Snake?
Snaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaake!!
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(Playstation 3) War has changed... and so has Metal Gear Solid. Mostly for the better.By LaughingMan
"War has changed..."
It's been seven years since the events of Metal Gear Solid 2, and the world is run by a global war economy. Mercenaries are plentiful and technology is regulating soldiers' actions, thoughts, emotions, abilities, and even their weapons through nanomachines in their bodies and a central system of AIs dubbed 'The Patriots' oversees all. Meanwhile, time has not been too kind to the most battle-hardened, stoic super soldier that could actually pull off having the code name 'Solid Snake' without making his enemies laugh themselves to death. No, the super soldier, Snake, has aged rapidly. His long time friend and scientist-who-makes-monstrous-nuclear-missile-launching-machines-inspired-by-Japanese-anime, Hal 'Otocon' Emmerich, informs him that he is aging because, like all clones, his cells are rapidly deteriorating. You didn't know Snake was a clone? Anyways, as Snake walks bitterly away from the unknown tombstone and towards the helicopter, he is greeted by his old radio informant and commander from MGS1, Colonel Roy Campbell, who tells Snake that they have finally located their arch nemesis and Snake's brother, Liquid Snake, in the Middle East preparing a world-wide insurrection. So you find yourself in the Middle East, on a truck bound for God-knows-where. There's a lot of explosions and people in turbans getting their asses handed to them by sniper fire from soldiers decked out in high tech armor. The game designers said that Metal Gear Solid 4 "doesn't make reference to modern day events" but they're just covering their own asses against pissed off government officials carrying lawsuits and crazy fanatic bastards wearing exploding vests. Like all of the other entries in the Metal Gear saga, your main objective is to NOT engage in firefights with your enemies, but rather avoid them by staying concealed in the shadows, keeping out of sight, and hiding in cardboard boxes. Yes, the infamous cardboard box is back; however, don't think that your enemies' are quite as stupid as they used to be in previous games. If your foe sees your cardboard box, they will likely turn it into a paper sieve with a barrage of bullets that would make the cast of the movie Predator cream themselves.
You also have your usual ways of 'picking off' your enemies while avoiding detection: You can sneak up behind them and, ala Metal Gear Solid 3, rob them of supplies, use them as a human shield, choke them out, or slit their throats with your knife. You can also pick off your enemies from a distance with the silenced tranquilizer gun. I would make mention of the silenced pistol you get about a 1/2 hour into the game, but I wouldn't consider that as a 'stealth weapon' because, like all the games after Metal Gear Solid 2, KILLING your enemies leaves behind bodies for passing patrols and wandering soldiers to discover and thereby hunt you down and rape you with bullets. While in Metal Gear Solid 4, you DO have the option of running and gunning, it's really counter-productive and usually ends up with you having a siege of enemy fire that is the equivalent of earning a 4th Star in Grand Theft Auto 3. It is often better practice to use the silenced tranquilizer gun if a soldier gets too nosy, since they just fall asleep. If a sleeping soldier is found by another, he will be awoken by a kick in the gut, and both parties will go along as though nothing happened: SOLDIER: "I don't know what happened Major. I was on patrol when I felt a sharp pain in my ass, and the next thing I know I'm lying on the ground being kicked in the ribs by Staff Sergeant Guermo. I dusted myself off and saw this little dart sticking out of my right ass cheek. Do you think this is something we should worry about?" There are lots of new gadgets and weapons for you to find in the game, but by far the coolest is the new OctoCamo where, if you press yourself against a surface, your entire suit changes INSTANTLY to match the surface, creating a nearly perfect camouflage against even those ultra rare soldiers who have a shred of enough intelligence to go investigate what appears to be a DISEMBODIED FLOATING HEAD.
