Keep Your 'letric Eye on Me Babe

Yo, so I'm two years late to the party but I beat Metal Gear Solid 4.

Well, alright, beat is a bit of a misnomer. A more apt description would be "watch it fizzle out slowly."

Despite the opening two chapters of the game featuring some of the best stealth gameplay in the genre, the three following chapters reduce the game to a series of quick time events.

I can't fault Kojima for them, as spending any more time on actual gameplay and not wrapping up inane story threads from the bloated second and third entries in the series would force him to "revisit" the series again. Apparently this is a horrible torture.

To be blunt, I'm a fair weather fan of the series in the purest sense of the word. I was a huge fan and supporter of the first title on the PSX over ten years ago, I played through the second one but recall nothing beyond disappointment and didn't even bother with the third.

From what I gather, the third was the best in the series because it shed (har har) the whole Snake angle from most of the game.

To me, this seems like a cop out for both the players and Kojima.

As a fair weather fan, my love of the series begins and ends with Solid Snake. By playing 1,2 and 4 I got Snake's narrative arc and I would be content with there never being another Metal Gear title for as long as I live.

This isn't to say I wouldn't want the stealth mechanics of the game to come back in some form, far from it. The fact I can cloak myself as a Persian rug screams out for this game's mechanics to be in a more deserving title.

No. Instead, I have finally outgrown Solid Snake and the series no longer needs me.

I can recall seeing my first trailer for Metal Gear Solid on a Playstation demo disk back in 1998. Around then, some promotional trailer truck was going around pimping Playstation games. Were we to look back on them now, I'd probably see a truck full of games that would give me a headache but at that point it time they were the coolest goddamn things around.

The demo CD a trinket they gave out to everyone, so when I got home I poped it in to play some TOTALLY SWEET Crash Bandicoot. However, the video demonstration on the disk was for a game entitled Metal Gear I had never heard of.

It wasn't until I had exhaused everything else I could do on that CD that I clicked the play video button.

With it's engrishy cries of "THIS FALL: LET'S GET SOLID!", the theme music that's since become one of the series few consistent traits kicked in and never let me little eyes go until I'd watched the video at least four more times.

It seemed unreal then. Here was a game that was telling me not to kill everything I on the screen. Furthermore, its sci-fi/military angle seemed startlingly mature and realistic when I'd just finished playing games like Jumping Flash and Crash Bandicoot.

When the game came out later that November, it more than lived up to the hype. The game trapped you in a base against overwhelming odds with one clear instruction "sneak or die".

Though time has passed to reveal the game is an overwritten Japanese cartoon as imagined by the Rainbow Six art team, it was a game that served its purpose at the time.

Metal Gear Solid 2 then, represented another passage of time. While I wasn't much older than 11 when I played through Metal Gear, I was probably 15 by the time I was able to play Solid 2.

With its boring characters, bizarre Japanese quirks and lead character I had never even heard of, I silently wrote off the series to myself.

It was the same case with 4 in all honesty. Despite owning a Playstation 3 I still consider it an overpriced "brown HD graphics" generator that lacks substantial exclusive games. MGS4, then, was more or less the ramblings of an insane Japanese man to me.

After playing through it, I still consider my initial assessment correct.

MGS4 should have been the final, gorgeous, eulogy to the series but instead felt like a constipated trip to the can. Sure, you feel pumped sitting down to get the poisons out of your system, but nothing ever comes.

At any rate, Solid Snake and his chum Ocelot are astoundingly emotive characters here that run the gamut from being genuinely funny to tragic figures we end up rooting for.

Snake's final tribulations, throughout most of the proceedings, trap him in a world where he realizes his end is ever more nigh and that it'd best for him to simply fade away. He quickly realizes that, despite what the back of the case may say, in his final hour cannot stand alone. Instead, his journey can only be taken through the suffering of others.

Kojima seems to have taken to heart the classical lesson of "at the end of a comedy there is a wedding and at the end of a tragedy there is a death" yet failed to learn the trick of artistic restraint in applying those ideas.

Characters we once loved change both for the better and the worse all while Snake continues his slow march towards the graveyard, both literally and metaphorically.

Were the game to have ended at the climatic moment Snake pulls the trigger on the pistol in his mouth, I would have said that the entire game and series had been vindicated as story about one old dog who just couldn't learn a new trick.

Apparently, I was told that the internet is run by evil computers and that I can come back from the dead with just a collection of cells. Whatever.