Patreon Letter: 16th September 2018

Hey folks, 

Jackson here with another Patreon Letter! Been a weird week for me, my friend came down and stayed with me so I was busy in a whole different way than the usual boatload of internet related work. Which was nice! The plan was to write about Spider-Man being kinda bad in the same way that every big AAA video game is kinda bad but I've written that piece like sixteen thousand times before so I decided let's do something else.

So I'm, uh, I'm writing about Metal Gear. Something I haven't talked about a billion times. Whoops. Look. I wrote about the series a bunch but I played it on easy so that doesn't count.

I played Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater this week on Extreme for the first time. I didn't have time to beat it, like I said I was very busy, but I did get all the way to the fight with The End and I'm completely stocked on Life Meds. I am deeply sorry to announce that I am good at Metal Gear. It happened to me.

Let us get right to the heart of the matter: Metal Gear Solid 3 is the perfect video game. It is not the best video game. But it is the perfect one. If I were to close my eyes and meditate until the hypothetical perfect video game emerged from within my soul it would charitably be described as Metal Gear Solid 3-adjacent. It would probably have a VR Missions mode. 

A lot of this has to do with who I am; my age, access to games, history etc etc. I fight against my natural biases and try to expand my awareness, it's a large part of why we even do Abnormal Mapping. I was born in 1993 yet I have played every NES Mega Man game to completion. The best one is 6. But still, I can't fight fate, and so the perfect video game just so happens to be the exact kind of video game that they made when I was between 9-12 years old. This is probably not a coincidence. 

The perfect video game is eight to twelve hours long. The perfect video game is constructed around highly specific set pieces in service of a larger narrative. The perfect video game supports multiple styles of play. It is both smart and stupid. The perfect video game is every game that is like Resident Evil, but not Resident Evil because I am too scared for horror games. The perfect game is also Resident Evil 4.

I am somewhat sad that an unshakable element of my relationship with video games is the dual pronged old man insufferable take that things were better before and things were better in japan which combine into the fucking Vegito of video game opinions: things were better before, in japan. And I know I'm exaggerating slightly in my introspection here, I like all sorts of games, from all sorts of times, but the fact remains that when I play Metal Gear Solid 3 I think of it as a shining example of a design ethos that is all but extinct, and couldn't be further from where the money is now.

Here is why MGS3's design rules infinitely hard.

The first Metal Gear is essentially a Zelda clone set inside an extended, single dungeon. You must open a series of doors using a series of keys. Sometimes these doors are literal doors, sometimes these doors are men named Shoot Gunner. Sometimes these keys are literal keys, sometimes these keys are rocket launchers. The point is, the game's design is simple: acquire x, do y. The meat of the game is exploring the space. The stealth - much like Zelda's combat - is merely there to give you something to do while you go about that exploration.

This holds true throughout the series, except the scope narrows with each successive game. There are less dead ends. There are less things to find. By the time you reach MGS3, you are left with a single path through a very long jungle. The game no longer becomes about finding the one thing you need right now, the puzzles are smaller scale and have many, many more solutions. Puzzle: defeat bee man. Solution: shoot an AK 47 from underwater. Solution #2: Throw a smoke grenade. The list goes on.

A lot is made of the great many ways you can approach every encounter in MGS3, and it is core to why the game owns but it's not what makes it work. You can do a billionty more things in MGSV and it's just not the same. It's always eight men in a base. They ran out of time and all got fired before they could design the video game. The game is not difficult. It is a series of very small, unique encounters that have been handcrafted to be pleasant to surpass over, and over again. It is without friction. Each room is its own specific challenge, and each room is over in fifteen minutes, all flowing together with the thoughtful tracklisting of a really good album.

It was great to revisit. I'm sure I'll do it again soon. Yes, I skipped the cutscenes. I'm not as young as I once was.

See you next week
-Jackson