what are the more open worlds of later metal gears when they are empty of anything close to experiencing the colonel breaking down and telling you to turn off the game console at 2am after playing the game all damn day other than a short interruption where your friends brought over their just newly released “the fast and the furious” dvd? what are more tools to play with (when it’s all just more ways to incapacitate enemies anyway), when instead you could be having your girlfriend constantly calling you in the middle of your special operations mission trying to get you to open up emotionally?
metal gear solid 3 is such a boring safe choice they added a third person camera, aka “the coward’s camera” to the game for all the safety sally’s. the beginning of the end continued in mgs4 moving the shooting controls to the shoulder buttons. and no later metal gears feature anything like a scene of two bro’s doing an elaborate bro handshake in one’s attempt to cheer the other up over incest.
metal gear solid 2 was released november 2001, two months after 9/11 and nearly twenty years ago. you crash through half of lower manhattan in a giant ship and fight the former president (who wants to liberate the u.s. from the deep state and the 1%) in the middle of wall street atop federal hall (next to the trump building). earlier when you meet the current president of the united states he greets you by sexually assaulting you. a tyrannical synthetic consciousness has evolved from the primoridial soup of american patriotism itself and wants to control society and censor the internet to keep people from going insane from fake news and conspiracy theories. one characters every line of dialogue is just stating how much she wants to die. her devoted simp who follows her around saying “yass queen” is inexplicably a vampire. in the middle of a tragic death scene a man suddenly confesses to having had sex with his step mother. every facet of the game is a response to being a sequel to metal gear solid. the tanker section is setup as a traditional sequel might be only to “kill” the protagonist early on. the plant section is a complete artifice designed to evoke responses based on it’s similarities to the first game. the game suddenly replaces the familiar solid snake with a surprise effeminate protagonist who is an uncertain, emotionally deadened, videogame trained dupe who is gaslit so hard by his commanding officer he is only able to finally reassert his hold on reality and own identity many games later after repeatedly destroying his own body and becoming a high heeled death machine wandering the earth, waging a personal war against memes and imperialist intervention in africa and the middle east. this is the game of our age if there ever was one. there could never be anything like it again. and was there ever anything before where someone could look back at a single piece of media from 20 years prior and see how it so specifically laid the track to the present like we can mgs2 now? who knows what we’ll be seeing when looking back at it another twenty years from now