indefinite articles

This week: The art of controller throwing. Kojima masturbates. The final panicked hours of Snake Eater.

As the mass video game market has increasingly become a blockbuster oriented industry, big budget game design has slowed to a crawl, with gamers expectations of graphics and depth rising to previously unknown heights. At the same time, as it becomes easier to get games online through quick & easy downloads, smaller games flourish in the gaps between larger releases. As such, there’s been something of a renaissance of classic arcade gameplay, with bar-raising shooters, puzzle games, and sidescrollers coming out each month.

But over the past few weeks, I’ve diligently turned off N+ and Geometry Wars to return to the elephant in my room: Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. Over four consecutive nights, I sat down in front of the TV determined to beat the game before heading to bed, feeling achingly close to the end credits.

Typically, there is only one genre that instills controller-throwing, floor stomping frustration in me: racing games. Despite enjoying them, I’ve found myself stomping and screaming through their constant demands for perfection. But my racing temper tantrums can’t really hold a candle to the outbursts that rose from me during the last five hours of Snake Eater.

During these final chapters of the game, I was constantly under the impression, given the flow of the plot thus far, that I was just on the precipice of completing the game. My initial estimation of the game’s length was 12 hours. When that milestone came and went, despite my best efforts to retain composure, my patience slowly began to melt away. Since patience is the key to successfully navigating the levels, and arguably the primary skill employed throughout the Solid series, I was done for.

Once patience has run out, the risk-reward balance of the gameplay goes completely out of whack, and soon enough I succumbed to the ultimate sin for a video gamer: referring to a walkthrough.

And thank God I did.

Not even amazing ASCII art can overcome the shame a gamer feels when consulting a walkthrough, the Cliff’s Notes of interactive media.

The final act of the game begins after a waterfall jump straight out of The Fugitive. Barely surviving, Solid Snake awakens to a boss battle against the Sorrow, a ghost who haunts the game on behalf of fallen soldiers. Like all Solid bosses, I began experimenting with what toys in my inventory would be best suited to take him down. Confusingly, the Sorrow’s life bar begins the fight empty, and nothing seems to affect him in any real way. Unwilling to try and discover the undoubtedly cryptic secret on my own, I went straight to a walkthrough, a giant text file that explains how to get through each area and each boss in a game.

The secret to defeating the Sorrow? Well, it turns out you don’t defeat the Sorrow. All you do is walk forward, and as you do, every enemy you’ve killed slowly floats past as a ghostly wraith. Throughout the game thus far, there have been three real options for defeating enemies: avoid, knockout, or kill. The easiest by far is to kill, which means it warrants punishment under the twisted moral code of the Metal Gear universe; if you’ve been a naughty mass murderer, the Sorrow “battle” can take a half-hour or more.

The Sorrow sequence is a didactic, essentially non-interactive exercise, a place for the designers to Comment on the Nature of Video Games. There’s a similar message in the brilliantly designed Shadow of the Colossus, but there it’s integrated wholecloth into the gameplay. In the Solid games, the player is an afterthought to the whims of director Hideo Kojima.

Clearly, Kojima wanted the end of Snake Eater to feel epic, and so the final two boss battles, between lightning-infused Volgin and Snake’s old mentor The Boss, took me around four hours all told. While the setpieces are appropriately grandiose, the combat involves repeating the same difficult sequence over-and-over again, not unlike taking the same hairpin turn at high speeds again and again in a racing game. Sometimes you have to repeat actions a dozen times or more. To make matters worse, the fights are often on a timer, and both Volgin and the Boss have lengthy segments where all you can do is avoid them and wait. Since it’s game over when the timer runs out, the waiting gets excruciating.

Kojima hammers it into the player’s skull: be patient. Be patient even as the clock ticks down and your lifebar drains and you are forced to start the battle again from the beginning. Be patient through this hour long cutscene, or for the alarm to turn off, or as you climb this pointlessly long ladder (each game seems to have a pointlessly long ladder or stairwell for some inexplicable reason). For the hardcore gamer, beating the game is the kind of accomplishment to share with friends: nonintuitive, time-consuming, and clandestine.

But I’m going to keep this victory to myself, and happily return to the world of arcade gameplay, with its palette-cleansing simplicity. Where depth emerges from a few simple action verbs rather than dozens, and where the screams are those of glee rather than frustration.

At least until cracking open the case of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriot.

Next time: The final game begins!