No place for Hideo
June 15, 2008
Here's the reason I bought a PS3 so many months ago. It's a weird feeling to have the killer app for a system ship so far past the launch date. I imagine to Sony these years were agonizing, but at least they have something good after all the waiting. Metal Gear Solid 4 is an excellent game on many fronts: technologically, artistically, and even conceptually. It pushes past what the standard definition of a game should be. That is, it pushes into the Hollywood realm. Some kind of hybrid between a Splinter Cell-esque sneaker and an X-Files movie, it's hard to tell you're playing a game until the HUD pops up when somebody emasculates Solid Snake.
No, make that Old Snake. Due to circumstances too torturous to describe outside Wikipedia, Snake now looks like an old man. It's about 2014 and the oil economy has given way to the war economy. Private military contractors like Blackwater have effectively taken over the globe and fan the flames of war in third world countries. The UN tolerates this because of the Sons of the Patriots (SOP), a system that acts like DRM for guns, preventing genocide and other atrocities by locking soldiers out of their equipment if they try anything funny. Clearly no one consulted with Cory Doctorow about this, because the bad guy's goal is to take over the SOP system and have a fighting force powerful enough to take over the world. At the point where I am in the game (just past halfway), the bad guy has done so. Whoops. My bad.
Maybe I wasn't sneaking hard enough. There are some strange gameplay choices in MGS4 that don't so much complement each other as counterbalance. You have an awesome stealth suit that can adapt its colors like a chameleon, plus this handy threat ring that shows where the bad guys are. There's also radar and night vision. Sounds like a sneaker's paradise, right? Except for the huge number of guns at your disposal, the enticing Call of Duty firefights that take place around you, and the fact that you can buy tons of ammo even during a boss battle. I chose to sneak most of the time, but it was pretty simple to take out a chopper with a RPG. Which is it, Hideo? Sneak or shoot?
Regardless, you get to play a stealthy pursuit through London and then a Bruckheimer-worthy escape on motorcycle that deserves to stand next to Final Fantasy VII's motorcycle sequence in the halls of gaming history. The boss battles, on the other hand, have been pathetic. I'm playing on normal difficulty and haven't broken a sweat. I feel like I'm doing it wrong, like there's this whole other way to play the game that will lead to better boss resolutions than Drebin giving me a lame sob story about the "hot babe" under the freaky armor. I don't need the colonel to tell me to plug my controller into port 2, and there hasn't been any Snake vs. Tank unfairness (for which I am profoundly grateful). But sometimes it's just boring.
Those times actually do not include MGS4's loooong cutscenes. Seriously. Go make yourself a sandwich. I've played Xenosaga before and I have to say, Xenosaga had much more gameplay on tap. Of course, the quality of the cutscenes is extraordinary: faces look wonderful and lips animate perfectly. The textures aren't 100% crisp and the frame rate fluctuates between 25 and 60, buy you probably won't mind. Overall the graphical detail is somewhere between Halo 3 and Gears of War, which is a nice place to be.
Sadly, there's no mentioning the cutscenes without talking about the voice actors. They are all uniformly talented and passionate about the material. It's just that they are forced to deliver it in the most stilted manner possible. I sometimes talk like this when Sunshine asks me to look something up on GameFaqs and I very carefully recite the steps to unlock something. Imagine an entire game full of people reading strategy guides to each other and you have the new Metal Gear. I also wish that Snake had lost his voice along with his good looks. While David Hayter is a capable voice actor, he's forced to gargle rocks to make himself sound older and instead comes off as a painful imitation of a real senior. Would it have been sacrilegious to find a real old person who can do a good Solid Snake impression? Listening to this guy is like being raped in the ear by a man wearing a sandpaper condom.
Or something like that.
