Day 7: Snake-u? Snake-U?! SNAAAAAAAAAAAAKKKE-UUUUUUUUUUUUU!?!?!?!?!?!?
Two of the biggest video games coming out for 2008 do absolutely nothing for me. GTA 4 and Metal Gear Solid 4 are going to be huge games. They’ll sell millions of copies, make billions of dollars, and eat up trillions of hours in play time, and I don’t really care.
I get why they’re great, and I know why people like them, but I can’t really play one for more than 15 minutes before I get bored and go do math homework or dry hump a belt sander.
GTA never worked for me because I only wanted to go kill people, except A.) you’re just some dude, and B.) the fighting and shooting mechanics play like the developers spent a fifth of the time they spent on the driving. You couldn’t really start killing people because you’d get shot to shit from some asshole off screen, and the guys who are screen you can’t hit because manual targeting is like trying to pilot a concussed hippo, and auto targeting would ignore the motherfucker two feet away with the sawed off shotgun giving me a rock salt suppository, and, instead, lock my uzi on a group of Make-A-Wish kids entering the building filled with puppies, candy, and cures for cancer.
As for just being a guy, who wants to be just a guy? You spend the first two hours picking stuff up and dropping it off somewhere else. Errands? The bad boy of the video game world, the game that gave Jack Thompson a fame boner, has you doing errands? I can drive a car. I can pick up dry cleaning and I can pretend said dry cleaning is a prostitute.
A game similar to GTA but infinitely more fun is Crackdown. You know what you do in Crackdown?
Earn a black belt in murder.
When you start out, you pick your guns, and then to go into the fictional city, you click on the button that says ‘Clean up the City.’ I killed a drug runner by throwing garbage trucks at him, and then cleaned out his urban fortress by beating his elite bodyguards to death with his own corpse. And I’m celebrated for it. I get stronger, faster, better weapons, and blowjobs for being a hyper-violent psychopath. I blew up an entire city block with a grenade launcher, and walked through the flames with a SAW and the narrator of the game exclaimed, “you have all the makings of a legend.” That’s the first 45 minutes.* Meanwhile back in GTA, at 45 minutes, I’m getting ice cream for the supposedly bad-ass crime boss’s kids.
*bar none, my favorite thing to do in Crackdown is turn on “Ride of the Valkyries,” get into a cop car, turn on the sirens, get back out, pick up the car, and then chase criminals with the sirens blaring, and crush them with the car. A close second is hopping around the city like the Tick, but with the Punisher’s arsenal.
See, I don’t want to work my way up the ladder. I find that interesting in movies, but that’s condensed, or montage-d, or filled with brilliant character actors. I play video games to escape the real world, you know, the place where I have to climb a fucking ladder everywhere I go.
I should have known the Metal Gear series wasn’t for me when I sucked at Metal Gear Solid. All I wanted to do was snap necks, and the game tended to punish you for killing people. I really should have known it wasn’t for me when during an interview, creator Hideo Kojima, said it was possible, and even encouraged, to finish the game without killing anyone, including bosses. You know where else I’m encouraged, if not outright celebrated, for not taking a life?
REAL FUCKING LIFE.
Every night, I crawl into bed, take off my glasses, pull the covers to just under my chin, and grin while saying to myself, “yes! The streak continues!” I don’t mind sneaking around as long as the exercise ends in blood. This might explain why one of my favorite games for the original Playstation was Tenchu. The series is crap now, but I loved the original game. Another great game that was woefully underrated due to snooty game critics was the Mark of Kri. It had an interesting if simplistic combat scheme, that many people saw simple, but great, as a bad thing. It was intuitive, and it let you take on twenty people at a time and feel like a badass. It had reversals, but most important, it had a stealth system that actually mattered. If one enemy saw you, not every bad guy knew where you were unless they hit the alarm. You could sneak around, picking off hallway guards and archers, before storming the main area to even the odds. In the Metal Gear Solid series you never got to storm shit. You just hid then ran like a bitch, and then fought a fat guy on roller skates.
I should really just stop watching G4. It gets me all excitable. Angers up the blood.
Matt