Be Excellent To Each Other

...is released on Thursday.

Yet neither GAME nor Gamestation have ANY posters or other "coming soon" notices up. Is this not a little bit odd?

I've spoken to staff at both and both say that they won't know what PS3/MGS4 bundles they'll have on until release day. The guy in Gamestation said that although MGS4 is supposed to be the PS3s "killer app", he's only had 10 pre-orders for it - and he showed me the pre-order book too.

How bizarre.

90 minute cut scenes can suck my foetid balls. Fuck that shit.

I never played 2 or 3, just watched my cousin. It was, seemingly, much more fun than playing them. I'm interested in4, just to see how pompous these seven-week cutscenes are.

I've just seen an advert for it, and it does seem to be selling it based on the storyline, rather than any sort of discernable enjoyable gameplay.

Housemate bought this a few days ago. I have played it for about two minutes (a boss fight where I quicky lost my patience and just hurled about ten grenades into the room, and finished it off by cracking it repeatedly in the nose with the butt of a rifle), and it was kind of fun. I've yet to play it properly as I've loads of work to put off first, but based on a few minutes of mucking about and a lot of watching, so far I can say this much:

1) You can buy guns at any time through the menu. Shitloads of them, it seems - housemate was just walking around with fifty single shot anti-tank rocket launchers. Money is fairly plentiful, as you get cash for every enemy gun you pick up (you store the gun if it's new, and if you have it already, you nab the ammo and get money for the gun instead), and presumably in other ways too - I'm not sure yet. So ammo concerns are less, and you can play around with guns as you like instead of being relegated to using whatever the game deigns to give you (ie: nothing but a pistol for the first four hours). This is a Good Thing.

2) The controls, though I haven't explored them fully yet, seemed much better than in the first two games (I've not played the third) - I was ducking and rolling and grenading merrily in about 30 seconds. It's possible more advanced stuff is a pain in the arse, but the basics appear sound. This is a Good Thing.

3) Everything is grey and brown. Like every other game since about 1999 (although, oddly, unlike MGS2, which was all yellow and orange). Ten percent off.

4) A woman you meet before this boss fight walks around with her tits practically falling out for no reason at all. It's really bad - I could almost see Snake himself considering saying "Look, you're supposed to be a scientist at work in a lab. We're discussing a possible threat to the future of civilisation. Could you please do your shirt up, for fuck's sake? I've got enough to worry about." This doesn't affect the game, but it's annoying. However, as a counterbalance, gratuitous, panning shots of Snake's skintight buttock armour are plentiful, so I suppose it's at least not gender biased objectification. Five percent off.

5) An enormous robot comes to life out of nowhere in a genuinely scary moment. I and housemate cack our collective pants and a voiceover shouts "Snake! A big robot coming to life out of nowhere! Run!" Yeah. Yeah, thanks game. I'm a grizzled old veteran who's also blind, deaf and a fucking moron. There's too much handholding and annoyingly obvious advice. Bad Thing. Five percent off.

6) There appear to be fewer of those irritating phone calls, though. Good Thing (or rather, removal of a Bad Thing that they sould have fixed two games back, but this is a videogame we're talking about, so it's low standards all the way, baby).

7) Some people are rubbish at stealth games.

I will give it a proper go in a few days and report back. Anyone else got any thoughts?

Not really, they don't really sell movies, try HMV.

Perhaps I'm being too harsh but the gameplay demo I say, whilst gorgeous, consisted largely of "Here's a guard facing exactly the right way for you to get away with this trick", "Here's another one facing exactly the right way for this other trick" "Oooh! Cutscene!" "Here's a guard facing exactly the right way for you to try this trick with your new largely useless otherwise little robot thing"....

Does it open up at all or is it a series of situations tailor made for one of your grab bag of goodies?

I've not really felt that. I've been told about a few gadgets but ignored almost all of them, and they're not required, and there aren't realy utorially bits yet. Judging from what I've seen of my housemate's game though, there are bits like that - they're just scattered throughout the game. That means you get new stuff to do later on, I suppose, but often it seems tacked on and gimmicky (the 'tracking' bit for instance, which crops up ages into th game but I'm pretty sure will prove totally useless afterwards). It also means you get atmosphere breaking tutorial-speak fifty hours into the game. GNghn.

Played for a few hours today, as I am unable to work while someone dicks around with a server.


