Metal Gear Solid 4: Demotion

So I played through the game again (on easy) doing a no alert, no kill run to get the always fun infinite headband and stealth camo, two staples of MGS replay value.

I skipped all the cutscenes and it underscored one thing: There's not much gameplay in Metal Gear 4.

One of the most interesting aspects in the promises of MGS 4 was being able to pick sides in a conflict. Snake would be able to ally with one side or the other, or go neutral and sneak on by. Skirmishes between factions only happen in the first two stages in the game, and you are never able to choose a side. You can try and sneak by, or you can make friends with the rebels. That's it. Helping the rebels means they won't flip out when they see you, but there's not a major change to the gameplay.

Skirmishes are boring, shooting the enemies is boring and the game is completely uneventful until level 3 when it merits more criticism.

The failure oflevel 3 is that the only people on the town streets are you, your target and soldiers. You are given a civilian disguise at the start of the level, but there's no need to ever use it. The PMC's already know exactly who you are, even with a mask on (go figure) and there's no one else on the streets. You don't need to even try to blend in: you're better off using your camo and hiding in the shadows, or, do as Gorgeous Hair did and stay in the cardboard box the whole time.

Waste of half a level. But hey, at least it was 'different'.

Level 4 takes us to Shadow Moses island, which can be summed up thusly:

"I didn't realize Metal Gear 1 was so ...small"

It's a short level, full of instances of infinite enemies, except where there aren't. Game balance: how it's done.

The Sniper Wolf battle's pretty cool. Apparently she wasn't initially hard enough, so they added those "frog" ladies to come look for you, which is a bit annoying, but whatever. I liked this battle the most.

The battle I liked next to most was the Metal Gear vs Metal Gear battle. The problem I have with it is it's like GTA. Grand Theft Auto does nothing well. It's a game of other games, all done better in their other games. People love it cos it has all kinds of different games. Metal Gear doesn't do robot on robot battles as well as other games. Still, it's the second best battle in the game, for what it's worth.

After that Liquid controls Snakes nanomachines, hops into a gigantic submarine and (almost) kills Raiden. Mei Ling shows up on the only working battleship in the US Navy.

BREAK.

Here is my biggest problem with the game outside of it's 3 hours of actual gameplay time: The story is stupid. Balistically stupid. Stand in front of this story and it will kill you with it's ineptness. The US has installed nanomachines into all their soldiers and vehicles, as has every other military in the world, all apparently using the same single AI system.

Yeah.

Liquid hacks into it and has complete control over everything that can cause violence. The game says there's no fighting in the world at this point. The only working warship (in the world) is Mei Ling's. Why the un-nanoed rebels from levels 1 and 2 aren't using this time to take over their respective countries I'm not quite sure. All millitaries of the world are broken and you're honestly going to tell me that instead of revolutions happening in half the countries of the world, everyone's having a fucking sunday?

So yeah.

With that kind of lazy writing, you can guess how satisfying the rest of the story will be.


Level 5 is so insultingly short it shouldn't even be called a level except for it's at least 2 hours of cutscenes.

Level 5 is exactly one board. get past some soldiers, shoot a few robots (nobody ever goes "Holyshit, our giant robots got shot!" in Metal Gear) and open a door by hitting the triangle button really fast. That's it. Boss Fight, level over.

The plot at this point centers around a supercomputer at the end of a deadly microwave corridor. No human can get in cos they'll get cooked. Snake says he'll go cos he's dying anyway. One last act of heroism. It's awesome. I'm serious. It's an amazing moment in an otherwise mediocre game. You, playing Snake, get to sacrifice your life for the goal of the game. I wish other games could nail this level of self-sacrifice in their characters.

The great moment is promptly ruined when you get to the supercomputer and Ottacon's little robot comes out and does all the work. ALL the work. You sit there, likely thinking, "sure I was gonna die, but was my final act to escort this stupid plot device?" I don't care if they gave Snake a floppy disk to upload or had him put some plastic explosive on the machine (which would have been both sweet and a nice homage to the old NES game) but to hand off the climax of the game to an RC car is crap.

Snake sits there and watches the little robot break everything. He watches as you the player are watching while the game plays yet another cutscene, all control of the situation taken away from you and Snake at the same time. Part of me wishes this was deliberate; You the player are watching the game hero watch a robot do the job at hand. A robot which is being controlled by someone remotely, as though they were playing a video game. Maybe Kojima knows his game is hardly a game; this scene being his analogy for the whole MGS 4 experience: sit there and watch.

It climaxes with a very pretty and somewhat poignant if completely implausible (they're gonna heal each other up and keep fighting? come on!) fight between Snake and Liquid that plays nothing like the rest of the game and are then insulted for an hour and a half with the resolution of the game in which everyone is still happy and no one dies. When Yang and Cid weren't dead in Final Fantasy, that was kinda weak, but okay, cos Tellah really did die and also it was not a gritty war tale.

BUT

BUT

BUT!~!!!

now I have the Stealth Camo, the Tanegashima (gun that has a 33% chance of making a tornado) and the infinite headband. Time for some fuggin REPLAY VALUE!

Headband is instantly obsolete: you have been able to buy as much ammo as you'd ever need from the menu screen since the first level.

The Tanegashima's tornado is cool, but neither fun nor useful. The reload and randomness of the tornado make it only a novelty. It also manages to work almost nowhere. A weapon to load up and show your friends once and that's it.

The Stealth is crap too: it doesn't' work against machines, which is dumb cos it's a magical cheat device so it might as well. Once enemies are alerted to your presence, they can see you even when the stealth is on. Why? Again, it's a magical chead device, given to you after you have completed the game to add an interesting replay value. The whole fun of getting it is that you can do funny things like appear in front of a guy, have him flip out, then disappear and watch him get confused as hell. Now it's broken and all of the fun I had with it in previous games is no longer have-able.


and my last complaint:

In MGS2 you could collect dog tags from every soldier. in MGS3 you could find and shoot frogs on every map.

There's nothing like that in MGS 4. You can get medals for doing various things, but there's no sub-game that runs through everything. There's nothing that will show you the nuance of the game the way having to stick up every soldier in MGS2 did. There's nothing to force you to explore the areas like the MGS3 frogs did. My cynical side thinks this is deliberate, because frankly, there's way less depth to the game this time around.


2 stars.

Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft's e3 announcements

Sony:
Movie rentals? On my game system. Awesome.

Microsoft:
Avatars, Really?

Nintendo:
More exact Wii controls. Great, more stuff I can buy and not use.

1 star.


Gorgeous Hair mentioned how they announced things like ZOE3 and the next ICO game last year but haven't shown anything. I posited a theory that after the breakup of last years e-3 thing, this year's return to form isn't being taken as seriously, and in an odd way, Dennis Dyack may have gotten his wish. So game companies are showing whatever's showable, and the Japanese ones are mostly waiting for the Tokyo Game Show to drop info.

We'll see if I'm right whenever that show is.