"Metal Gear Solid" fans are rabid, fanatical, and emotional by nature. If you're reading this, you already know it to be far too true. The post-modern uber-complicated tactical espionage series is unlike anything else to come before it, or after it: No series has such a brilliant and also, utterly incomprehensible storyline like it, which is to say nothing of the way it pioneered an entire genre of games like it. The problem?
The only recent release in the series has been an HD remastering, as fans wait on an MGS game that's not really an MGS game ("Revengeance") to come out after the holidays, and are forced to salivate over the same eleven minutes of "Ground Zeroes" footage we've been watching for the last month. MGS fans are a long-suffering bunch, but they always suffer together; it's a unique situation, especially for a single-player game.
Perfect example: Pixels or Death, and the excellent piece they published on Friday about what it's like to grow up with Solid Snake and friends ("In The Name of the Father: Metal Gear Solid").
It's not exactly a review, but it's the kind of thing you can send around to people who might not already get why you love the game so much, or what other people might have to do with this. Or in writer Sean McGeady's words:
Metal Gear Solid was the first game I really loved. In 1998 I was seven years old. I couldn’t comprehend its concepts and I couldn’t appreciate its narrative. My enjoyment was solely mechanical. My dad could understand the game on a thematic level, on a conceptual level and on a mechanical level. But whether he derived enjoyment from the intricacies of the narrative, the direction of the set pieces, or the simple interaction with his son I don’t know.
This writer here played the first MGS over a Thanksgiving school break with an older brother and cousin, taking turns on every other death until wrapping up the game at 7AM, after a marathon session, just as the Macy's Parade started on TV. It seems like everyone's got a "Metal Gear Solid" story. What's yours?
In The Name of the Father: Metal Gear Solid[Pixels or Death]