Well, I say I played for a few hours. I spent perhaps a quarter of the time playing and the rest watching cut scenes. No, really. It's WORSE than the last ones, from the off. At least with number 2, they just got longer and longer and more frequent towards the end, but here it's constant, you're never playing for more than about ten or fifteen minutes. The worst part is, most of the cutscenes are completely pointless. They're just you creeping around a new area, and sometimes you get a cutscene of that, then you walk for ten feet, then get another cutscene. Every now and then, too, there's a bit where something in a cutscene is obviously important, so an icon comes up telling yo uto pres X to see it in first person. If you don't press x, you just see reaction shots of whoever's in the room, so have fuck all idea of what's going on. It's like playing Sim Editor. Where anything does actually happen in a cutscene, it's padded out with long, pointless pauses and silences, so you have to watch hours of dull footage or skip it all and miss the odd nugget of useful information (I do have a vague interest in knowing what the plot's doing, even if it's just going to get sillier and sillier as it goes on. It's really testing my interest in the story, though, and I don't think I've even finished the first "act").

It's irritating too, because it's an alright game aside from that. They've just shoved a fuckload of pointless cutscenes in at every ten yards. Oh yeah, and I don't want to bitch about the Japanese, but why do so many of their films have to feaure "comic relief fuckwit"? In this case it's an elite soldier who - hilariously - fucks up at every turn, whinges like a child, gets beaten up by everyone in sight and spends his first ten minutes of air time shitting himself. No. Literally. I think it's supposed to be funny. It's not. You can do comedy in a serious story - you can do comedy in any story. It only has to be funny. It doesn't have to be as lighthearted and slapstick as the story is over the top and sombre.

Annoying. It's a fairly good game liberally decorated with shit. So far it consists of sniping soldiers while some rebels draw their fire (quite fun, but also available in every other shooter), sneaking up on snipers and rummaging through their pockets before shooting a tanquiliser dart up their urethra (fun), and not much else. Controls are a vast improvement, and there's a satisfying instant stun move if you get the jump on people - you leap out and simply crack their head on the pavement, then drag them off to steal their stuff.

More later. Running score: 5/10. Could go either way.

One Solid Snake is enough for me.

"come on now, eat up your whole eggs"

*pats its head*

That's not quite what I meant (and put badly).

I mean it's like "Look here's an obvious place you can hide!", "Oh look they've split up, there's an obvious guy to karate chop from behind!", "Oh look guy to shoot with dart!" "Oh look shadows" etc.



Oh jesus.

That'll be Johnny Sasaki, he's a staple of the MGS games. There's one in every game.

Ahh, I get you. There's a little of that if you look for it, but not noticeably more than any stealth game. More often though, you us tlook for a guard who walks a little too far from the group so you can off him and get into a better position. It's not insultingly obvious ,and where tealth is an obviously better option, you get quite a bit of leeway in how you go about it. I've just had a good bit where a bunch of hostages are being led off to be execeuted one by one, and I'm creeping around slitting throats as quickly as possible so I can take out the last few guards and save some hostages. OR - I could leave them all to their fate and wander off. It's completely optional. Hopefully now I'm out of the first chapter, there'll be more of this and less fucking eighth-rate cinema.

UKresistance posted this:




It made me laugh. It shouldn't have.

Metal Geared Solid Floor: Illegitimate Sons of the Patriarch.

About a third of the way in now, I'd estimate. A few thingS:

I'm enjoying it more now.

1) The levels are more interesting (and less drab. One level is set in a sepia-toned city at night in a trenchcoat as you tail a resistance member. It's almost film noir, and I liked that), and the cut scenes are further between and generally shorter - I've gone for perhaps an hour without one at least once, now. They're still about six times longer than they need to be though, largely because of frequent lengthy, gratuitous pauses in dialogue - apparently sneaking past an entire army and talking to a vital hostage is a great opportunity to sit around relaxing for a minute or two, and not for example demand the information you need and get the hell out of there.

3) Some of the cut scenes, however, are even more ridiculously long than before. Nothing at all happens for about 40% of them - it's people walking slowly around, fiddling with props, failing to answer questions and sighing (you'll hear Snake's all-purpose "hauuwh" sigh/grunt approximately 76 times), and while the plot is so far fairly comprehensible (if you've played the second game through. Good luck if you haven't), it spends far too long telling itself.

2) A note about the graphics: they are very good indeed, particularly the faces, the textures are convincing and don't do badly for movement. The dead eyes are less of a creepy thing than usual.

3) I've fought one boss, and it was mostly non-annoying, although I did get stuck in a deadly stunlock at one point, which annoyed me a lot.

