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I, like most every other PS3 owner, desperately want Metal Solid 4 to come out yesterday. My issue though, and I’m sure I’m not alone, is that I’d never actually played a Metal Gear Solid game before. Having read some reviews and previews it’s evident that while familiarity with the series isn’t required, it’s extremely satisfying as every single loose end (and from what I hear there were many) gets tied up in a sparkly bow by the end of the 4th game.

With this knowledge I decided to start at the beginning of the series by playing the remake/port for the gamecube, Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes.

What the hell is wrong with this game?

I played it for a little over an hour this morning. I even woke up early to do so before going out to brunch with friends. I really shouldn’t be writing this post. No, I should be entrenched by the brilliance of producer Hideo Kojima’s stark vision of espionage and technology. I should be in the middle of a cut scene that, were it any other game, I’d have turned off by the time it hit the half hour mark. I should be snapping necks and stuffing bodies into lockers so that other troops on patrol aren’t alerted to my presence.

Instead, I died 13 times and never got past the main hangar area of the second level. On stock difficulty, it’s one of the hardest games I’ve ever laid my thumbs on, and not in the nicely challenging way either. Scarily enough, I think these count as the tutorial stages as well, which makes my repetitive dying all the more frustrating; I, a seasoned geek who’s been gaming for the past twenty-two years should not have this much of a problem getting past the first stages of the game. I nearly crapped all over my couch in the moments after jumping through the window in the opening scene of Resident Evil 4, and put the controller down after dying once because I figured there was no way to beat it. A few days later I realized I was prissy twunt who was just afraid of people who foamed at the mouth waving a blood soaked axe that chased me while screaming “Die Motherfucker!” in Spanish, and later went on to almost beat the game despite (what seemed to be at the time) some excessively punishing situations the game threw at me along the way.

The Gamecube’s MGS remake, however, isn’t scary. All you have to do is sneak past undetected. The issue is, and I suspect the issue isn’t as present if you played the original and already know the guards’ paths and abilities, that there’s too many bad guys and not enough hiding spots for you to cower in while pissing yourself because you’re about to receive 8 bullets in your eye sockets.

After all this ranting I searched a few youtube vids of the first few levels and discovered how you’re supposed to play, I think… Sneak up behind, grab the baddies, break their necks, put’em some place they won’t be seen. I’ll try it all again later this week. With that Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots is definitely on hold, though, until I can come to grips with how I should probably be playing it.

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