Being a lawyer better be awesome.
So I went camping last weekend. That's probably why, if people were looking for me, I wasn't around. Afterwards I stayed at someone's apartment who lived alone and worked from like 10-6, leaving me alone with nothing to do for eight hours on Monday and Tuesday.
He had a PS3 and a copy of Metal Gear Solid 4. Which I proceeded to play all the way through. Coming up, my possibly spoileriffic thoughts on the game. Mostly because all the stuff I'd be referring to specifically are from the latter half of the game.
Metal Gear Solid 4 is Awesome Because
- There is a fair-sized chunk of one of the acts in which you get to control REX. This includes a boss fight against one of the Metal Gear RAYs. Which is totally sweet.
- The beginning of Act 4 where you get to play the helipad section of the original MGS exactly as it was in the PS1 game (The TV actually switches resolutions down to whatever it was on the game to do so) was amusing even if it only took all of five minutes.
- Act 5 is by and large incredible.
- At first I was a little put off by the fact that they tried quite hard to make Raiden and (especially) Johnny Sasaki respectable characters. However, by the end of the game I felt like they actually succeeded in doing so.
- Drebin is awesome. His monkey is not.
- A couple of the cinematics were extraordinary. The wedding planning scene in Act 5 was especially awesome.
- Screaming Mantis was a lot of fun to fight.
Metal Gear Solid 4 Sucks Because
- It was far too long. Indeed, most of my criticism leads in some way back to this point. It took me about sixteen hours to play through the game, and well over half of that was spent just watching the game play itself. About a third of what was left was spent on me trying to beat Laughing Octopus.
- In general, the first three acts were mostly uneventful and uninteresting. Also there wasn't much sneaking involved in the first two, so much as "Try to goad a bunch of guys into shooting each other and hope that in doing so they don't shoot you instead."
- The boss fights were pretty boring, save for Screaming Mantis. All of them involved me doing basically the same thing, which was pull out the highest-damage weapon I had, chase them down for a few minutes, shoot, chase them down for a few more minutes through an environment that made them needlessly hard to find and not much else, and shoot them again.
- Screaming Mantis was effectively the final boss, not counting the obligatory fist fight at the end of the game. In MGS1 terms, this would be like fighting Vulcan Raven, then watching a cutscene of REX blowing up and the next time you had any real control over the game would be on top of destroyed REX fighting Liquid. So, in summary, while she was a ton of fun to fight, nothing about her really felt like she should've been the last major fight in the game.
- Sometimes scenes would just drag on without any logical reason to. Example: On board Outer Haven in Act 5, there is a scene of Meryl and Johnny holding off a basically endless supply of soldiers. Over the course of about a half hour to forty-five minutes where the most control you have is your ability to walk down a long hallway, the game cuts back to this scene about four separate times. At the end of each cut to the scene, one or both of the people get shot, fall to the ground, and the situation seems hopeless. Again, this happens like four times. By the end of the scene, they've both been shot at least eight times, have run out of ammunition at least once each (Twice, I think, for Meryl), and are still fighting with no significant loss of ability.
- Other example: Big Boss shows up in the Epilogue, talks for about fifteen minutes, has a heart attack or something similar, then continues to monologue for another fifteen-or-so minutes while dying. It nearly got to the point where I just turned the game off because he wouldn't just die already. I didn't, though I may as well have, really.
- A lot of the throwbacks to the old games were interesting or clever, but some of them were just overly tacky. The whole "have your TV black out and the word "HIDEO" appear in the corner" thing was amusing in MGS1. But after you do it at least three different times in MGS4, it sort of loses its charm. When you reach the blast furnace on Shadow Moses, Otacon calls you and tells you to switch discs, then realizes that you're on a PS3 and realizes that a dual-layered BluRay disc was big enough to hold the entire game. Screaming Mantis has all kinds of goofy references to Psycho Mantis's bizarro mind control things not working, like changing controller ports even though the PS3 has none or reading your memory card even though there are none on the PS3. Every time something like that happened was kind of a facepalm moment.
- The whole game lacked the feeling of progress of the earlier games, largely because you weren't really required to get much in the game and it didn't really lend itself well to backtracking since every few hours you'd be deposited in a new place with no way of going back to the old ones. In MGS1, as you got higher clearance keycards you could go back and get new stuff. Often, between key points in the game you'd have to get some new weapon or item that made the next area possible. In MGS4, you were given a target to move to and doing so basically involved evading or killing everyone in your way and nothing more. There were a ton of weapons but none of them really did anything differently than the others. There was no meaningful difference between the Operator, the Desert Eagle, the Five-seveN or most of the other handguns; some had a range of about ten meters longer and some had larger clips. That was about it.
- Maybe other things, but this is getting long enough as it is. So I'll stop.
So, on the whole, the game was actually quite a bit of fun, but there were a bunch of minor to considerable annoyances about it that just rubbed me the wrong way. It certainly doesn't deserve the score of 10/10 that some places gave it. And it's not worth buying a PS3 for if you really don't want one for anything else.