4) There's a section where you're on the run and it's clear you need to get past a particular thing. I attempted to roll by and got hurt. I attempted to blow this thing up, but for some reason my unguided rocket took a 90 degree turn into the sky to avoid hitting it. Evidently it was impassible, because when I got killed (I was under heavy fire and exposed the whole time), the game went ahead to the next cut scene. However, I got killed because I'd used all my medkits up and thought I must have taken a wrong turn, so decided to kill myself to reload. This means that I had to play on with no medkits and no rockets. This pissed me off a great deal. Make a "you will die" situation by totally changing the rules of the game so that one thing is arbitrarily invincible? Fuck you, Kojima. Fuck you.

5) You can get "money" for guns not only by taking enemy guns, but by getting decent stats - few kills (ie: avoiding/knocking out guards), few alerts, that sort of thing. This I like. However:

i) Stats aren't divided by 'chapter', so if you went kill-crazy in the first chapter, but decided to play painstakingly carefully and stealthily in the second, you'll still get shitty stats and no money. So, there's basically no chance at all that I'll get any bonus money for playing 'properly', even though I like playing 'properly', unless I play the whole thing from the start again. Fuck you, Kojima.

ii) "continues" are counted as a stat - more than a certain number and you'll get no bonus. This means that if you're playing for stealthy fun and it all goes pear-shaped, your normal recourse (grenade yourself to death and try again - you can't reload games from the menu without quiting to the titles first) will fuck your stats up anyway. It also means that screwing around with the AI and experimenting with props and weapons will fuck your stats up. Fuck you, Kojima.


6) Stuff about a major character:


Non-spoilery summary: Stupid anime clichés, "look at all the cool stuff you everyone else can do in this game!"

7) Snake goes karate-mental against five or six guys! In a cut scene. You wish you could do this, player! Now, back to the three punches you can throw until the next cut scene, peasant.

When Snake is not making you look bad by being awesome in cut scenes, he is making you look bad by being a tactically inept moron in cutscenes. There are six of them standing in a tight formation, snake! Throw one of the fifty (yep) grenades I picked up and kill them all in... oh, okay, fire uselessly in their general direction and hide, then. They're piling into a helicopter and preparing to take off, but yo uhave the drop on thenm Snake! Quickly, use the silenced sniper rifle to kill the pilot, then throw one of our twenty-eight stun grenades, neutralisi... oh, okay, fire uselessly in their general direction, allowing them to drop a bunch of soldiers and take off, then. This sort of thing happens in all games, but it's still fucking irritating. If Snake hadn't been such an unreliable cretin, this whole series could have been wrapped up two games ago, I reckon.

9) "Hi! I'm the other woman in the game, and this is my open-to-the-navel shirt. What's a bra?*"

10) Snake for some reason always has a pistol out in cut scenes. He points it menacingly at unarmed hostages and forty-foot armoured robots alike. This would be fine - easier on the clearly busy cut scene team, I'm sure - except that when the cut scene is over, you're always equipped with this near-useless gun, and a random gun from your inventory is placed in your backpack, so you have to dick around with the weapon settings to use the gun you had equipped earlier (and take three or four hits while you equip it). Fuck you, Kojima.

11) You can throw empty magazines to distract guards, grab guards from the front and hurl them to the ground in an instant stun (if you get the drop on them), play dead, fire or throw grenades from the floor after you've been knocked over, commando roll into a firing position, then roll back into cover, use people as human shields, grab people and mercillesly slit their throat, etc, etc. It's fun, it really is, and while so far I've been fighting with generic Arabs and generic Central Americans, they all have american voices, making it feel somehow charmingly silly instead of borderline racist. And, as their conflict is ultimately nothing to do with your mission, you really don't care or even know what they're fighting about, so can freely ignore them or take advantage of the rebels as diversions or walking supply dumps. It's quite amusing hearing them thank you for the help after you shell their enemy's gun nest, then a few minutes later you casually beat up one of them because you liked the look of his gun.

12) Air burst shotgun rounds. Finally, a stealth game where I can use a (pretty funky) shotgun but not ruin my game by killing everyone! Stun grenades are good, too, as is the stun knife. As a knife it's pointless - it's too slow from the front, and from behind it's easier to grab them and slit their throats, which is an option regardless of what gun you have equipped - but its secondary function is a taser. Zap! Hee hee! Zap! Hee hee! Maybe it's just me, but I never get tired of it. The weapons and doodads are by and large entertaining and useful.

