Metal Gear Solid 4 is probably the most hyped game of all time. It's the most important Killer Application of the PS3, and it's considered by a lot of people to be a work of art. But is it a good game? According to the 99.9% of the world's reviewers it is, but those people will go to hell for lying, because not only mgs4 fails to deliver anything of what was promised, but is also a dumbed down sequel to MGS3 and the negation of everything that is good in the world.

The first impact you're going to have with the game is the new control scheme. (Actually it's going to be a 45 minutes long cinematic, but I'll get into that later.)
I won't get into much detail, but the new control scheme is great. You are always in full control of your character, you can walk while ducking, you can walk while in first person mode, you can aim in third person mode and the CQC is controlled much better than it was in MGS3. The only action that you cannot perform anymore is the interrogation, and while it wouldn't have made a lot of sense for snake to stop and interrogate the enemies during a fucking shoot-out in the middle east, it means that all the little extras from MGS3 (like the extra codec frequencies) are gone.

If you duck for a few seconds, snake "concentrates" (don't ask, that's what the manual says) and creates a "Threat ring" around him, that indicates what kind of threat is nearby, and that is also fucking pointless because after the first 5 minutes (1 hour if you aren't skipping the cutscenes) of game you get the solid eye, that shows you a radar with all the people present in that area.
The camo system has been replaced by the Octocamo, that allows you to assume the same pattern of the floor if you stay still for a few seconds.

 

Metal Gear Solid 4 is probably the most hyped game of all time. It's the most important Killer Application of the PS3, and it's considered by a lot of people to be a work of art. But is it a good game?

 

According to the 99.9% of the world's reviewers it is, but those people will go to hell for lying, because not only mgs4 fails to deliver anything of what was promised, but is also a dumbed down sequel to MGS3 and the negation of everything that is good in the world.

The first impact you're going to have with the game is the new control scheme. (Actually it's going to be a 45 minutes long cinematic, but I'll get into that later.)
I won't get into much detail, but the new control scheme is great. You are always in full control of your character, you can walk while ducking, you can walk while in first person mode, you can aim in third person mode and the CQC is controlled much better than it was in MGS3. The only action that you cannot perform anymore is the interrogation, and while it wouldn't have made a lot of sense for snake to stop and interrogate the enemies during a fucking shoot-out in the middle east, it means that all the little extras from MGS3 (like the extra codec frequencies) are gone.

If you duck for a few seconds, snake "concentrates" (don't ask, that's what the manual says) and creates a "Threat ring" around him, that indicates what kind of threat is nearby, and that is also fucking pointless because after the first 5 minutes (1 hour if you aren't skipping the cutscenes) of game you get the solid eye, that shows you a radar with all the people present in that area.
The camo system has been replaced by the Octocamo, that allows you to assume the same pattern of the floor if you stay still for a few seconds.
Also, the Survival Viewer is now gone, which means that you are not supposed to eat or treat your wounds anymore. The stamina bar is now decreased by the Stress percentage, that goes higher if you engage in battle your enemies, if you stay in the heat, etc.

As dumbed down as all of this may sound, though, it all fits very well in the game's new setting: you are thrown in the middle of a battlefield, where a side "A" (Always the rebels) and a side "B" (Always the PMCs) are waging war to each other, and you are supposed to either ignore the battle or help whichever side you feel it'll be more useful. In theory. In fact you're always going to help the rebels, because helping the PMCs is fucking pointless and helping the rebels makes the game a lot more easy. You can disguise as a member of one of the two sides (always the rebels), but while the rebels will assume that you're just one of them, the PMCs will always recognize you as Solid Snake and call reinforcements even in the middle of a shoot-out with 600 other rebels that look exactly like you. I just assumed that they recognized you with that S.O.P. Nanomachines thing, but your nanomachines were outdated and couldn't be recognized by the system until Drebin shot in you the new ones, so what the fuck? Do they spot your mustache from afar? How does that work?

 

The little immersion factor that was spared by the endless loading and installing times (The game installs itself 5 times every time you play it and it loads after every screen and even between cinematics) is killed by this absolute nonsense. Also, the game was presented as having a "real time" battlefield, but except the soldiers shooting each other, nothing is in real time. Some bombs drop and some walls get crushed, but it only happens one or two times in the first level, and it's programmed to happen just when you walk on a certain part.

You have a lot of gadgets (The cardboard box, a controllable little robot called Metal Gear MKII, a bin, some plugs, a fucking ipod, etc.) but all of them are useless, because the moment you unequip the solid eye you are done, since you can't see the radar and even distinguish the enemies from the background becomes difficult. This of course could've been resolved just by having the Solid Eye always equipped instead of having it as a generic item, since you have no reason whatsoever to unequip it, but what do I know.
But even after all this nitpicking, this setting can still be fun. So what is it that delivers the killing blow to the war zone setting?

Drebin. God fucking damn Drebin.

It's not enough that the first time that you meet him he gives you an M4 that is the fucking grim reaper, and you can basically make it through the whole game just using it, since it can be modded into a sniper rifle and a granade launcher, but from that moment on you can log in the Drebin Shop (Ebay) from your start menu, and buy all kinds of weapons and ammunitions you feel like buying with "Drebin Points" (The game doesn't use money because it's trying to be the most politically correct game ever made).