He had a PS3 and a copy of Metal Gear Solid 4. Which I proceeded to play all the way through. Coming up, my possibly spoileriffic thoughts on the game. Mostly because all the stuff I'd be referring to specifically are from the latter half of the game.
Metal Gear Solid 4 is Awesome Because
- There is a fair-sized chunk of one of the acts in which you get to control REX. This includes a boss fight against one of the Metal Gear RAYs. Which is totally sweet.
- The beginning of Act 4 where you get to play the helipad section of the original MGS exactly as it was in the PS1 game (The TV actually switches resolutions down to whatever it was on the game to do so) was amusing even if it only took all of five minutes.
- Act 5 is by and large incredible.
- At first I was a little put off by the fact that they tried quite hard to make Raiden and (especially) Johnny Sasaki respectable characters. However, by the end of the game I felt like they actually succeeded in doing so.
- Drebin is awesome. His monkey is not.
- A couple of the cinematics were extraordinary. The wedding planning scene in Act 5 was especially awesome.
- Screaming Mantis was a lot of fun to fight.
Metal Gear Solid 4 Sucks Because
- It was far too long. Indeed, most of my criticism leads in some way back to this point. It took me about sixteen hours to play through the game, and well over half of that was spent just watching the game play itself. About a third of what was left was spent on me trying to beat Laughing Octopus.
- In general, the first three acts were mostly uneventful and uninteresting. Also there wasn't much sneaking involved in the first two, so much as "Try to goad a bunch of guys into shooting each other and hope that in doing so they don't shoot you instead."
- The boss fights were pretty boring, save for Screaming Mantis. All of them involved me doing basically the same thing, which was pull out the highest-damage weapon I had, chase them down for a few minutes, shoot, chase them down for a few more minutes through an environment that made them needlessly hard to find and not much else, and shoot them again.
- Screaming Mantis was effectively the final boss, not counting the obligatory fist fight at the end of the game. In MGS1 terms, this would be like fighting Vulcan Raven, then watching a cutscene of REX blowing up and the next time you had any real control over the game would be on top of destroyed REX fighting Liquid. So, in summary, while she was a ton of fun to fight, nothing about her really felt like she should've been the last major fight in the game.
- Sometimes scenes would just drag on without any logical reason to. Example: On board Outer Haven in Act 5, there is a scene of Meryl and Johnny holding off a basically endless supply of soldiers. Over the course of about a half hour to forty-five minutes where the most control you have is your ability to walk down a long hallway, the game cuts back to this scene about four separate times. At the end of each cut to the scene, one or both of the people get shot, fall to the ground, and the situation seems hopeless. Again, this happens like four times. By the end of the scene, they've both been shot at least eight times, have run out of ammunition at least once each (Twice, I think, for Meryl), and are still fighting with no significant loss of ability.
- Other example: Big Boss shows up in the Epilogue, talks for about fifteen minutes, has a heart attack or something similar, then continues to monologue for another fifteen-or-so minutes while dying. It nearly got to the point where I just turned the game off because he wouldn't just die already. I didn't, though I may as well have, really.
- A lot of the throwbacks to the old games were interesting or clever, but some of them were just overly tacky. The whole "have your TV black out and the word "HIDEO" appear in the corner" thing was amusing in MGS1. But after you do it at least three different times in MGS4, it sort of loses its charm. When you reach the blast furnace on Shadow Moses, Otacon calls you and tells you to switch discs, then realizes that you're on a PS3 and realizes that a dual-layered BluRay disc was big enough to hold the entire game. Screaming Mantis has all kinds of goofy references to Psycho Mantis's bizarro mind control things not working, like changing controller ports even though the PS3 has none or reading your memory card even though there are none on the PS3. Every time something like that happened was kind of a facepalm moment.
- The whole game lacked the feeling of progress of the earlier games, largely because you weren't really required to get much in the game and it didn't really lend itself well to backtracking since every few hours you'd be deposited in a new place with no way of going back to the old ones. In MGS1, as you got higher clearance keycards you could go back and get new stuff. Often, between key points in the game you'd have to get some new weapon or item that made the next area possible. In MGS4, you were given a target to move to and doing so basically involved evading or killing everyone in your way and nothing more. There were a ton of weapons but none of them really did anything differently than the others. There was no meaningful difference between the Operator, the Desert Eagle, the Five-seveN or most of the other handguns; some had a range of about ten meters longer and some had larger clips. That was about it.
- Maybe other things, but this is getting long enough as it is. So I'll stop.
So, on the whole, the game was actually quite a bit of fun, but there were a bunch of minor to considerable annoyances about it that just rubbed me the wrong way. It certainly doesn't deserve the score of 10/10 that some places gave it. And it's not worth buying a PS3 for if you really don't want one for anything else.