13) You're not funny, Kojima. You're really, really not funny. Stop it.

14) While we're at it, stop doing that fucking fourth wall breaking shit. The "on the back of the CD" thing from the first game was novel and kind of clever, and I could forgive that it broke the illusion. Once. Doing it twenty times in every fucking game I will not forgive. It does not make you revolutionary and postmodern; it makes you an artless, contemptuous prick.

15) I just had th most irritating chase scene ever. Look how cool the angles and slow motion and explosions are! Never mind that you're being constaly shot at by unseen enemies and even when you have an idea of where they are, the camera changes so often, and turning to aim takes so long that it's nigh on impossible to shoot half of them anyway! Also never mind that that fucking cheating bullshit with the invincible medkit-depleting thing earlier left you with too few medkits to survive this regardless of how many you shoot!

I sense a boss fight coming next. If it's one of those that's designed to be nothing but a test of how much ammunition and health items you can stockpile, I'm going to deduct 45% on principle.

In conclusion: It's a weak 5/10 so far, despite my whinging. Without the cutscenes, it would be closer to 7/10.



*Oh yeah, that reminds me. One of them has her braless tits all over the place, but a few minutes later leaves her bra lying around so you can tail her properly. Is this supposed to be funny? I really can't tell anymore.

1, 3, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, face, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15

Nice counting system.

So far I am highly disappointed in the game. I'm finding it very hard to get the enthusiasm to actually play it.

I finished the boss. Not as hard or unfair as you'd expect - just that it soaked up a lot of damage and was hard to spot. Fortunately there was a safe place to recharge (your health replenishes slowly over time - very slowly), so I crept off there to chill every few minutes. That took maybe twenty minutes.

The rest of the time since my last post has been 100% loading and cut scenes.

Yeah.

It wouldn't be so bad, only I can tell you that maybe two significant things happened in the entire thing. Everything else was filler, stupid silences and overblown buildup that went on far too long, and people going "buh?" and acting stupid. And they keep harping on about this 'new' and incredibly special training called "CQC", which turns out to be, er, pretty standard unarmed combat that most any moderately experienced soldier would know.

"Snake! USE CQC!"

"You mean 'twat him in the head with your fist', right? I could have figured that out myself, thanks."


"My CQC is superior to yours!"

"Yeah, and you kicked me in the cock as well. New low, man."


It's probably a lot more fun if you're drunk and have a couple of mates with you to fill in the constant silences. Last few hours: 2/10.

That confused me about MGS3 as well.

I don't think I ever used CQC in the whole game. All that ever fell out was the 'bah-bah-boooah' combo from MGS1 and 2, or the 'grab 'em from behind with a knife to their neck' and they're not it, are they?

And to think I got called both ignorant and arrogant on a usenet group for assuming that this game would be worse than the rest for all the reasons you state. If one thing is apparent to my ignorant eyes it's that Kojima thinks he's a story telling God of some description, and the gameplay is an afterthought to facilitate his fantasy of being a supergifted writer and director. How do I know this - because the length and preposterousness of the cutscenes has increased dramatically out of all proportion to any gameplay improvements that have happened in each successive game.

One review, keeping a very straight face discounted the 90 minute cutscene at the end of the game myth by saying it had timed it to just over 70 minutes! SEVENTY FUCKING MINUTES FOR ONE CUTSCENE! And then went on to say that the game took 20 hours to finish, about half of which was cutscenes! Ten fucking hours of cutscenes!

It's just overinflated pretentious guff that would be insulting to everybody other than fanbois or 12 year olds, is it not?

To be fair, by the high standards of Usenet, that's some pretty sophisticated Oscar Wilde-style putdownery.

Metal Gear!?

I smiled so much when he first said that in MGS4.

You're supposed to leave the room - like that New York cinema club, that walk out of any movie than mentions the title in the movie.

Welcome to BeEx - we know shit about games (except for me - I know shit-all about games).

If the cutscenes were good then this wouldn't be a problem.

Yeah, because Aliens, Terminator, Fight Club, Gladiator, Leon, Citizen Kane (Christ, I could go on forever) are all rubbish films.

Wait a minute -- there is no cane in Citizen Kane!

Is that serious about a 70 minute cut-scene at the end?



So they want me to watch what is almost an entire movie at the end of completing a game? Surely the point of a game with a story is that you have degree of control?

Oh for the halcyon days of Dragon's Lair...

