A Bizarre Contraption

Last week sometime I started a Metal Gear piece using that blue painting I posted earlier as the basis for the main image. It's turning out pretty well I think. The reason I bring Metal Gear up is that I just finished the fourth installment of the series. If you've finished the game yourself or know someone who has than you know that when I say "just finished the game" I mean I stopped playing the game a long time ago and had to wait through the 40 or so minutes of talking which just ended.

At first the game was awesome; it was just about everything I had hoped it would be. I had heard before hand that the game had really long cut scenes which was to be expected: the other Metal Gears had big cut-scenes and the Japanese have a tendancy to go a little over board. I assumed I was prepared. In actuality I was about as prepared as a man who had never riden a bike is prepared for the Tour de France. I quickly grew to dread the cut-scenes, dread them to the point where that's all I thought about during the seemingly shrinking amounts of game play.

Almost every scene was a reiteration of something that was said during a previous scene and it would then be explained in every single way possible. And if it wasn't that, it was an unnecessarily drawn out introduction of a boss who I had to fight; an introduction during which I could have unloaded every bullet of every weapon I had, into said boss.  

I wish I could think of a specific example of the verbal diarreha that was Metal Gear 4 but that would be like trying to recall one particular sentence out of the entire history of literture. So instead, I'll make up a scene.  This is a scene where Otacon gives Snake an apple. I'll write it the way that Hideo Kojima (creator/director of Metal Gear) would have written it.

Otacon: Here Snake; take this apple.
Snake: The apple?
Otacon: Yes, Snake; this green apple that's in my hand.
Snake: Take it?
Otacon: Yes.
Snake: Where did you get it?
Otacon: I picked it myself.
Snake: I see.
Otacon: I think it's important for people to get away sometimes, ya know? Just leave their job and take a day off.
Snake: And pick apples?
Otacon: That's just one thing you could do. There are so many!
Snake: Hmmm...
Otacon: What do you do to get away Snake?
Snake...me?
Otacon: Yes you.
Snake: ...
Otacon: Come on Snake; there must be something that interests you?
Snake: I did just buy a potters wheel.

It's at this point that I break down into tears. Oh, and it would all take place during a fire fight. That conversation shouldn't exist in the first place. It should take mere seconds for someone to take out an apple, motion that the apple is being given and have the apple taken. Why would it even be relevant to talk about the history of where the apple came from? The game is full of scenes of useless information, the only real difference between the scene I wrote and the scene that would actually be in the game is that Otacon probably would have started talking about the life cycle of the apple accompanied by visuals that would become a cut-scene within a cut-scene. 

I seriously think that they wanted to make a three part movie of Metal Gear 4 but they didn't have the funding so they just crammed  a trilogy's worth of dialogue into a video game and then remembered that it was video game so they made it possible to move Snake around sometimes between talking.

And all the "professional" game reviewers that gave it 10/10 and claimed it was "superb story telling"" Please. It's now more apparent than ever that while they were playing the game, there were Konami representitives shooting heroin into their scrotums.