Using a Playstation 3 to catch up to games I have missed (and other wonderful uses of time and money)

Greetings fair readers! I am still here, still looking at Final Fantasy XIII-2 with a mixture of apprehension and optimism, still slowly crawling my way through random games (This blog was going to be about Demon’s Souls, but then speedrunning marathons happened and then the cheap garbage power cord on my PS3 broke and now I probably should buy a new one), but I figured I’d tell you about stuff I’ve played in written form. Because I can. And because I need to tell my mom that something productive comes out of me playing too many video games.

Games I have played a little bit of, enjoyed, and will have to play more of at some point. Thanks Steam, for tricking me into spending money on digital goods.

1. Transistor (It is by the dudes what made Bastion)

Games I have played enough of to write something big on, but won’t.

1. Xenonauts (continues to be a fine, fine adaption of one of my favorite games. Its lack of ambition doesn’t elevate it above comfort food status, and it takes parts from old X-COM that I didn’t like then and still don’t like now)

2. King’s Bounty: Warriors of the North (Picking up, ostensibly from where I was playing last year. Still totally King’s Bounty, which is to say that it steals blatantly from Heroes of Might and Magic, occasionally betrays its Russian origins by randomly crashing and is enjoyable even when I’m sort of steamrolling through everything)

3. Demon’s Souls (As I said, this was originally going to be one big blog about Demon’s Souls. I’m liking it quite a bit, but I don’t think I like it as much as either Dark Souls game. Maybe that’s just me being cheap and playing as a Magician, running around with Crescent Falchion and murdering everything, or maybe its simply the switch from the rather vibrant community of Dark Souls 2 into the already explored empty lands of Demon’s Souls. You can expect something significant when I finish it)

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots

Wait, seriously? This is the game that almost won Giant Bomb’s GOTY 2008, earned a significant number of perfect scores with a Metacritic average of 94? Really? People called this game a “Masterpiece”? But somewhere in the 5, almost 6 years since this game was released, I guess our standards have changed. Mine certainly have, because looking back on it now, I’m not quite sure how others reached that point and why we didn’t all just give Banjo-Kazooie Nuts and Bolts/Fallout 3 the game of the year awards they so richly deserved. It didn’t have to be this way. I like Metal Gear. When it is debated, it’s usually split between the odd and even numbered installments of the franchise. As a member of the pro-MGS2 camp (I can appreciate that game’s complete and utter devotion to being as subversively insane as possible), I thought I would naturally like Guns of the Patriots. I wish I could say that was true, but that simply isn’t the case.

Don’t get me wrong, Metal Gear Solid 4 delivers the things I want out of a Metal Gear Solid game, ridiculous action, people uttering complete nonsense with dead seriousness, bizarre Japan-isms, and a dash of 4th wall humor for good measure. It has that, and those parts are just as great as they are in other MGS games. But somewhere among the exceptional amount of crazy, I found an exceptional amount of dumb. How is it more dumb than other games in the series? Well, I think some of it stems from an inflated sense of self-importance, maybe some from the usual tonal dissonance these games have, but between this and Peace Walker I’m starting to question if I like MGS as much as I thought I did. Like, this game is really dumb. Nanomachines! The System! Cyborg Raiden! Liquid Ocelot! FOXDIE! Johnny poops himself! Nope! I’m good, actually. The absurd, almost obsessive need for this game to resolve everything from previous titles (leading to fun stuff like “NANOMACHINES EXPLAIN EVERYTHING”) works in its detriment, especially when it comes to the 90+ minute ending cutscene that might as well be someone dropping a giant anvil of (needless) exposition on the player with just a dollop of fanservice. It’s all just a little too convenient, a little too “Darth Vader made C3PO when he was a boy! Also Midichlorians” for my tastes. Another way of saying that might be “The writing in this game is bad and not in a funny way”. Maybe I’m just getting older and MGS is secretly not for me anymore. That wouldn’t be a bad conclusion to reach, between me not much caring for Peace Walker and now this, but I only played MGS 1-3 recently enough that my thoughts on them exist as blog posts on this very site (albeit from 4 years ago…) I bet that if I replayed MGS 2 and 3 now, I’d still like them, and that this game is just an unfortunate aberration. I don’t have the will or the time to replay them now, but I have the HD collection in case I ever want to test that fact.

You’ll notice I didn’t mention the gameplay at all. That’s because it’s almost inconsequential. Oh sure, there is still sneaking, you can shoot dudes a little more effectively than you could in MGS3, but at some point it feels like it’s there for the sake of being there, as if Kojima still needed to be reminded that he was making a video game at some point. I’ve never been the biggest fan of Metal Gear’s approach to stealth (it’s fine), but at least the proportion of cutscenes to gameplay seemed about even. This game? No question, you spend more time watching overwrought dialogue than you do sneaking. The thin veneer of justification starts to slip away once you start taking control away from me every hour for 30-60 minutes at a time, and at some point I’m just watching bad anime. I’m sure someone will say “But isn’t that ALL of Metal Gear Solid?” No. I don’t think so. There is merit to the actual gameplay of the series and there is merit to the way that Hideo Kojima tells his stories and I don’t think you could have one without the other and in this case I don't think the ratio works in the game's favor.

I'm still excited for The Phantom Pain, but it's good to bring my expectations down a tad and be reminded that Metal Gear isn't all sunshine and nukes. Still, I'm glad I played Guns of the Patriots, admittedly for the same reason I played Final Fantasy XIII: So I could know for myself. Once I bother to buy myself another power cord, you can be assured that this isn't the end of me playing games on this fancy PS3 box.