of the greatest moments of any video game, ever.

Everyone who is anyone remembers Metal Gear Solid, and how it made us feel. It was a cinematic experience and though we barely understood it (and most of us probably still don't), we felt a connection to it, whether or not our enthusiasm for the game came from us actually doing anything, or whether it was us sitting around, watching as a type of magic unfolded on the screen. It was called a masterpiece and launched Kojima into the forefront of video game design. He was at that moment, for all intents and purposes, the man. Unfortunately, he couldn't shake the heavy burden which the game had left for him, it attached itself to him like a leech and here we are, he has released three more numbered Metal Gear Solid games, as well as others. The “story” of the series has expanded beyond any logical measure. All we need to do is look at Metal Gear Solid 4 to understand that there is such a thing as “too big”.

This game, to me, seems to be a cry for help from Hideo Kojima. Solid Snake, the once young protagonist, has become an old man. Despite this, he is carrying his burden. Metal Gear as a series is the burden that Kojima has carried since Metal Gear Solid was released. He has said that he wants to stop making Metal Gear games, yet they keep coming out with him at the helm. This game, his opus according to many, shows off the technical prowess of the PS3 (although I can't understand, especially with mandatory pre-act installations, where the load times could possibly be coming from) but it is not so much a video game as much as it is an “anti-video game”, just as much as it is “anti-literature”.

It is certainly wild of me to use such terms at my leisure, especially since I don't feel qualified to even be writing this review in the first place. There are people who actually get paid for this! The first term, the “anti-video game” can be observed by two simple things:

1. the excess amount of cut scenes in the game
2. what these cut scenes accomplish

Metal Gear Solid 4 is a game about its story, as illogical as that may be. The two concepts are attached at the hip so tightly that they likely can't escape from each other without permanent damage. We can play the game with skipping its cut scenes, or we can watch all of them. It's really a decision left up to the player, but even when we know what we're doing, even when we've watched a cut scene a handful of times, skipping it just feels...wrong. The amount of work that went into designing some of the scenes can feel greater than the care that went into several video games themselves. Shouldn't we credit the hard work of those tasked with creating this scenes by you know, actually watching them? Even when they mean nothing in the grand scheme (75% or more of them I'd like to think, do not whatsoever).

The most awe-inspiring moments of the game happen within cut scenes, many of which are so grandiose that we as a player feel a sense of longing to be able to stop saying: “God, I wish I could be playing that!” Raiden, the main character from Metal Gear Solid 2, likely the series' most hated character, returns in this game as a chronic bad ass in cyborg flavor, wielding a katana the way most people only imagine themselves in fiercer than fierce dreams. Never, and I mean this, unfortunately do we ever get to play as Raiden. We can only watch as he accomplishes the greatest feats of illogical choreography we've ever seen. For fuck sakes, we never actually interact with him outside the cut scenes! It's possible, maybe, that Raiden does not exist in Metal Gear Solid 4: The Game and that he is just a figment of Metal Gear Solid 4: The Movie. He is an integral part of the “story”, but he is not even a factor in the game.

I'm not going to sit around and call the plot of this video game stupid or anything like that, because it's just not worth the effort. Maybe it's just too complicated for me to really understand or maybe it's just really poorly written. Characters can and will stumble through dialogue that has no bearing on anything, fictional or otherwise. The wisest statements of the game are simply reworded versions of a simple epithet: “war is bad”. Thanks for the newsflash, Hideo! We may have grandparents that perished during a war, so I think we're allowed to render that opinion ourselves. In this current age, it's a possibility that someone close to you is serving in the Middle East, where death is more than just a fear; it's an outright fact. I feel kind of bad that a game is trying to help me come to that conclusion.