 

This basically erases any point of exploring the levels, since all the weapons you can find searching around are easily buyable pressing the start button. Yes, there are a few unique weapons that you can't buy, but even then the most powerful weapon in the whole game is the one that they give you at the start, and even if you don't feel like using the M4 the game will always put it in your hands after every cinematic.

 

Even if you want to get every single weapon in the game you'll only go around searching for them the first time, since every time you buy/find a new weapon it'll stay in your start menu forever, even if you start a new game.

The Drebin Points are also ass-easy to get, unless you're the worst videogame player in the world. On my second playthrough I had already bought all the items and weapons available.
So, the point is that you have 70 weapons always with you, you'll never run out of ammo since you can easily buy them from ebay and you have no reason to explore the level. This eliminates any form of challenge from the game and every objective beside, of course, "Run from point A to point B to see the next cinematic".
And talking about cinematics, do you remember when I told you that, even if dumbed down, the changes from MGS3 fit very well in the war zone setting?

Well, this only applies to the first two levels. After you beat the first boss, believe it or not, the game is over. All there's left is a series of long (hours long) cinematics with short and guided sections of gameplay between each other.
We have, in order:
1) Follow Naomi's footprints in the jungle (not that bad).
2) Shoot the shit out of zombies on Drebin's van (Yeah I know they are supposed to be PMCs with broken nanomachines, but they look like zombies, they act like zombies, they sound like zombies and they only die when you shoot them in the head).
3) Chase some asshole in an eastern europe town, that is under curfew but nobody is going to bother you as long as you keep some facecamo, even if it's ninja cyborg raiden's or a female one.
4) Shoot the shit out of PMCs while riding on a bike with your 78 years old mother.
5) A level where all the enemies are machines, so the 99.9% of your weapons and all your cqc skills are pointless.
6) A giant robot fighting.
7) Walk for 300 meters.
8) Get cooked.
9) Punch the shit out of liquid, that is actually ocelot, that pretended to be possessed by his right arm and everybody belived him immediately.
All of this with some boss battles where you've got to do nothing but, again, shoot the shit out of the enemy. Except for two of them, where you have to shoot the shit out of the enemy and then use another item.

So yeah, the gameplay sucks big time and it's basically nothing more than a short single-player version of Metal Gear Online.
But what about the story? Well, that's the "Negation of everything that is good in the world" part of my review. Yeah, the cutscenes are too long for a videogame, most of them involve snake just walking, fighting with someone or other things that I could've played instead of watching, but let's just assume that this is ok. Let's just pretend that we're watching a movie. After all, I'm more than able to forgive GHM's games for their shitty gameplays because they are so well written. So, is the story good?

Well, MGS2 was a post-modern experiment that wasn't meant to have a sequel, and the game basic message was to avoid being influenced by the masses opinion, find your true self, shut the fucking console and get a life. But since most gamers are dumb and see the videogame characters as their immaginary friends in their fucked up minds, they did not understeand/chose to ignore the meta-narrative nature of MGS2 and kept bitching for a sequel that would explain everything to them. So MGS4, being that sequel, spends a lot of time retconning MGS2 to put it in a way that "Makes sense" (i.e. easier to understeand) and to make it "cooler".
(Most of the complaints that MGS2 received were about Raiden's "Gayness". So they decided to make Raiden a Cyborg Ninja! That's cool, right? Well, yeah, too bad he spends most of the game bitching about the fact that he doesen't get laid, crying over himself because he doesen't have a girlfriend and saying that he wants to kill himself. So apparently, being a normal person makes you gay, while being a 12 years old emo kid makes you a fucking badass.)

So, according to MGS4, the events of MGS2 actually took place. They even mention the Colonel and Rose as being actually working in Foxhound during MGS2, so it's implied that the Patriots IA was just posing as them during MGS2. Fair enough. Too bad that Otacon, in a codec conversation, says that Foxhound was disbanded right after the shadow moses incident. Uh, ok. They probably didn't have time to double check this, it's not that bad. There are a lot of other cool scenes that make up for this little errors. Like the one at the beginning where snakes salutes the grave of Big Boss. The same Big Boss that he hates with passion in a codec conversation IN

 

THE LEVEL SET RIGHT AFTER THAT SCENE.
So yeah, as you probably already guessed, the story of MGS4 doesen't make any fucking sense. It touches upon some important themes (The PMC problem, mentioned in one cutscene that you have to select from a menu because is not even in the main game) but never elaborates on them, and in the end it goes against any form of common sense, stating that a Major of the CIA was actually the ruler of the world and that the war economy was created by a satellite. For a series that at least tried to deal with the problems of society, even if it did it in a pretty basic way, blaming an evil computer for all the problems of the world and then destroying it to end the series is the ultimate declaration of failure.

