Any Given Monday or Kojima wha??? or My Very Own Aneurysm

Tonight I got a chance to sit down with Snake Eater again. I've been playing it for probably a month. I tend to take it slow with some games, because some games base about 40% of their dialogue on how difficult it's going to be to do whatever you have to do next. I put myself in the game a little too much sometimes. So naturally I'd rather be going about my usual life (throwing tennis balls against a wall, eating the #1 combo at Krystal, alphabetizing playing cards) than to be in a jungle with 1000000 things that want to kill me. Or more of an archetype, a games "Fortress of Doom."

Seeing as how my life for the last several days has included nothing but building furniture, making pizzas, eating pizzas, and trying to state "Jeff Bezos is rich because he uses computers" in the form of about 250 words (how can you overstate the obvious with any dignity), I decided that for this night, I would rather be in the jungle with eccentric Russians than in my own life. In any case here's how my night with Snake Eater. It's fairly spoiler free, but if you're like me and you don't want to know anything about games that you haven't played, just scroll down to "The Missing Link" and read Will's article of which I whole heartedly agree with.

I had to begin with returning to fight The End. When I first met The End, I instinctively saved, because it seemed like it would take a while. Para-Medic warned me not to save, and I got really paranoid that something like a corrupt save file would occur. At this point I wouldn't put anything past Kojima. I really had to leave the game though, so I saved in a separate file, and everything went fine. I waited about 3 days before I got back to it. If you've played it, you know the rest. So I fight this miserly, Santa Clausian, googily-eyed old fart for about 2 hours. Let me show the definition of the word 'fight' in context of a battle with The End.

fight (fite): v. fought, fighting, fights

1. To attempt to harm or gain power over an adversary by blows or with weapons.

2. (when in reference to the fight with The End) Crawling around brush for a time period longer than one hour, listening for footsteps or breathing, only to find that his senile ass is sleeping or pointing 36" barrel at your face that is 38" away from him.

I had to use the knife to pull two of his shots out of the crown of Snake's head and his gnards. I hated the fight the entire time. The only shots I got on him were from the Colt when he accidentally stepped on me while moving from sniping locations. I felt shamed that this elaborate fight, wasn't working out the way it was intended. Finally it all paid off, and saw what I hope to be a reflection from his scope. I got three shots on him and he was dead. I sniped the sniper. And suddenly the whole painful fight felt wonderful. I imagined that Hideo was standing right behind me on my bed, patting me on my back for playing the game the way it was meant to be played. To get the exact experience that he was looking to give you throughout the fight.

Moving on I shot some spiders that I didn't intend to eat. They bit me, that's gotta be worth bullet no matter how ammo conservative Resident Evil games have made me. Then I continued to climb the longest ladder in video game history. I began to get vertigo and I mean that. Honestly.

Did some more stuff that I didn't really want to just to get to a cut scene. When you play a Metal Gear game, you're playing it for the cut scenes. Go log on to XBox Live and just randomly say "Metal Gear... Snake Eater!" Then listen as 12 year old dumbass comments "Man, I beat that game 4 months ago. It was too easy." There's someone who has made it through the entire game and not realized a single thing about it. Metal Gear games are fairly easy in comparison to a lot of other contemporary games. The reasoning behind that is the game meant to be watched. Interaction is just step up from it's base storytelling.

But I'll come to my point. My point every time I play a Metal Gear game, I walk away thinking "Hideo is F*****G NUTS." There's a lot of things he puts into his games that really upset me. First and foremost, mullets. Not that brilliantly complex storylines are often bridged with dialogue that rivals the poetic genius of Max Payne.

But tonight while playing, I really felt something. That something was admitting that I was wrong to call Hideo "F*****G NUTS." All this stuff that makes little to no sense, all this stuff is just style. I went to film school to waste a semester of my life about 4 years ago, and while there I remember watching E.T. with my roommate who was a mildy retarded jackass. When the bike flew up into the moonlight, I made a comment that Stephen Spielberg couldn't make a movie without an uplifting violin song in it just as the characters escape or triumph or leave an island full of dinosaurs to eat one another or whatever. He looked at me and told me that it was just his style. I told him that it was obviously a style I didn't like then. And then he said something about eating and scratched his groin. You know, that mildly retarded jackass was on to something. Style is style, in any form. And particularly when it's in new environment, and it's original, you have to applaud it. In some ways, I can almost take Metal Gear as black comedy. Sometimes I think that some of the stupid stuff I do in the game (running around corners blindly, walking directly into a spiked log that's been hanging there for days), somewhat justifies the blatantly moronic stuff that Snake says. It almost ties them together more. Raiden nude, scoping out Eva's boobs, Snake's violent opposition to never ever understand anything ever. It's all a style. He's not out of touch, he's definitely got the smarts. Let's just trust the man with style and take in all of it's greatness. And that's my point. God bless that glowing hearted alien.

-timothy l.