Whenever a video game gets released with the kind of hype and furor that this one received, it's pretty much a given that the personal taste of all professional reviewers goes right out the damned window like an empty bottle on a lingering road trip. It's not hard to point out that really, when it comes to the popular opinion, that we as a species give the public what they expect. People were so caught up with this game that to call it anything than a goddamn masterpiece was editorial suicide, and gamers attacked the least positive of reviews (which still ranged usually between 9 to 9.5 on a scale of 10!) without even playing the game themselves. These are the exact same people who were upset that yes, there were going to be copious cut scenes in this game, and yes, they were going to be long. What exactly were they expecting? Surely, they'd played the previous Metal Gear Solid games. This is nothing out of the ordinary, and thankfully this game lets us pause the movie sequences. People expect weird things.

What did I mean when I called this game “anti-literature”? Not exactly the most well yielded term, although I'll let you in on a bit of a secret; the ambiguity of the term is mostly intentional. Can a video game be literature? Has there ever been a video game worthy enough of that title?

I don't feel that a video game can, or should be literature at all. I think Kojima understood this when he was making Metal Gear Solid 2, in which he attempted suicide  (not his own, but the suicide of his series) by using the game as a platform for a very well executed joke. The people were so in love with Solid Snake after Metal Gear Solid that they wanted more, so Kojima, sick of people clamoring for Metal Gear Solid once more, did several things antagonistic in nature. First off, he faked the death of Solid Snake, and second, he pushed Raiden into his place, who was everything Snake was not. Man, did he ever do a good job of pissing people off, until some people finally understood that it was just a joke. The reaction to this realization baffles me. These gamers who moaned about Raiden suddenly acted like they were in on the joke with Kojima the whole time and took to calling Metal Gear Solid 2 a work of art. Weirder still, people finally came to terms with the postmodernism of the game and acted like they were never angry in the first place. Kojima had told the entire gaming populace a story that could only be told by a video game. That was the first really notable example that a video game shouldn't be literature, instead it simply used its own medium creatively and cunningly to be something truly unique.

Metal Gear Solid 4 is that idea, replicated a million times, over and over, never giving you room to breathe. It is, in fact, shoving that idea down your throat, so forget about breathing room, that's simply not in its directive. Never will this game try not to be lingering outside the fourth wall, and often times; you'll likely laugh at just how weird this can be. Two characters talking about the game console you're playing on itself, like they're aware of the fact that they are video game characters isn't really postmodern as much as it is fucking obnoxious. There's being clever, and then there is trying way too hard. You can likely guess which one of those stuff like that is.

In the second act of the game, we begin to question what kind of video game that Kojima Productions was trying to make when we are thrust out of trying to be stealthy to being testosterone unleaded, wielding a big gun and shooting the fuck out of everything that moves or looks the least bit threatening. By finishing that sequence, which me and my roommate dubbed as “pretty awesome”, you get the ability to watch our good buddy Raiden tear up several nigh-unstoppable enemies (before you start abusing the weapon buying system to obtain heavy artillery) armed with a katana and pretty fucking ridiculously action hero theatrics. As far as rewarding the player goes, I actually think that's pretty good, especially since we did get to do a fun on-rails shooter sequence in a stealth game for no reason other than because it's cool. So cool that a chapter later, we get another rail shooting sequence. And the chapter after that, we get a third on rails section where we play as the big mecha from the first Metal Gear Solid. No, I'm not joking about that either. I think Kojima could make a damn fine rail shooter, perhaps something to rival the genius that was Rez.

Somewhere in the chaotic mess of all this, we start to realize that we have been provided some stuff in the game that nobody really wanted. Part of the tension of a stealth game comes in the fact that we may not be properly equipped at all times. We're given every option to make sure Snake is a walking killing machine. I understand, the shop run by Drebin is the connection to the game's plot point of the war economy, but god damn is it totally unnecessary. All drama is taken out of many moments in the game when you can just open up your menu, in the middle of a damned boss fight, and pay a guy to send you bullets for your best gun. How exactly does Drebin give us our new weapons and ammunition , especially since his service is instantaneous. If he's behind us at all times, why doesn't he just help us? He comes out in Act 2 and quite flagrantly does it (the “pretty awesome” sequence described earlier), so why can't he just do that all the time? Ironically enough, I put this shop system to use quite often, despite my disagreeing with it, because why the hell not?

