By the time we had finished the second Metal Gear Solid, we had gone quite mad and had begun literally to chew upon one another. We had lost our civilization and taken on the characteristics of beasts, grazing endlessly on thick shag and producing a sort of call which was said to recall an orangutan fucking an accordion. When we regained our higher brain functions - or, at the very least, sufficient manual dexterity - we produced the
following comic which we placed in our archive, like a head on a pike, as if to warn us away from this franchise should memory and good sense fail us simultaneously. With the proper course of action made so explicit, we had merely to choose between wisdom and folly. Precisely how we chose folly in this instance is not entirely clear.
They say time heals all wounds, which isn't actually true. For example, the simple passage of time can't cure aggravated damage (such as that dealt by vulgar magick) or reverse the effects of magical diseases like lycanthropy or mummy rot. However, in our case, it was able to make us forget just how long the cutscenes are in an MGS game. Though not a wound per se, strange sensations are created by them, such as the impression that your brain's mouth is actually agape and hanging open inside your skull. We were listening to a codec conversation yesterday that was so long, so God damned long, that the entire Earth was destroyed, remade, and our species achieved a level of development commensurate with what had risen before.
The cold war setting, the expression of a different era of espionage altogether is the main reason I wanted it - and in this, it strikes unerringly. The idea - the idea, now - of sneaking through natural environments, this also drew me in. The cinematography is, again, marvelous. Konami has managed to find a cache of powerful, secret chips in the system and are working them in tandem, like a rowing crew. I'll tell you true, though: I don't know if I can endure the game long enough to reveal it in any significant quantity. The controls don't feel classic at this point, they feel obstinate. The organic setting and global glow just serves to muddy things I need to be explicit, like enemy locations and environmental features. You have to want to like it pretty bad, and honestly, I thought I did.