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Thursday, June 12, 2003
Metal Gear Solid 2: Why It Sucks
Well, after that blatant fan-boy review of my favourite band I have a less cheerful review. It's more of a rant actually. It is the first in my series of "games which are considered great but I think suck", which will be a sort of introduction to my favourite video games.
First up is Metal Gear Solid 2. After reading stuff about this game I was hyped to play it. It sounded great. With the exception of Penny Arcade's comic about the game (See also here), everyone loved it. Sounds cool, says I. It wasn't long before someone had rented it for my housemate's PS2. Let me tell you, the opening sequence is incredible. A perfectly executed cutscene. Then you start to get control of the character and you're like "holy shit, these are the graphics??". I mean, damn, the game still looks amazing and it was made like 2 1/2 years ago! These were my thoughts.
Well, I wasn't prepared to call it great quite yet. I mean, I hadn't actually played that much. So I started playing, and it seemed pretty good. You have to use stealth, stay cool in crisis situations, and you get to try different approaches in most every room. I'm not a huge fan of this kind of gameplay, per se, but it seemed well executed. All was going well until I got to the end of the tanker sequence. At this point we get some guy coming in whose arm starts taking him over or some shit like that. I didn't really understand. Then Snake (you, the main character) starts talking to the arm....I was kinda bemused. But then it all ended in a big explosion, which is always good.
I think up to this point in the game was what the demo consisted of, and I can understand why people were calling it the best videogame ever. It certainly had style, decent gameplay, and a ton of potential.
But it all starts going downhill after that. I will spare you the details, but the main idea is this: the game wants to be an interactive movie (like many other games). But when the movie/dialogue/plot is utterly fucking stupid, ridiculous, pretentious, and pointless, it utterly ruins the game. The whole "my arm is taking me over" bit is only the beginning. It goes on into crazy double-crossings upon conspiracy theories upon marriage proposals until you can't stand it any more. Tycho (of Penny Arcade) questions whether such bad cutscenes can ruin the game. I say: you're damn right they can. Part of the tension in interactive movie type games is wondering what will come next in the story. When you don't care, it ruins the actual gameplay, which is sad.
Which might be ok if the actual gameplay were a bit more well, involving. As I mentioned above, it isn't bad, but there's practically no point in replaying the game. Final Fantasy games manage to have linear gamplay while retaining replayability by packing in the secrets. Metal Gear Solid's only replayability factor is in trying to get more dogtags - who cares.
Anyways, all of this makes me mighty concerned why so many reviewers would rate the game so highly. Just read some of the reviews linked to from gamerankings, eg. gamespot's review. "Incredible story"? What the hell was he watching? I get the feeling many reviewers played through until the end of the tanker sequence then wrote up their review, eager to beat their deadline. A game that is more fully destroyed by it's mid-to-ending I can not imagine. The story is just horrible.
Well, I should stop ranting. I don't think it's a good game precisely because its story fails it. I don't think we can really seperate "story" from "game" these days, especially if the game's creators set out to combine the two. If one is bad, the whole game is bad.
Well, after that blatant fan-boy review of my favourite band I have a less cheerful review. It's more of a rant actually. It is the first in my series of "games which are considered great but I think suck", which will be a sort of introduction to my favourite video games.
First up is Metal Gear Solid 2. After reading stuff about this game I was hyped to play it. It sounded great. With the exception of Penny Arcade's comic about the game (See also here), everyone loved it. Sounds cool, says I. It wasn't long before someone had rented it for my housemate's PS2. Let me tell you, the opening sequence is incredible. A perfectly executed cutscene. Then you start to get control of the character and you're like "holy shit, these are the graphics??". I mean, damn, the game still looks amazing and it was made like 2 1/2 years ago! These were my thoughts.
Well, I wasn't prepared to call it great quite yet. I mean, I hadn't actually played that much. So I started playing, and it seemed pretty good. You have to use stealth, stay cool in crisis situations, and you get to try different approaches in most every room. I'm not a huge fan of this kind of gameplay, per se, but it seemed well executed. All was going well until I got to the end of the tanker sequence. At this point we get some guy coming in whose arm starts taking him over or some shit like that. I didn't really understand. Then Snake (you, the main character) starts talking to the arm....I was kinda bemused. But then it all ended in a big explosion, which is always good.
I think up to this point in the game was what the demo consisted of, and I can understand why people were calling it the best videogame ever. It certainly had style, decent gameplay, and a ton of potential.
But it all starts going downhill after that. I will spare you the details, but the main idea is this: the game wants to be an interactive movie (like many other games). But when the movie/dialogue/plot is utterly fucking stupid, ridiculous, pretentious, and pointless, it utterly ruins the game. The whole "my arm is taking me over" bit is only the beginning. It goes on into crazy double-crossings upon conspiracy theories upon marriage proposals until you can't stand it any more. Tycho (of Penny Arcade) questions whether such bad cutscenes can ruin the game. I say: you're damn right they can. Part of the tension in interactive movie type games is wondering what will come next in the story. When you don't care, it ruins the actual gameplay, which is sad.
Which might be ok if the actual gameplay were a bit more well, involving. As I mentioned above, it isn't bad, but there's practically no point in replaying the game. Final Fantasy games manage to have linear gamplay while retaining replayability by packing in the secrets. Metal Gear Solid's only replayability factor is in trying to get more dogtags - who cares.
Anyways, all of this makes me mighty concerned why so many reviewers would rate the game so highly. Just read some of the reviews linked to from gamerankings, eg. gamespot's review. "Incredible story"? What the hell was he watching? I get the feeling many reviewers played through until the end of the tanker sequence then wrote up their review, eager to beat their deadline. A game that is more fully destroyed by it's mid-to-ending I can not imagine. The story is just horrible.
Well, I should stop ranting. I don't think it's a good game precisely because its story fails it. I don't think we can really seperate "story" from "game" these days, especially if the game's creators set out to combine the two. If one is bad, the whole game is bad.