 

Also, in basically every cutscene from act 3 on someone is "revealed" as being acting all along. Not only is this the same exact plot twist that ends every metal gear game, but is now used on almost every character in the game. In the Act 3 is revealed that Naomi acted all along during MGS1 (Altought is not explained why), that ocelot acted all along for 50 years because he wanted to destroy the patriots (that's why he saved their asses in both mgs1 and mgs2), and that the patriots are unaware that Revolver Ocelot is the same Ocelot that was one of the founding members. We also find out that the patriots were run by the cast of snake eater, with the highest graded being Major Zero. It means that Colonel Campbell actually outgrades the leader of the world.

 

In Act 4 you see a lot of flashbacks from MGS1 (A better game I could be playing instead of this shit), you pilot the metal gear REX that apparently learned kung-fu moves while inactive, you beat the shit out of Metal Gear Ray, then ocelot dies from fox die.............. NOT (that's the actual quote from the Japanese version. And he actually dies from foxdie later in the game, so I still don't get why the fuck he didn't die earlier since he and snake came in contact a lot of times) and he runs like a girl to the biggest battleship in the world spotting the faces of the snake family on his side. (He was just posing as Liquid, so I don't get why the fuck he built that mount rushmore thing to celebrate the snakes on the side of the ship. Besides, when did he do that if it was underwater? And seriously, a fucking mount rushmore on the side of the biggest battleship on earth with the heads of the snakes?)
Raiden then cuts off his arm because he can't shake some rubble, but then he stops the biggest battleship on earth from moving. He dies, but actually he doesen't, because he's mentioned as being alive later, and when he reappears he's missing the other arm too. And near the end of the game he has both arms again.

 

Then in Act 5 we find out that Liquid Ocelot acted all along and killed thousands of innocents just to force snake into destroying the patriots, and that he was a good guy all along. Then you fight him, I can't really understeand why tought.
Then Big fucking Boss comes back to life and tells you that in fact, Ocelot was never Liquid, he acted all along so he could trick the system into sending snake (It's implied that he acted all along during mgs2 too, but the encyclopedia says that in mgs2 he was really possessed, but seriously who gives a fuck). Then he tells you that the body eva died to save wasn't his, it was solidus', and she was aware of that, as well as ocelot's acting, so she acted all along and died on porpouse to convince the patriots that it was actually Big Boss' body, when in fact he was reconstructed with pieces of liquid and solidus.
Oh, and what killed Eva and Ocelot and is now killing him is the new foxdie that drebin planted in Snake in the middle east.

 

Why the fuck would the patriots program the foxdie to kill also Eva (that was not in the middle east) and Big Boss (that they kept alive for 15 years and they tought was solidus anyway) is beyond me.
Then Big Boss says that the dream of The Boss was to respect the will of others and let the world be, altought I don't remember her saying shit like that, and finally shuts the fuck up dying.
Also, the Nanomachines get people immortal, turn your personality into the one of the twin clone brother of your enemy, stop cancer, suppress your personality and you know what? Fuck it, I won't even get into how they explain every single thing in the world with nanomachines, because there's even more retarded bullshit going on in this game.

Now take this, add some unintresting characters (The B&B group has almost no personality, except for the ridicolously sad and pointless backstories), some old characters that now act like anime stereotypes (Meryl is Akane Tendo, Raiden is Sasuke Uchia, Otacon is the fucking nerd you find everywhere etc.) and some break dance contest by raiden twhirling some giant robots with his legs while a romanian bisexual vampire limbo dances to avoid them and you got the story of MGS4. Combine this with its half-assed, unbalanced gameplay and apparently you got a worldwide success, billions and fine-ass models.
So congratulations Kojima, you are a bloody genious.

[1/5]

 

By XED51 : Sum Month? , 2009

Godfather: Xed51 of Rome, Italy.

He's a BaDA$$ mothafucka.

The mastermind behind Paradise Hotel 51. He took control of K7SINdicate as a part of his plan to overthrow the world economy, but he was blown up in his building, along with 600 trillion yen, by the US Army. The world economy was fucked up by that debt, but 5 years later it apparently recovered and it wasn't that bad of a crisis either. Don't ask.
Meanwhile, after his death, Xed built a little hotel near the gates for Paradise, Paradise Hotel 51. His objective might have been to gather enough souls to start a war against the army of God AKA Hideo Kojima, but unfortunately he inherited the souls of the damned mothafuckas.

 

All they ever manage to acheive is to waste their mothefuckin time talking about irrelevant bullshit. Mothafucka! Mothafucka, mothafucka the site mascot, My Killer Melody (The angry bunny.) shall lead us towards the valleys of BEDLAM! Or maybe not, because all that fucking Bunny ever does is exclaim "Mothafucka!" We believe this is due to the mascot bunny not having a decent enough grasp of English so the Bunny adopted the most commonly used words of the American dialect. Which are Mothafucka and bitch. The bunny doesn't actually know what the expletives mean but we simply follow along coz it's a friggin' bunny who keeps saying mothafucka. The bunny says that word so much that we don't even know what the word Mothafucka means anymore.

The girl in the pics is either dead, unconscious, or escaped to an unknown foreign country. Nobody gives a fuck about her identity anyway.