Concern

I bought Metal Gear Solid 4 recently, along with a new DualShock 3 controller. I’m getting old, and like Snake, it feels shitty and premature.

There’s probably some point in your development when you can’t learn how to use a gaming controller, much like how your aptitude for learning music or languages drops sharply as you age. If, like me, you started with something like the Atari 2600 joystick, through the NES and Genesis, and ended with the Super NES, these analog sticks are strange and frightening. I haven’t yet been able to feel like I’ve really mastered using them, even after a fair amount of practice, which is rotten because it seems as though every game made today, that doesn’t make you flap your arms around, uses them as the primary control.

That said, the new Metal Gear Solid game is really fun, but it has this perverse edge to it. The last “Metal Gear” game I played was the original. Not the original Metal Gear Solid, the original 8-bit game. So, before anything else, the storyline makes about as much sense as I’m sure watching the fourth season of Lost would, if you hadn’t seen any episodes before. The story would be as entertaining as it could be, and everything would be nice and pretty and kind of humorously weird, but it won’t strike much of a chord.

It’s kind of a good thing, then, that the gameplay works so damnably well without any kind of sensible story.

I haven’t even gotten through the first act, and I’m hugely impressed with the gameplay, just for the emotions it carries. It’s not a mindless shoot-em-up game, even though there are adrenaline-laced action scenarios. A few things have struck me so far; first, is meeting the whoever-the-redhead-is and her team of soldiers, and the shockingly rich dynamic of the group as you’re trying to escape an attack together. It works really well, even though I screwed it up by misfiring a rocket, and killing everyone the first time. Even still, I want us to work together to get out in one piece, my sprites and I.

The other thing that struck me really hard was in the very first real part of the game, when you’re just sneaking by some soldiers. In the game, you can easily incapacitate soldiers that are alone, without killing them, though they’ll eventually wake up and be a threat again. You can, while they’re out, use your knife to actually kill them, and they won’t get up again. I went through this a few times — first with the first soldier you need to take out, then the three that swarmed me after I got spotted, then the guy I surprised by hiding under a box. You know, konk them out, notice the stars starting to fade over their heads, and equip the knife and stab them until the stars stop completely. And it makes me feel horrible to do that, genuinely. The soldiers here are realistic enough that you start to think about that kind of death: before you know what’s happening, some asshole creeps up and knocks you unconscious, and then, while you’re completely unaware, mercilessly kills you at his leisure. Sure, this soldier wouldn’t hesitate to shoot me dead, but he’s literally an unthinking cog in the machine, and I have a decision here to make — I can slip away and just let this guy live with a bad headache, or I could end him forever. There’s no clear gain in the game to letting any enemies live, and in fact, it might make your progress harder if you’re taking too long, but I can’t help but consider the actions I’m taking.

I mean, this is the most human and morally complex anything on a video game has gotten with me. I’m going to start the game over again, just so I can go through some of the first areas without taking the cowardly murderer’s way through. It would be awesome if all things in life could be restarted from the beginning, or at least the last save point.