Playing MGS 4 for the first time. I don't like it...and that scares me.
 

I've never played Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. The original MGS blew my f*ckin' balls off years ago. So did Sons of Liberty, and Snake Eater. Peace Walker for the PSP was pretty fly, too.

I bought Guns of the Patriots the other day, seven years after its release. Nine bucks. I thought, "why the hell not." My girlfriend owns a PS3 (I'm a 360 owner). The time is right.

So I start it up. And...it's...awful? Like, I'm not liking it. There's the fact that the "Mission Briefing" intro is accessible only via the main menu, and not when you, like, actually start the campaign, so there's vital information I'm missing off the bat.

The Middle East setting is cool. I guess. But interspersed within the pseudo-realistic Kojima world of guns, terrorists and global warfare, there's...fart jokes? Wait, no -- not fart jokes, just farts. We meet Meryl for the first time since the original Metal Gear Solid, and she has a teammate who soils himself -- complete with frrrap and gurgle noises -- during her intro, and during the reunion talk, and during your escape from an abandoned building?

Like. Jesus. Is this supposed to be funny? Whose idea was this?

And then there's Sunny. Olga's daughter, apparently, who hangs out with Otacon in Snake's mobile headquarters. I can't stand that little girl. She's just so stereotypically "Japanese" in design. A character meant to come off as so cutesy and adorable that she actually has the exact opposite effect.

I hate her thin-pitched little stuttering voice. And those striped leggings, bottomed by oversized shoes. And the way she clodhops around the other characters, while they talk of PMCs and private militias and military coups, offering fried eggs to everyone and then emoting when they turn her down.

There's a lot of good stuff in here. Don't get me wrong. But...did Kojima pull a George Lucas here? Did they let him have complete creative control, and he went a little nuts? Is Olga Jar Jar Binks, and all the fart jokes sort of like overdone CGI?

I'm now starting Act II. Vamp just showed up. Maybe things will improve.

Am I being overly picky? Am I just not in the right frame of mind? Has Metal Gear Solid always been this...asinine? Strange, yes, and idiosyncratic, always. But this lame?

Someone help.

Its a good game, but it is probably the weakest of all the mainline MGS games. Also later on the game practically becomes a movie with very little actual gameplay segments inbetween.

Play till the end though. The ending of the game made me cry, and its the only videogame in existence I ever cried. Its well worth it to see how the series essentially concludes.

I've feared going back to it, because I'm sure it has aged poorly gameplay wise, though it seems most of your issues stem from the story/characters? I played through all of the MGS series, including the MSX Metal Gear games, in about a two week span in preparation for 4 and I can honestly say I didn't feel like a beat was skipped. It felt perfectly inline with the rest of the series. Meaning it was incredibly dumb and filled with stupid characters saying/doing stupid things. Also, pretty much the reason I love the series.

I'm not so into the beginning of the game, but at some point it does this flip and just becomes pure fan service that kind of glosses over how idiotic everything is.

Also, if I'm to include the absolute insanity that is Ground Zeroes, there's a lot more vitriol to be spilled over how moronic the series has gotten.

Dude, what? What the hell made you cry in that game? I can maybe understand feeling an insane amount of heart string tugging nostalgia during the last fight, but I can't think of anything that would make anyone cry.

Interesting. Maybe I'm just not in the right frame of mind.

I just came off a fourteen-hour Dead Space campaign (my first time playing), which has a totally different vibe than a Metal Gear Solid. I grooved on those esthetics: the lack of HUD, the stark and gritty vibe.

How often does that happen to you guys? One game affecting your perception of another? The juxtaposition here has been pretty offputting.

It happens to me a lot less these days, because I play games so infrequently that they don't really have time to set-in before I move on. When it does happen it's also way more of a problem, because my time is so limited that if something feels off (even if it's just me not being in the right mind space for a particular type of game) I abandon it almost immediately.

For instance, I've been playing a sh*t ton of Monster Hunter the last month, but I was really excited for Axiom Verge on the PS4. I put in maybe an hour or so on it, but it was such a total shift that my mind couldn't really focus and I fell out of it after two play sessions. That's pretty much how it goes for me these days. Outside of a handful of portable games I generally get a taste of something and then it goes on the pile.

I can certainly see how some characters may put people off, it's a lot more character tropes running around. And Akiba's constant dihaerra, goes stale rather fast, but he's been the poop guy since MGS, so I guess it's a running joke...

Okay. It's getting better. I'm getting into now, I think.

The storyline's confusing as f*ck to follow, but that's par for the course. That old Metal Gear Solid charm is starting to warm the cockles of my cold, cold heart again. I appreciate all the references to previous games in the series, and I still find myself surprised at some of the gameplay -- give Kojima credit, he's fearless when it comes to shaking things up.

This section, featuring a trenchcoat-wearing Snake prowling Eastern European streets, doesn't feel like MGS at all. And I think that's a good thing. Hell, MGS 2's sunlit Big Shell didn't feel like MGS. Neither did Snake Eater's jungle. It takes a lot of guts to constantly try new things like this.

I kinda think the controls in 4 are the smoothest in the series.

I played Rising and Twin Snakes back to back before playing 4. I was in a totally awesome groove by the time I got to the end of 4. I was so engrossed in the characters and the story that there really wasn't any point in 4 where I wasn't having a good time.

Oh, man. It's also among one of the worst sequences in the game. I recall close to nothing about the act of playing MGS4 at this point, but I can remember that scene and that memory contains an incredible amount of frustration and anger.

Those two games, especially Rising, is so far removed from MGS4 and the design language that game is built on to even begin to be compared.

Not comparing them, they're totally different. I was just so into the "universe" after playing them all over a week.

Misconstrued your control sentence.

Either way, that is probably the weirdest line to follow to get to MGS4. Sh*t is confusing enough in order.

Totally agree. :lol:

I got Rising for Christmas, and I made it a point to play it right away, and liked it more than I thought I would. So that made me want to play Twin Snakes and 4, since they were the only ones I had handy. I hadn't played TS in about 5 years and never played 4 before, so figured I might as well ride the wave.

I would've played the whole series in storyline order but my PS2 took a leak some time ago and I haven't gotten around to replacing it. Also didn't want to wait until I got around to getting the collection on PS3, just figured I'd play what I had.

Total random weird order, agreed.

A friend of mine and I had Metal Gear marathon weekend, managed to get through Metal Gear, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, Metal Gear Solid, MGS 2: Sons of Liberty and Snake Eater, that was quite an experience. we thought we could do up to 4, but I think we'd need a separate weekend to do so.

We're just gonna do the canon games, so no Snake's Revenge, Ac!d and Ghost Babel.

We did grounds Zeroes, the longest MGS ever :lol: and Rising on separate occasions. Rising was pretty good, I was a bit iffy having Raiden go Anime extravaganza in the MGS universe, but if Snake can be retconned to jump on flying missiles (ugh)... Why not.

If you could get yourself out of that situation in some way that didn't involve jumping on a missile, I'm eager to hear how.

Show your work.

But... how can someone dislike Sunny? I loved her so much.

To be fair, she's grown on me.

In Rising isn't she supposed to be 10 years old? Yet she looks like a teenager.

I don't remember how old she's supposed to be in Rising. I'm sure you can look it up, though. She does indeed kinda look like a teenager.

The real annoying character in Rising is that kid who speaks with the weird broken English.

Hah. F***in' George. :lol:

And I swear I read that Sunny was about 14 or so in Rising. it was like 5 years after part 4, so I'unno, math.