can love bloom WITH the battlefield?
i forgot how early I was exposed to the metal gear series. it was probably here:
it was very definitely here. there was an old game magazine my parents used to own. before i started reading tips & tricks (the game magazine we could get here in rural AZ) for some reason my parents (i always assumed they bought them, for some reason) owned a couple of copies of old game magazines that mostly covered PC games with some limited NES stuff. there was a zelda II walkthrough in one for the final dungeon.
history of culture and pop culture on an individual level has always been a big deal for me, so this post will mostly be about That ™ but yall’re’ve free to talk about Metal Gear n’ Solid n’ Rising as much as you want here.
ANYWAY. sooner or later in those magazines that advertisement popped. don’t remember the circumstances, but they were kind of this weird window into the 80’s i didn’t grow up in. as a little kid, i had a plastic uzi like the one in that advertisement. I didn’t know anything about metal gear, but running around my yard i imagined it was kind of like Lethal Weapon.
in a lot of ways, isn’t it funny how i’d find out that was kind of true?
ANYWAY, sooner or later this popped up at our house, a game my oldest brother had played:
i never actually played it, because by the time this showed up at my house 1997 was right around the corner. i would’ve been six, maybe seven years old. so i didn’t actually play the original metal gear growing up. I watched my brother clear the first couple of screens and it didn’t stand out in my memory until recently.
(that’s because in 1997, this happened)
Metal Gear Solid was a revelation in the family household, by the way. my older brother absolutely hated the way it played and everything about it. my oldest brother ate it up: somewhere in there i think that Metal Gear Solid is the reason he joined the military. it certainly shaped his and my, political views to a great deal.
(that’s right, i’m that kind of kojima fan. sorry.)
but to a grade school kid who’s deepest political reading material on the middle school reading list was like a biography about one of the presidents, watching metal gear solid be played was like being an Adult.
i had all of this knowledge know. i knew how the world worked, because campbell and natasha explained it all via radio transmissions directly into my household.
as an aside, here’s a question: does peace walker use the Monser Hunter engine? i recently went from Metal Gear Solid 2 to Peace Walker and was kind of stunned by how gorgeous PW is compares to MGS2.
anyway, yeah, i was That Teen. i read some books, yeah, but my worldview was explicitly canonized by Metal Gear Solid. weirdly, i considered myself a conservative. later, i’d find out i wasn’t
so like: if you haven’t figured it out yet i never actually played metal gear solid myself until i was well into highschool, i was probably 16-17 before i marathoned it entirely in one weekend.
it was a Really Good Time. i’d highly recommend everyone go through and play it because it’s still a lot of fun to run through. it’s Tactical Espionage Action. it’s basically an arcade game’s version of stealth. metal gear solid does not have much functionally different from Bonanza Bro’s, and Bonanza Bro’s is an oficially Glam Grimfire Approved Good Ass Videogame (GGAGAV)
(i guess the guy on the left would be Snake, and the one on the right, Raiden)
man, that shook up my whole world. actually playing that game through. some of my favorite highlights are a lot of the conversations with Natasha and her weird dynamic with Snake. if i still wrote fanfiction: Snake definitely would’ve been with Natasha in MGS4. the way the game looks too is super good. SUPER GOOD. fuck, god, i love the way MGS1 looks on the PS1.
until i played it, the cast of metal gear solid were bizarre phantoms in my memory. afterwards, they’re still one of my favorites, yeah.
real secret of thread: i got teary eyed when i just played MGS2 for the first time and snake hugs raiden. i don’t like e.e, she’s a patriots apologist.