The largest failing of Metal Gear Solid 4,  is that it simply doesn't try hard enough to be anything more than another one of Kojima's jokes. Now, I realize I've been totally negative through the majority of the review so far, and I apologize for that. I still gave the game a fairly positive score, and the positives do outweigh the negatives as far as I would let on. For the record; it's one of the most infuriating games I've played in recent times and I recall yelling at my television several times, however, none of that was when I was actually playing the game. The frustration only came in trying to be part of the game's experience.

Remember in Metal Gear Solid 2, Raiden faced off against a character named Vamp, who was for whatever reason, immortal? By the end of that game, we had no reason to believe that Vamp was anything other than supernatural. Raiden, the player character, however, could die, at least in the context of playing the game. He could “die”, we would get a game over, we would continue onwards regardless, because it wasn't really Raiden that had died. Nothing had died, no, we had just failed. Failure is one of the biggest aspects of video games, because we have to learn how and why we failed and how to prevent it the next time. The only bigger aspect is that of success. Anyways, back to Vamp. Turns out, his so called immortality was just mundane and poorly explained. In a series where we have fought a psychic, whose claim to possessing the powers was to interact with the player by verifiable actions occurring in real life (you know when Mantis vibrated your controller in Metal Gear Solid, you thought it was all kinds of awesome); it turns out that the concept of immortality is too out there. The oldest game chronologically in the series features a man of advanced age whose body is capable of photosynthesis. That, and he's the father of modern sniping. This, apparently, was normal enough for Kojima when he produced Metal Gear Solid 3.

The final boss battle in this game is actually a pretty awesome fighting game, and it's basically just two tough as nails guys going at it for no other reason than male pride. You've already completed your final objective, by all rights, the game should be over, but we need to settle it, so we do. The weirdest part of this is that in one of the last parts of the multiple cut scenes that make up the way too long ending, we basically get told that we weren't even fighting who we thought we were. In fact, that character had been long dead, even though in...man it's not even worth the explanation. All it did for me, upon hearing it, was confirm that all we had just played was certainly a gigantic joke from Hideo Kojima, attempting once more to self-destruct his own series.

If he was really serious about this, maybe he'd try to hit us where it would really hurt us, in the game as a game, not the game as a story. Super Mario Bros had what was basically no story. There was a missing princess. Go rescue her. Why? Well, because she's not here. Where is she? Well, you're facing right, just keep going that way. No hero starts out in the wrong direction, because that would just be goddamn dumb. Shigeru Miyamoto did more with that basic premise than Hideo Kojima did with all the script of Metal Gear Solid 4. I'm not saying a game can't have a large, complicated narrative and not be good, but I've definitely seen many cases of video game stories where less certainly is more. That's not particularly the point. What I'm saying is that next time Kojima wants to pull a fast one on us, he should make a game that's crappy. It would be a lot easier to create a bad game than it would be to create a shoddily written one, in my opinion. Hell, he could attempt to do both. Beat Takeshi, the famous Japanese comedian, made a video game for the Famicom called Takeshi no Chosenjou (how I've wanted to reference that game for what feels like forever) and he claimed to “hate video games”. Given what the game puts the player through, it's certainly not a stretch of the imagination. It is notoriously difficult, to the point where the focus of its design becomes a flaw since realistically, the game is nigh unplayable and completely unrewarding. If you want to learn more about it, Google is your friend.

Hideo Kojima needs to make a video game that isn't Metal Gear, for his own sake. It's beyond evident at this point that the general gaming public will love anything related to the series, I think it's time Kojima tackled something else before he becomes convinced he can do no wrong. Here's an idea, just a little food for thought. Let him make a game with as convoluted a plot as Metal Gear, but make the game either “bad” or “not Metal Gear”. Make it both, just to see if people start realizing that the plot is actually pretty damn bad. Let him create a game that is nothing more than his way of telling people to go and fuck themselves.