Eventually you get the OctoCamo face mask, which makes you even more invisible to the nearsighted soldiers you encounter on your adventure. Also available is the Mk II robot, which I honestly found completely useless. While it has the ability to turn 100% invisible, it can only tazer your enemies (which drains your battery) and can only venture out only so far away from Snake. At most, the Mk II is best for clearing a short path or scouting, which I guess is the intended purpose; having Snake sit back and enjoy a smoothie while fighting a war via remote controlled robot sounds like a really shitty game. Metal Gear Solid 5: Bums of the Orange Julius. One thing that really set MGS4 apart from its counterparts is the Drebin store, where you no longer have to scrounge for ammunition but can instead buy bullets from a monkey. I shit you not. This is probably the worst thing that happened in the franchise. In my opinion, the most 'solid' MGS game was MGS3 because it was survival and stealth at its finest: you had to sneak in the bushes with camo and had to take out enemies with a knife and steal their weapons and ammo. You know, SURVIVAL WARFARE. Now, you just give Drebin a ring on your communicator and 'presto', all the bullets you can carry with no sense of danger from running low and being rendered desperate enough that you have to find a soldier, take him out, and steal his shit... LIKE THE OTHER 3(+) GAMES. As a MGS purist, I refused to purchase anything from Drebin, except for the weapon ID unlocks, which is necessary in a world where all guns have trigger locks via nano-technology injected into your body. Also, I thought Drebin was a pretty cool character: He always seemed to know too much, and was mysterious to the point of creepy. It's about time that the 'mysterious stranger' wasn't a damn cyborg ninja... oh, wait... MGS3. Duh. Speaking of cyborg ninja, Raiden found his balls! Apparently his girlfriend, Rose, had kept them in a shoebox under her bed and then finally mailed them back after their really nasty breakup... Thank God. Now we finally get the Raiden we SHOULD have gotten in MGS2, instead of that whiney he-bitch that nearly destroyed the whole franchise.
A ton of the (surviving) characters from the Metal Gear Solid games return to make their final performances in Guns of the Patriots. Who lives and who dies, I could spoil right now, but I don't feel like being an asshole and I DO want you to play this game. Moving on... Needless to say that the enemies in Metal Gear Solid 4 aren't all that more intelligent than those in Metal Gear Solid 3. If you use the OctoCamo in conjunction with well placed silenced tranquilizer headshots, your enemies are like lambs for the slaughter and you'll breeze through Metal Gear Solid 4 with very few problems... Until you encounter Gekkos. The moo-ing, shitting bipedal bastard children of Metal Gear Rex can see through your camouflage and are nearly impossible to kill with most conventional weapons. Finally, Metal Gear Solid 4 has some real challenge. Don't get me wrong, Metal Gear Solid 4 is challenging to the average FPS 'I-stab-u-with-bullets' zombie player, but if you bested Metal Gear Solid 3, Guns of the Patriots will be a cakewalk in comparison. MGS4 has its fair share of memorable moments. One of my favorite scenes in video game history was the final chase scene from MGS1, so it's a no-brainer that I love both of MGS4's chase scenes: The first is on the back of Drebin's tank, and the second is on the back of a motorcycle driven by every gamer's favorite MILF. Escaping the RATPACK1 stronghold in Act 1 is also one of my favorite action sequences, while returning to Shadow Moses and hearing the theme song "The Best is Yet To Come" from MGS1 is probably the most emotional part of the whole game because of the flood of nostalgic memories that Snake AND YOU, the player, both feel as you bear witness to the MSG1 stronghold rapidly aging and falling apart. It's a perfect, though painful reflection of Snake's current state. Probably the most unexpected and adrenaline-pumping moment is... highlight for a massive spoiler ---> Piloting Metal Gear REX and fighting Liquid in Metal Gear RAY As far as cutscenes go, it's a mixed bag in my not-so-humble opinion. While some of the cutscenes are amazingly scripted and well acted/voiced to the point of being better than the shit Hollywood has been churning out lately, I feel that they overshadowed a great deal of the gameplay. For instance, when you first start up the game, you watch a 10 minute cutscene where Snake rolls into Baghdad, then you crawl under a truck. That's all. You crawl under a truck... Then you watch a 5 minute cutscene, and then you get to pick up a new gun and walk down the street. Then you watch ANOTHER 5 minute cutscene, and you run for your life against a pack of Gekkos (which is seriously fun, mind you). Then you get treated to a 10 minute cutscene of Snake three days earlier in a graveyard, and afterwhich you get a 20 minute cutscene that flashes back a week earlier and fills you in on why you're in the Middle East. Then you get ANOTHER FUCKING CUTSCENE WHERE YOU WATCH OTOCON MAKE A CAMERA WITH LEGS, LISTEN TO THE COLONEL YAMMER ABOUT THE MISSION, AND HAVE AN AUTISTIC GIRL BURN YOUR BREAKFAST!! Oh, we're not done yet... BACK IN THE PRESENT, YOU GET A