You forgot Dude, Where's My Car?

True. The laughable thing is that calling anybody ignorant is akin to calling yourself conceited anyway

Well, obviously as a review metric it's shit, deeply shit, I just remember hearing about them when my missus was Pic Ed on Empire about 15 years ago and thinking it was noteworthily stupid. Unfortunately it's the kind of crap that sticks...
I could add tons of movies to that list, including several movies about Christ as well, no doubt

Yep.

That was from the review on Ars, IIRC. They even went so far as to say it isn't the worst culprit in Japanese Games for preposterously long cutscenes. As everybody keeps pointing out, they are skippable, but that isn't the point, if you have a fear or anxiety of missing something that is going to be pertinent.

I have a morbid curiousity about how bad they are. I think I have the self restraint not to let that get the better of me, I hope, but it wouldn't be the first time I've succumbed to stupid impulse purchases, as DrG will undoubtedly be along any moment now to confirm.

You're weak, dude, plus you already bought everything else. Gotta catch 'em all! Although I should point out that if you are specifically going to go buy a bad game just to get angry with it, well, we already have the Canuck for that.

From what I've heard the cutscenes in MGS4 are pausable too. Although a 70 minute cutscene is taking the smeg a bit, I'm sure that some of the cutscenes towards the end of MGS2 were that sort of length.

Never mind fucking pausable. At 70 minutes, I need to be able to bloody save in the middle of it to come back later!

If it was on the 360, you could have 'you've watched all the cut-scenes' achievements.

It would have to hook into the Live Vision camera though, to ensure you hadn't just gone off to walk the dogs. In fact put some headtracking software in there to make sure you're not reading a book.

I'd change the channel on the TV. That'd fuck it.

Hmm.. it'd need to detect if your eyes were staying open too.

Good point. Clearly a second camera is required, pointing back at the screen, to ensure the correct content is being displayed.

Is that //puts on silly deep promo voice// W E B B E R?

Surely he does it for our amusement, though. He's very funny when he gets angry.
Also, I spotted him playing COD4 - has everybody else stopped?

Getting the rare Welsh Beared Tit away from his drums is quite a challenge.

Many's the time he's been too engrossed in his solo rythmic beating to play with me.

Solo Rhythmic Beating!?

This is half the problem with the game(s).



That's the other half.

Seriously. I could handle the stupidity of the plot and pseudoscience, and the over the top nature of bits of it, but for all its constant complications and double crossing and sudden convoluted revelations, the plot is still a poorly-told mess full of more obvious and significant holes than a cheesegrater. Every character (particularly the ones you're supposed to root for) is a total fucking idiot, the dialogue is unnatural (and you can talk about killer robots and nuclear war and super-genetic soldiers in a believable manner - Kojima just doesn't understand how real people talk, or even how dramatic characters should talk), characters are inconsistent and often display no actual motives for their actions, and the timing and pacing of the story is atrocious. There'as one bit where you send a camera to spy on the villains, and they reveal their diabolical plans and motives in explicit detail. Snake and his mates watch this footage, and then spend ten minutes going "Hmmm.. .whatever are they going to do next?" and scratching their heads, then slowly working out what THEY JUST FUCKING TOLD YOU IN EXPLICIT TERMS THEMSELVES TEN FUCKING SECONDS AGO. GET ON WITH THE FUCKING GAME, I HAVEN'T PRESSED A BUTTON FOR FORTY MINUTES.

Gah. And I'm still playing it because I'm hoping it'll give me another run like the second 'chapter' where the cutscenes mostly fuck off and let me play without interruption - it started off bad, got good, and it's gone superbad. I'll be bringing a book with me from now on. If you took all this shit out (or, dare I dream, replace it with more levels and stuff - I wouldn't care if there were no story at all and you just infiltrated fifty random buildings. It works for the Hitman games, which focus on giving you interesting and original locations to stalk around, and then hammer the plot in as an excuse later), you'd have a fun, quite difficult and tense game. They've taken out nearly all of the gimmicky, tedious shit like bomb hunts and 'snipe all these targets or die' bits, improved the controls, made the guns more interesting, given you a few new tricks and generally improved lots of tiny things.

I like distracting a guard and bashing his mate in the head, then when the first one tries to check his pulse, firing a dart into his neck. I like using a bloke as a human shield, disarming snipers and setting off C4 as a diversion*.