Keita Takahashi, the creator of the pretty much modern art video game Katamari Damacy, was smart enough to back out of making games for the series because frankly, he grew sick of it. He was roped into it by Namco, despite his protests that repeatedly making Katamari games would kill anything unique about it. He was one hundred percent right in that statement. The greatest part about Katamari Damacy, other than the fact that it was unique in every aspect of its presentation, was the fact that its game design was so very simple. It would be my right as a gamer to call Katamari Damacy Keita Takahashi's Super Mario Bros., or even his Tetris (two examples of very simple games that transcend the aforementioned simplicity to be the absolute best examples of this, our hobby). Not everyone gets lucky enough, or is naturally affluent in the task of video game design to create something like that. Shigeru Miyamoto has proven himself possibly the best video game designer of all time; he has come up with classic ideas time and time again, always looking to tread new ground in particularly intriguing ways. Did you know the idea of Pikmin fostered from Miyamoto's passion for vegetable gardening?

What I'd like to see in the near future, from any game designer willing to rise to the challenge, is something wholesome and simple once again. Boldly, I'd love to see someone tackle their “Super Mario Bros.” and abandon the concept of the complicated narrative, leaving us with a story that can be told simply through the context of the game and what we are doing in it. Super Mario Galaxy, a game which I fear to say I do not enjoy, was halfway towards doing something similar to that before it became bogged down by trying to tell us...something. Was it honestly necessary for the game to use dialogue to convey that Bowser had A) kidnapped the princess and B) had some big, evil scheme. I'd really like to see something new come along and take us by storm. As I see promises for more Call of Duty and Guitar Hero games in 2010, I start to worry that I'm asking too much.

Metal Gear Solid 4, is the bee's knees when it actually comes to sitting down and playing it! I'm being one hundred and fifty percent serious when I say it's really fun. I don't really tire of the sneaking, especially since you can approach it several ways and usually have a blast with it. The sections of the game where Kojima tries something radically different are usually pretty fun too. Like I said, the dude could probably cobble together a bitching rail shooter.

Super Mario Bros. 3, which came out a tad before my time (born in 1990 here, people) is exactly what I want from a video game. By expanding on the design of its predecessors, and just adding more, as well as being polished from top to bottom, it took the simple design of the first two games (the second being what we happen to have referred to as the Lost Levels over on this continent) and cranked it up to eleven. Conceptually, Metal Gear Solid 4 is a lot like the other three games, and the focus is still on stealth, which they play quite well in the war zone settings. In some parts, attacking the right enemy group while being near the opposite group will get you recognized by that second group that you're on their side. It's a pretty neat mechanic even though it is rather bare bones in its execution. Unless I was doing it horribly wrong, all it really did was stop them from firing at you. The battles that happened between these two sides seemed to play out the same regardless of whether you made Side B your “guys”.

There's really a thousand little details I could go on and nitpick about, but any writer worth their weight should have a general idea when enough is enough. Fondly looking back at Metal Gear Solid 2 (let's call it ***1/2), I wonder where that boldness went. This game feels so playful in its attempts to break the fourth wall, like it's trying to get a laugh out of you. It tries really hard to be a certain degree of clever, and eventually uses that power for frustration. The exchange between Snake and Otacon about disk changing and the PS3's advanced power is so beyond the fourth wall that it's pretty much a commercial for the PS3. You may wonder why you are being told the advantages of the system when you're already sitting on your couch, playing it. You may chuckle, or you may just sigh, or you may not even do anything at all.

Does anyone remember the fake Game Over screen from Metal Gear Solid 2? In an attempt to royally mess with the player, the game screen becomes significantly reduced and placed inside a Game Over screen. Only, you're still playing the game. Your first time through the game, when you completely were not expecting that, it was something else. All of a sudden, you stop thinking about the game and try to analyze how it was you died. You realize, maybe slowly or perhaps suddenly, that you're still in control. This is when you figured it out; Metal Gear Solid 2 was a video game that could only be a video game. The issue is that Metal Gear Solid 4: The Game doesn't need to be a video game, or more correctly; it can't be just  a video game. Metal Gear Solid 4 only exists as a fusion of it as a game and it as a movie or a “story”. It's just a damn shame that the second concept of the experience had to be so damn flawed, because it really could have been so much more. Thanks for the ride, Hideo Kojima.