CUTSCENE OF YOU CHECKING A MACHINE GUN FOR BOOBY-TRAPS BEFORE YOUR FRIEND OTOCON CONTACTS YOU ON YOUR COMMUNICATOR AND YAMMERS AWAY AT 'THE STATE OF THE WORLD' FOR ANOTHER FIVE FUCKING MINUTES! THEN YOU FINALLY GET TO PLAY THE FUCKING GAME. Not including a 10 minute install, I spent 5 minutes playing a game and spent less than an hour watching a fucking MOVIE. Now, Metal Gear Solid has always been pretty heavy with the cutscenes, and for the most part they've added a great deal of depth to not only the storylines, but also the characters themselves. The series wouldn't be as highly regarded if it wasn't for the use of well written and scripted cutscenes. Metal Gear Solid 4 is no exception, and most of the in-game movies involve complex storylines and deep character development. HOWEVER, the older games seemed to have had a better balance between the gameplay and the movies than MGS4 does. I just kept thinking that there were a lot of sequences that could have been playable, or atleast interactive (ala God of War) to help keep me 'in the game'. The gameplay seemed to be more like "play 10 minutes, watch a 20 minute cutscene, rise, wash, repeat" than its predecessors: "play a section, act or chapter with a few brief cutscenes, THEN watch a 20 minute cutscene at the end of it." But not all is bad with the unusually long and frequent cutscenes, because they are all amazing to watch. The level of detail, the realistic movements, the facial expressions and the sheer power of their performances doesn't disappoint. Sure, it's like watching a movie, but it's a damn entertaining movie. I guess now that we're on the topic of cutscenes, it's a good time to bring up stuff like 'Graphics' and 'Sound'. Here's my summary:
By the time I was on Act 2, both my eyes and ears have had multiple orgasms. My visual and auditory sensory organs had been laid by Metal Gear Solid 4. The graphics are truly "next-gen". The crispness of the textures, the lighting effects, the character shading... it's all a polished presentation. The detail in the characters' faces (especially Vamp and Liquid) is incredible for a video game. During gameplay there's just a ton to experience: when you stand in the blizzard, your screen gets fogged over and snow sticks to it; dirt clouds your vision at times; there's some spectacular scenery (the bridge and river in Act 3). One thing to note: I'm almost 95% sure that the cutscenes are real-time. Kojima, the game's producer, is known for not using CGI in his games, but sometimes I wonder if the graphics in Metal Gear Solid 4 are really as fantastic in-game as they are in the cutscenes. The reason I bring this up is because of something I noticed in the fight against Vamp: The difference between the amount of detail during and after the fight is like comparing VHS to DVD, in the after cutscene he is a hell of a lot more detailed and rendered. However, to counter that observation, I noticed that if you enter a cutscene with OctoCamo set at some texture, you can still default it back to the black by shaking the controller. Even more convincing that the cutscenes are real time is that when you are between acts, you can control the Mk II through the entire cutscene. Oh well... The sound (if you're lucky enough to have surround sound) is indescribably intricate. The soundtrack, while not the best in the series, is definitely memorable, especially the haunting "Old Snake" theme, the dramatic climax of "Father and Son", as well as the final credits theme "Here's to You". The sounds of gunshots whizzing across your living room, the footsteps of enemy soldiers, everything is amazing. The voice acting is superb, which is to be expected. The one thing that kind of threw me off was that both Naomi and Ming Li (MGS1) lost their English and Chinese accents respectively. Just something I caught that kept bugging me. But at least Raiden sounds more like a man with his new raspy, deep voice that just screams, "I'm not a bitch... I'm EMO!!" ... There's not really a difference between the two, but it's still a major improvement. The controls are definitely smoothened out for 'Western tastes', and feel a lot more natural than the prior 3 games. A lot of that has to do with making the X button the 'Enter' button, rather than the O button that the Japanese are used to. But seriously, a lot of the kinks have been worked out: it's easier to reload your weapon (a press of the O button); when you're on your stomach and getting shot at from behind you can roll onto your back and shoot; you can lie on your back and throw grenades over your head in an arc, which is less awkward than trying to pitch one from your stomach. There's just a ton of new moves that are probably making other game developers think, "Why didn't we think of that?" Finally, where Metal Gear Solid 4 truly shines is in its epic boss battles. Oh my God, they're good. While they aren't as innovative as the infamous Psycho Mantis fight from MGS1, they are still fantastic. You fight the elite psycho-bitch/mech-suit squad known as The Beauty and The Beast Squadron. Their gimmick is that they are all real hotties (REAL HOTTIES) who have been emotionally scarred by war, and each has a backstory that is only made more horrifying by the fact that shit like the stuff they were put through ACTUALLY HAPPENS in parts of the world.