But witless nob Kojima just won't let me enjoy them. He's too desperate to wave his miniscule drama cock in my face, as though the bajillion tedious hours of the first few games hadn't already given him more screen time than Quentin Tarrantino. And it pisses me off, because if they fired or, preferably killed him, and let the level designers and AI guys and whoever it is that adds the little clever touches** go to town, this could be a fucking awesome game. As it is though, it's 30% of a great game and 700% of a really fucking awful anime toss festival.

-----

*(I fucking hate the 'nothing but robots' level that plagues pretty much every stealth game ever, mind. Why do they do that? Is it just me, or are the 'nothing but robots' levels always a wearisome chore?)

** that bit in MGS2, for instance, where the stupid woman won't leave the sinking "you're going to fucking die, idiot" installation because there are insects over the lift door. I found out just a few months ago that normal people use the spray thing or a grenade to kill them. I, however, immediately beat the stupid tosser unconscious and carried her to the lift - and it worked. Replace 10% of the cut scenes with neat touches like this and you'd instantly double the entertainment factor.

Bonus points for ringing Otacon or EE while beating her.

Is it just me or does this Kojima guy seem a bit mysogynistic? Cleavage, stupid female characters, evil female characters with hairy armpits and 'lazy stereotype lesbian' haircuts*, scared witless female characters and lots of posters of flimsy dressed females. Hmm, emotionally mature eh?**

8/10 in Game, they had nothing bad to say about the cutscenes. *Sigh* I don't read it but I thought it was supposed to be a good reviews mag, or something?

(And only 6/10 for Boom Blox. *Double sigh*)

*According to Game screenshot, not played it.
**On the other hand, I seem to recall really fancying the women in Cryo's Dune point and click RPG.

(Edited for clarity)

Oooh, really? I must have not met her yet. Excellent! Wait... she'll be a villian? Bah.

I want just one of the heroes to be someone I can root for, damn it!

NEW LOW

You're fighting a boss battle.

Actually, you've just fought one almost to death, and then grabbed him, but, instead of slitting his throat before he can kill another bunch of innocent people, you let go and talk for a moment or two, at which point a bunch of other things turn up to save him. Instead of, for example, shooting him with the shotgun I was using, or hurling a grenade and blowing him to pieces, then legging it before the things get you, you dither and look around dumbly at the other things before a chum turns up and saves the day, killing three of the things instantly.

Now.

It's previously been shown that this chum can take on about fifteen of the things without breaking a sweat, while you struggle to kill one. It's also been shown that this chum fought the now-severely-hampered boss for five full minutes and didn't finish him, whereas you just beat him so badly you could have finished him off with a spoon (but inexplicably let him recover, natch). So, what does the game do? It makes your chum fight the Boss He Can't Fucking Beat But You Can, while you fight the Things That He Can Beat But You Can't.

Is this bad enough? Yes, it is. Is cheating you out of finishing the irritating boss off more than enough? Yes, it is. But that's not all.

While you're laboriously fighting the many Things (remember that bit in MGS2 with the billion Robots and no hope but attrition? Yeah), your chum fights the boss.

In split screen.

So, you're fighting a really difficult battle where you're outnumbered and in irregular surroundings, and enemies can come from anywhere and kill you instantly. And they've cut the fucking size of the screen in half. Just think about it for a moment. You're never going to see that battle. You're never going to win it however many Things you shoot - you have to just keep killing them until the cutscene on half of the screen finishes - a drawn-out fight that you can't even fucking see, because you're busy fucking fighting infinite Instant Kill Enemies on a screen that's too fucking small for NO FUCKING REASON.

You know what this is for, don't you? It's to show off, nothing more. It's a fucking in-game trailer for people who are watching their mates play the game. The person who's shelled out for the game is being punished and forced into a shitty unwinnable fight with a tiny screen until the advert on the other side is finished, all so that they can make the game look good to someone who isn't playing.

Fucking incredible. And why, why, fucking why would you go to all the trouble of setting up at least a framework for split screen, and then use it only for a fucking glorified trailer? There's so much potential in a two-player "infiltrate a random building" mode of MGS that even a half-arsed attempt would boost the game's longevity tenfold. But no, fuck you, player, you'll give me your money so I can advertise to your friends, who in turn will be ripped off by my shitty z-movie cutscenes.

Garggh. Hideo Kojima is an ultracunt. Everyone involved with the making of this game who did not object at every one of his fuckheaded ideas is a cunt and a coward.

Somewhat ironically, this review-diary thing is getting ever longer and more intractible. But hey, at least I'm not insulting your intelligence.