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AT PLAY: HIDEO KOJIMA'S DEEPLY FLAWED MASTERPIECE

"Hideo Kojima's 'Metal Gear Solid 4: Sons of the Patriots' was, without question, one of the most important game releases of 2008," writes Brett McCallon in his gaming column. Be patient: its greatness overcomes its considerable flaws ...

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Hideo Kojima's "Metal Gear Solid 4: Sons of the Patriots" was, without question, one of the most important game releases of 2008. It represented a monumental achievement in terms of graphical fidelity, gameplay innovation, and cinema-grade production values. 

Yet I hesitated to play it. While Kojima's talent is unquestionable, he is also unquestionably self-indulgent, and his work can seem impenetrable to those who don't follow it closely. Kojima is sort of like the David Lynch of the gaming world. Like Lynch, Kojima's brilliant images and stunning innovations are often coupled with questionable narrative and aesthetic decisions. But having invested the 20 or so hours it takes to complete "MGS 4", I'm happy to say that the game is far more "Mulholland Drive" than "Dune". Kojima's team has created an undeniably powerful gameplay experience, despite its considerable flaws.

The "Metal Gear" games, which first appeared in 2D form in the 1980s, base their gameplay on stealth. Perhaps Kojima's most important innovation was turning the standard gaming convention on its head. Instead of a powerful hero who shoots his way through wave after wave of innumerable, but comparatively weak enemies, these games tend to feature an unarmed hero who sneaks around a complex environment.  He can fight his enemies, but the game rewards those who use the terrain, gadgets and their wits to avoid detection altogether.

The series' other hallmark is that much of the experience consists of narrative cut-scenes--that is, cinematic, non-interactive segments (discussed in a previous column). These moments in "MGS 4" are the best in the business. Not only does Kojima have a real gift for cinematography, but his team's mastery of graphics and animation means that it is surprisingly easy to become completely engrossed in the action, and to forget that you are watching a video game. Some of the combat sequences are on a par with any similar scene in "The Matrix" or "Kill Bill". 

The problem is Kojima needs an editor. Desperately. Cut-scenes in "MGS 4" regularly exceed 20 minutes, and the game's final scene is nearly an hour. These might make nice short films, but 20 minutes of watching a game (in lieu of playing) can feel excruciating. In the case of the immaculately choreographed action scenes, I was torn between admiration and frustration: I loved watching them, but it seemed odd that most of the best action in the first two acts of the game is out of the player's control. 

More problematically, the majority of these scenes are devoted to endless, ponderous, histrionic explication of an utterly absurd plotline, along with some seriously over-the-top melodrama. While the history of gaming is littered with formulaic, deeply silly narrative ideas, "MGS" takes the prize for both implausibility and self-seriousness. It's pointless to even try to synopsise the absurdities of the "MGS" story here--the game's publisher, Konami, recently released an interactive encyclopaedia to help make sense of it all. Here's one emblematic plot point: Liquid Snake, the twin of Solid Snake, the game's hero (both of whom are clones of Big Boss, a legendary war hero), dies in the first instalment of the MGS series, only to have his arm grafted onto former Russian operative and superhuman marksman Revolver Ocelot. The arm then apparently takes control of Ocelot's brain, naturally.

It took nearly eight hours of playtime before "MGS 4"'s greatness overcame these flaws. I was fully hooked by the third act, in which the player controls Solid Snake as he stealthily pursues a member of a resistance movement through a heavily patrolled, gorgeously rendered Eastern European city in the dead of night. It was like controlling Joseph Cotten as he pursues Orson Welles through the streets of Vienna in "the Third Man". The tension was relentless: just when I believed that I was in an undetectable position, my quarry suddenly stopped, looked around, and doubled back toward my hiding place behind a screen of bushes.  Scrambling out of sight, I saw that he had returned in order to relieve himself in the shadows. I waited for him to finish, took a deep breath, and then resumed the hunt at a safe distance. For vicarious, cold-war-era spy thrills, this beat the hell out of John leCarre.

The game is littered with brilliant moments like the above, but its true genius lies in the empathy that the game develops between the player and Solid Snake. For reasons that are too ridiculous to explore here, Solid Snake has aged prematurely by the beginning of the game. As the gameplay progresses, his physical deterioration is viscerally conveyed (Snake is frequently overcome with coughing fits, pain in his back, etc) to a point where I actually felt bad about pushing Snake through ever more difficult challenges. In one of game's final interactive segments, Snake must make his way through a series of hallways that are filled with microwave radiation. In order to progress, the player must hammer on one of the controller buttons with ever-increasing rapidity, even as Snake falls to his knees and finally crawls the final few feet to his destination. This was a truly weird experience: my frustration at  the endless, high-speed button-pressing mixed with the obvious pain of the character on screen to produce something very much like regret, at least in my case.

I felt bad for putting Snake through this--which is precisely what Kojima's team was hoping for. It's strange--having finished the game, I'm still entirely indifferent to the plot and most of the characters, but I feel like I have a stronger identification with Snake than I have with any other game character I've ever controlled.

And that is a singular, and remarkable, achievement.

Picture credit: Konami

(Brett McCallon is a writer based in New Orleans. His last gaming column was a last-minute shopping list.)