indefinite articles

This week: Can Hideo Kojima find redemption with Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater?

After the debacle that was Metal Gear Solid 2, I’ve been playing the third installment of the series with a knot in my stomach. The notion of another Metal Gear game fills me with equal parts nausea and hope.

Hope, because Snake Eater is regarded by many fans as the best in the series, a redemptive return to form after we were force to watch Raiden’s shit-eating grimace hour after hour. But many fans also dress up in costumes and have accounts on DeviantArt. Plainly, they can’t be trusted.

I play on in fear.

After a few nonchalant hours, Snake Eater starts to sell itself rather well. Hideo Kojima, undoubtedly weighed down by a guilty conscience, dishes out some self-parody, then pulls out the stops to get back to the pulp-action roots of the original. The opening credits burst in on the game, a pitch-perfect homage to the abstract collage of Bond openings, carried by a spot-on theme.

And so the stakes are set. It’s a promise that the game will be nothing more than a stylish popcorn game, without all the grueling metaphysical reminiscing. Not that the promise is worth much, knowing Kojima.

For now, there’s something undoubtedly appealing about the game. Taking place a few years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Snake Eater flashes back to tell the story of Solid Snake’s father - or rather, the man he was cloned from - Big Boss, before he went the way of the bad guy in the NES Metal Gear. The colors are bright, the levels are laid out in ways that feel wide open, and there are more weird systems and toys to play with than ever. Most of all, it’s all put together with a contagious enthusiasm.

In getting whisked away by the game’s poppy allure, the real paradox of the Metal Gear Solid series comes blazingly to light. No matter how gratifyingly the plot plays out or vibrant the aesthetic, the gameplay is a cumbersome mess. While the Solid games undoubtedly offer an impressive number of options and solutions to any given situation - be it different ways to take down a boss or dozens of easter eggs - these solutions are exacted through labyrinthine, alienating processes.

While the new gadgets and systems added in Snake Eater are conceptually intriguing, actually using them devolves the game into frequent starts and stops. Included in the game is an elaborate camouflage system, a Trauma Center-like healing minigame, and a survivalist food simulator. These join the dozens of intricate items that build up in your inventory over the course of the game, all of which are used differently, often each with multiple functions. It’s sort of like stuffing your mouth with marshmallows and trying to sing “Raspberry Beret.”

It’s an issue that’s only grown like a cancer as technology has continually widened the design space of the madman Kojima. Let’s just hope the game follows through on the Bond opening, and spares the soggy ending.