Your first fight, Laughing Octopus, it's a duel of who has the best camouflage in a small laboratory, and that bitch will pull out every trick in the book to trip you up (even the infamous 'cardboard box' trick). For Raging Raven, you're shooting at her from the back of a motorcycle, then you head into a fully destructible tower to snipe her ass out of the sky. For Crying Wolf, you're having a sniper duel in the middle of a blizzard that reminds me more of the Sniper Wolf fight in MGS1 rather than the horribly long fight with The End in MGS3. The trick with Sniper wolf is that she can track your footprints and can SMELL YOU based on the direction of the wind. "Whoa..." For the final fight with The Beauty and The Beast squadron, you take on Screaming Mantis, who has the combined powers of Psycho Mantis's telekinesis and mind control (MGS1) and the medium (talk to the dead) powers of The Sorrow (MGS3). After the fight with Screaming Mantis do you realize just who is 'pulling her strings', and it's shocking (and equally hilarious). The final boss, Liquid Ocelot, is probably the greatest, most dramatic fight I've ever seen in a video game, let alone a movie. It's brutal, it's powerful, it's EPIC. There is no other way to finish off this game than that final, amazing, perfect, epic, nostalgic, brutal, emotional battle. Hell, I'm not even going to describe it because it's so epic it must be EXPERIENCED to be fully enjoyed. I can't spoil the ending itself, but I seriously had a huge lump in my throat before the final credits rolled. All I can say is: If you never played ALL the MGS games, play 1-3 FIRST in order to get the maximum effect. THIS IS ESSENTIAL. Not only will you have no emotional attachment to any of the characters who appeared in an earlier game you may have missed, but very little of the REAL ending will make sense. However, after I finished Metal Gear Solid 4 the first time around, I realized that it was extremely lacking in all the 'little things' that made Metal Gear Solid games so innovative. You only have 2 comm channels, where other games had like 4 or 5 (sure, most of them were B.S., but at least they were fun(ny) to listen to). There's not a lot of "ingenious" moments: Using the ketchup bottle in MGS1 to escape from jail; The cool little computer interface of Hal's you use to upload pictures (MGS2); Killing a boss by simply saving during the boss fight and not playing again for a few days (MGS3). It's all the little things, the tricks, quirks and secrets that made a lot of the Metal Gear Solid games replayable, but MGS4 just doesn't seem to have nearly the amount of them that the prior installments did. Even the fight against Screaming Mantis pales in comparison to the original fight with Psycho Mantis. It's a shame, too. With the Playstation hardware, it could have been something REALLY innovative. My suggestion would have been more 'head-fuck' moments, like if the game kicked you into your XMB (cross media bar) at a crucial point in the game, if the motion controls reversed, make it look like Metal Gear Solid 4 restarted, flash back to the MGS1 Psycho Mantis battle (in its Playstation 1 glory), jump backwards to a fight against one of the other bosses, or make your OctoCamo change so your body looks like a chick in a bikini. Okay... that last one was a little creepy, but you get the idea.
OVERALLI HAVE to recommend this game, but ONLY if you played the previous 3 Metal Gear Solid games. If you missed out on even one of them, you're doing yourself a disservice jumping into Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. You won't know what the hell is going on and you won't care about any of the characters you encounter. I guess if you're a die hard FPS gamer, then you're already used to that kind of thing, so you might enjoy mindlessly blowing away enemies without realizing the subtle implications of your actions, and will skip all of the story elements and character development. You also might want to pick this game up just to see how good a PS3 can get, and I won't dissuade you. But all in all, you NEED to play the other games FIRST. If you HAVE played all the other games, you've probably been so confused by the storylines that it's all one incoherent blur of pain and alcohol. It's like the main story of the X-Files: It's so condiluted that you eventually stop caring and just take what you're given. Thankfully, by the end credits the tangled ball of twine that is the Metal Gear plotline is finally straightened out and, surprisingly, braided to make a solid rope. The entire series will finally make sense and you'll be left with this sense of awe over everything you've accomplished. However, it's not the story that is so amazing, but the journey of all of these individual characters and each of their near-perfect resolutions that you will carry long after Metal Gear Solid 4 is over. In summary, despite my heavy gripes about the game, I loved every bit of MGS4 - no, the entire Metal Gear Solid saga as a whole. ... Oh, at the end, Snake gives the mysterious tombstone a final solute, falls beside the headstone, takes a final draw from his cigar, smiles and utters, "This is good... Isn't it?" If you think I just spoiled the ending, you're wrong.
MISC.Metal Gear Solid triumphs in a nutshell:
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Comments
otocon 10 Mar 2009, 14:52
newB 24 Apr 2009, 11:02
HAHAHA NICE REVIEW OF METAL GEAR 4
lacking 03 May 2009, 01:08
your old reviews need more pictures of the game itself like teh newer one
tarzanian 22 May 2009, 12:52
Good review of metal gear solid 4. the Raiden and Rose picture was the
exact image I had in my head when I was playing Metal Gear Solid 2 Sons of
Liberty. I was like, 'I do not care about the relationship crap. Raiden is
a pussy!'
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