Wednesday, March 10, 2010

The Best Is Yet to Come

This all began because I got an itch to start playing the Metal Gear Solid games, and wound up playing through the whole series backward. If that seems like an odd way to do it, that’s because it is.

I’d like to tell you that I had some good, thoughtful reason for doing it this way. I’d like to say that I played the games in reverse order so that I could work my way down through all the progressive layers of bells and whistles (and bullshit), paring down all the additions made to the gameplay over the course of the series in order to arrive at some conclusion regarding the true essence of the games…or, you know, whatever. The fact is that this is not the case at all.
I started playing the fourth game, largely because it was the only one I hadn’t completed at least once previously. When that was done, I decided to go back to the third game, because I was in the mood for more Metal Gear Solid, and it was (and probably still is) my favorite in the series. When that was finished, I still wasn’t ready to be done with the series as a whole, so I progressed to the second game, and from there to the first. From there, I went on to Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, because my nature demanded I complete things, and because I was able to buy it on the cheap at eBay.

It did not become clear to me until midway through my time with the third game that I would be doing write-ups of the series for my blog. I already had it in mind to go through the whole series—or rather, I had an idea that I would wind up doing so (I don’t really plan these things)—and it occurred to me that I like these games enough and talk about them enough that it would be only natural to do blog entries on them.

So, here we are. I will try to make my write-ups for these games as accessible as possible. Whether that means I am leaving out information, or explaining everything so that everyone understands every important nuance, is a decision I haven’t yet made.

I suppose we’ll all find out together.

In the meantime, I’m going to write a little bit about how I got interested in this series of games in the first place.

I first ran across Metal Gear Solid on Christmas day, 1998, because nothing says “holiday cheer” like Tactical Espionage Action. I got a Playstation from my parents, and the demo disc that came with it included a playable demo of the game. The dialogue was still all in Japanese, but as an anime fan, that was hardly any kind of deterrent.

What was a deterrent was the control scheme. Prior to this, I had owned an 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System. The controller (as most of you likely know) featured a directional pad, two face buttons, a Start button and a Select button. Pretty pedestrian, really, even though my mother still—still!—pines for the ancient arcade-style joystick with two buttons featured by the Atari 7800, which we owned for what felt like much longer to my child-self than five or six years.

(In the history of bad console design decisions, the Atari 7800 features one of what might be the very worst. The Pause button was located, not anywhere on the controller, where it could be easily accessed in case you needed to pause the game suddenly to get a drink or go to the bathroom or whatever, where it would have made some kind of sense, but on the console itself. So to pause the game, you had to put down the controller, get up, and walk over to the console. Trying to beat your high score in Centipede? You might want to think about unplugging the phone first.)

From this humble 8-bit start, I was required to accustom myself to a directional pad, four face buttons, a Start button, a Select button, four shoulder buttons, and two analog sticks. I felt like I was upgrading form a go-kart to a Ferrari. And make no mistake, Metal Gear Solid uses all of those things, except for the right analog stick.

But there was more to my initial distaste than the feeling which must go through the mind of a nine-year-old all alone behind the wheel of a moving vehicle who knows just enough to understand that the steering wheel turns it and one of those pedals down there makes it go: specifically, “What the hell am I doing?” There was also the fact that the primary focus of the game is stealth. Now, most games encourage the player to confront and destroy his opponents. Even kid-friendly games—any installment of Super Mario Bros., for instance—have enemies whose primary intention is killing the player. It may be hard to take all those big, goofy-looking Goombas and Koopa Troopas seriously, but trust me on this: they come at you with death in their eyes and violence in their hearts, and they are out to kill you. I was used to walking right up to my enemies and dispatching them with clean efficiency. The main challenges up to this point had always been finding the right way to do so. The right order to tackle the enemies in, the right technique to use, the right combination of moves and the character’s abilities… Metal Gear Solid says “Nah, fuck all that,” and gets down to the grim business of brutally disabusing you of all such notions in minutes. You spend much of your time in the game hiding, avoiding detection, and attacking only when there is no sure retribution. You can destroy all of your enemies, but what you can’t do is win in the sort of pitched firefight around which most other games are built. The odds are stacked astronomically against it. Sneak up behind them—snap their necks, beat them or choke them into unconsciousness, shoot them with your silenced pistol—dispatch them quietly. Oh, and watch out for cameras. And mines. And infrared laser-triggered traps. Be prepared for enemies to investigate signs of your presence—loud footfalls, trails of footprints in the snow, etc. I mean, the enemies in the first Metal Gear Solid aren’t smart by any stretch of the imagination, but they’ll do more than just walk in circles and shoot you if you cross their (bafflingly short) line of sight. They try, you know?

Anyway, I couldn’t handle playing the demo. It was just too much change too soon for my liking, and I was thankful that it ended as quickly as it did. I resolved to think no more about the game, no matter how many people told me it was pure entertainment distilled into the form of a game disc. They might be entertained, but I had tried it, and it didn’t agree with me.

I tried the demo for Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty a couple of years later, when I was in the Army, and had basically the same reaction. The controller was second nature to me by this point, but it required some fairly awkward combinations of button presses to do all the things that were necessary. One of the many ways the sequel improved on its predecessor was to give the player more moves, more abilities, more things that he might potentially do…all with the same amount of buttons as before. If that sounds potentially confusing to you, well, it is. My experience was much the same as last time, and I decided that this was just a series of games that was not for me.

Then, in the spring or summer of 2002, I was playing a game called Headhunter. It was originally a Dreamcast game made in Europe, but had been ported to the Playstation2, probably in part because the Dreamcast market in the States had collapsed by the time the game could have made it here on its native system. It was sort of fun, as long as you didn’t expect much. It was simple in terms of gameplay, story and difficulty. I read on GameFAQs that it was supposed to be Sega’s answer to the Metal Gear Solid franchise. Others described it at Metal Gear Lite. Now, by this point, I had seen how shallow the gameplay in Headhunter was, and was in the mood for something a little more substantial—something that would require me to think a little more. Suddenly, Metal Gear Solid no longer seemed like an impossible task. The feeling was one very similar to the feeling I’d had many years back, on learning to swim for the first time. The deep end of the pool stopped being an object of fear, and started to look like a fun challenge. So I walked a couple of miles to the store to pick up both Metal Gear Solid and Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. I figured that if I actually spent real money on them, that would require me to invest time and patience into the process of figuring them out and truly understanding them. And in the end, if it still turned out that these games were very emphatically not for me, well, my income was largely expendable at the time. The truth was, I could spend that kind of money back then without really thinking about it.

And so, here I am today, telling you that this is one of my favorite series of all time. Sure, the storyline isn’t always very believable or even sensible a lot of the time, but so what? I’m probably over-simplifying it by putting it this way, but Metal Gear Solid, for me, is basically G.I. Joe for adults: It’s a military fantasy. More than that, it’s a hell of a lot of fun, and in the end, does it need to be anything else?