Why Metal Gear Solid 4 Sucks!

/* Posted September 5th, 2008 at 9:35am */
/* Filed under PS3, Sony, Video Games */

/* */

There are tons of things that you simply cannot understand no matter how hard you try. Stuff like “Why people watch American Idol” and “Are turn signals really that hard to use”. Everyone has things that they simply cannot grasp. Here are mine for today:

metal gear solid 4 Why Metal Gear Solid 4 Sucks!

Why do people like Metal Gear Solid 4?

I don’t get what people find so appealing about these games… they aren’t games. They are hours and hours of mind bogglingly bad FMV sequences punctuated with the occasional part you get to play a very repetitious game. It’s like watching a really, really badly written and poorly acted hong kong sci fi movie that takes itself way too seriously and every hour or so you can push some buttons on your remote but no matter what you do your actions cannot avoid, change, prevent or otherwise improve the plodding, heavy handed story. Throw in more inane plot twists, completely immature poop jokes, shameless self exposition and more shallow one dimensional characters than your average soap opera and you have Metal Gear Solid. I think I loathe it as much as Halo now. It’s like being forced to listen to your crazy uncle prattle on and on and on about his conspiracy theories just so you might possibly get him to give you a dollar. I can understand liking the actual game that is hidden between all the crap sandwiches but you STILL have to take repeated bites of a very large crap sandwich to play it. It’s like telling someone you’ll give them some candy… if they let you hit them in the hand with a hammer for four hours first. I question the fans of this series taste repeatedly in my mind. If it was somehow possible to remove all the crap from Metal Gear Solid and leave you with just the game I would probably think highly of it… but if you remove all the crap then you have a game that would last about an hour…

The actual game, if it could be removed from the horrid story, gibberish dialog, shallow awkward characters and long winded soap boxing could probably be pretty good… provided they trimmed some stuff and altered the completely wonky control scheme, but as it is the framework ruins any decency the game portions generate. Metal Gear Solid -the game portions- is a mostly tasty sweet pickle slathered inside the biggest sh!t sandwich I have ever seen. I don’t like having to take repeated forced bites of said sh!t sandwich to get to that tasty sweet pickle relish, which is forever tainted with the aftertaste of sh!t from being inside said sh!t sandwich.

Halo at least had the gaul to let you -play- most of the time and feel like you were driving the story… Metal Gear just feels like one long, winding badly written movie that makes you play a game to see the next piece… of which it constantly interrupts your game to remind you of that.

Watch movie, watch more movie, watch even more movie… start to yawn… oh! I get to play some game now? Thanks!… oh wait… I was only allowed to play a few minutes now I have to watch more movie… and watch more movie. When is this going to be over? Can I play some of this sixty dollar movie I just bought?

As I said, I can’t understand how smart, articulate folks who by all accounts should enjoy smart, articulate entertainment can stomach the pure stupidity and ham-fisted storytelling that is Metal Gear.

From what I’ve seen more people are gay for Metal Gear Solid than there are penguins in the arctic. I just wish more folks would pipe up and admit that the storyline is one big crock of duck. I mean, I hear people clamoring to see this junk as an honest to god movie in the theaters… that would be the most painful Uwe Boll style horror I can think of. The only thing that saves Metal Gear Solid is that every hour or so you get to play a tolerably decent, albeit over hyped and overcomplicated, game for a few minutes. If you remove the sweet pickle from the sh!t sandwich I’m not sure many people would want it anymore.

Much like my qualms with modern anime I wonder if the Japanese get more out of all this malarkey than I am. I mean, the story of Metal Gear is just -so- Japanese… it’s dripping with Japanese… by that I mean the painfully cliched and shallow characters, the common themes of pointless sacrifice, mental issues and awkward almost misunderstood use of emotions like love, the seeming need for plots within plots within twists within convolutions as if a simple straightforward story was too easy, the over the topness of it all and always that ghost that the Japanese writer just doesn’t properly understand the west, westerners, how they act and react, what actually drives them and how they actually carry themselves. I mean Asians love to complain that “the western white man doesn’t know how to write Asian themed movies because he doesn’t understand the Asian mind” and they are RIGHT. The same goes for Asians trying to write western themed movies starring westerners doing western things. The story of Metal Gear is like a non westerner watched too many bad eastern imitations of western Hollywood action movies (which themselves have bizarre issues when viewed through the eyes of a westerner) and only gleaned the over the top junk from it all and then tried to shove it all together into one big pot.

If Metal Gear Solid was an anime it would fit right in like a fat guy laying a reeking garbage barge in a public bathroom.

To be as blunt as possible the reason I DON’T like it is because the story is crap. It is badly written, poorly executed and overall terrible. If that terrible story had been told in a way that involved the player rather than yanking them out of the game and the immersion to watch it transpire I would have much less to complain about. The point of a GAME is to immerse yourself in the world and control your character’s course in it, not to simply watch your character perform actions that you may or may not agree with. At it’s core it’s a control issue. Metal Gear Solid is a movie, it controls the course of everything and you are along for the ride… as opposed to a true “game” that you play and feel like you are guiding the direction of the game rather than it guiding you (even though it IS actually doing that).

What I really don’t understand is my big qualm is with fat guys stinking up my office can… the Metal Gear thing was thrown in simply because I’m sick of people giving it handjobs right and left all over my office, the internet, you name it. Metal Gear is like that hot chick in high school that everyone goes out of their way to be nice to and suck up to even though she is a shallow queen bitch that if you ever actually got a chance to date her you’d be putting up with mountains of crap on a daily basis and listening to her yammer on and on constantly about crap you could care less about. I know people still love the hot chick… I choose not to. It’s all opinion in the end and mostly my own personal inability to understand why people who I see as intelligent “deep” folks go so ga-ga over what I see as one of the most retarded things in recent memory.

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